"The Correspondent"
Mar. 31st, 2026 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeVirginia Evans
What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace….
Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time.
-- Joan Didion, “On the Morning After the Sixties,”
It was exactly as you described. Unlikely and electric, inventive, and right up my alley. // Dear Ann, I am writing to congratulate you on your most recent novel, State of Wonder,
How’s Washington? (Honestly, from my angle Washington is looking like a carnival on fire, but what else is new? I will say, it surprises me how much I like President Obama. He’s a wonderful speaker, I could listen to him read the phone book.) I’m fine. It’s been a nice summer. My dahlias are splendid, I am very pleased. And look, this is what I’ve been reduced to, an old woman writing with gardening reports while you crack on at the center of the world trying to keep the ship right.
Donnelly & Van Antwerp: You really couldn’t imagine them ever splitting up. Butch and Sundance.” And later, “An opinion from them—it’d be as clean and neat as a pin. If you sat with them for even a short time, you could see they were intellectual counterparts. They were a closed circuit.
* As there is no such rhythm in the human life, I have to think that when it comes to seasons we all get one round... One turn of the seasons per person, unless it’s cut short, like it was for Gill, and like it was for Quintana Roo. I suppose, on this schedule, we’d say your John had made it to fall. My mother died in her summer. <> But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind... But Gilbert’s death was a swift ejection back out to the loneliest bitter stretch of road, and that is the bone crunching grief.
James is a little uptight, and married to a real wreck of a woman riddled with nerves from a wealthy family out in California
the practice of law. The appeal for someone like me (us) to find, on the face of this mad, inside-out, senseless, barbaric, intolerably fraught and painful and mind-spinning planet, some semblance of order…well, of course it’s appealing.
* Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way
* reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world, the preservation of which has to be of some value we cannot yet see. The WRITTEN WORD, Mr. Watts. The written word in black and white. It is letters. It is books. It is law. It’s all the same.
My mother grew up in Arizona and my father in Maine, and furthermore, I was adopted at fourteen months. As you can see, your simple question does not have a simple answer. I did have three children, as it is in your family, but the second one passed away when he was eight years old. His name was Gilbert. I have a son Bruce, who is a lawyer in Alexandria, and a daughter, Fiona, who is an architect and lives in England,
The first letter I ever wrote was in 1948 to P. L. Travers regarding her book Mary Poppins. I loved this book and read it numerous times.
You would think I’d have it down to memory by now, but for some reason the only part that stays word for word in memory is the bit about being born at dawn under a pink sunrise. Isn’t that lovely? Makes me miss a thing I never really had... Yes, I suppose it’s still rather always there, part of the original foundation. There, even if I’m not thinking about it consciously. There it is down at the bottom. But the letter writing stuck to me.
It’s sweet the way Daan talks to him about the past. I guess history is all they have anymore. Daan will say something like, Remember when we took the train with Mother to see her sister in France…and go on into some old memory like he’s telling a story to a child. Lars seems to listen.
Felix, do you have moments when you feel, I don’t know, like Pluto way out there on its own, rather observing the workings of the galaxy from a distance? This sense has come to me at odd times throughout my life and I’ve always attributed it to having been adopted. Does this affect you?
But a child of fourteen months, what could possess a person to do that? These are thoughts I’ve had, but not in an urgent sense, just a little bruise I’d press on every once in a while.
Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes. Either you bind yourselves together and hold on for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed. For us it was the latter.
That made me feel embarrassed. I know you will tell me I should tell my parents, but I am not going to. By the way, this whole paragraph is a stone.
* His old knees in the middle of the street wearing good khaki pants and I could see the top of his head (have I ever told you he is quite tall? A big man, built for sport, like Lars. He still has a good head of white hair). He wrapped the cat in the towel and managed to stand up carrying the cat, and that did impress me, that his knees still work so well. He thanked me for helping him—thanked me! I killed the creature!—and took the cat inside.
It reminds me of the past when everything was right, you know that way boys walk, heads down, strong backs, kicking at the ground.
* I reread a bunch of the letters, and with mixed feelings. On one hand, it took me back to that time, and it was a dear feeling. Not nostalgia, exactly, but something like comfort—maybe some sympathy for who we were then. On the other hand, seeing things now as an adult through the lens of who we were as children is—there is something painful or uncomfortable about it, and now, knowing how things would go with Margaret’s sickness.
1955: He told me there will be more books in The Chronicles of Narnia series, and he gave me a couple of hints about what happens! He suggested I read the series The Lord of the Rings, which came out last year and is written by a friend of his
The child knew something about government and politics. I did enjoy thinking about everything again.
Your career was astounding. It makes me proud. You still occupy a large space in me. I felt honored those years we were together that you entrusted me with your stones, and I still keep them. I want you to know that, even though it’s not what I’m writing for.
* here is a secret: my letters have been far more meaningful to me than anything I did with the law. The letters are the mainstay of my life, where I was only practicing law for thirty years or so. The clerkship was my job; the letters amount to who I am.
* You mustn’t rush. When you rush you pen things you didn’t mean and you tire. It takes patience to say exactly what one means, to think of the right word... I believe one ought to be precious with communication. Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal.
That must mean things were good if I can remember all that laughing. And the children were at such wonderful ages then. I made myself think about the day he died. I went back to the day and put my outfit back together (I could get that far, denim pants, white top) but when I tried to follow myself back down on the dock where I was when he dove into the water, I couldn’t. It is as if, in my mind, there is a sentry standing outside the locked room of this memory—it won’t let me in. It’s my memory! He won’t allow it, stands unyielding. It is like blindness. So that’s as far as I got. I couldn’t get in. But I know what happened. He dove into the lake, he hit the rock shelf and snapped his neck.
could you try to have the letter to me by December 31, 2015? That would really even things out well, although I’ve messed up the pattern the last few months. If you do write me again, I would like to know (a) how your vision is doing, (b) if the dean of the English school at University of Maryland let you into a class, (c) if you are still attending the garden club, and (d) if you went for dinner again with the dude from Texas.
I am forgetting the name, but I remember this woman who contacted you lives in Fort William, Scotland. When I worked for Kindred, I was troubled by the ethics of sending you this information, but I am free from that contract now.
Lo and behold, an e-mail from Basam, from his PERSONAL e-mail address, in my e-mail account this morning just sitting there like a little rabbit with eyes up waiting for me. He was FIRED from Kindred because of the online correspondence he exchanged with ME
My houseguest Harry is different, though. He is fortunate to lack a certain civilized propriety that makes the standard person self-censor. He continued asking questions later that evening. I feel a certain openness with Harry. We are alike. We also have an established commitment to discreet confidence with one another.
He taught me that, too. To say what people want to hear, not necessarily the truth, because most people tell you they want to hear the truth, but they do not, and if you tell the truth it will come back to bite you like a snake finding its own tail to swallow. I remember how he would say this to my brother and me and I didn’t like the way it sounded because my mother taught the opposite, that if we do not say the truth we have nothing. We are nothing.
My mother stood and composed herself and took a few things from the bag and tucked them into her pockets and she put me in the car. Although I understood what it meant I did not fight because I wanted to escape... I remember a time my mother was vibrant, honest, beautiful, but all of it was extinguished. I wish I would have spoken up to offer my brother safe passage, but I did not. I was only a child. I was learning what vastness is found in the hearts of men.
* I told her I was the woman who’d been fighting to audit courses for two years. She looked positively surprised and we faced off for another moment, but then all the air went out of it, and it seemed very funny to me all of a sudden. I don’t know what on earth was happening, but I found myself trying not to smile, or rather, trying not to laugh, but my face must have broken and then we were both laughing, these two short women standing thirty feet apart, it was really very funny.
I hated you for such a long time, but you were just a small old woman and I was lost. I didn’t know what to do so I cut the flowers. This didn’t help.
Here is the whole truth, and this is my confession: when your mother came into my office with her two perfect, healthy sons begging for Judge Donnelly to have mercy on your father, I was cold and cruel. I hated her because she had you. Your big, curious eyes. How like Gilbert you seemed to me... There had been no mercy shown to me; why should anyone receive mercy? My misery made me cruel.
I am finding I have nowhere to put all of this. I’m sorry, but do you know what I mean? It’s like I’ve come home from the grocery store overburdened with bags, but the cupboards, the refrigerator, the pantry, the countertop are all already full. A mother and father? But I had a mother and father. Siblings? I have a sibling. It feels a betrayal to even acknowledge you exist!
* On the phone the other night you mentioned this, that you wondered if maybe I could only have meaningful relationships through letters, and I have been thinking about that. When I was young, by writing letters I found a framework that made living easier, and that has never changed. However, I do wonder if by conducting the most intimate relationships of my life in correspondence, I have kept, since I was a child, a distance between myself and others. I think it’s true the letters have insulated me, have been a force field, just as practicing law insulated me from dealing with humanity directly, and I wouldn’t change any of it, but I find myself, at this old age, wanting closeness.
When Gilbert died you were only four. His death—toppled me. I couldn’t had worked to do everything correctly, follow the rules, wedge myself into the world, but it wasn’t enough.
Dear Dezi, Learning about the circumstances of your father’s death caused me tremendous grief, and my offering is small, but it’s all I have: I am sorry.
I happened to read Lonesome Dove during a stretch of my life when I felt that everyone around me was rising up to the fullness of themselves while I was withering... It seemed to me that the text was tapping down into some ancient, painful stream of truth, or rather, the story of the cattle drive and its narrative appendages seemed to be somehow coming out of me, rather than going in.
What I had seen those years ago as a lack of mercy became to me a presence of…courage—to hurt them! To leave them in dismay! It was courageous because it was unbearable but it was true, and YET, Mr. McMurtry. AND YET. Here was something I had not taken pains to see, but for which I was now looking, indeed hoping to find (as I am hoping to find in my own life): this GREAT VITALITY. Augustus and Call, full to overflowing with the meaning of the life they had made.
Scotland: The landscape soars, immense and distant and gentle, and the sky is crisp and alive, clear, moving, and textured, the air a raw quality I never knew existed.
* When I started writing to you, it was in an effort to live—not just shrivel up and die—and it’s worked. It’s kept you beside me. .. You know, I imagine what it would be like if you were here. I’ve taken your personality, all that I knew of it before you were gone, and stretched it out as far as I am able. It’s like trying to press out pastry dough as thin as possible without tearing it. I stretch you out to now, imagining you as a fifty-four-year-old man. However, what I have very rarely allowed myself to do is remember you.
It was all forty-three dollars you wanted to give over to her, and you were grieved when you weren’t able to. And you know, Colt, remembering that, I wept. For so, so many things, I could just weep.
What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace….
Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time.
-- Joan Didion, “On the Morning After the Sixties,”
It was exactly as you described. Unlikely and electric, inventive, and right up my alley. // Dear Ann, I am writing to congratulate you on your most recent novel, State of Wonder,
How’s Washington? (Honestly, from my angle Washington is looking like a carnival on fire, but what else is new? I will say, it surprises me how much I like President Obama. He’s a wonderful speaker, I could listen to him read the phone book.) I’m fine. It’s been a nice summer. My dahlias are splendid, I am very pleased. And look, this is what I’ve been reduced to, an old woman writing with gardening reports while you crack on at the center of the world trying to keep the ship right.
Donnelly & Van Antwerp: You really couldn’t imagine them ever splitting up. Butch and Sundance.” And later, “An opinion from them—it’d be as clean and neat as a pin. If you sat with them for even a short time, you could see they were intellectual counterparts. They were a closed circuit.
* As there is no such rhythm in the human life, I have to think that when it comes to seasons we all get one round... One turn of the seasons per person, unless it’s cut short, like it was for Gill, and like it was for Quintana Roo. I suppose, on this schedule, we’d say your John had made it to fall. My mother died in her summer. <> But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind... But Gilbert’s death was a swift ejection back out to the loneliest bitter stretch of road, and that is the bone crunching grief.
James is a little uptight, and married to a real wreck of a woman riddled with nerves from a wealthy family out in California
the practice of law. The appeal for someone like me (us) to find, on the face of this mad, inside-out, senseless, barbaric, intolerably fraught and painful and mind-spinning planet, some semblance of order…well, of course it’s appealing.
* Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way
* reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world, the preservation of which has to be of some value we cannot yet see. The WRITTEN WORD, Mr. Watts. The written word in black and white. It is letters. It is books. It is law. It’s all the same.
My mother grew up in Arizona and my father in Maine, and furthermore, I was adopted at fourteen months. As you can see, your simple question does not have a simple answer. I did have three children, as it is in your family, but the second one passed away when he was eight years old. His name was Gilbert. I have a son Bruce, who is a lawyer in Alexandria, and a daughter, Fiona, who is an architect and lives in England,
The first letter I ever wrote was in 1948 to P. L. Travers regarding her book Mary Poppins. I loved this book and read it numerous times.
You would think I’d have it down to memory by now, but for some reason the only part that stays word for word in memory is the bit about being born at dawn under a pink sunrise. Isn’t that lovely? Makes me miss a thing I never really had... Yes, I suppose it’s still rather always there, part of the original foundation. There, even if I’m not thinking about it consciously. There it is down at the bottom. But the letter writing stuck to me.
It’s sweet the way Daan talks to him about the past. I guess history is all they have anymore. Daan will say something like, Remember when we took the train with Mother to see her sister in France…and go on into some old memory like he’s telling a story to a child. Lars seems to listen.
Felix, do you have moments when you feel, I don’t know, like Pluto way out there on its own, rather observing the workings of the galaxy from a distance? This sense has come to me at odd times throughout my life and I’ve always attributed it to having been adopted. Does this affect you?
But a child of fourteen months, what could possess a person to do that? These are thoughts I’ve had, but not in an urgent sense, just a little bruise I’d press on every once in a while.
Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes. Either you bind yourselves together and hold on for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed. For us it was the latter.
That made me feel embarrassed. I know you will tell me I should tell my parents, but I am not going to. By the way, this whole paragraph is a stone.
* His old knees in the middle of the street wearing good khaki pants and I could see the top of his head (have I ever told you he is quite tall? A big man, built for sport, like Lars. He still has a good head of white hair). He wrapped the cat in the towel and managed to stand up carrying the cat, and that did impress me, that his knees still work so well. He thanked me for helping him—thanked me! I killed the creature!—and took the cat inside.
It reminds me of the past when everything was right, you know that way boys walk, heads down, strong backs, kicking at the ground.
* I reread a bunch of the letters, and with mixed feelings. On one hand, it took me back to that time, and it was a dear feeling. Not nostalgia, exactly, but something like comfort—maybe some sympathy for who we were then. On the other hand, seeing things now as an adult through the lens of who we were as children is—there is something painful or uncomfortable about it, and now, knowing how things would go with Margaret’s sickness.
1955: He told me there will be more books in The Chronicles of Narnia series, and he gave me a couple of hints about what happens! He suggested I read the series The Lord of the Rings, which came out last year and is written by a friend of his
The child knew something about government and politics. I did enjoy thinking about everything again.
Your career was astounding. It makes me proud. You still occupy a large space in me. I felt honored those years we were together that you entrusted me with your stones, and I still keep them. I want you to know that, even though it’s not what I’m writing for.
* here is a secret: my letters have been far more meaningful to me than anything I did with the law. The letters are the mainstay of my life, where I was only practicing law for thirty years or so. The clerkship was my job; the letters amount to who I am.
* You mustn’t rush. When you rush you pen things you didn’t mean and you tire. It takes patience to say exactly what one means, to think of the right word... I believe one ought to be precious with communication. Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal.
That must mean things were good if I can remember all that laughing. And the children were at such wonderful ages then. I made myself think about the day he died. I went back to the day and put my outfit back together (I could get that far, denim pants, white top) but when I tried to follow myself back down on the dock where I was when he dove into the water, I couldn’t. It is as if, in my mind, there is a sentry standing outside the locked room of this memory—it won’t let me in. It’s my memory! He won’t allow it, stands unyielding. It is like blindness. So that’s as far as I got. I couldn’t get in. But I know what happened. He dove into the lake, he hit the rock shelf and snapped his neck.
could you try to have the letter to me by December 31, 2015? That would really even things out well, although I’ve messed up the pattern the last few months. If you do write me again, I would like to know (a) how your vision is doing, (b) if the dean of the English school at University of Maryland let you into a class, (c) if you are still attending the garden club, and (d) if you went for dinner again with the dude from Texas.
I am forgetting the name, but I remember this woman who contacted you lives in Fort William, Scotland. When I worked for Kindred, I was troubled by the ethics of sending you this information, but I am free from that contract now.
Lo and behold, an e-mail from Basam, from his PERSONAL e-mail address, in my e-mail account this morning just sitting there like a little rabbit with eyes up waiting for me. He was FIRED from Kindred because of the online correspondence he exchanged with ME
My houseguest Harry is different, though. He is fortunate to lack a certain civilized propriety that makes the standard person self-censor. He continued asking questions later that evening. I feel a certain openness with Harry. We are alike. We also have an established commitment to discreet confidence with one another.
He taught me that, too. To say what people want to hear, not necessarily the truth, because most people tell you they want to hear the truth, but they do not, and if you tell the truth it will come back to bite you like a snake finding its own tail to swallow. I remember how he would say this to my brother and me and I didn’t like the way it sounded because my mother taught the opposite, that if we do not say the truth we have nothing. We are nothing.
My mother stood and composed herself and took a few things from the bag and tucked them into her pockets and she put me in the car. Although I understood what it meant I did not fight because I wanted to escape... I remember a time my mother was vibrant, honest, beautiful, but all of it was extinguished. I wish I would have spoken up to offer my brother safe passage, but I did not. I was only a child. I was learning what vastness is found in the hearts of men.
* I told her I was the woman who’d been fighting to audit courses for two years. She looked positively surprised and we faced off for another moment, but then all the air went out of it, and it seemed very funny to me all of a sudden. I don’t know what on earth was happening, but I found myself trying not to smile, or rather, trying not to laugh, but my face must have broken and then we were both laughing, these two short women standing thirty feet apart, it was really very funny.
I hated you for such a long time, but you were just a small old woman and I was lost. I didn’t know what to do so I cut the flowers. This didn’t help.
Here is the whole truth, and this is my confession: when your mother came into my office with her two perfect, healthy sons begging for Judge Donnelly to have mercy on your father, I was cold and cruel. I hated her because she had you. Your big, curious eyes. How like Gilbert you seemed to me... There had been no mercy shown to me; why should anyone receive mercy? My misery made me cruel.
I am finding I have nowhere to put all of this. I’m sorry, but do you know what I mean? It’s like I’ve come home from the grocery store overburdened with bags, but the cupboards, the refrigerator, the pantry, the countertop are all already full. A mother and father? But I had a mother and father. Siblings? I have a sibling. It feels a betrayal to even acknowledge you exist!
* On the phone the other night you mentioned this, that you wondered if maybe I could only have meaningful relationships through letters, and I have been thinking about that. When I was young, by writing letters I found a framework that made living easier, and that has never changed. However, I do wonder if by conducting the most intimate relationships of my life in correspondence, I have kept, since I was a child, a distance between myself and others. I think it’s true the letters have insulated me, have been a force field, just as practicing law insulated me from dealing with humanity directly, and I wouldn’t change any of it, but I find myself, at this old age, wanting closeness.
When Gilbert died you were only four. His death—toppled me. I couldn’t had worked to do everything correctly, follow the rules, wedge myself into the world, but it wasn’t enough.
Dear Dezi, Learning about the circumstances of your father’s death caused me tremendous grief, and my offering is small, but it’s all I have: I am sorry.
I happened to read Lonesome Dove during a stretch of my life when I felt that everyone around me was rising up to the fullness of themselves while I was withering... It seemed to me that the text was tapping down into some ancient, painful stream of truth, or rather, the story of the cattle drive and its narrative appendages seemed to be somehow coming out of me, rather than going in.
What I had seen those years ago as a lack of mercy became to me a presence of…courage—to hurt them! To leave them in dismay! It was courageous because it was unbearable but it was true, and YET, Mr. McMurtry. AND YET. Here was something I had not taken pains to see, but for which I was now looking, indeed hoping to find (as I am hoping to find in my own life): this GREAT VITALITY. Augustus and Call, full to overflowing with the meaning of the life they had made.
Scotland: The landscape soars, immense and distant and gentle, and the sky is crisp and alive, clear, moving, and textured, the air a raw quality I never knew existed.
* When I started writing to you, it was in an effort to live—not just shrivel up and die—and it’s worked. It’s kept you beside me. .. You know, I imagine what it would be like if you were here. I’ve taken your personality, all that I knew of it before you were gone, and stretched it out as far as I am able. It’s like trying to press out pastry dough as thin as possible without tearing it. I stretch you out to now, imagining you as a fifty-four-year-old man. However, what I have very rarely allowed myself to do is remember you.
It was all forty-three dollars you wanted to give over to her, and you were grieved when you weren’t able to. And you know, Colt, remembering that, I wept. For so, so many things, I could just weep.
