When Someone Wants to Publish Your Correspondence With a Famous Writer

For most of my life I didn’t read books of letters. I wanted what I read to be deliberately shaped. I wanted art. And in middle age, I lost some vision. I read more slowly, so every word had to be right. Letter writers, I assumed, would not work at their writing. Then I had a surprising experience: a scholar, Chad Wriglesworth, asked to compile a book of letters that a friend and I had written thirty to forty years earlier. She was the poet Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia in 1995 at the age of forty-seven. My letters, which I didn’t remember, were in an archive. I feared they were boring and foolish, but I put that thought aside. I had Jane’s letters. They’re observant, honest, loving, quarrelsome, funny.

Jane was remarkably open, even with strangers. However, she emphatically did not want her husband, Donald Hall, to know some secrets she’d told me. And even apart from the secrets, her letters were private. As her literary executor, Don gave permission for them to be published, but I didn’t know if Jane would have agreed. Legally, I could prevent publication only of my own writing. But if I said no, there would be no book. I said yes, not at all sure I was making the ethical choice. I taped over some paragraphs, copied Jane’s letters, and sent the copies to Chad. When Don died, three years later, I sent Chad what I’d omitted. Meanwhile, he went to the archive and copied my letters. After he put the whole correspondence into chronological order and had it typed, I read it. My letters were not as bad as I’d feared. Over years of judicious choosing and cutting, Chad turned our heap of mail into a book.

When letter-writers finally meet, they’re happy, but the reader is excluded. Letters stop. I felt deprived each time, but sometimes there was a photo.

Its impending publication, What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison, edited by Chad Wriglesworth, will be published by the University of Michigan Press in July, reminded me that I’d still never read a correspondence between friends. Would I read this one if I hadn’t written half of it? My vision was worse. I needed brisk, purposeful writing more than ever. But now I wanted to read books of letters. Maybe they would answer some questions. What was this form? Did letters tell us anything we wouldn’t already know about friendship? Was such publication ethical? Searching online, listening to friends’ suggestions, I got hold of five books of letters.

In Susan Fleischmann’s photo on the cover of Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 (edited by Julie R. Enszer with an introduction by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan), two middle-aged women lean into a hug, their faces lively with delight and amusement. When letter-writers finally meet, they’re happy, but the reader is excluded. Letters stop. I felt deprived each time, but sometimes there was a photo.

Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, middle-aged poets with additional careers as speakers and activists, often write about their frustration, as Black lesbian feminists, both with people who share their political values but don’t take poetry seriously, and with people who value poetry, but not by Black feminist lesbians. Typewriters break down; when Pat Parker gets a computer, it “torments” her, giving her “a lifetime of blank pages.” Writing a letter is interrupted by demanding people and unreliable machines, by illness and trouble. Their letters come to a heartbreaking climax when Parker writes about having breast cancer, from which Lorde also suffered. Adding to Parker’s earlier frustrations, it is now hard to be taken seriously as a cancer patient. Friends oppose her choice to have chemotherapy, or they try to be helpful but get in her way. It’s clear that of all the people she knows, Audre Lorde, whom she calls “Sister Love,” is the one she trusts to recognize her as the person she is.

As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, was edited by Joan Reardon, who also wrote an introduction. Avis DeVoto, in Cambridge, MA, answered mail for her husband, the historian and novelist Bernard DeVoto. In 1952, Julia Child mailed him a kitchen knife from France, in thanks for an essay he’d published about the deficiencies of American knives. Avis DeVoto wrote a long letter back. Nine months after her first “Dear Mrs. Child” letter, she begins one, “Julia, my pet.” They both sign off “Love.”

With two French friends, Child is writing the book that eventually became Mastering the Art of French Cooking. DeVoto persuades an editor at Houghton Mifflin to offer them a contract; when Houghton Mifflin eventually rejects the manuscript, DeVoto gets Knopf interested. They are fifties homemakers, “Mrs. Paul Child” and “Mrs. Bernard DeVoto,” but also serious and committed professionals. Faulty vision or no, I wanted to read all four hundred pages of As Always, Julia.

These men don’t sign letters “love” but their closeness is apparent.

Words in Air:The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell is eight hundred pages, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton. Bishop and Lowell had both published well-received early collections of poems when they met in 1947. Their first letters didn’t interest me much: Bishop is unhappy and seems powerless; Lowell, whose first marriage has just ended, is in a relationship neither he nor the footnotes explains. But the letters become irresistible when Bishop moves to Brazil to live with her longtime partner, Lota de Macedo Soares, in a lively household including children connected to Lota. Bishop and Lowell, who never again lived in the same country, wrote letters mostly about writing, like Parker and Lorde: how hard it is, despite success, which seems to have made writing even harder for Bishop. Their letters are rarely about their complicated love lives, Lowell’s manic episodes, or Bishop’s struggles with alcoholism. Lowell thinks Bishop’s poems are better than anyone else’s, including his own, and he recommends her for any honor or prize that comes up.

Lowell and Bishop often mention their friends Mary McCarthy (whom Elizabeth Bishop had met in college) and Hannah Arendt. Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975, was edited with an introduction by Carol Brightman. Mary McCarthy gossips more frankly about people Robert Lowell mentions. She writes about her own four husbands and several lovers. Arendt is candid when she thinks McCarthy is making a foolish decision or blaming an ex unfairly. Both struggle to deal with difficult writing projects. Arendt travels to Israel, then writes Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The book is misunderstood and attacked just when McCarthy’s novel The Group is dismissed by reviewers. McCarthy publishes a long defense of Arendt’s book. Serious thinking comes so naturally to Arendt that her letters veer into philosophy; McCarthy responds. Arendt explains the implications of current news; McCarthy gets an assignment, then travels from her home in Paris to write about it.

Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, was edited by Albert Murray and John F. Callahan, with a preface by Murray and an introduction by Callahan. Like Bishop and Lowell, Ellison and Murray begin corresponding in 1947, writing comradely letters about their unfinished novels. Invisible Man is published and celebrated, but the resulting travel and teaching mean, in the fifties, that Ellison is rarely in contact with other Black people; Murray becomes essential to him. These men don’t sign letters “love” but their closeness is apparent. They are more rigorous about literature and jazz than most people they know; with each other they can say what they think. Ellison, whose letters are infrequent but long, writes, “Maybe if there were not so many things I’d rather talk to you about than anybody else I know, I could do a better job of just keeping in touch.”

Friendship itself unites these books, which let us observe something rarely documented: how it comes about. Lorde’s and Parker’s letters are forthright and funny from the start, but the other writers are reticent and polite at first. Later they blurt out opinions. They’re more relaxed and they care more: they need this other person. Avis DeVoto on a new omelet pan sent by Julia Child: “First omelet practically perfect. Second omelet jerked right out of the pan onto the stove. What a mess.” Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil to Robert Lowell in Boston, speaking of her publisher, Houghton Mifflin: “I sent them all my stories to date, and they dropped them like a hot potato, so if you ever go by 2 Park Street you can throw stones at their windows for me, if you want to.”

The relationship and the privacy allow them to be frank about serious issues. Albert Murray to Ralph Ellison, about “Letter to the North,” in which William Faulkner objected to legal enforcement of integration: “Saw that Faulkner piece in Life. Sad, pitiful, and stupid thing for a writer like that to do.” The title of this book, Trading Twelves, is appropriate not just because both writers are jazz fans but because they sound jazzy, especially Murray, whose style shifts from professorial to slangy, informal, propulsive. Robert Lowell says that Bishop’s letters are publishable because they have “the startling eye and kept-going brilliance of a work in print,” but Bishop, appealingly, often sounds like anyone, as when she asks Lowell, “Do you think The Observer is a good place to send a poem or two?” The letters I read certainly include polished, professional paragraphs. But those I liked most were informal and expressive, Pat Parker’s, Julia Child’s, Albert Murray’s, given form by salutation and complimentary close, progression from what’s happening now to what the writer has been thinking about, but barely under control, as playfulness or strong feeling takes over.

Letters are both shapeless and shaped. The conventions ground the writing as meter and rhyme steady a sonnet. Letters start “Dear” (or “Dearest,” or just a name). Then comes either an apology for not having written sooner or an explanation of why the correspondent is writing right now. DeVoto and Child often say a letter will be short, but it never is. We learn what time it is, where we are, what just went wrong. We are lulled by the familiar form into expecting the rest will be recognizable, and then, often, it’s unexpected. A burst of feeling makes it immediate, as if it were just being written, and written to us.

Letters, now, have nostalgic glamour.

The form prevails; letters come to an end and quiet down. They finish with a wish for the household or partner, then a signature, and usually “Love.” Over time, as the writers become freer, shapelessness is more noticeable. Sometimes excitement, anger, or worry is so intense it breaks the form. Writers drop a subject, then go back to it, or stop writing, return, and explain what they’ve been up to since the last sentence.

Letters tell stories, within each letter, and from letter to letter. There’s not much of what you’d call plot, but, as in a novel, readers need less plot than we think; we just need to be kept  curious. The letters I read were all by professional writers except Avis DeVoto’s, but she becomes, essentially, an unpaid agent. Writers live with uncertainty: maybe they’ll write and maybe they won’t. A book may or may not be finished, be published, get good reviews, bring in money. The publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, unlikely, possible, definite, indefinite, cancelled, then actual, makes As Always, Julia intensely suspenseful. Relationships are also uncertain. The reader identifies with each friend in turn, then hurries to find out if the other friend understood, disagreed, helped, explained. Sometimes there’s no letter, or the important issue is never raised again. Maybe the writers talked on the phone, or a letter was lost. But often, thanks to the patience and skill of an editor who has figured out a chronology, along comes the answer. That question is settled. But a new issue comes up.

Letters, now, have nostalgic glamour. Like fedoras or horses, they’re no longer ordinary; those I read were mostly by people born between 1904 and 1917. Letters are objects made of paper: they are easily destroyed, but they have a presence: thick or thin, neat or lumpy, because folded paper was stuffed into too small an envelope. Letters took enough time to arrive that curiosity, maybe worry, built up. Days or weeks passed, but then the dog barked, the mail carrier tramped onto the porch, the mailbox clattered. Letters from a close friend looked different from other friends’ letters, greeting cards, or business letters. They were in a recognizable envelope, with your friend’s unique handwriting. Jane Kenyon sealed envelopes with stickers depicting cats or other animals, a gesture I somehow knew was ironic (she was laughing at herself). I stopped whatever I was doing to read them. Then they lay around in my kitchen. They got dirty. Or the phone rang and I scribbled something on the nearest piece of paper, which was sometimes Jane’s envelope. Or they were nearly thrown out, but finally rescued: brought to a desk, put into a pile, answered, then stored in a shoebox.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, introducing Lorde and Parker’s letters, claims that “reading writers’ letters is the best kind of eavesdropping. It brings the rush and sweetness of hidden listening. . . .” As she puts it, “the hiddenness somehow makes the listening better.” “Eavesdropping” is a helpful word, describing something bad but not terribly bad; I was pleased when Joan Reardon used that word too, introducing Child and DeVoto’s letters. But she begins, “A letter truly belongs to the sender and the recipient, and to encroach upon their privacy, in effect to eavesdrop over their shoulders, seems to me an intrusion of their personal exchange.”

As someone who’d made the decision that my dead friend’s letters and my own would be read by strangers, I was shaken by this statement, and unconvinced by the one that followed it: “But when a group of letters tells a terrific story, creates a complex narrative of professional growth, deep curiosity, and culinary awakening, it’s important, yes, even imperative, to open those envelopes again and look at what the correspondence reveals.” It’s satisfying to read published letters, but is it “imperative”? Sure, if the cure to a terrible disease exists only in a private letter from one scientist to another, publishing that letter is imperative. But a story of two people managing daily life, relationships, and work? Maybe it’s just not okay.

Twice, Ralph Ellison says he’ll tell Murray about something in his personal life when they’re together, as if he’d just caught sight of me looking. And, indeed, publishing letters can do harm. Carol Brightman, in an Editor’s Foreword, reports that McCarthy said, “We can’t go into print saying that so-and-so is a drunk!” Yet, when they worked together, McCarthy excluded only one discussion. After she died Brightman followed her lead, and the letters are frank about drinking and much else.

It would oversimplify to claim that the problem is only the harm published letters may do. It’s hard to explain my unease when I read a letter of Jane’s that was addressed to me but is now available to anyone. All her letters seem private, not just those containing potentially troubling information; at times, what I agreed to seems decidedly wrong. And then I change my mind. I want people to read Jane’s letters.

Several times, Elizabeth Bishop mentions reading books of letters. She suggests that there could be a college course about poets’ letters. But when Lowell tells her he’s selling his papers to Harvard, adding, “Your letters are the most valuable and large single group. I would like to have them pay you $5000,” Bishop writes back, “Oh! No, no, a thousand times no, or five thousand times no. . .I feel guilty enough living with the possible intention of selling personal letters.” She’s been reading W.H. Auden’s reviews, “and in almost every piece he goes on and on about the wickedness of printing private letters.” (Then she admits that he obviously enjoys the “gossip.”) Henry James, she says, was “even more severe on this matter.” However, when Harvard did offer that money to Bishop, she reluctantly accepted it, to help pay for an apartment on Boston Harbor, from which she writes to Lowell about passing ships.

Would they have stopped if they’d known the letters would be printed? But I’m grateful to learn what I couldn’t know from my own experience.

After Bishop sees a draft of Lowell’s book The Dolphin, she writes him a letter, now famous, about his use of letters in poems. Lowell had left his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, for a relationship with Caroline Blackwood. Writing about the breakup, he incorporated but altered Hardwick’s letters. When Bishop writes that she was troubled by this mixture of truth and fiction, I was surprised that of all possible objections to Lowell’s actions, she made only that one. Maybe altering the letters bothered her most because publication inevitably makes the integrity of a letter, the message from writer to recipient, secondary. Lowell’s poems, to express what he wanted to say, required that Hardwick’s words be changed.

Bishop says, “IF you were given permission, IF you hadn’t changed them. . . etc. But art just isn’t worth that much.” Maybe that’s what Joan Reardon is getting at, or disagreeing with, when she says that the privacy of letter writers matters and in the next breath that a good story justifies the infringement. Books of letters between friends don’t alter letters, but they often select among letters, or shorten them, because of the book’s needs, the reader’s needs, or the publisher’s needs, not the needs of the friendship.

Letters are intimate. After Invisible Man won the National Book Award, Ellison’s travels took him to New Orleans, where “I didn’t see the parade,” he tells Murray, “because I couldn’t ride in either the airport limousine or the white taxis and thus spent hours steaming. I called some white folks some unheard of mfers that day!” DeVoto goes into details you’d only tell a close friend, writing to Child about a troubled son. After a visit from Arendt, McCarthy writes, “It was sad to watch you go through the gate at the airport without turning back. Something is happening or has happened to our friendship. . . .”

Arendt, writing in New York to McCarthy in Paris, begins her reply as soon as she reads the letter, so troubled that her usually accurate English fails her: “I just come home and find your letter, and it is too late to call.” She is mystified. At the airport, she says, she was just sad and lonely. These letters are between people who love each other. What does our presence do to their friendships? Publication opens a relationship to anyone’s scrutiny. Readers can judge Jane and me, deciding that one of us was unfeeling or uncomprehending. I sometimes thought Bishop took advantage of Lowell; I often was annoyed with Lowell. This is none of my business! I felt uncomfortable about eavesdropping when Pat Parker and Audre Lorde talked about being Black lesbians, since I’m not Black or a lesbian. Would they have stopped if they’d known the letters would be printed? But I’m grateful to learn what I couldn’t know from my own experience.

Readers benefit from published letters, not always selfishly: what we learn enlightens us. But privacy is compromised, and letters may inflict pain for reasons we can’t foresee. How much is art worth? Maybe all art does harm: perhaps a painting we love displeased the model, who didn’t want to be thought of like that. Great novels have delighted everyone except the author’s lightly disguised parents.

But, again, that’s not the only issue. Talking on the phone with a close friend whom I met after Jane died, I understood why I was uncomfortable about the impending publication of our letters. As I told my living friend, it was as if I’d arranged for some third person to listen in on our phone call. We weren’t telling our own secrets or anyone else’s. But letting someone listen would fail to acknowledge our intimacy: it would be disrespectful to the friendship itself. Publication of letters between friends intrudes on what it illuminates. As misdeeds go, however, I can think of worse.

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What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison is available from the University of Michigan Press.