When letters say it all

All letters intrigue me. Especially letters of people I have no personal connection with. Sometimes old books bring with them a wealth of this and that — a ticket stub, a recipe, a card and quite often a letter that was perhaps used as a bookmark.

I continue the practice of using the letter as a bookmark but not before reading it first. Even if I have no clue as to who the letter writer or the recipient of the letter was, that it was in that particular book gives me an indication as to what the recipient at least was like.

In the last few years I have taken to reading the published letters of famous people. It began with Camille Pissarro’s Letters to his Son Lucien. I have always delighted in Pissarro’s work and in art museums that have the Impressionists, I make a beeline to that section and there I linger in front of Pissarro’s paintings.

Many years ago Irving Stone’s fictionalised account of Camille Pissarro’s life titled Depths of Glory provided the framework to the man’s artistic endeavour.

But it is with his letters, I discovered the twists and turns of that vision; of how the artist has to cope with being more than just an artist.

Over the years there have been several such collections — Philip Larkin. Mozart. And now as I read Ted Hughes letters, it is for the first time I see Ted Hughes version of what it was to be him.

All along I have only read the Sylvia Plath story and Ted Hughes has been a shadowy monster. Suddenly he has come there alive, and how! He is also a husband, father and son; he is part of an age and is also someone who has to make a livelihood of his art.

Or on an everyday basis he has to negotiate with the world and its demands to carve a little space and time to devote himself to his art. Between fighting demons of the soul there are monsters of mundanity to be dealt with.

And it is this struggle that the letters capture best with neither self deception nor guile.

Anita Nair’s new novel is Lessons in Forgetting.