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 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. ’

Left Roald Dahl with his mother, Sophie Magdalene. Photograph © Roald Dahl mother Story Company reproduced by kind permission of The Roald Dahl Museum & Story Centre.

Roald Dahl showed similar bossiness when asking his mother to buy him a cricket bat or a model boat, but for Sophie Magdalene, as for Frau Goethe, this was all water off the maternal back. Both had, after all, been dealing with their talented, but overbearing, offspring since birth. There is a special intimacy here. Goethe confides details of his physical and mental health and there is an easy affection between them that is absent from his dealings with other correspondents. In 1783, the 34-yearold writer even speculates that he and his mother may spend their old age together – after all, his mother was only 18 years older than he was.

Among the most enchanting letters to a mother on the Library shelves – and certainly one of the most borrowed collections, judging by the state of the book – are Joyce Grenfell’s letters to her mother, Nora, in Darling Ma: Letters to her Mother, 1932–44 (1988). That was how the young comedienne began each of them, in this chatty and revealing selection, written from Grenfell in England to her American mother, who was the sister of Nancy Astor, in North Carolina. We are immediately plunged into a world of intimacy, of shared friends and in-jokes. But the letters also give us a fascinating sense of what it was like to live through a great conflict – in this case the Second World War – as an ordinary civilian.

Grenfell entertained the troops during the war and, among all the tittle-tattle, there are eloquent passages that would probably never have seen the light of day in any other context, such as this one from a letter written in October 1940. It evokes a mood that would eventually see Clement Attlee’s reforming Labour administration of 1945 elected with an unexpectedly large majority. ‘D’you know I’ve come to the conclusion that we are fighting this war for more than mere democracy and so-called freedom … We’ve been lulled into a false sense of security, a wrong sense of comfort and we’ve got to break that. Of course we here in England are having it broken for us, for the old things we thought so safe, bricks and mortar, steel shelters, etc. just aren’t there when you turn around to lean on them. Instead we are getting glimpses of the things that really do last. And these are qualities of spirit – neighbourliness, brotherly love, kindness, compassion, spiritual strength, etc. etc. These qualities are on fire everywhere nowadays and the barriers of class and position are coming down through sheer necessity. If only we can cling onto these things – and I feel we shall – this war would have accomplished something really worthwhile. ’

Sylvia Plath’s tragic life was about as different from Joyce Grenfell’s as it is possible to imagine. Grenfell was a sunny soul, who found humour even in the worst of circumstances. Plath, by contrast, was tortured by anxiety and self-doubt and was frequently able to make a hell of heaven. In 1955, aged 22, she tried to commit suicide, taking an overdose of her mother’s sleeping pills and hiding in the basement of the family home in Massachusetts. She was not discovered for three days. The following year, after rejection from Harvard, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge, from where she wrote her mother a series of letters that seem full of hope and optimism. It is as if she has put her depression behind her. ‘It is cold, biting, with blizzard flurries, and I bike home from classes and market, laden with apples, oranges, nuts, and daffodils … I am grateful for all the uncertainty, and all the horrors of suffering when I thought I was doomed to be mad for 90 years in a cell with spiders; I am solidly, realistically joyous … I write, however poorly, or superficially, for fun, for aesthetic order, and I am not poor or superficial, no matter what I turn out. ’

Sylvia Plath with her two children and her mother, Aurelia, in Devon c.1962. Photograph © CSU Archives/ Everett/ Alamy Stock Photo.

Plath’s father had died when she was eight years old and she became immensely close to her strong but doting mother, Aurelia. The voluminous correspondence between the two of them reflects Plath’s awareness that her mother’s love was boundless. In 1953, she described this to her younger brother, Warren, in typically grisly terms: ‘It is a frightening thing, that mother would actually kill herself for us if we calmly accepted all she wanted to do for us. She is an abnormally altruistic person, and I have realized lately that we have to fight against her selflessness as we would against a deadly disease. ’

So it was that Sylvia hid the darker side of her nature in her letters home and delighted her mother with sunny portraits of her travels and adventures. ‘Oh, mumsy, I’m so happy here I could cry … The world is splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon! ’ she had written to Aurelia of her first term at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1950. But her journals from this time tell a different story: ‘God, who am I? I sit in the library tonight, the lights glaring overhead, the fan whirring loudly … There is my date this weekend: someone believes I am a human being, not a name merely. And these are the only indications that I am a whole person, not merely a knot of nerves, without identity. I’m lost. ’

Plath’s letters home show only one side of the psychological coin. It was the same with Roald Dahl, who also lost his father at the same age, and who loathed his boarding school as much as Plath was stressed by Smith. He too contemplated suicide, but gave no indication of this in his letters home, writing instead in an endlessly positive vein, telling her funny stories and making her believe school was a wonderful place. One senses however that, for both Dahl and Plath, writing such misleading letters to their mothers in a time of crisis was not just an act of subterfuge, but one of therapy. The letters home sustained them. They provided a connection with a loving world that had become a distant Eden.

This is not really the case with Plath’s fellow American and poet-suicide, John Berryman (1914–72). He also lost his father at a young age, declaring at the beginning of his autobiographical novel Recovery, published posthumously in 1973, that, while there was no male hero or villain ruling his life, there was instead, ‘an unspeakably powerful possessive adoring MOTHER, whose life at 75 is still centred wholly on me’ . Martha Berryman was indeed an overbearing figure, whose obsessive love for her son may have had much to do with his subsequent alcoholism and depression. His letters to her, published as We Dream of Honour (edited by Richard J. Kelly, 1988), focus on his own talent in a way that is sometimes unbearable to read.

Her devotion is extreme. At one point Berryman – the only writer in this selection who consciously anticipates publication of his letters – declares that because he is a perfectionist he would ‘detest having any of my personal letters printed’ . His mother, true to form, offers to type them up for him, so he can correct them. When Berryman writes to say that he has fallen in love, she breaks off the correspondence, warning him that this might well damage his creativity. This is a woman who is living her life through her son and, as the letters progress, the contorted nature of their relationship becomes ever more apparent. Berryman becomes increasingly watchful about what he tells her. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the pressures she put on every aspect of his life may have lain behind his decision to jump off a bridge in Minneapolis in 1972.

By contrast, one of the most rewarding of all the Library’s collections of writers’ letters to mothers is Thinking of Home: William Faulkner’s Letters to his Mother and Father, 1918–1925 (edited by James G. Watson, 1992). This delightful book covers the time when the writer was in his early twenties, beginning in 1918 when Faulkner enlists as a reservist in the British army in Canada because, at 5 feet 5 inches tall, he was considered too short for the US military. Interestingly, Faulkner wrote to both his parents, Maud and Murry, back home in Oxford, Mississippi, and perhaps as a result, his letters are less needy and neurotic than Plath’s or Berryman’s. Many are filled with piercing observations and funny reflections, often on the nature of home itself. Faulkner initially finds it ‘queer’ , for example, that the keenest soldiers around him are the ones who prize their own homes most highly. ‘It isn’t so queer though, ’ he continues, ‘for only he whose heart and soul is wrapped about his home … can know that home is the thing worth having above everything and it is well-known what is not worth fighting for is not worth having’ .

He has a wonderful eye for detail and shares his delight in the hardships of his training. ‘We are all mud to the knees today … If you could see me wading around in the water and mud, and sleeping any way, wet clothes or not, you’d have a fit, Mother. ’ To his regret, he never sees action, but when the war is over he travels to New England, where he revels in describing new landscapes and people. He observes with amusement, for example, how absurdly a ‘dyed-in-the-wool’ Englishman pronounces his vowels, while New York City – and particularly travelling on the subway there – is not to his taste at all: ‘The experience showed me that we are not descended from monkeys, as some say, but from lice. I never saw anything like it.

Great crowds of people cramming underground and pretty soon here comes a train, and I swear I believe the things are going a mile a minute when they stop. Well, everybody crowds on, the guards bawling and shoving, then off again, top speed. It’s like being shot through a long piece of garden hose. ’

‘I couldn’t live here at all without your letters, ’ Faulkner confesses to his parents at one point – not out of despair, but out of a surfeit of pure affection. And affection, in many guises, is the common thread that binds all these collections together. Facing new challenges in unfamiliar places, writing home provides each writer with a link to a voice or voices that are almost as familiar to them as their own. In every case, apart from Berryman’s, one is also reminded of the strength maternal (and paternal) love can offer. Even after six years away, suffering no apparent homesickness, for example, Faulkner feels moved to tell his parents that he loves them ‘more than all the world’ . It is no surprise that he eventually returns and settles in his native Mississippi.

In all these collections, however, one thing is generally missing: the mother’s side of the correspondence. Did editors consider their letters unimportant? Were they lost? Perhaps the offspring destroyed them, or just didn’t bother to keep them? One misses them, for while the absent voice can often be imagined, the personality of the mother remains tantalisingly enigmatic. The German poet Eduard Mörike captured the situation perfectly: ‘Not one of my songs proclaims your praise, O Mother, For to praise you indeed, I am too rich and too poor. You are a song, as yet unheard by any others but always close to my heart, offering me sweet consolation.'