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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Every reader will have his own list of favorites cited --- and also a list of sorely-missed absentees, November 16, 2009
This review is from: Yours Ever: People and Their Letters (Hardcover)
In YOURS EVER, Thomas Mallon resumes his odd yet engaging habit of puttering about on the fringes of the literary life and, in the process, churning out a good many fascinating tidbits. In previous works, he explored diary writing and plagiarism. Here, he gives his readers a quick tour of letter writers past and present, young and old, famous and obscure, longwinded and epigrammatic. Every reader will have his own list of favorites cited --- and also a list of sorely-missed absentees. The book is not chronological --- in fact, one of its somewhat annoying features is the need for the reader to leapfrog back and forth through history. We go without a break from Sacco and Vanzetti to Sir Walter Raleigh, from Richard Nixon to Florence Nightingale, and from Harold Ross to Abelard. The time-travelling reader gets a bit jet-lagged, though the trip itself is often engrossing. This is due to the way Mallon has chosen to organize his book. YOURS EVER is structured around nine broad motifs of absence, friendship, advice, complaint, love, spirit, confession, war and prison. I lost count of how many letter writers he covers, but they surely would populate a small town. His book is enjoyable reading, but as its parade of writers passes by, it begins to seem like the literary equivalent of speed dating. Some of these writers are treated more fully than others. Charles Dickens, one of the great literary letter writers, gets only a couple of pages while the rather boring and persnickety correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Alfred Jung goes on a great length. My personal list of people who deserve severe trimming, if not outright exclusion, would include Rainer Maria Rilke, John Keats and Bruno Schulz --- writers who certainly deserved their fame but whose self-absorbed letters do not always make good reading. My list of I-wish-they-were-there candidates is headed by two names: Abigail Adams and Arnold Schoenberg. Adams's letters are famous enough to need no recommendation; Schoenberg's are probably the most self-revelatory of any famous composer's --- cranky, arrogant, and full of the writer's certainty of his own importance. But they are also a window into the mind of a prickly genius uprooted from his native soil by the Nazi menace and plunked down into an American culture that often revolted him. Among the most felicitous of Mallon's choices are the letters of Lord Byron and the doomed British wartime poet Wilfred Owen. There are also a couple of exchanges between gay couples and a fascinating look at letters from a German army officer who was revolted by what his leaders were making him do during World War II. Mallon surmises that letter-writing has not died, but merely entered the "post-private age" by morphing into e-mail and even more exotic forms. But he finds the old-fashioned pen-and-paper variety more fitted for revealing the true character of the sender. Regardless, each reader will certainly make up a bouquet of favorite quotes from these letters (and also from Mallon's often witty commentary). Here are a few of my favorites: Lord Byron on his rather unfortunate marriage: "I got a wife and a cold on the same day, but have got rid of the last pretty speedily." Mark Twain's deft putdown of Sir Walter Scott: "Did he know how to write English and didn't do it because he didn't want to?" And perhaps the most cutting of all is Ayn Rand's warning to a niece who had asked her for a loan of $25 to buy a dress: "I want you to know right now that I will not accept any excuse --- except serious illness...If, when the debt becomes due, you tell me that you can't pay me because you needed a new pair of shoes or a new coat...then I will consider you as an embezzler...I won't send the police after you, but I will write you off as a rotten person and will never speak or write to you again." Rand ended with the hope that "this will be the beginning of a real friendship between us." Mallon records that the niece took the deal. The reader can only hope that she got herself a becoming dress with that cash. --- Reviewed by Robert Finn
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A grab bag, but sheer delight to peruse, December 6, 2009
This review is from: Yours Ever: People and Their Letters (Hardcover)
Spotting this volume on a bookstore shelf, I grabbed it and headed straight to the cash register. I began devouring it on the way home, and relinquished it on the final page only with a sigh of regret... Mallon's companion volume to this fascinating review of the art of letter-writing is an equally-compelling look at diarists and their prose, A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries. I bought that in hardcover -- one of the earliest non-fiction books I purchased in hardcover, back in the days when I first started working and could afford to buy my own books rather than simply borrow them from the library -- and has never moved from its spot on the "easily accessible because I will want to pull it down and consult it a lot" shelf in the 25 years or so that have elapsed. Now this book, an insight into how a host of very different personalities (imagine Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng and Romantic poet John Keats cohabiting, alongside the correspondence between Gustave Flaubert and George Sand, and that between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy!) will join it there, because the greatest pleasure of a book of this kind is really only revealed over the years, as I dip into it for a some perspective (Noel Coward's letter to Marlene Dietrich to stop mooning over Yul Brynner, who "only really says tender things to you when he's drunk"), inspiration (the intellectual clarity of Wei Jingsheng in the face of his imprisonment and torture) and insight into some part of the human condition. One of the joys of this collection is that while the usual suspects are here (from Abelard and Heloise and the Pastons to Winston Churchill, via Dickens, Faulkner, etc. etc.), there are many less familiar names as well as unknowns, such the epistolary courtship between a deaf seamstress in Liverpool and her American suitor. There are letters from those in the besieged Sarajevo, from fans of celebrities, from those about to kill themselves. All are assembled under thematic headings, each of which explores one of several contexts in which letters can be written. There are, of course, love letters; there are letters of advice and complaint; letters that are confessions, acts of friendship or just an effort to keep in touch. The collection, which probably required an incredible amount of effort and thought to compile and organize (just imagine what was left on the cutting room floor!), covers the emotional gamut from great wit to immense poignancy, sometimes while Mallon is dealing with the letters from a single individual (think Oscar Wilde...) And yet, sometimes it's Mallon's own commentary that is just as striking. Writing about the wonderful World War I poet Wilfred Owen, Mallon notes that one "must proceed through the correspondence with a terrible foreknowledge" that Owen will be killed in action in the final weeks of the conflict. On Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, he writes that "not the least sexy thing about these lovers is that they never ran away with each other." In the two decades or so that Mallon (who went from non-fiction literary books of this kind, and an equally intriguing one about the 'art' of plagiarism, to writing fiction) spent thinking about this book, the kinds of letters that we write have changed beyond recognition. In my 20s, I was still eagerly awaiting letters from friends living in different countries or continents (I still treasure a series from a friend who was in Eastern Europe at the time of the 1989 revolutions; in one I wrote to him I mentioned wryly that now that he planned to go to Romania, the revolution would certainly follow him; by the time he received it, Caecescu's regime had fallen and he commented equally wryly on the fact.) This collection will make those of us who recalls snail mail as the only option ponder about what has been lost in the ability to communicate rapidly and constantly. Now that it has become so easy to write 'letters', have we actually enhanced our ability to connect with our correspondents? Questions like this ripple just beneath the surface of Mallon's book and yet only occasionally poke their heads above the surface. Indeed, my only quibble with the book is that I would have found this book more intriguing and timely had Mallon opted to set his literary selections against the backdrop of this kind of question, and allow his own voice to be heard more frequently on these questions. Certainly, he's earned the right to put his own thoughts side by side with many of the people whose letters he quotes. This is a delightful grab-bag of a book, one that I'd suggest dipping into over time rather than trying to read cover-to-cover in a single sitting. Everyone will emerge with their own favorites, I imagine, and some thoughts about writers who don't belong or who are given short shrift. Still, it's a fascinating compendium to publish at a time when the whole concept of communicating via the letter is in the midst of dramatic change. Although only about half the letters in the book are those of 'literary' figures (Faulkner, Chekhov, Dickens, et. al.), this collection will probably appeal most strongly to readers who are, themselves, of a literary bent -- after all, the point of a letter is to capture events in a way that makes their recipients feel as if they were at the writer's side. But I'd recommend this to anyone with a wide-ranging curiosity; it's a perfectly-timed book for the holidays. (I've already earmarked it for several friends as a gift.) Highly recommended.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lots of Interesting Sections, January 30, 2010
This review is from: Yours Ever: People and Their Letters (Hardcover)
I purchased YOURS EVER because I love writing letters . . . long letters. I hadn't read any of Mallon's previous books, so didn't know quite what to expect, but I thought it would have full-length letters plus commentary by Mallon. I was wrong. It's all commentary with brief quotations. At first that was a disappointment, but as I read along, I thought maybe it was a good approach. There are, of course, some letter writers I'm not interested in. But I loved Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, H.L. Mencken, Philip Larkin, and a number of others. Enough to like the book.
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