The Life With A Hole In It

To learn that a vibrant, engaging novelist was also spirited in his personal correspondence shouldn’t come with a shock.

Talamona, Italy 2017

Consider this excerpt from a letter written by John le Carré to his first wife in 1951:

Today, sun and a fresh fall of snow on the Dolomites, a cold sharp wind. A smell of Spring, and ‘Vermouth Syphon’. This evening, the night train to Vienna, and with luck by tomorrow morning I should have further news of where I shall go next, for I am still ‘en route’.

Writing this letter, it is worth remembering, involved paper, pen, a sealed envelope, and a trip across town. Le Carré never wavered in his preference for pen over the decades—in his travel notebooks, for his letters, with the first drafts of his twenty-six novels—and you might want to picture these descriptions in longhand.

A small, unspoilt village, with a pub, a couple of shops and a group of houses with wooden walls and steep grey rooves. Cobbled streets, and the vigour and happiness of a real spring day. The river and the lake & the mountains. The fields look young and green, as if they were breathing in the warm sun and letting the wind run across them like spray over the side of a ship.

To learn that a vibrant, engaging novelist was also spirited in his personal correspondence shouldn’t come with a shock. Now of course this excerpt isn’t dazzling, nor is it even that memorable, but it is vivid, descriptive, and it comes with a serviceable metaphor. We picture the village, the look of the streets, the sensation of the warm sun, how even the fields seem, for le Carré, to breath. It is personal, distinctive, from his pen and meant for his wife’s eyes, full of verve and thrust and, most importantly, his voice.

Yet the recent publication of le Carré’s selected letters might compel some readers to ask themselves a few tricky questions, especially those readers who complain about the quality of contemporary language, or about the informality and illiteracy in texts and emails. How exactly, these readers might ask, would their private correspondence fare on the printed page? Plenty of people grumble about contemporary language, but how many people uphold their ideals in private?

To see this happen – this great transformation from the grey indifference of England to the bewitching colours and the bright rebirth of Spring in Austria. One day we will see it, both of us, together. We can wait till then. Oh I know this is nonsense – it can’t all be true. But sometimes I feel as if I had woken up from hibernation in England, and cleared my lungs of the soot of ‘dark satanic mills’ to breathe again the beauty and the peace of the outside world.

This is conversational, even casual, yet it still retains its literary quality—there’s a continuous search for the perfect word to match the sensation, there’s a desire to evoke the internal feel of the external, and, I would argue, it is written in a register that’s within reach of anybody with a bit of initiative. A lack of ability isn’t what prevents most people from writing thoughtful sentences. It is, instead, that most people have selected other priorities, despite how much they may feign a desire for the literary.

Of course it doesn’t help that our culture and technology continues to reward both the fast and the brief. You don’t need to be a luddite to recognize the tradeoff: you can be efficient and decisive and direct, but you can’t also be deliberate and absorbing and reflective. To prioritize speed is to downgrade your ability to reflect, which is perfectly fine, as there’s a time and purpose to speed, but the contradiction comes when someone praises literature, language, and expression, yet decides to live without those ideals.

So there’s no real surprise when all the unfulfilled desires—I should write more often, I need to read more books, I should take the time to write longer letters—never quite rise to the surface. They remain, for most people, platitudes, unrealized, as commonplace statements but unusual actions. Nevertheless, there’s no authority that prevents the crafting of insightful, poignant sentences, and here’s a simple letter from a forgettable trip that just might be inspiring rather than dejecting—it reveals that any life, at any time, can contain artful writing, and that the only obstacle is to start.