To the Letter. Simon Garfield
to the right bloke? I’ll say you are! Joan gave me my ‘cards’ a couple of months back, though I had seen them coming since April, when I got my first letters.
I think you had better write some more on your view of emotions. You say that if they could be ruled out it would make New-Order-building easier. I deny that. We only feel like that when our emotions are tinkered and played about with.
I can quite believe your estimate of the way the London-leave soldier improves the shining-hour. You can understand chaps who get three or four days leave before a campaign opens, ‘painting the town red’, but unfortunately quite a large number who are in comfortable Base jobs have their regular unpleasant habits. When I was at Base our evening passes bore the injunction ‘Brothels Out of Bounds. Consorting with Prostitutes Forbidden.’ Where we collected the passes there was a large painted sign, ‘Don’t Take a Chance, Ask the Medical Orderly for a – doodah’. The whole emphasis of Army Propaganda is ‘Be Careful’, even the wretched Padre at Thirsk, when he said a few words of farewell, said merely that most foreign women were diseased, and we should be careful.
[At the pyramids] when I found a preventative on the place I had chosen to sit down on, I thought it was a nice combination of Ancient and Modern! Whoever told you Pyramids told the time was pulling your leg. No iron or steel was used, cranes or pulleys. Ropes and Levers only. Their erection was due to Superb Organisation, Flesh and Blood, Ho Heave Ho, and all the other paraphernalia of human effort.
I am afraid this letter is not what it set out to be, but I have little doubt you find it acceptable. What paper do you read nowadays?
I luckily secured a bed, a great help when one remembers the many crawly things. Flies are nauseatingly numerous, and fleas annoyingly active. (I got two from my left leg while writing this, earlier. It’s not often you can kill them.) Washing is a difficulty, petrol tins are our bath tubs. Squeeze a rag at the shoulder, and the water trickles interestedly down for re-use. Mice are a nuisance, scratching around. The ubiquitous, utilitarian petrol tin is here made into a trap, properly baited and it gets three or four a day for a time. They go in the tin which is on its side, then a lid comes down and they are trapped. Killing them afterwards is a nasty business, stunning, drowning, then burying. I have avoided it so far. Much rain lately has made an ornamental lake of the wide flatness; but we have now got grass and some tiny flowers where before was merely sand. I have transplanted some of the flowers into a special patch we have made into a garden. Bert and I play chess most of our spare-time, on a set we made with wire and [a] broom-handle. There are some dogs about the camp which is far from anywhere. No civilians. We have two pigs fattening for Xmas, poor blighters, though I believe the uxorious male has given the sow hope of temporary reprieve.
I hope you hear regularly from your brother and that your Dad and yourself are in good health.
Good wishes,
Chris
* The translations of his autobiography and the subsequent letters are by Betty Radice, Penguin Classics, 1974.
* There has been some academic discussion that the unnamed correspondent to whom Abelard sends his confession was a creation of Abelard’s making, a device to focus his attention and garner some sympathy. There is also a theory that suggests that all the correspondence between the lovers was consciously manufactured between the two, or even later invented by another writer, but the authenticity of the early letters at least is generally accepted.
* Forged letters were not unknown at this time, the most famous being a letter purportedly from Prester John in 1165 in which he positioned himself as a mythical king and detailed fantastical creatures in Central Asia. But the motivation behind the possibly fake letters of Abelard and Heloise remains unclear, beyond mere titillation or a desire to re-expose hypocrisy and scandal within the Church.
* Mews and his colleague Neville Chiavaroli uphold Ewald Koensgen’s tradition of crediting the correspondents merely with male/female monikers rather than definite names.
Chapter Five
How to Write the Perfect Letter, Part 1
There is a new pope. Hooray for his holiness. But how, in 1216, should you write to him about the management of your church? Or about a terrible miscarriage of justice? How best to address your student son about the dangers of excessive study? Or give warning regarding the unhappy events that befall students at the outset of their courses?
All these problems may be solved with the purchase of the Boncompagnonus (also available as the Boncompagnus) a six-volume manual featuring all of the real-life examples above. There are others: how to write a grant application and a letter of recommendation, how to persuade people to go on pilgrimage and how to compose a letter to settle a matrimonial dispute. You could also learn how to write to jugglers about their fees. The guide was composed in 1215 by Boncompagno of Signa. A Bolognese professor of rhetoric and a master at chess, he had a reputation as a megalomaniac* and a bit of a prankster, but his letter guide is all business, particularly when it comes to money and the law, and how to write a letter of condolence following bereavement. The condolence templates, which formed the 25th section of the first book, were so diverse as to allow no room for error. There was consideration of the particular practices of the mourning habits of the Hungarians, the Sicilians, the Slavs, the Bohemians and the Germans, and the different ways to interpret the ‘bliss of priests and clerics’ and the customs of ‘certain provincials’.
What was Boncompagno’s motivation for writing such a guide? He hoped that the well-written letter might go some way to correcting society’s ills, with the prime targets being injustice and jealousy. These ills, he believed, would plant the teeth of the hydra upon you, a beast that ‘never rests, but surveys the world, tracking down any sort of good fortune, and always it tries to find any sort of excellence, which when it cannot harm, it is confused, grumbles, shrieks, rages, becomes delirious, swallows up, harasses, becomes livid, becomes pale, clamours, becomes nauseated, hides, barks, bites, raves, foams at the mouth, rages, seethes, snarls’ and that kind of thing. But motivation and effect are different things.
The medieval epistolary expert Alain Boureau has observed that Boncompagno’s manual was one of our earliest proofs of the complex and changing hierarchy of European society, with a classification that relied on a wide variety of positions and ranks rather than just divisions in the Church and nobility. Letter guides such as this bear witness to the emergence of a middle class, and the influence of the universities. They gave voice to a new grouping of people in villages and towns that had previously not been incorporated into either feudal or ecclesiastical worlds, many of them in the burgeoning legal professions. Soon merchants would demand letter-writing guidance of their own.
Aristotle, who believed one should write as one speaks.
But the Boncompagnonus was not the first guide to the art of letter-writing. For that we should credit a man called Demetrius, date uncertain, background unknown. This Latin tract has been dated somewhere between the fourth century BC and the fourth century AD, and the Demetrius at the helm may be Demetrius of Phaleron or Demetrius of Tarsus, although most bamboozled scholars have found it easier to consider the author as anonymous.
What is clear is the certitude of the advice. The author’s brief is far less specific than many of the manuals that followed it, but its generality should be useful to all. He begins by questioning the advice once given by Artemon, the editor of Aristotle’s letters, that ‘a letter should be written in the same manner as a dialogue’, a letter being one of two sides of a conversation.* ‘There is perhaps some truth in what he says, but