Write to the Browns

‘Nothing else for me to say’ sings Billie Holiday signing off a letter to a travelling friend. She has reported on the weather (which is cool) and the folks (who are fine):

Yesterday we had some rain
but all in all I can’t complain.
Was it dusty on the train?

Write to the Browns just as soon as you’re able
they came around to call.
And I burned a hole in the dining room table
now let me think… I guess that’s all.

The dust on the train, the burn in the table—not to mention yesterday’s rain (this is a scene you can smell as well as see)—give us a secure and ordinary domestic world where a cigarette mark is a matter of some moment, and a train ride to another town only slightly varies the weekly routines. But you ‘can’t complain’, she says. Nobody could. From what I can tell it’s the lyric-writer’s world rather than the singer’s, but thanks to Johnny Mercer’s simple poetry and Billie Holiday’s ability to conjure character it’s as wistful a nostalgia piece as you could hope to hear.

Besides a prevailing atmosphere of calm and order (‘I’m in bed each night at nine’) there seems little serious expectation of reply. It’s the sort of note that is sent into the void out of an affection which may or may not be requited, and is probably meant for self-reassurance as much as anything else. It wholly lacks the self-dramatizing anxiety which often marks the letters of literary folk—including the fear that the mailbox they inspect each day will be empty:

“Of all disappointments the worst disappointment is expecting a full post and finding none,” writes Henrietta, Countess Bessborough, from her Irish estate in 1808. “Oh, the misery of depending on wind and weather for one’s letters! We had a delightful day upon the lake, which is beautiful. I came back promising myself such a comfortable evening, with heaps of letters, when I was chilled with ‘No mail from England,’ in answer to my eager inquiries.”

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But literary correspondents can have lively thoughts. Here’s Robert Louis Stevenson writing to J. A. Symonds in 1886 on the subject of happiness, a letter that usefully supplements Aldous Huxley’s comments in Pleasure and Balderdash. Stevenson has been reading Dostoyevsky:

“Men do not want, and I do not think they would accept, happiness; what they live for is rivalry, effort, success… Happiness is a question of morality—or immorality, there is no difference—and conviction. Gordon was happy in Khartoum, in his worst hours of danger and fatigue; Marat was happy, I suppose, in his ugliest frenzy; Marcus Aurelius was happy in the detested camp; Pepys was pretty happy, and I am pretty happy on the whole, because we both somewhat crowingly accepted avia media, both liked to attend to our affairs, and both had some success in managing the same. It is quite an open question whether Pepys and Iought to be happy; on the other hand, there is no doubt that Marat had better be unhappy….”

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As for happiness, George Bernard Shaw was about as happy as an uptight, sexually repressed, intellectually electric and compulsively garrulous vegetarian could hope to be. It might be argued that everything he wrote was epistolary: plays, prefaces, essays, whatever, were all of them didactic Letters to Mankind. Writing to Edward Elgar, in 1933, he freely lectures the composer on music, and when Elgar tells him that he is leaving for Paris to conduct his Violin Concerto, with Yehudi Menuhin as soloist, tells him in effect to ‘Forget France and go to China’.

“My dear Elgar, why Paris? I recommend Peiping (ci-devant Peking) where you must go to the Lama temple and discover how the Chinese produce harmony. Instead of your laborious expedient of composing a lot of different parts to be sung simultaneously, they sing in unison all the time, mostly without changing the note; but they produce their voices in some magical way that brings out all the harmonics with extraordinary richness, like big bells.”

“I have never had my ears so supersatisfied. The basses are stupendous. The conductor keeps them to the pitch by tinkling a tiny bell occasionally. They sit in rows round a golden Buddha fifty feet high, whose beneficent majesty and intimate interest in them is beyond description. In art we do everything the wrong way and the Chinese do it the right way.”

March 2005