Dear F,
I find myself surrounded by the imaginative debris of my most recent read, a slim but monumental novella by the always astounding Alan Bennett called The Uncommon Reader. The most pertinent thing to say about it for the purposes of this letter, although too mechanical a remark to really befit the work, is that it is everything I have ever wished to know or say about reading, writing, and English Royalty, squeezed through a much more sensitive, seasoned brain, and poured across one hundred or so pages. The following, for instance, plucked a resonant string:
The book is making me romantic and a little ridiculous, dulling my cynicism and softening me toward everything. One has even begun to wish one were a queen, just so one could get away with referring to oneself as "one". In all seriousness, though, apropos of this writing business: I do feel something brewing inside me and by jove it isn't tea.
Can't decide if I want to move onto to Jane Austen or D.H. Lawrence next. No doubt the sex will be a determining factor. Write soon. It's lonely these days. Skeletal trees and literary Brits are my only company.
Love,
L
I find myself surrounded by the imaginative debris of my most recent read, a slim but monumental novella by the always astounding Alan Bennett called The Uncommon Reader. The most pertinent thing to say about it for the purposes of this letter, although too mechanical a remark to really befit the work, is that it is everything I have ever wished to know or say about reading, writing, and English Royalty, squeezed through a much more sensitive, seasoned brain, and poured across one hundred or so pages. The following, for instance, plucked a resonant string:
"The truth was Sir Claude had no notion of what the queen should write or whether she should write at all, and he had only suggested writing in order to get her off reading and because in his experience writing seldom got done. It was a cul de sac. He had been writing his memoirs for twenty years and hadn't even written fifty pages."I wonder if this isn't the hidden, terrifying reason I aspire to a life of writing. Because it is, somehow, the suburbia of ambition, recognizably noble yet too safe to really be significant. A cul de sac career. Comfortable, finite, foreseeable. A place where there is no more journey left to journey.
The book is making me romantic and a little ridiculous, dulling my cynicism and softening me toward everything. One has even begun to wish one were a queen, just so one could get away with referring to oneself as "one". In all seriousness, though, apropos of this writing business: I do feel something brewing inside me and by jove it isn't tea.
Can't decide if I want to move onto to Jane Austen or D.H. Lawrence next. No doubt the sex will be a determining factor. Write soon. It's lonely these days. Skeletal trees and literary Brits are my only company.
Love,
L
