Janet Malcolm, Mama Andersson, Barbara Morgenstern

letters never sent

When I first thought of doing this I had no idea what I’d call it.  Then last weekend I was reading Janet Malcolm’s book about the biography industry that’s grown up around Sylvia Plath (The Silent Woman) and in amongst many of Janet’s typical gems of beautifully concise prose was this, about the correspondence between herself and Olwyn Hughes:

“..I never received a reply to this letter – or expected one – since I never sent it. After reading it over, I marked it “Letter not sent” and put it away in a folder.

The genre of the unsent letter might reward study. We have allcontributed to it, and the literary archives are full of specimens. In the Plath archive at the Lilly Library, for example, there are several of Aurelia Plath’s unsent letters to Hughes – letters in which she permitted herself to say what she finally decided she couldn’t permit herself to say. But she carefully preserved the letters, and included them in the material she turned over to the archive. The preservation of the unsent letter is its arresting feature. Neither the writing nor the not sending is remarkable (we often make drafts of letters and discard them), but the gesture of keeping the message we have no intention of sending is. By saving the letter, we are in some sense “sending” it after all. We are not relinquishing our idea or dismissing it as foolish or unworthy (as we do when we tear up a letter); on the contrary, we are giving it an extra vote of confidence. We are, in effect, saying that our idea is too precious to be entrusted to the gaze of the actual addressee, who may not grasp its worth, so we “send” it to his equivalent in fantasy, on whom we can absolutely count for an understanding and appreciative reading. “

I read most of the book on a train – between London and Windermere. Reading the book and seeing ‘Control’ at the cinema in Ambleside village seemed to jolt my thoughts out of the morbid turn they’d taken as autumn’s darkness seemed to swallow up London…that and the long walk all the way up and then down a hill, eating blackberries from the hedgerows, drinking whisky from the bottle…I was tired but happy to be back in London and to go straight to a party nearby. Immediately met this girl that’s just started going out with a our friend N.  She’s very pretty and at ease with it. Bright and sharp as a new pin. Coincidentally, when we were telling each other the stories of our year, she mentioned that she’d written a lot of letters she hadn’t sent. She has them still and thinks she’ll probably keep them.  I told her about this book I’d been reading. 

Sometimes you have to write and keep it, whether it’s for anyone to read or not. So it seemed as good a name as any to give this…outlet.  It’s just stuff I have to write for no other reason than it feels better out than in.

The other thing I’m going to do here is share my record collection and some other things I come across that I think are interesting.

So, at the top there’s this picture by Mama Andersson.  I went to see an exhibition of her paintings at the Camden Arts Centre last week. I’d been consumed with anxiety all day – being out of work and in that state where you have to get away from your computer or you’ll check your emails literally every 2 minutes, like an insane budgie, pecking at the feed button in its cage despite it clearly being empty and unlikely to be refilled.

I got on the Silverlink train and 20 minutes later stepped out into the late afternoon’s deep golden light and knew I’d done the right thing. The exhibition had the most powerful effect on me – making me write a flurry of messy scribble about what it seemed to evoke.  I might see if I can read any of my terrible handwriting in that notebook and if any of it’s worth putting in here – but to summarise, there was a world of women in her pictures – inscrutable, often absorbed in their own activities, turned away from us – apart from this one example reproduced here where they’re all turned to look at us: this picture makes me think of being at college – the intense friendships you share with fellow female students or flatmates before you all pair off and live with men and eventually, maybe have babies.  In the show at Camden Arts Centre there was a painting next to it called ‘Leftovers’ I think, showing various girls spread around a flat – one in the shower, one dressing…a couple in the kitchen…a few still asleep on the floor under duvets or blankets. It looked like the aftermath of a party.  There were also a lot of sombre landscapes – grey skie-d, with leaf-less trees… One was called something gorgeous like ‘Where my dreams live’. And suddenly I couldn’t get these two tracks by Barbara Morgenstern out of my head. I guess, partially because the cover of the 10″ I was thinkingt of has a similarly overcast landscape on it. But also the music is deliciously stark and glum in a comforting way. It feels like the perfect soundtrack for the kind of slate grey day we’ve had a string of here lately. That kind of winter loneliness which is almost pleasurable – you know it will pass.

I had to dig through the most neglected part of my record collection to find it -the 10″s…all on their own at the end of the 7″ section, gathering dust.  Digging out that pile I found it was a treasure trove. I’m going to upload a bunch more mp3s culled from a random selection of 10″s, but first, Barbara Morgenstern’s lovely instrumentals:

Fjorden

Eine Verabredung

Here’s the cover.  Nothing like Mama Andersson’s landscapes in execution really…but the same sort of atmosphere of desolate beauty.  And funnily enough, though, I know Fjords are Norwegian, and Mama’s Swedish.. it does seem like the Scandinavian thing was chiming somewhere when I thought of this music while looking at those pictures, as one of the instrumentals is called Fjorden. I could go on and on about how Scandinavia seems to have some kind of hold on my imagination at the moment (don’t get me started on Tove Jansson and open sandwiches) but that’s for another day. More 10″s soon…

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