The Correspondent, psychology, psychoanalysis,
communication, handwriting a letter, typing, emailing
My Reluctant Mother recommended this book a while ago
because I have been writing snail mail letters for the last three or four years
and she thought I would have an interest in a fictionalized account of a series
of correspondences from the same author.
I think she also thought I would enjoy the articulation of this
particular character – Sybil Van Antwerp - from her letters – including her growth as a
person. And she was right (as usual).
This book asks the reader to follow multiple threads as this
woman corresponds with her children, her close friend, her neighbor, her
godchild, and various mysterious others, including an unnamed correspondent
whose letters are never sent. As we do
this, we learn about the author of the letters from the way her thoughts are
presented on the page and we also, implicitly, learn something about the relationship
between the use of language and character formation and expression.
Without too many spoilers, this woman is adopted. She is adopted into a Waspy family, and she
writes like my very Waspy Maternal grandmother.
In fact, she reminds me of her a lot, and to a lesser extent, she
reminds me of my reluctant mother, her daughter. Grandmother learned to write – letters of the
alphabet – from her grandmother, and her penmanship was excellent. But she also learned how to think and to
think about the world from that same grandmother, who home schooled her for a chunk
of her childhood in Wisconsin. Her
letters were things of beauty. She
learned and used the Palmer method of cursive writing, and all of her letters
look the same – eminently legible.
In addition to their appearance, my grandmother's letters also have a
similar structure, one that is present in the letters in this book. There is an acknowledgement of the person
they are writing to and any previous correspondence, especially the most recent. Then there is the main body of the letter –
articulating what she is most interested in communicating. It may be a response to the other’s
communication, or it may be a new topic, and, in either case, there is an
effort to be clear about the intention of the communication and to provide
enough context that it makes sense. Then
there is a closing – perhaps an entreaty, a summary, or a question to evoke a
response.
The exceptions to the standard form vary from unremarkable –
the single paragraph of an email requesting information – to the urgent, where
the need to communicate overrides the nicety of an introduction and the
immediacy of the concern is portrayed not just by the words, but by the
violation of the standard letter protocol.
That said, these letters are far from form letters. My father’s father wrote a lot of letters. My father remembered his writing every week
when my dad was in college. I read a
collection of the letters he wrote one week to a variety of family members and
friends – and the content of the letters was remarkably varied, as was the style
of writing – even within his own standardized format. My grandfather’s wife was out of town, and he
told her about news of the garden club, he wrote to my father about hunting and
fishing with mutual friends, a mutual interest of theirs, and he wrote to others
of business dealings that they were involved in. Similarly, Sybil writes of aspects of her
life that are germane to the person she is corresponding with. There is some overlap between letters, but it
is remarkably limited. Part of the joy and
challenge of reading this book is putting together the pieces and figuring out
the relationships between the people that Sybil is corresponding with – and her
relationship with each of them.
A friend who read the book fantasized about reading the
letters at the pace that they were mailed.
It would have taken him the better part of a decade to finish the book –
and the memory of a particular letter, not held together by any connection with the
person outside of the letter – would likely have made this an impossible task: he wrote after confessing this fantasy to acknowledge that he had
finished the book the next day. I took a
very different tack than he and occasionally read ahead along a single line of
correspondence. I was anxious to figure
out how this particular aspect of the book/correspondence developed and didn’t
wait for it to unfold organically. When I told other friends about doing this, they were appalled. I was violating the form and structure of a work of art!
Writing snail mail letters is different than composing an
email. Especially when you write them
out by hand, you have to think about what you want to say before you say it –
you can’t edit after the fact, the way you can with email. Generally, I also have a length in mind. I want to keep most letters to the front and
back of a single piece of stationary, or, if I am writing a longer letter, I am
still thinking about how the end will line up with the next piece of paper. In other words, there are constraints that
don’t exist with an email, which can be one line, or a tome.
Sybil Van Antwerp frequently writes
drafts of her letters – one or two – before she sends the letters out. This is a constraint that I don’t include –
much to the chagrin of my correspondents who note missing and illegible
words as well as misspellings and ask me to at least read over a letter before
sending it. I do work through at
least two and often three or four drafts of a blog before posting it, but this
does not prevent all kinds of odd locutions, typos, and some bad grammar and
mistaken references to characters showing up in the final product. And in reading The Correspondent, despite the
effort that goes into crafting the letters, we still get a sense of the
underlying (human) clutter, concern, anxiety, and uncertainty that undergirds
the crafted letter. While emails are
often about transactional matters – when should we meet, what should we wear,
how should we solve this problem – and they verge on conversational gambits,
letters are a step removed from that. We
are composing something that is, ultimately, a one-way piece of communication
and we think more carefully about the impact of that communication on the receiver
(notwithstanding my lack of care for the incidentals of a particular letter).
This woman’s character; she is an attorney who worked hand
in glove with a judge as they decided how to mete out justice – a task that she
took very seriously professionally but also in her personal life, is measured. She is thoughtful – and to a psychoanalyst,
this means that she works to manage her feelings – to take them into account –
to let them inform her decisions, but not to let them drive her decisions. The words in her letters are clearly driven by feelings, but they have also clearly been filtered through a process of determining how they will land, that includes a complicated measuring of the mind of the recipient and how that recipient will appreciate what is being said.
What becomes clear, again – to the analyst, is that, despite
her best efforts, her feelings actually play a determining role not just in her letters, of course, but in pivotal
moments in her life, and the plot of the book, when it emerges, is based on how
she manages to address the guilt that she feels about the mistakes that she has
made – mistakes made based on mismanaging competing feeling states, something
that becomes apparent only in retrospect – and the efforts she engages in to
compensate for these mistakes, and her efforts to manage feeling states in her
current life, as she continues to live, despite having retired and working actively
to put to bed the unresolved issues from earlier in a life that might seem all
tied up.
Through her correspondence, we become quite fond of her – or at
least I do. Others I have talked to
found her irritating, and I get that. I
think my fondness (and irritation) is driven in part by my familiarity with the
cultural position from which she is writing.
I am very much at home in a WASPy world.
It is important, I think then (spoiler alert), that when we discover her
birth history, a picture develops of a person who does not look like the person
that we have come to know on the page.
If this book is put on the screen, the casting director will
be tempted to cast Francis McDermott, who was miscast as Olive Kitteridge
because, though she could portray Kitteridge’s grumpy gruff affection, she
simply couldn’t be the physically massive woman that Olive was – and her physicality
was essential to her character. In the
correspondent, the character is inconsistent with her physicality. We don’t discover her swarthiness until we
have already gotten to know this person through her writing. Perhaps if they cast a swarthy woman, we can
have lots of voice overs of her letters before we meet her – but please don’t
cast someone who looks like she sounds – Francis McDermott would be great for
that - we need to know that the author wants us to know that her character is
the product of her adoptive family, not her birth family.
Ultimately, this book is of interest to me less because of
my letter writing – I am OK with my family and friends intuiting my character
from my letters – isn’t that what we do in all of our interactions? But I am more concerned about the ways that
strangers may intuit who it is that I am from my blog posts. Especially, I guess, because I intuit so much
about the authors of the books that I read from the material that they
write. I initially posted anonymously to
protect my patients, should I write about them. But I have only written about patients in a very broad and general sense, not in any way that they would be identified.
Increasingly my anonymity is protecting myself.
Recently, I wrote about a family member who was very critical of being
included in a post, even though I had cleared it describing the result of a
conversation with them ahead of time. I think they felt exposed to have been featured here. I
have had extended family ask me not to write about them in writing that I do
for the family. The issue of the privacy
of our character when we act publicly is an interesting one.
Sybil Van Antwerp, the correspondent, tackles this issue
head on. She writes to the authors she
reads. We read her correspondence with
Joan Didion and with Larry McMurty (I am currently reading Lonesome Dove on the
recommendation of a family member, and had the story spoiled – or perhaps had
my heart prepared for it by Sybil’s correspondence with McMurtry). She writes to them as fellow human beings as
she writes about their books. My guess is that this has stimulated a lot of correspondence for Virginia Evans, the author of The Correspondent.
I have sent links to some authors after I have posted
something about their works, and I have corresponded with some of them about their
work. And it feels uncomfortable to do
that. I have a relationship with them
that they are not quite privy to. I have
read their work, I have formed an opinion not just of their opinion but of them, and I am now in their
presence. Perhaps that is part of why
fan behavior is so odd – we are interacting with someone we know who doesn’t
know us.
I think this generalizes beyond the book world. When I worked in an inpatient psychiatric setting, the recreational therapists would interpret patient (and staff) behavior when we played together. I think we can judge athletes character from their play on the field. Whether accurate or not, we feel that we know them. In High School, when I played the part of David in the play David and Lisa, a play about patients in a psychiatric institution, my director's mother would regularly ask about whether I was doing better. She knew that I was his student, and that I had played the part, and certainly I brought something of who I was to the part - and the part informed me, but the director recognized that the line between me and my character had become too blurred in her mind.
It occurs to me that fan behavior is a little like a child
interacting with a parent – at least after a certain point. At first, the parent knows more about the
child, but then, certainly by adolescence as the child builds parts of their
character that are inaccessible to their parent, but they continue to observe
and know their parent, they begin to interact with their parents, but with
others as well, as if they know them. In
the case of interacting with parents, that may well be the case. Children see their parents at their most
unguarded moments. And then, through the
magic of transference, they begin to see others as defined by that paradigm.
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