Book Reviews : Notes on the Letter as an Art Form

The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the 18th-Century Familiar Letter by Bruce Redford (University of Chicago; $28 hardcover; $11.95 paperback)

In their effort to get more spontaneous writing out of their foreign correspondents, newspaper editors sometimes will urge them to imagine that they are writing a letter to a friend.

It works a little, but only a little. For one thing, to think of the editor as a friend can herniate the imagination. Or seriously: As soon as he receives your letter, you know he is going to show it to 800,000 readers.

That is fatal overcrowding for the little world that letters to friends seek to create. It is only this little world that allows for the “Acts of Intimacy” referred to in the subtitle of Bruce Redford’s study of selected letter-writers in England’s 18th Century.

This, of course, was a glory-time for correspondence. The letters of Mary Wortley Montagu, Horace Walpole and dozens of others have long served as a key to the manners, morals and sensibilities of the time. Their intimate detail is a large part of the reason that the 18th Century seems so much more graspable in human terms than the 17th Century.

A Kind of Fiction

In “The Converse of the Pen,” Bruce Redford looks to this converse, or conversation, for something more than a psychological and social tapestry. Using six writers--Montagu, Walpole, Thomas Gray, William Cowper, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson--he postulates their letters as an art form, as a kind of fiction.

The idea is provocative, and although Redford only carries it a certain way--nobody so imbued with the spirit of letter-writing could or should resist a tendency to wander off and leave a notion half-completed in order to go on to something else--it can be illuminating.

Perhaps his central idea is the thought that when someone writes a letter to a friend or a lover, an act of invention is taking place. The writer, in other words, is creating his or her own personage in order to express something that, while undoubtedly true, is a selected and stylized truth. A dancer, in other words, is herself, but she is also her dance.

Secondly, the writer is tailoring a style and a tone--whimsical, passionate, allusive, mock-grandiloquent or whatever--in which to clothe the intimacy that is desired. A corollary that I don’t find specifically expressed but that is certainly implied, is that the writer invents the person he writes to. Clearly, of course, this triple invention must satisfy a need on both sides, or the correspondence would stop.

‘Subdues the Outside World’

What is the need? Redford suggests ordering, the taming, the reduction of a chaotic and dangerous universe to something smaller and more manageable. “Like the Lady of Shalott’s mirror,” he writes, “epistolary language subdues the outside world.”

Redford leads us beguilingly, with only an occasional stumble over “paratactic” or “hypotactic” or other bits of critical apparatus left lying about, through these vulnerable, shifting and sometimes collapsing inventions.

He gives us Montagu’s ironic wit--like barbed-wire, it defended a precinct--describing a languishing lover lying “like gold leaf upon a till”; or proclaiming her invulnerability. “If you expect passion I am utterly unacquainted with any,” she writes her future husband.

Later, of course, she falls extravagantly in love with an Italian, and pours out her feelings unrestrained--in French. She does not, she writes apropos a Turkish love-poem, “think our English proper to express such violence of passion, which is very seldom felt among us.”

In the book’s longest and most thoroughly worked-out chapter, Redford explores the variations in persona used by Horace Walpole. Even at the time, Walpole was considered a self-inventor. He “played innumerable parts and over-acted all of them,” Macaulay gibed.

Six Different People

Redford shows how, describing London’s Gordon Riots to six different people, Walpole presented himself variously as “the vivacious gazetteer, the choleric politician, the equable historian, the aristocratic butterfly and the meditative moralist,” and finally, to a scholarly friend, in the removed, absent-minded figure “of a placid, mole-like antiquarian.”

Redford is choppy and sometimes confusing on Cowper, but he draws a profound and sometimes brilliant portrait. The poet had a mania about littleness--the mild Sussex downs were far too violent for him--and he retired into a little summerhouse at the end of a garden in a secluded village in a most placid part of Buckinghamshire. It was a nook within a nook within a nook within a nook.

Correspondence was a means of introducing sociability into this retreat, but in controlled form. When he invited a friend to stay, he wrote her in advance a detailed account of just what she would see and do. He wrote of the minutiae of each bit of gardening housekeeping as if they were major events; killing a garden snake that frightened his kittens becomes a powerful act of governance.

It is a mode, reductive and enhancing at the same time that survives to this day. E. B. White used it, for instance, in his essays from Maine.

“Cowper is to his kittens as God is not to Cowper,” Redford writes. Life outside was unmanageable; and eventually his retreat, his small occupations and his letter-writing collapsed, and he went mad. It was like going blind, he wrote, as the details that sustained him, failed.