letters to mother
‘
Donald Sturrock examines the published collections of correspondence between writers and their mothers Many London Library members will have lamented the decline, possibly even demise, of the art of letter-writing. The email certainly now dominates business correspondence, but the personal letter, though endangered, is not yet extinct. A letter, as we are now discovering, is safer and more secure than an email. It’s still perfect for declarations of love, confessions, and other contexts where the need for privacy is paramount and the writer wants to show themselves at their most vulnerable. It has its own rituals. For the sender, there is the sealing of the envelope and the attaching of the stamp, the trip to the pillar box, the exquisite delay, and then, for the receiver, the intriguing swoosh or clunk as the post falls through their letter-box. A letter is more personal than an email. It’s also more theatrical. It’s no wonder that so many writers have also been great letter-writers. Most began writing when they were young, usually to their parents. Often the trigger would be a trip abroad or being sent away to boarding school. In both these situations, the correspondents usually cast themselves as an intrepid traveller, telling tales of their adventures to a distant, but familiar, world back home. The pattern might continue into adulthood if sufficient distance separated parent and child. I recently edited a volume of Roald Dahl’s letters to his mother Sophie Magdalene, Love from Boy (2016). The two of them corresponded from his first days at a Somerset prep school, when he was barely nine years old, to her death more than forty years later. The six hundred letters he 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Roald Dahl and his mother corresponded from his first days at a
’
Somerset prep school to her death more
than forty years later
wrote to her between 1925 and 1967 are candid, funny and sometimes extremely touching. They chart a child’s progress into adulthood and give the reader a sense of unguarded intimacy with a writer who is in some respects eternally a child – at least to their correspondent. This can be disturbing. The reader becomes an eavesdropper, an interloper into a private relationship, an observer of things he or she was never meant to see. Trawling through The London Library stacks, however, one becomes aware how individual the correspondence of writers with their mothers can be. The oldest collection of mother–writer correspondence I looked at was a volume of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s letters, published in 1889, which includes, almost as an afterthought, a collection of letters to his mother. Victorian muscular sensibilities are to the fore in the editor’s mind, and it’s clear he was a great deal more interested
in the poet’s dealing with other literary luminaries than with the intimacy of a mother–son relationship. This is a bit of a surprise, because Katharina Elisabeth Goethe (1731–1808) was a formidable intellect in her own right. Her friend Bettina von Arnim even based the central character of one of her novels, The King’s Book (1843), on Frau Goethe, portraying her as a character with great political initiative who is not afraid to express her progressive views on life. Johann Wolfgang was Frau Goethe’s first child and the apple of her eye. He attributed his intellectual side to his father, but credited his mother with his ‘happy nature’ and his desire to tell a story. Frau Goethe seems indeed to have been a jolly soul, who calmly tolerated her son’s somewhat patronising manner. When in 1779 he came, aged 30, on a rare visit from Weimar to Frankfurt to visit her, for example, he brought his patron, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, with him. Johann, a bit of a lickspittle where his boss was concerned, sent his mother lengthy and fussy instructions about how she should look after him: ‘He sleeps on a clean straw mattress, over which a fine linen sheet is spread under a light counterpane … Have dinner at midday. Four dishes, no more nor less, no cookery, but your homely art, at its best … Take all the lustreware porcelain out the Duke’s room. It will seem absurd to him. The sconces you may leave. Otherwise everything should be neat as usual, and the less appearance of show the better. It must seem as if we had lived with you for 10 years. ’
