#FORGOTTEN SPAT LICENSE#

#FORGOTTEN SPAT LICENSE#

The men gradually became close friends, entering into a correspondence that gave them license for jokes bad and bawdy, obscene limericks, an occasional sexy postcard or cheesecake photo, cartloads of male jesting and tomfoolery, as well as the sustained acts of provocation from which memorable letters are made. MacDonald, an architectural historian a year or so older than the poet, arrived at the Academy on his own Rome Fellowship, accompanied by his own new wife. He’d won the first Rome Fellowship in Literature three years before, and with his new wife had returned to the Academy with Guggenheim Fellowship in hand. Hecht was a young American poet who had just published his first book, A Summoning of Stones. MacDonald in 1954 at the American Academy in Rome. (Eliot was so private even his own roommate, a close friend, was shocked when Old Possum failed to return from church one morning, having in secret married his Faber and Faber secretary.) Only in fairy tales do sweethearts who court by letter live happily ever after but, once the wedding sheets are stained, lovers rarely need to send each other anything but a note from upstairs to down.Īnthony Hecht met William L. The reader learns from their letters little explicit, but overhears far more than he hears. They were so busy dressing for show that the private was left behind. Eliot and Ezra Pound found in each other a co-conspirator and perhaps for that reason in their letters they engaged more in peacockery than private revelation, often in stage whisper and whimsical voice. No, for a letter writer to exhaust the darkest resources of the medium, there must be a secret sharer, a doppelgänger, the sort who appears no more than two or three times in a life.įor later readers who don’t mind rummaging through private correspondence, every writer demands, at the least, a shadow who does not reject his letters. I’m not speaking of writers who force advice upon the young-Lord Chesterfield, for instance, or Rilke. The more such writers keep buttoned up, the more they require a familiar-now and again they simply must run to hounds. To the mass of their friends they may be almost mute, with a tongue never indiscreet. Most letter writers, though, prefer a confidant or two. Only his letters remain to give us the personality lost to the flames. Byron opened his heart to almost everyone but his most brutal secrets were probably lost with his memoirs, burned all too eagerly by his friends. Shaw, for instance, always had something to say (or something he couldn’t bear not to say) and it didn’t matter whether the correspondent was a brow-beaten actress who at the fortieth performance had wrecked the rhythm of her lines or a widow who didn’t mind the playwright rabbiting on in condolence, as he often enclosed a rather generous check. Some writers never needed any correspondent in particular, taking opportunities as they came and making of accident all that was wanted. Letters nonetheless became a confessional for the literate, if they were moved to confess at all. Diaries served natural graphomaniacs like Pepys and Boswell, a locked closet in which all secrets could be concealed. Not everyone required letters to put personality on stage. However much we long for the day when a letter from a good friend was an occasion, to be read at leisure and set aside a month before replying, that day is never coming back.

After a dozen exchanges on some trivial matter within the hour, you want to slash your wrists. Though the hurry-scurry of email has reinvented, with a vengeance, the mail deliveries six times a day in Regency London, the surge of ephemera allows no more than pinched and hasty replies.

Forgotten spat