Yours Ever

by Thomas Mallon

  A sheet of stationery would often suggest itself. On it, the cheer he prepared for others could also be sent to himself. Lamb is letter writing’s great whistler in the dark, his productions a singing kettle put on for both writer and recipient. We grab for their gossip; their overstuffed descriptions (“each individual flake presents a pleasing resistance to the opposed tooth”); their harmless japes, in which a man so hemmed in by circumstance can tinker with reality. In April 1829, he complains to Henry Crabb Robinson: “I have these three days been laid up with strong rheumatic pains, in loins, back, shoulders. I shriek sometimes from the violence of them. I get scarce any sleep.” In his next letter, he admits that this was all just one-upmanship to irritate the genuinely rheumatic Robinson: “I have no more rheumatism than that poker … The report of thy torments was blown circuitously here from Bury. I could not resist the jeer.” Nor, one suspects, the chance to provide himself with relief, if only from an affliction he must imagine in order to banish.

  Lamb deprecates his letters for a tedium they never have (“dull up to the dulness of a Dutch commentator on Shakespeare”) and more honestly apologizes for the scarcity of time he has to write them. Innumerable distractions keep him from “epistolary purposes;” chief among them is his job, which he curses to Wordsworth in 1822:

  Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don’t know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between 10 and 4 without ease or interposition … these pestilential clerk faces always in one’s dish.

  He wishes “for a few years between the grave and the desk,” but when they finally arrive, he makes a difficult adjustment. He now writes letters to pass the time he never had: “I pity you for overwork,” he writes Bernard Barton in 1829, “but I assure you no-work is worse. The mind preys on itself, the most unwholesome food … I have killed an hour or two in this poor scrawl.”

  But Lamb had always hated getting to the end of a letter. “Things come crowding in to say, and no room for ‘em,” he’d written Manning decades earlier before returning to the difficult life beyond the margins of his stationery. If the letters of Keats, his younger contemporary, are prescriptions for living, tickets into the world, Lamb’s mood-driven miniatures are respites from it, little globes unto themselves, complete and welcoming and, for all that, still hard to bear:

  The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book case which has followed me about (like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved—old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school,—these are my mistresses.

  Even now, he is the distant correspondent from whom we would most like to hear.

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