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Because the number gives me a place to begin— it pronounces something that is not zero. And Cynthia Ozick’s “Voices from the Dead Letter Office” gives me the writer, herself, stalking Lady Caroline Lamb, the novelist whose obsession with Lord Byron elevated the epistle into novel fan-tasms.
Inspired by Lamb, Ozick developed a similar thing for Sidney Morgenbesser, a philosophy professor, “an original,” an electrical storm of intellect “dazzingly endowed,” as Ozick puts it, leaving her “maddened by a hero of imagination, a powerful sprite who could unravel the skeins of logic that braid human cognition.” Building on this poetic logic, she opens her hand: “And so, magnetized and wanting to mystify, I put on a disguise and began my chase: I wrote letters.” Not just letters, but that particular genre known to literary history as the love letter, that species “of enthrallment, of lovesickness” —- Ozick addressed them to the philosopher in his university office, signing them all in “passionately counterfeit handwriting” as “Lady Caroline Lamb.” Thus does the writer forge the sword of her fiction. Let it be noted that writing has never been an art for the feint of heart.
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Letters are central to fiction, of course, and Ozick brings “the mute and final revelation of Melville’s Bartleby: his origin in the Dead Letter Office,” to bear on the history of the happenstance, as well as the figurations of “horse-faced” ugliness that Henry James observed in George Eliot when redeeming her looks by referencing her spirit in a letter to his father. “To begin with she is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous,” James writes, before launching into an inventory of warped pieces: “her low forehead”; “dull grey eye”; “a vast pendulous nose”; “a huge mouth, full of uneven teeth”; “a chin”; a “jawbone.” In sum, a “vast ugliness” to which the author admits the usual interior beauty.
Here is where James shifts course: “Yes, behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking . . . an admirable physiognomy—a delightful expression, a voice soft and rich as that of a counseling angel—a mingled sagacity & sweetness—a broad hint of a great underlying world of reserve, knowledge, pride and power.”
Literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking, James confesses, sheepishly pacing the page of a brewing fiction. Ozick’s essay laments the end of the letter, and I can’t agree entirely with the despair, since the the decline of Hallmark’s “ready-made card—that handy surrogate for intimacy” has been a relief, and emails perhaps have stepped into the space of snail mail, albeit differently.
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The most striking excerpts quoted by Ozick are surely her own—- in the portrait she sketches of a former friend named “O” who sounds wonderfully inventive, or well-invented, or else the well-dressed ghost of pseudo George Steiner . . .
2
“If the writing itself is the event then why can’t I figure it out by writing, P asked, by this point agitated,” Laynie Brown writes in “Periodic Companions”.
“So I tell her, you’ve touched the white space,” Brown writes. You have tarried with the nothing and found the space lacking. “We still live within pages and persons and within our own limited consciousness,” and there is no curative lens or fixative contra the irresolution of images that prefer to remain unsettled; or the amnesias and aporias hidden behind the nouns, shadow or bloom, depending.
Paula Rego, The Artist in Her Studio (1993)
So I end with two more epistles excerpted by Ozick and a piece of poem copied into my own notebook in this freezing January that promises to be a beginning.
April is an unkind month, but perhaps May nowadays is still unkinder: I always find the first burst of spring, and the last glory of autumn, the two moments most troubling to my equilibrium and the most reviving of memories one must subdue. . . . One cannot help coming to the surface at times with a realization of how intense life can be—or how it was—or how it might have been. . . . But I do always feel convinced that every moment matters, and that one is always following a curve either up or down . . . and that the goal is something which cannot be measured at all in terms of “happiness”—whatever “the peace that passeth understanding” is, it is nothing like “happiness,” which will fade into invisibility beside it, so that happiness or unhappiness does not matter.
—- T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale, whom Ozick describes as “(a steady correspondent in a long-standing relationship that she mistakenly believed would culminate in marriage)”, on the date of April 12, 1932
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What I wish to put on record now is my new invention. . . . My idea is this: Make a scrap book with leaves veneered or coated with gum-stickum of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush, rag, or tongue, and dab on your scraps like postage stamps. . . . The name of this thing is “Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrap Book.”
— Mark Twain to his brother Orion Clemens, August 11, 1872
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You are my love after so many years,
My dizziness before so much waiting,
That nothing can ice-over, obsolesce,
Not even what waits for our death,
Not even what is alien to us
In my eclipses, in my returns.
— René Char, “To ***”