Epistles that reveal the soul
While novels open up an author’s mind, letters give you a peek inside their hearts
navneet.vyasan@htlive.com
In October this year, the National Library of Israel announced that rare letters written in Hebrew, by Franz Kafka, have been made public. And while the debate about whether one’s private letters should or should not be made public continues to rage on, it is up to the reader and his/her conscience to judge whether these deeply private conversations are theirs to claim. But it is safe to say that the admirer inside all of us, more often that not, gets the better of our conscience.
Recounting trauma — Franz Kafka
Take for instance, Franz Kafka, whose letter to his father almost berating him for his attitude towards the young writer, is as intriguing as it is horrifying. “You asked me recently, why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you,” wrote Kafka. He added, after all these years, it will still be impossible for him to answer that question for “it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me”.
And after penning pages and pages of words, that would inspire a generation, the young author just could not get one distinct memory out of his head. As a young boy, once, Kafka woke up in the middle of the night, thirsty. He does not mention his age, but says he could not hold back his tears. Sniveling, he woke up his father, who, to his surprise, grabbed his arm and took him to the balcony before shutting the door, leaving the young boy to fend for himself on an extremely cold winter’s night.
“I was quite obedient afterwards at that period, but it did me inner harm. What was for me a matter of course, that senseless asking for water, and the extraordinary terror of being carried outside were two things that I, my nature being what it was, could never properly connect with each other,” wrote the author, questioning his father, about his actions and how after all these years, he just could not make out why his father did this to him, as if he “was a mere nothing for him”.
Of love and longing — VS Naipaul
And it’s not only desolation that these words express. Helplessness, too, paints these pages of intimate colloquies. This stands true for the late Nobel laureate VS Naipaul. The book, Letters Between Father and Son, charts the emotional journey of the young writer who is discovering a completely new world for the first time after he earns a scholarship at the Oxford University. Naipaul, unlike Kafka, admired his father immensely. Make no mistake, Naipaul knew that his father was a failed writer, and he understood what it meant to him, when his son earned place in one of the most prestigious universities in the world. But soon hiraeth, too, seeped in. Naipaul, in the form of a series of letters between his father, Seepersad and his sister, Kamla, wrote about the baroque cobbled lanes of the English city and also his ineffable feelings. In one such instance, Naipaul writes to his father asking for cigarettes. Seepersad replies, “Your letters are charming in their spontaneity. If you could write me letters about things and people — especially people — at Oxford, I could compile them in a book: Letters Between Father and Son, or My Oxford Letters. What think you?” Seepersad also affixes the letter with “a check for ten dollars”, saying that “cigarettes are forthcoming, hidden inside a parcel of sugar”.
The collection is filled with fascinating intimate discussions — Naipaul’s callousness towards Jane Austen’s writings, coming face-to-face with his Indian identity (Naipaul was born in Trinidad), and his growing infatuation towards India (his sister studied in Banaras Hindu University) — between a family of writers. His years at the university would turn worse when his father would die of heart-attack. But Naipaul, unsurprisingly shattered, wouldn’t be able to go back to Trinidad for he could not afford the flight fares.
The most striking confession comes towards the end, when Naipaul writes to his mother about returning for a visit to Trinidad that year, saying “I shall spend the rest of my life trying to forget that I came to Oxford”.
Orwell’s Warning bells
It would be an understatement to say that George Orwell’s macabre seminal work, 1984, has stood the test of time. Orwell, who was born in Motihari, (present day Bihar), in the collection of letters, released in 2013, to a certain Noel Willmett, warns him of the rising totalitarian tendencies among governments around the world. “I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers,” he writes. Three years later, Orwell would pen 1984. It will take two long years after that, to get published.
In fact, these letters house something for everyone. Orwell’s thoughts go beyond the invisible boundaries of the right and the left wing. He blames everyone equally for their ignorance as they bask blindly in their beliefs. “What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen,” he writes.