Letters in the Attic
Some people can do it without even trying, easy as rolling off a log. Give them pen and paper and someone to write to and words will flow magically from their fingers. My Great-Aunt Anna in Kentucky was one of these, a virtuoso of the ordinary letter. She made the mundane extraordinary by witty observations and pretty turns of phrase, she could fill four pages, back and front, in an even, looping hand, describing what she and Uncle Ken had done that day, with amusing asides and backward glances to ground her observations. Reading one of her missives was like sitting on her verandah in a rocking chair, shelling peas while listening to her mull over the past few hours or days or years. We kept up a correspondence until she died and, looking at her letters now, I note how effortlessly she imbued the commonplace with grace.
My mother was less comfortable with letter-writing, although she too had a beautiful hand. But her letters were stilted, as if she were blocked from pleasure by procedure. Like Aunt Anna’s, they were heavy on factual detail, alerting me to what she and my father had had for supper, how they’d spent the week previous, perhaps a little family news or neighborhood gossip. She often included newspaper articles concerning health or proper behaviour (Ann Landers columns and the like), and during my years at university these were combined with a closing exhortation to “be good.” Because of a stroke, her letters stopped before her death at age 63 when I was only 30, and to my sorrow I did not save many, maybe because they seemed identical, repeating the same information—the very thing that imbues these boxes of letters in my attic with some value: the real, ongoing lives of real people, what historians call primary sources.
The decision to hand over my papers to the library archives at the university from which I graduated seems straightforward enough. I’m even a little flattered as the young archivist tells me what’s wanted are manuscripts in various stages, notes prior to writing stories, essays or poetry, correspondence concerning publication, reviews, book tours and the like. Plus journals and diaries and personal letters, she says, for these serve as social documents, their value not so much to do with me as to cast light on earlier times. Context, contemporary mores, that sort of thing. Life in the last half of the twentieth century.
It’s pretty easy, even pleasant, sifting through drafts and revisions and press clippings, and I’m making progress until I come to the correspondence. I’ve kept letters from as far back as the 1950s and, although there has been some serious culling over the decades, there are still hundreds packed into IKEA boxes stacked in a corner of the attic. The task is daunting, like trying to dance in quicksand, and I begin to wonder what good can possibly come of sending this stuff off to eternal rest in climate-controlled conditions.
Opening the first box, I am on my knees and a good thing too. As the lid comes off, the force-field of memory shoves me over, an invisible presence so powerful that I am blown back on my haunches. Scooping out folded letters and envelopes, the visual shock of familiar handwriting hits me as sharply as if I have been slapped and I am shaken by faces, voices, whole bodies leaping toward me—vibrantly alive, even those long dead.
Handwriting, whether printing or cursive, is surely as unique as fingerprints, attaching an individual’s personality to the page. Reading even a few words, or simply the address on an envelope, my brain registers the whole person who held the pen, as if pen-marks on paper have the power to bring forth human beings, blossoming in the air the way that folded tissue-paper flowers do in water: sound of voice, colour of eyes, the sensation of a smooth cheek next to mine in an embrace. Almost without exception, I know immediately from whom each letter came, by the choice of paper, the colour of ink, and most especially the distinctive way the words sit together—straight or crooked, loosely spaced or tightly jammed. I wonder whether this would be the case in Arabic or Hebrew or Chinese and a little research proves that yes, it would be equally easy to identify authors from something as simple as the angle or width of a brush stroke. It is the same process, after all, the drawing of thought always dependent on the individual’s hand and heart: mood and motive often show themselves without intention.
As evocative as a photograph is an envelope mailed decades ago, flooding me with memories until I feel faint with ancient desire. As deeply felt as a phone call are letters bringing forth my dead husband’s voice in a peculiar kind of emotional ventriloquism. In a box labeled 1969-70, I find the daily letters we sent while courting by mail between Timmins and Toronto: the year we married, I ironed the letters and ordered them chronologically in a three-ring binder, but have seldom looked at them since. Now, in my widowhood, they yield a strangely sweet melancholy and I can only bear to read a few at a time. (How young we were, how little we knew of what lay ahead.)
Such strong feelings of reconnection come unbidden, impossible to ignore, as startling as lightning, as frightening as thunder. Of those whose letters I cherish, their words have been part of a continuing flow between us. So many are no longer here. Dead or disappeared. All that’s left are marks on paper and I am bewildered by an intense wish to ingest the letters I hold in my hand: perhaps I shall turn into a madwoman in the attic, chewing paper into pulp and swallowing the words.
Opening another box labelled late 1990, I see it is half-empty. Along one side of the interior I find a clump of brown oval mud-nests made by wasps to house their larvae. But where did the mud come from? How did they make these nests in this box? I have no idea and react with alarm, even though the little critters have long since died, their amber-coloured corpses littering the letters along with bits of dried mud.
Life is always arranging metaphor for its own amusement, and certainly this box seems like a Jungian analyst’s dream—perfectly mythic! Imagining how Pandora must have felt as the evil spirits escaped and swarmed around her head, I gather the dead wasps carefully and shake the box clean. I go through the letters then, expecting a sting…but no, the contents are benign. A nice note from Barry Lopez rests on top of one from an old friend named Harry Phillips who became my surrogate father in the 90s, and the remaining letters are but a motley sampling, nothing dangerous. I was wrong.
In a small box I find a bundle of aerogram letters kept by my mother from the year I spent abroad in the mid- 60s: these are the only examples of my correspondence to my parents, as my father threw out everything when he cleaned his attic (intentionally wiping me from his life before he died in 1991). The thin blue paper covered with cramped writing makes me ache for those youthful days on the road with my friends Sheila and Melodie: the letters are carefully composed so as to not worry my mother, my first excursion into the memoirist’s gentle art of omission. “The buses are so expensive in Greece,” I wrote. Meaning: “We are hitch-hiking everywhere and having adventures.”
It’s in another box that the sting arrives, a selection of letters from 1988. For here is the poison-pen letter my husband received in Nairobi from someone in Ottawa, assuring him that his wife had slept one night with an older writer famous for his flirtatious tendencies. A typewritten note on a narrow strip of paper, it named the time and place (Kingston, July 1987). However, I had an alibi, for the night in question had been spent quarreling with the poet Bronwen Wallace, who was then my closest friend. She was dismayed by my decision to go with my husband to Kenya because of his work. “It’s only for two years,” I promised, but when we bid a tearful goodbye next morning, she said with much bitterness she was sure I’d never come back and that she’d never see me again.
A prophecy that turned out to be true. A prophecy that still haunts me.
I sit on the floor of the attic, quizzical: why did I keep the strip of paper? Maybe for the same reason that, in the same box, I saved letters raging between Bronwen and me for the next year, ending in mutual anger several months before her death: documents for the Truth & Reconciliation Commission that sits, waiting, at the back of my mind.
Quite certain I knew who had sent the malicious message, I confronted that woman one summer but she swore her innocence. My suspicions slid to another poet and his wife, but eventually I let the anger slip away: it did my marriage no harm, my husband believed me without the alibi. Maybe I still keep the thing as visible proof that we are never safe from wickedness, we must be prepared.
Remembered pain makes you feel strong because you know you’ve come through it, the same way that remembered happiness—this yellowing packet of love letters bound by an elastic band—is a poultice, an analgesic.
But here in the attic, among the boxes, is also where grief lies in wait, ready to sink its claws into my bent shoulders, far worse than the quick sting. It is impossible now to move forward without this heavy monster attached to my back. Even as it increases in size and weight the deeper I go into the boxes, I am driven by some peculiar need to face letters recording loss, so many kinds of loss that even as I fill up my mind with memories, I feel bereft.
My sadness comes not only from facing the deaths of beloved friends and family but from letters of argument or rebuttal, blame and counter-blame, or those recording the end of love. Indeed, one large container is labelled The Heartbreak Box. I often kept copies of letters, because (as many of us did in those days) I’d compose a rough draft and then send the final one written or typed “in good,” saving my original as a reminder of what I’d said, should I want to remember. I wince now as I encounter my awful temper or self-righteous tone. Oh to go back, to erase, to start again. But those were the days before DELETE.
I didn’t know there would be so much pain in this archival business.
For besides all else, there is the worst sting of all: Age is chasing me down and already proving the winner in whatever life & death scrabble is going on here. I must face the truth that I am old, born before the end of World War II. There can be no doubt, for who anymore has an attic heavy with saved letters?
Old people, that’s who.
Who among the young can recollect the delicate pressure of pen nib on fine stationery—pale blue or cream—or for that matter, ballpoint on lined yellow legal pads? Who among the young remembers the numbering of pages back and front, the folding into an envelope, the licking of a gummed triangular flap, addressing and stamping and sliding it into the narrow slot of the mailbox?
Going, going and…post offices closing across the country, astronomical franking costs set to discourage use, house-delivery in its death throes: a tearing-apart of social fabric that denies the quaint and quintessential pleasures afforded by writing a letter and the delicious anticipation of it being answered, the soft fall onto carpet through the front door or the crisp envelope waiting in the box…. Gone.
Electronic communication is immediate and succinct. No one waits days or weeks for a response, within minutes you have a reply to whatever query you toss out into the ether; a few words by email or even fewer by text, pared down to a grotesque parody of language. There’s constant connection if you keep your iPhone or your iPad at the ready. Who needs letters when there is the immediate gratification of tweets on Twitter or likes on Facebook or whatever other linkages now exist? The young, and those who aspire to remain au courant, have developed a simplified code bearing little similarity to the chatty verbosity of Aunt Anna. But perhaps this is all for the good? We are busy people after all.
Having been an ardent letter-writer since age ten when I ventured into the heady world of penpals, it was inevitable that I would join PEN—as I did, before leaving Canada in 1987. It turned out that, while I was in Nairobi, I could be of service, taking US$1000 from PEN to a recently released prisoner in Addis Ababa whose name is Martha Kuwee Kumsa. I had written to her over a two-year period, but more importantly, Timothy Findley had early taken her on as his major PEN project, and his letters to Martha sustained her for many years (CBC produced a radio program from these letters, called Blue is the Colour of Hope). Eventually, pressure from PEN resulted in her freedom, although she was still followed and watched—hence the need for cash so that she could arrange for her escape through Kenya.
I flew up to Addis in the spring of 1990, with several American bills secreted around my body and in my shoes, to meet Martha with whom I then spent a week, understanding fully the power of PEN—letters written to governments demanding justice are essential but just as important are the intimate, caring letters written to prisoners. She knew she would survive and eventually be freed because she had not been forgotten. She and her children eventually made their secret way over the border down to Nairobi and, after many more letters supporting her status as a refugee, to Canada, where today she is a professor of social work.
I become an amateur graphologist as I sort the letters into piles, noting how many ways there are to write by hand—careless scrawl or neat printing or extravagant calligraphy. It seems I can decipher old relationships by the way words form themselves on the page, and I view tidy letters with a little distrust. Somehow, scribbled lines slanting helter-skelter give an impression of genuine involvement—perhaps a carefree disrespect for the genteel epistolary art, but with full-hearted attention to the immediacy of connection.
Reading through, I note that salutations don’t differ much, but there are many kinds of closure: best wishes, best love, love, all my love, much love, love you forever, love you me, as ever, warmly, affectionately, with regard, yours truly, truly yours, take care, see you, keep in touch, sorry, in haste, goodnight sweetheart, goodbye for now, goodbye, au revoir.
I also observe how increasingly lavish are declaration of devotion (both male and female), as years have passed. Something has changed. Early correspondence was prim, never more than love until the late 1990s… but in recent years we call each other darling or funny pet names and, male or female, we swear eternal allegiance in the manner of Anne of Green Gables and her best friend Diana. It appears that the older we are, the less we are embarrassed to express warm feelings—but perhaps this is just a sign of the times, a loosening of the old WASP brain-corsets: nowadays everyone kisses everyone hello and goodbye in a show of well travelled sophistication. Whatever the cause, I am glad of it, here alone in the attic, where affection rises like fragrant vapour from unfolded pages.
Maybe there’s something symbolic about my letters being up here and not in the cellar, as if memories belong in the head of the house. I think of this brain-image as I gather up three bundles of letters from friends who have now succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease, and whose children wish to be given these visible memories of who their mothers were “before”. One of these women—I shall call her Lily—wrote extraordinarily beautiful letters, describing her experiences around the world. Educated, cultured, poetic, her letters now appear like the tops of fence posts in deep snow, stark reminders of who she was. Who she is still, but this part of her silenced.
These boxes of letters have followed me from Elmira to Toronto to Belleville to Ottawa to Nairobi to Montpellier to Manila to Tornac, perhaps explaining the rather astonishing number of people with whom I have “kept in touch.” There are some who’ve been friends since kindergarten, and others met along the way as neighbours, colleagues, students, fellow writers or simply like-minded souls. The contents of these boxes have occasionally been winnowed—for example, saving only one letter per person per year—but never totally discarded, although twice there have been small burnings, fueled by wine and the surmise that some recorded indiscretions (not always mine) could cause harm if discovered. As I go through now, I set aside anything that looks the least bit dicey, and before sending everything off will ask senders who are still extant if they agree to have their private correspondence archived, promising a “hold” if their letters require it. (Hardly likely, as 95 percent of my friends have led exemplary lives, and the others seldom wrote about the really hot stuff, they were too busy living it).
Already, however, one Canadian writer with whom I have been friends for 30 years has objected to her letters being included, on the grounds that they were “a personal gift.” I would have thought that meant whatever was given belongs to the recipient not the donor, but rather than rouse ill feelings, I have removed her letters and sent them back.
Sometimes I am drawn into the boxes and can’t find my way out. Hours pass, and I am pulled deeper and deeper into the past so that when I finally emerge and make my shaky way down the narrow stairs from the attic, it’s as if I have been spelunking in dark caves deep in the dripping earth, attached to the present by the most slender and fragile rope: I literally don’t know up from down I am so dizzied by emotion. The past cannot repeat itself, but it can be revisited and every trip brings fresh peril to one’s grip and balance in the present.
From around 1970 onward, I find letters which begin: sorry about typing, I know it seems so impersonal but I’m in a rush/at the office/knew you wouldn’t mind…. These letters are still several pages long, same as handwritten ones; often there are typos and, from fastidious friends, penned corrections or arrowed addenda. They are similar yet different from the printed email messages that I’ve saved since the millenium, although here too it is always evident who is a true epistolarian and who is not. Die-hard letter-writers continue to indent paragraphs and to compose narratives with reference to the last-received email, often opening with mention of the weather: however, few allude in any detail to world events or politics—it’s as if we are on the same page without saying so—except to pass on a blog or an attachment from one news source or another. The equivalent of my mother’s clippings.
As I pass days and weeks reading, I note that in the last 20 years, there is little current handwriting by which to gauge character: examples exist on Christmas or birthday cards but real letters have been replaced by phone calls and Facetime, Skype and email. I agree that the informality of email allows for an openness of spirit—a relaxed mode of discourse that comes with pressing keys or tapping the screen, an ease not so evident in handwritten letters. But as we have come to know, email brings its own hazards—the shock of having hit SEND to the wrong address and the knowledge that our words can be accessed by others.
In those distant days when we wrote letters because long-distance was too expensive, correspondence was endowed with ceremony, with gravitas. But those days are gone. The young with their cell phones will be saved the anguish of backward-looking, but neither will they have the tactile joy of holding memories in hand. They won’t even have photo albums over which to shed a sentimental tear or two—camera shops have closed across the country with the same rapidity as
video stores. We’re accustomed to friends passing us a Smartphone so that we can view the latest grandchild or the most recent trip to Peru.
Face it, I tell myself, your era is over.
And yet, it occurs to me that Great-Aunt Anna’s honouring the quotidian is exactly what is happening now but without written construct, without form or style or considered content. It is simply the case that the impulse to tell and comment and share one’s thoughts and feelings has found a new way to exist— and so who am I to deny its worth?
A rhetorical question for which there’s no reply, unless you, dear reader, wish to write me a letter, sharing your thoughts on this matter. Oh, do! Take up a pen, and begin….
Photo by Flickr user Sebastian Raskop
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