One usually finds this level of anxiety operating in the retrieval of love letters, not packets of mail that so often, along with so many other suggestions, counseled the avoidance of love’s snares.
ON OCCASION one side of a published correspondence will make for better reading than two. After all, in replying to a letter, the writer will often make verbatim reference to some of its contents, trying to remind the first sender of what he wrote some time ago. But these are the same words that a latter-day reader, if both sides of the exchange have been published, will have read just half a page and a minute ago.
One-sidedness also offers the pleasures of inference, the intellectual labor it takes to surmise what the other party said and was like. After James Agee’s premature death in 1955, his letters to Father James Harold Flye were published by themselves, without his lifelong advisor’s half of their thirty-year correspondence. The teacher had outlived his pupil, and whatever counsel the Episcopal priest gave to Agee—from the time the boy left St. Andrew’s School in Tennessee, all through his attempts to balance serious work and slick journalism, and beyond the success of A Death in the Family—was to remain mute, the unheard half of a conversation on which we’re now trying to eavesdrop. What we get is all Agee, and the general effect is that of a long, hesitant recessional. As he grows up and older, the author’s handwriting shrinks; he switches from definite ink to impermanent pencil; flares to a brief fulfillment and then keeps backing away from his oldest friend and his own better self.
From Exeter in the late 1920s, Agee reports that the Dreiser he is reading is “horribly obvious, and has no humor,” though the novelist’s “dullness is a relief from the heady brilliance of Dos Passos or Lewis.” (Agee is also reading Anita Loos, on Flye’s surprisingly hip recommendation.) The boy’s own writing shows the exuberant strain of someone realizing he’s got what it takes. A girl he’s met has an “unobstreperous intelligence, tinged with a charming limeadish sarcasm”—a description self-conscious enough to make the young Agee follow it with an amiable retraction: “Well, I’ll cease to make a jackass of myself.” He’s performing for Flye and delighted by his own showing off.
It’s a wonder to see how fast he becomes genuinely good: “‘Through pull’ with an Irish Politician, I got to see the [Boston] Morgue and the Jail, neither of which were what I’d expected, but rather worse, in a clammy, metallic way. I had a taste in my mouth as if I’d been licking an old sardine can.” By the time he’s ready to go off to Harvard, he’s the one recommending writers to Flye, though as soon as he’s done so (“Don’t you think [Housman’s] beautiful stuff?”), he remembers his manners and who’s supposed to be mentoring whom: “Probably you know it—even have the books in the house.”
Precocity doomed him. His letters resemble no one’s so much as those of Rupert Brooke, who also, in style and psychology, became at a very early age not just all he would ever be but all he could ever have become, however long he lived. At twenty-eight, a dozen years after leaving home, Agee is a paunchy, anguished Peter Pan, unable to stop singing in an adolescent tremolo: “The world (and my self) seem to me this morning, in light of recent context, evil, exhausting and hopeless, not to mention nauseating and infuriating and incurable, yet I am thoroughly glad I am in it and alive.” He never sheds the self-importance of youth. One sees it mutating, as he embarks upon Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, into a kind of grandiose humility: “If I could make it what it ought to be made I would not be human.” Once the book is done and Flye has praised it, Agee’s mea culpa is more megalomaniacal than self-critical: “What you write of the book needless to say is good to hear to the point of shaming me—for it is a sinful book at least in all degrees of ‘falling short of the mark’ and I think in more corrupt ways as well.” In 1940, he continues to fly a teenager’s banner (“I never in all my life want to feel respect for a half-good”), and ten years after that he’s still taking birthdays hard.
From his own point of view, the worst compromises are the ones he must negotiate between his literary ambition, honestly confessed to Flye, and the need to make a living. Having famously parodied Time for the Harvard Advocate, he lets Henry Luce’s magazine empire co-opt him with a job offer from Fortune, the acceptance of which he ceaselessly bemoans. When, in 1937, he decides never to take another staff position, it’s with a brass band of renunciation: “I will work for money only when I have it and think security and solidity and respect for these hopeless and murderous traps and delusions.”
Drinking floats his “enormously strong drive … toward self-destruction,” and yet it’s only when he’s at least half-drunk that he can write a letter less about himself than his concern for Father Flye. Twenty times more often it’s his own spiritual sloth that goes into the mail, styled in a self-pity that Agee is well aware of himself. “I am in most possible kinds of pain,” he writes on October 30, 1934, ashamed of this letter he still won’t stop himself from sending. He apologizes for posting near-suicide notes, but even when a terrible mood lifts mid-letter, he goes ahead and burdens Flye with the whole thing he’s written. On one occasion, he retracts responsibility below the signature: “P.S. This is now several days later. If this seems bad, annoying, ill-tempered or otherwise no good please forgive it.”
Having begun to teach his second wife to play the piano, he can discourse to Flye upon “some funny and tricky things about teaching”—without ever seeming to realize that Flye may already have discovered one or two of them for himself in a lifetime at the job. The impending birth of Agee’s child has him passing out cigars to himself: “On that I feel such complications of hope, fear, joy, sorrow, life, death, foreboding, interest, and a dozen other true emotions on which the copyright has expired, that I am not qualified to try to touch them now.” He knows that Flye is endlessly willing to listen and respond, and that their correspondence has, finally, only one subject: “So I want to write, as I would talk if we could, only of the few most urgent things you have written of—all to do with me.”
One can sometimes guess Flye’s specific recommendations from Agee’s responses: “You used to tell me what to do—that is about relaxing my mind and body—when things tied up in knots. I didn’t really know what you meant, but I do now.” Most of what the older man said, however, could not have been as important as his letting Agee vent; if Agee is using the priest, this seems to be no more than what Flye desires. In one instance, Agee directly solicits spiritual guidance, receiving back the single, quite beautiful, letter from Flye that its author allowed to be printed (as an almost apologetic footnote) in this whole book of those he got from Agee: “You are naturally religious … There are those who are bored by what is clean, sweet, beautiful, tender, reverent. As between the high and the low, they will choose the low. There are those who disapproved of Christ and those who laughed and jeered at Him as He hung on the cross. I know that you are of those who love the highest when they see it; anima naturaliter Christiana, as the old expression was. As between Christ and those against Him, there is no doubt to which side you are drawn. The way to make this allegiance open will I think become clearer to you.”
As the volume ends, with Agee dying in his forties of heart disease, illness makes the author approachable. The pompous self-appraisal drops away in favor of concrete realities and sincere feeling. Even so, these letters are not art by Agee’s own definition (an “attempt to state things as they seem to be, minus personal opinion of any sort”). In fact, Agee deliberately excludes them from that realm: “this is a lousy letter, a mouthful of sweet potato,” he writes Flye on February 12, 1953. “I’ve said virtually nothing about myself. Maybe that is a virtue in the Art of Letter-writing, but between friends it seems a vice …” He more than once derides letters as a poor substitute for face-to-face conversation, and yet, when a chance to see Flye presents itself, he seems reluctant to take it. Agee doesn’t visit him on a trip South, and appears tentative when the priest has the chance to come to New York—as if the prospect of talk, which woul
d require some self-interruption, had become suddenly unattractive.
James Harold Flye remained a faithful listener until the end, taking Agee’s last letter (“I feel, in general, as if I were dying”) from the writer’s living-room mantel, where it had been placed, addressed and stamped and waiting to be mailed.
THE ONLY REALLY DIFFICULT thing about giving advice, epistolary or otherwise, is getting people to take it. In the early 1930s, already an object of aesthetic veneration, Frank Lloyd Wright set about making sure he would have a long string of disciples by setting up a fellowship for apprentice architects at his Taliesin studios, first in Wisconsin and, later, Arizona. For two decades, past his eightieth birthday, he kept his own administrative hands on the enterprise. The letters he wrote for an hour or two each morning show him more in the role of a dean than a deity: begging donations; dunning tuition; scaring up the right mix of cello players and carpenters among the applicants. He also wrote their acceptance letters: “Come along and get to work.” Time and again, not wholly trusting a brochure to do the job, he explained the fellowship, right down to what the recipient should pack: “Strictly formal clothes are no[t] essential. Bring your own bedding: sheets, blankets, etc., and if you happen to have sleeping bags bring them with you.”
His great theme is the superiority of Taliesin’s “culture” to education, the kind provided at Yale and leading to “a scrap of paper” called a diploma. “No academic preparation is necessary to enter Taliesin;” in fact, the best time to join is before corruption by schooling. Besides, “a letter of recommendation from this office is of more value than a degree of architecture from any college of Architecture in the world.” Over the years, throughout an era when “degeneracy looms,” Wright pours it on against “the scholasticism that has manufactured parasitic white collarites by the million.”
More gently—reluctant to bite the hands feeding his community—he writes to the fellows’ parents. Sometimes the news is bad (“your son Willets … with a pint of whiskey got dead drunk and messed the place up rather nastily”), and in one case where it’s good, Wright must ask a thriving boy’s father to “give us some explanation of your sudden resolve to take [your son] out of here and throw him back into the stagnant city pool.” Woe betide the student who fails to resist such parental retraction: “I may invest Taliesin and myself in a likely boy like yourself and then have him ditch both Taliesin and myself when both need him most to help ‘ma’ and ‘pa.’ I didn’t foresee that. But I see it now and do not find it good.”
In perpetuating its founder’s architectural gospel of romantic form and individualism, Taliesin could not avoid a certain cultishness. Wright warns one prospective fellow, in 1947, that “as a fountain head we are not for all and sundry,” quoting, perhaps unconsciously, Ayn Rand. It’s hard to imagine that ego-hymning objectivist, whose dirtiest word was altruism, as anyone’s acolyte, but her fiction’s one memorable hero came out of her own prolonged hero-worship of Wright. The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark was not meant to resemble Wright biographically but to fight his fight for a modern expressionist architecture against the pack of Beaux-Arts Philistines.
Her novel, she writes him in 1937, while still researching it, will be “a monument to you … to the spirit in you and in your great work.” She has contacted Wright to obtain an interview, employing the sort of blaring overstatement that she would use in the book itself: “you can understand why it seems to me that of all men on earth you are the one I must see.” Still, this first letter to him contains as much posturing as prostration: “I do not suppose that you have heard my name, since I am not that famous—as yet.”
She would have her fame, and it would bedazzle her into a delusion of uniqueness: “The success of other books was always due in large measure to big-scale publicity, organized pushing, book-club-wholesaling. My book is the only one that rose, unhelped, through sheer, genuine popular response.” Wright, who never sat down with Rand until after this supposedly unheard-of phenomenon had occurred, eventually wrote her a sort of fan letter, to which she replied “Gratefully—and always reverently,” without letting him get away with a single reservation about her book: “Am I really ‘sensationalizing’ my material? If I am, I think it is in the same way in which your buildings are ‘sensationalized.’”
Her ordinary fans—many of them far more worshipful than Wright’s most enraptured apprentice—got away with even less. Rand didn’t usually like their letters, but if she detected seriousness, she could gratify it with lengthy, even generous, advice, as when she addresses the vocational anxieties of a gifted sixteen-year-old: “don’t expect any outside circumstance or observation to give you a desire for a particular career. That desire comes from your own convictions about life, its purpose, what you want to do with it, and in what form you want to express it.” More typically she rewards compliments with lectures, scoldings and corrections; letters written to two different fans on March 6, 1965, both have paragraphs that begin: “You are mistaken.”
A long, early reply to Nathan Blumenthal—who as Nathaniel Branden would become her public expositor and secret lover—whips him into philosophical shape: “now let me ask you a question: Do you really know what Capitalism is?” More casual correspondents must “earn” responses—like one sent to the hapless Raymond B. Young, Jr., who apparently had kind things to say about Rand’s intellectual archenemy, Plato. The practical difficulties of authorial celebrity keep her guard up—but so, no doubt, does the memory of long ago having tried to earn that interview with Wright. “May I come?” her first letter to him had ended—before she was denied.
The seriousness with which she could take her fans reflected, more than anything else, the colossal seriousness with which she took herself. She speaks of Howard Roark as if he were really alive, and refers to “the author of The Fountainhead” in a manner less detached than awestruck. Possessed of an extreme literary intentionalism, she seems never happier than when megaphoning exactly what she means by her elephantine allegories: “Much later in my novel I will have a very long speech by the hero in which I will summarize the entire philosophy of the story and cover all the important details of the free-enterprise system.”
Any novelist learns that enjoyment of his own work in progress should be taken as a warning light, a sign that he’s tarrying in his own fantasy world instead of creating one that will be intelligible to his readers; but Rand’s self-delight throughout the years and reams of paper required by Atlas Shrugged borders on the autoerotic: “it is moving well, and I love it, and it is much better than I expected it to be.” The filming of The Fountainhead—that “atom bomb of the movie industry”—seems “even more miraculous” than the book’s sui generis triumph. Rand directs any admiration she has left over toward pop-cultural tough guys like Mickey Spillane and Robert Stack, both of whom can turn her all girly and giggling: “If you want me to be a ‘Spillane Hunter’—take this as part of the pursuit.” The objects of these crushes are spared the chilling tone of the liquidator, the Stalinist rhetoric that elsewhere comes so naturally to this fierce anti-Stalinist.
The ugly, pile-driving clarity of Rand’s writing was, in fact, sometimes suited to the giving of advice, at least in those instances when the requestor needed someone else’s certainty to pulverize hesitation. When Rand’s niece asked to borrow twenty-five dollars for a dress, the repayment terms that were offered must have made the young woman consider running to a convent instead of a boutique:
I want you to understand right now that I will not accept any excuse—except a serious illness. If you become ill, then I will give you an extension of time—but for no other reason. If, when the debt becomes due, you tell me that you can’t pay me because you needed a new pair of shoes or a new coat or you gave the money to somebody in the family who needed it more than I do—then I will consider you as an embezzler. No, I won’t send a policeman after you, but I will write you off as a rotten person and I will never speak or write to you again.
This
is just Aunt Ayn, trying to save her niece from the evil altruists and hoping “that this will be the beginning of a real friendship between us.” Perhaps less attracted to the dress than to the letter’s crazy definiteness, the niece took the deal.
STAGE-FRIGHTENED TEACHERS and tentative physicians do not make the best purveyors of wisdom, and yet at least one book of counsel by an underconfident master has remained—through eras during which Hermann Hesse, Anaïs Nin and Kahlil Gibran have come and gone—a staple of support to the artistically inclined young. The Letters to a Young Poet that Rainer Maria Rilke wrote between 1903 and 1908 provide an odd spectacle of encouragement in which the nervous mentor seems to preach as much to himself as his disciple: “Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good.” Rilke’s correspondent is Franz Xaver Kappus, who, while enduring the same sort of military schooling that once traumatized Rilke, sends the twenty-seven-year-old poet his own verses—under “a covering letter in which I unreservedly laid bare my heart”—and forces Rilke into a role he seems scarcely strong enough to perform.
Rilke’s prescriptions for writing are more or less firm. Kappus must avoid reading criticism and look for validation only within himself. He must honor sadness and not overvalue irony. He must respect the difficult and learn to love questions more than answers. He must cultivate a ripeness-is-all patience that will bring forth works of art made inevitable by their own necessity. The boy must avoid “unreal, half-artistic professions,” such as journalism, in favor of one that “will make you independent and set you entirely on your own in every sense.”
During much of this period, however, Rilke himself lacks any compelling artistic project. Poverty forces him into the reviewing and article writing he so dislikes, and keeps him from sending Kappus any more than the titles of the books he has managed to publish. Already married and a father, Rilke nonetheless imparts the most ethereal sort of sexual advice: “most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.” Depressed by springtime whenever it arrives, he recommends solitude, muses on the chance for a new androgyny in the world and talks about a state of mutual regard between lovers that sounds like D. H. Lawrence’s “star-equilibrium” without the preliminary fun: “this more human love (that will fulfill itself, infinitely considerate and gentle, and kind and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.” In fact, Rilke’s imagined lovers appear as if they’ll always be exchanging letters instead of kisses.
Yours Ever Page 11
