Special Delivery:
UNSENT LETTERS
Fax,
Fed Ex, computer modems: the great world is ahum with high-speed messengers,
helping everybody hurtle through his wheedling and dealing at record pace. Sometimes
it seems the only people left lurking about that most primitive example of
communications hardware, the mailbox, are the creators of that quaintest of
software, the novel.
For
unsuccessful writers the postal service mostly outputs despair: rejection slips
and royalty statements showing negative balances. For literature's grandees it
mainly offers worldly delights: invitations to accept honorary degrees, chair a grant-giving panel or cash a nice
subsidiary-rights check. The more typical professional writer, however, earns
neither pity nor envy -- just a modest living, neither more perilously nor more
glamorously obtained than anyone else's. For him, the postman's bag is ever a
hilariously mixed one.
Or
so Malcolm Bradbury would have us believe. A superior comic novelist (his 1976
The History Man may be the funniest English academic novel this side of Lucky
Jim), Bradbury is also a hard-working critic, a professor of American studies
at the University of East Anglia and, at 55, a man disinclined to suppress the cholers of middle age. Unsent Letters consists of 18
imaginary, therefore utterly forthright, responses to his junk mail.
He
leaves the reader to guess how he would answer the simpler importunities: a
"pleasing request to sit on the pavement for two days outside the Russian
Embassy," or invitations to memorial services for departed rivals (though
these are "more satisfying than learning they have published a new
book"). It is the more drearily typical epistles that raise his ire and
ironic spirit.
Take,
for example, the German graduate student in search of a thesis topic, who
claims "competences in Philologik, Linguistik, Pedagogik, Psycho-Analytik and Aerobik," but
whose command of English is not so confident as his manner of address.
"What I like is to take your 'campus-novels' . . . and compare them with
the works of your better competitors -- as, Thom. Hardy, Max
Beerbohm, J.I.M. Stewart . . . and David Lodge." Bradbury cannot
resist compounding the young man's confusion ("It was clever of you . . .
to work out that in fact I am several if not all of the authors you
mention") while offering him a few biographical scoops ("It has been
a difficult business, especially the episode of being married to Mrs. Thomas
Hardy").
So
it goes, through a list of correspondents that includes most of the types who
dwell on the literary life's ragged edges. The unpublished writer who
aggressively demands that Bradbury read her last seven novels (enclosed) is
turned aside with a compliment ("Be reassured, a masochistic and paranoid
temperament is a well-known sign of a great writer") and a practical
suggestion ("May I recommend a pseudonym -- something like John le Carre"). The young academic confronting his first job
interview is reminded that he must dress both down (there is always a raging
egalitarian on the committee who resents Oxbridge college ties) and up (someone
else inevitably believes there is a correlation between white shirts and
intelligence). "Of course you cannot please everyone," Bradbury
counsels, "but for heaven's sake, Messmer, at
least try."
Bradbury
suggests that writers to whom the best-seller list and the movie sale are but
distant dreams must become survivalists. As he says, there comes a time when
the need for a pair or two of lamb's-wool socks and a typewriter with a
functioning letter R on its keyboard will overwhelm high literary principle.
When that happens, he implies, it is O.K. to respond favorably to the mail's
more dubious propositions -- to adapt a classic for television, for example, or
address an academic conference (especially if its venue is warm and equipped
with Jacuzzis). He draws the line only at concocting advertising copy, and
offers one ironclad rule: form a partnership with a first-class Writer's Wife.
His own, he notes, "looks after reality for me while I am absent from it,
which I am most of the time."
But
Unsent Letters is not so much an escape from reality as a transformation of it.
Underneath the jokes lie a good deal of authentic, entertaining autobiography
and many shrewd observations of the current literary and academic scenes.
Readers not preoccupied with literary correspondence of their own will find it
instructive as well as hilarious -- and perhaps even cautionary.
Published on Monday,
Jul. 18, 1988
By
Richard Schickel
©
2008 Time Inc.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,967931-1,00.html
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Universitat de Valčncia Press
Creada: 06/110/2008
Última Actualización: 06/11/2008