By Their Letters

Famous authors are not always good letter writers, but when they are their letters are interesting and valuable, not only for their own sakes, but for the light they throw on the more formal writings that have brought the author’s fame. Revealing the man or woman behind the prose or poetry, they help us to understand how the prose or poetry came to take the shape it did. Recently three such revelatory collections have been published: Marcel Proust: Letters to his Mother, translated and edited by George D. Painter, with an essay by Pamela Hansford Johnson (Citadel, $4.00); Letters of Ellen Glasgow, selected and edited by Blair Rouse (Harcourt, $6.75); and The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited with an introduction by Diana Trilling (Farrar, $4.50).

These collections serve to remind us—if we need reminding—that there are many mansions in the house of literature, providing habitations for the most widely various guests. They may also serve to remind, or inform, “educationists” of the fact that creative human beings, the pride and vindication of our species, are almost always so constituted as to guarantee their ignominious flunking of any course in “life adjustment” or “social integration.” Proust’s life, homosexuality apart, was abnormal from beginning to end. Ellen Glasgow thought of her life as a prolonged tragedy, despaired of her age, and felt she was almost never understood. Lawrence lived out his life searching for a home he could not find, yearning towards friends he could never hold, and dreaming of a new religion he would never find. Suffering, of one kind or another, plagued all three.

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Ben Ray Redman

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Literature

Famous authors are not always good letter writers, but when they are their letters are interesting and valuable, not only for their own sakes, but for the light they throw on the more formal writings that have brought the author’s fame. Revealing the man or woman behind the prose or poetry, they help us to understand how the prose or poetry came to take the shape it did. Recently three such revelatory collections have been published: Marcel Proust: Letters to his Mother, translated and edited by George D. Painter, with an essay by Pamela Hansford Johnson (Citadel, $4.00); Letters of Ellen Glasgow, selected and edited by Blair Rouse (Harcourt, $6.75); and The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited with an introduction by Diana Trilling (Farrar, $4.50).

These collections serve to remind us—if we need reminding—that there are many mansions in the house of literature, providing habitations for the most widely various guests. They may also serve to remind, or inform, “educationists” of the fact that creative human beings, the pride and vindication of our species, are almost always so constituted as to guarantee their ignominious flunking of any course in “life adjustment” or “social integration.” Proust’s life, homosexuality apart, was abnormal from beginning to end. Ellen Glasgow thought of her life as a prolonged tragedy, despaired of her age, and felt she was almost never understood. Lawrence lived out his life searching for a home he could not find, yearning towards friends he could never hold, and dreaming of a new religion he would never find. Suffering, of one kind or another, plagued all three.