Reviews for A Life in Letters, 1914-1982

The average rating for A Life in Letters, 1914-1982 based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-10 00:00:00 Jody Lamkin These letters cover the penultimate year of KM's life. It was the year she wrote a lot of her best work, including At the Bay and The Garden Party. Often, you'd never guess she was almost completely physically incapacitated with a terminal illness. Her letters, more often than not, are playful, witty, celebratory. She seems bursting with life and is brilliant at communicating a contagious joie de vivre. Not that she's denying the tragic reality of what is happening to her - "The beauty of the world is a kind of anguish; it is almost too much to bear. It's like being a child again - but all glorified. The light shakes through the grass, and the wind whispers over, and one's heart trembles. A new flower appears in my garden. How has it come there, so silently? But it is the silence which is so different. It's as though the silence becomes your old nurse who said: Very well, you may play a little longer if you are so happy and not tired, but remember I have called you. But the sun goes down so fast, so terribly fast. Now it is shining through the topmost branches of the thinning trees - now there is only a rim of gold to the hill." How chilling is that but remember I have called you? There's also the sense of her taking stock of her life and finding much to criticise herself for, most notably perhaps her "falsity". (The irony here is that she still continues to adopt a different persona for each person she writes to and contradicts what she says to one person to another.) KM is one of those people who obsessively sought to obliterate her past. She made a lot of mess in her young years. (Her father was anxious to ship her off to London after a scandalous relationship with another girl at her college in New Zealand, a wealthy Maori called Maata. She had another passionate affair with a girl at the London college where she played the cello. She then had an affair with a musician, was pregnant with his child at twenty but married a respectable older man and then left him later that same day. It's not known for sure how the pregnancy ended. Only that she went to Germany. Her first literary success was a story she plagiarised from Chekhov - a lover of hers was the first person to translate him into English and so perhaps she thought no one would discover her theft. At some point during this period she unknowingly caught gonorrhoea, which, going untreated, contributed to her later bad health and also led Virginia Woolf to once comment: "We could both wish that ones first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a civet cat that had taken to street walking." Even after she finally settled down with Middleton Murry her eye was constantly wandering and one time she travelled alone to Paris during the war to have an affair with a French writer. During these letters her husband is blackmailed by one of her ex-lovers. Despite being poor she has no qualms about paying the money.) Her husband has come in for a lot of criticism. But I've always quite liked him. For one thing he inspires her best letters. But he was clearly out of his depth with KM. It's a bit like trying to imagine a present day woman married to a Victorian man. Murry was vying with TS Eliot for the accolade of best upcoming poet and critic (we all know how that fight ended.) The novel I read of his was as if written with a board stuffed down the back of his shirt; same goes for his attempts at poetry. He personifies what happens when a high intellect bereft of artistry attempts creative works of art. Also he was guilty of one of the cardinal sins - stinginess. The most awful example when he makes KM pay half the cab fare when she returns home after surgery. As ever she responds with wit - "I suppose if one fainted he would make one pay 3d for a 6d glass of sal volatile and 1d on the glass." - but you can tell how much his insensitivity hurt her. I can't help wondering what she truly thought about her husband's work. Now and again she berates him. But there's a sense she was more comfortable with acolytes than equals (hence her difficult relationship with VW). In fact, KM's most loyal friend is a woman who slavishly idolises her and at times you feel she is trying to mould her husband into a similar role. KM was in love with the idea of being in love. She was the same with places: initially upon moving to a new home we get an outpouring of love only to be followed by bitter disillusionment. A moving moment is when her cat is brought to Switzerland. She humanises this cat in her letters just as she does with her dolls. So we hear about him writing his memoirs and acquiring a pair of skis. It's indicative of the lost idea of innocence she's searching for up in the Swiss Alps which is why nearly all the stories she wrote were inspired by her childhood in New Zealand. Her beloved brother had died in WW1. She had come to see the modern world as corrupt. This dynamic of innocence and corruption was a constant theme throughout her work. You can see how this struggle impacts her personal life in these letters. Finally, it's fitting that Ali Smith gave a love of KM to a woman dying of cancer in Spring because I can imagine these letters would provide a measure of sustenance to anyone living under a death sentence. Onto Volume 5 now…

Review # 2 was written on 2018-01-19 00:00:00 John Campbell It's better to be the victim than to be the hangman. 1889 to Alexander Chekhov. Being quarantined is a surprise I wouldn't wish on anyone. It's worse than being arrested. 1892, to Alexei Suvorin Anton Chekhov's letters to Alexei Suvorin and a few others. Dealing mostly with literature and the theatre. I'm very curious how representative these are, according to Karlinsky there had been almost no commenter until him who hadn't distorted Chekhov to suit their own ends. You will forgive me for being sceptical. The commentary was, however, very helpful and instructive. Why, you'd have to be a pretty dry, wiry, immobile crocodile to spend all summer in the city! Two or three good months of tranquility are centrainly worth giving up your work or anything else for that matter. 1886 to Viktor Biblin. Oh and by the way again, I've enclosed a clipping from the New Times. This Thoreau fellow sounds quite promising, the first chapter at least. He's got ideas and a certain freshness and originality about him. 1887 to Vladimir Korolenko. You advise me not to chase after two hares at once and to forget about practicing medicine. I don't see what's so impossible about chasing two hares at once even in the literal sense. Provided you have the hounds, the chase is feasable. In all likelihood i'm lacking in hounds (in the figurative sense now), but I feel more alert and more satisfied when I think of myself as having two occupations instead of one. Medicine is my lawful wedded wife, and literature my mistress. When one gets on my nerves, I spend the night with the other. 1888 to Alexei Suvorin. I take my meals at the common table. Can you imagine? There are two sweet little Dutch girls sitting opposite me, one of whom makes me think of Puschkin's Tatyana and the other of her sister Olga. I look at both of them all through the meal, and picture a neat little white turreted house, excellent butter, superb Dutch cheese, Dutch herring, a dignified pastor, a staid schoolmaster . . . and it makes me want to marry a sweet little Dutch girl and have her and me and our neat little house become a picture on a tray. Rome, 1891, to Maria Kiselyova Of course I have no time to give even a thought to literature. I'm not writing a thing. [...] You can't run after two hares at once. 1892, to alexei Suvorin The following excerpt was written during the 1892 Cholera pandemic: I have been appointed cholera doctor, and my section includes twenty-five villages, four factories, and one monastery [he tended to this entire section first alone, and later with an assistant]. I am organizing the building of barracks, and so on, and I feel lonely, for all the cholera business is alien to my heart, and the work, which involves continual driving about, talking, and attention to petty details, is exhausting for me. I have no time to write. [...] There's been no word yet about cholera uprisings, but there is talk of arrests, proclamations and so on. If our socialists do in fact exploit the epidemic for their own ends, I will feel utter contempt for them. Repulsive means for good ends make the ends themselves repulsive. Let them make dupes of the doctors and their assistants, but why lie to the people? Why assure them that they are right to be ignorant and that their crass prejudices are the holy truth? Can a beautiful future really expiate this base lie? If I were a politician, I'd resolve never to disgrace my present for the sake of my future even if I were promised tons of bliss for a pennyweight of base lies. 1892, to Alexei Suvorin The novel's goals is to lull the bourgeoisie in its golden dreams. Be true to your wife, pray wih her according to the prayerbook, make a fortune, enjoy sports - and you're all set in this world and the next. The bourgeosie is very fond of what are commonly referred to as "positive heroes" and of novels with happy endings, because they make them feel at ease with the idea that you can hoard capital while maintaining your innocence, be a beast and yet be happy. 1895, to Alexei Suvorin About the Dreyfus Case: Little by little, a messy kettle of fish began stewing; it was fueled by anti-Semitism, a fuel that reeks of the slaughterhouse. 1898, to Alexei Suvorin