Pioneering Over Four Epochs

PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS

Part 1:

With the opening of this arch-lever file of personal correspondence there now exists ten volumes of personal letters to individuals for future biographers, analysts of embryonic Baha’i institutions, communities and interested parties of various ilks. This volume of letters opens the 23^rd year of my extensive letter collecting, and the 46^th since the first letter in this collection found its place in volume 1 on 27 November 1960. I had been a Baha’i for 13 months at the time.

For the most part these letters are a casual, although to some extent, systematic collection. In recent years I have also added some non-epistolary material because it seemed appropriate;  I leave it to future assessors and literary editors to sift out this material, to keep it in appendices, to simply include it as part of a varied type of letter/communication or to delete it as desired. The decision as to how to organize this assortment of resources I leave in the hands of anyone who takes a serious interest in it.  To decide what to do with it all belongs to them. All I do here is place these introductions in cyberspace.

In some ways my collections of writing are themselves manifestations of my effort to make my life subservient to a personal need to be a letter writer, a poet, an essayist, a note-taker, as Dylan Thomas’s writing efforts were part of his self-appointed task to make his life subservient to his need to be a poet. This is a subtle idea and quite complex and I deal with it more extensively in my writing, especially my poetry, from time to time over the years. But the idea, however intricate, delicate and subtle, needs to be given an airing occasionally in these periodic reviews of my letters, and the occasional update of these introductions. This latest update is taking-place on 12/5/’13.

There is, it seems to me, an unavoidable self-consciousness in my approach to the business of writing since perhaps the 1980s. This self-consciousness was also the case with the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas as I pointed out above. Paul Ferris states this in his introduction to Thomas’s collection of letters. This self-consciousness has done Thomas some harm at the hands of his critics–as Ferris notes in his discussion of the analysis of Thomas’s critics from the 1960s and 1970s.

Part 2:

Perhaps my somewhat dogged sense of living within the confines of a self-constructed role as a writer in these latter years of the first century of the Formative Age will prove my undoing.  As a writer, I revel in the context of a range of a complex set of implications both for me and for the Baha’i community I am part of. Perhaps this will bring me some “harm” as well in the long term. Of course, if this harm ever occurs, I will be long gone from this mortal coil. In the short term the problem is irrelevant at least insofar as any public is concerned. I began to receive a great deal of feedback to what I wrote in the period after I had retired from FT, PT and casual-work in the years 1999 to 2005. This feedback, now some ten years in the making is kept on file, at least some of it. The task of keeping all the feedback became impossible, indeed, quite undesirable by the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

Since my retirement in 1999 I have written a great deal more in all the genres of my writing. In my years of full-time employment and student life as far back as the late 1940s, if I take the analysis as far back as the years of middle childhood, the notebook dominated my writing life. Then the essay and several attempts at a novel as the years went on. The extent of my writing in all other genres in the last twenty years(1993-2013) has exceeded whatever I had done before. This is especially true of letters.

In the most general of senses, I see my letters as “a kind of spiritual journal.” Robert Gittings says this of the letters of John Keats written at the time of the birth of Baha’u’llah and the Bab. There is an obsessive quality in some of Keats’ letters, occasionally a sign of morbidity and despair and many signs of self-control and the lack thereof. This is also true of my own letters and journals. Like Keats, I try to face my difficulties, fight my battles and get on with the journey. I do not always do this successfully. My criticism of others both in letters and in life, if it is felt or thought privately, tends to be muted. I tend to mask it with a sympathetic tenderness, a softening of intensities, a moderating influence, an etiquette of expression, at least for the most part. I often try to diffuse tension that might easily flare into anger and close down a line of correspondence. Readers will look in vain for the kind of acrimonious correspondence, the kind of quarrel, that took place between the poet Irving Layton and the Canadian academic Desmond Pacey or, indeed, other writers of our time.

Part 3:

I can not think of any correspondence that led to a falling out. Rather lines of letters just withered away, usually after two or three letters. Comments on my writing are occasional with very little analysis. Even after 25 years of writing and, perhaps, a decade of writing extensively few were readers of my writing, such was my impression. But this is a separate subject.

I would like to draw extensively here on the words of Rachel Donadio who discusses the email in her article in the New York Times because so much that is in this volume of letters and others in recent years is in the form of an email. “Back in the 20th century,” Donadio writes, “it was often lamented that the telephone might put an end to literary biography. In lieu of letters, writers could just as easily gab on the phone, leaving no trace. Today, a new challenge awaits literary biographers and cultural historians: the e-mail. The problem isn’t that writers and their editors are corresponding less, it’s that they’re corresponding infinitely more — but not always saving their e-mail messages, so argues Donadio.

Publishing houses, magazines and many writers freely admit they have no coherent system for saving e-mail, let alone saving it in a format that would be easily accessible to scholars. Biography, straight up or fictionalized, is arguably one of today’s richest literary forms, but it relies on a kind of correspondence that’s increasingly rare, or lost in cyberspace. My correspondence is not lost. I keep a goodly measure of it in each of my collections of letters. I like to think that my correspondence reflects a sensitivity to and an appreciation of the idiosyncrasies of the recipients of my emails. Writing is like talking and, in the process, one tries to create some impression. With the passing of time, whatever talking I have done will have gone into the ether, but this writing, these letters and emails, will reveal much about my life and my times. Many of my poems sprinkle the pages of my emails in an impromptu, often impulsive and serendipitous fashion, although I often do not keep a copy of all the poems which accompany a particular letter. Worrying about trees and the extent of print one produces became a concern in the 1980s and 1990s and it often seemed pointless to keep a copy of poems I already had in my computer files and poetry booklets.

In 2004 alone Farrar, Straus & Giroux, to chose but one publisher, put into the marketplace ”The Letters of Robert Lowell” and a biography of the critic Edmund Wilson that draws on his letters. These are but two of an extensive list of publications that draw on correspondence. That doesn’t necessarily mean that publishing companies are saving their own communication with writers. This is also true of many a writer. A great deal of personal communication is just going down the proverbial drain. Since the email became part of my life some 20 years ago(1993-2013) I have tried to save emails that are significant, relevant or important in some way for the tasks at hand. I have written about this subject before and I do not want to go into detail here. But this subject does need to be given an airing occasionally, given the extent of emails in my recent collections of letters since the late 1990s.

Part 4:

Jonathan Galassi, the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said: ”I try to save substantive correspondence about issues concerning books we’re working on, or about our relations with authors, but I’m sure I don’t always keep the good stuff, particularly the personal interchanges, which is probably what biographers would relish.” Galassi made this comment via e-mail, of course, like most of the editors and writers who might make a comment on such an issue. ”I don’t think we’ve addressed in any systematic way what the long-term future of these communications is, but I think we ought to,” Galassi continued. I include these comments here in this introduction to Volume 10 of my personal correspondence because virtually everything in the last few volumes of personal correspondence is now an email. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule and I have commented upon them before.

Random House Inc., whose imprints include Alfred A. Knopf, Doubleday and Bantam Dell, has not set any email guidelines. ”At present Random House Inc. does not have in place a distinct corporate policy for archiving electronic author-publisher correspondence, and we have yet to establish a central electronic archive for housing publishing material,” Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, noted. ”Each of our publishing divisions decides what author-publisher correspondence and materials they wish to retain.” W. W. Norton doesn’t have a policy for saving e-mail messages or letters, leaving it to the discretion of editors, and Harcourt’s archiving policy doesn’t yet govern e-mail communication. So, it appears, I have lots of company in my new problem, a new problem that arose in the 1990s and especially since my retirement in 1999.

Although David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said he considers the collected letters of Harold Ross, the magazine’s founding editor, ”the best book I’ve ever read about The New Yorker,” you won’t see Remnick’s collected letters or e-mail correspondence, any time soon. ”Oh, God forbid,” Remnick said. For one thing, The New Yorker routinely purges messages from its system. And I do the same; I have to with over 200 emails coming in every day from the many websites I am a member of in the last several years.

Deborah Treisman, who as The New Yorker’s fiction editor, is in communication with most major living writers, confessed she doesn’t always save her messages. ”Unfortunately, since I haven’t discovered any convenient way to electronically archive e-mail correspondence, I don’t usually save it, and it gets erased from our server after a few months,” Treisman said. ”If there’s a particularly entertaining or illuminating back-and-forth with a writer over the editing process, though, I do sometimes print and file the e-mails.” The fiction department files eventually go to the New York Public Library, she said, ”so conceivably someone could, in the distant future, dig all of this up.”

Part 5:

The impact on future scholarship is ”not something that I’ve spent much time thinking about,” Remnick said. “As much as I respect lots of scholarship in general, what matters most is the books and not book chat. Something’s obviously been lost, even though I don’t think it’s the most important literary thing we could lose.” This may be the case for me and my letters as well and the final result of all this worry-warting may be that it all simply bites the dust and all the issues about what to save and what to erase may prove irrelevant, immaterial and in the ‘who could care less’ basket.

Book chat or no, irrelevance or not, great letters are great literature. In Robert Lowell’s letters, for instance, the mundane quickly opens up into whole worlds of feeling. ”I think our letters on the agency tax-money must have crossed,” Lowell wrote Elizabeth Hardwick, his soon-to-be ex-wife, in 1971. ”Through long hours of revising, a leisurely bath and a quick dressing, I have been thinking about our long past,” he continued. ”Not having you is like learning to walk.” Some entire books don’t convey as much raw emotion as those eight words do . And I feel the same is true of some of my correspondence. In the end, of course, the significance of what I write is so intimately tied up with the growth and development of the Baha’i Faith as the emerging world religion on the planet.

Designed for constant and instant contact many e-mail messages inevitably have a different tone from postmarked missives that allow correspondents the time to ruminate and percolate, to apply a critical eye to their own lives. Often less nuanced, more prosaic, written in haste and subject to misunderstandings, e-mailed thoughts are microwaved, not braised. ”It often occurs to me that e-mail may render a certain kind of literary biography all but obsolete,” Blake Bailey, the author of a biography of Richard Yates and a forthcoming one of John Cheever, said. Email messages are ”too ephemeral: people write them in a rush without the sort of precision and feeling that went into the traditional, and now utterly defunct, letter.” 95% of the emails I receive are certainly ephemeral and oblivion is the only place for them and that is where they go within the day they are sent. But there is much in the emails I write and receive that is not in this ephemeral category. And these emails are found here.

Part 6:

Unless one possesses the emails or letters at the other end of the conversation or dialogue one misses a great deal. I have tried, where possible, to keep copies of relevant correspondence at both ends. One misses a great deal, too, when all one possesses is the advocacy or the judgement of the letter-writer. It is often difficult to find out the truth of an idea or a situation in one’s own household; people who live in the same house often have completely different stories to tell. A number of views is often necessary, but not possible when one is dealing with the contents of a letter. The copiousness of letters is no guarantee of what is authentic, true and accurate. Perhaps, as a major biographer of Wagner, Ernest Newman, said: “There can never be too many documents.” He might have added: there can never be a final truth.

Ron Price

^{28/11/’05 to 12/5/’13}