In Elizabeth Taylor’s tragicomic classic ‘The Letter Writers’ a woman prepares to meet a man she’s corresponded with for ten years. Emily and Edmund, an English novelist based in Rome, have never met before in person. With Edmund visiting for the day, Emily has planned a luxurious meal, an outfit change and a crisis of self-confidence:
“At eleven o’clock, Emily went down to the village to fetch the lobsters. The heat unsteadied the air, light shimmered and glanced off leaves and telegraph wires and the flag on the church tower spreading out in a small breeze, then dropping, wavered against the sky, as if it were flapping underwater.
She wore an old cotton frock, and meant to change it at the last moment, when the food was all ready and the table laid.”
Charged by descriptions of hot weather and glinting light, ‘The Letter Writers’ hums with the headiness of summer. As Emily walks to the village, the sun seems “to touch her bones – her spine, her shoulder-blades, her skull”. Her emotions are fraught and refracted across the landscape, where the sea glitters “like a great sheet of metal” and the late morning silence has the effect of “drugging the brain and slowing the limbs.”
For years, Emily had been tidying her thoughts and observations into sentences for Edmund. “Her days were not full or busy and the gathering of little things to write to him about took up a large part of her time.” There are shades of Anita Brookner in Taylor’s story of a woman – by turns intelligent and idle – conflicted by the prospect of entertaining a man. On this day, she is “more agitated than she could ever remember being”; she’s angry at herself for agreeing to let Edmund come to see her on his visit to England.
At home, Emily looks in the mirror, ashamed by the “wings of white hair at her temples” and her poor complexion, “unevenly pitted, from an illness when she was a child. As a girl, she had looked at her reflection and thought ‘No one will ever want to marry me’ and no one had.” She sips sherry to stop her hands from shaking; she straightens the knives and forks on the table, and shakes the salt in the cellar until it’s “nicely level”. Her cat smells lobster in the air, so she puts the dish high up on a dresser and covers it with a piece of muslin.
To say any more would risk spoiling this wonderful story – suffice it to say that the genius of ‘The Letter Writers’ lies in how Taylor flips from Emily’s point of view into Edmund’s perspective as he arrives at the door: “At the sight of the distraught woman with untidy hair and her eyes full of tears, he took a pace back … She was incoherent and he could not follow what she was saying … she seemed to him to be rather drunk.”
Much like Mary Costello’s stunning story ‘The Astral Plane’ – where a man and woman meet for the first time after an affair-in-emails – ‘The Letter Writers’ stretches a wire between two islands: writing and life. Inevitably the tightrope snaps, and after ten years of correspondence, Emily and Edmund are marooned from each other. “There was no more to say, not a word more to be wrung out of the weather, or the restaurant in Rome they had found they had in common, or the annoyances of travel – the train that was late and the cabin that was stuffy. Worn-out, she still cast about for a subject to embark on. The silence was unendurable.”
What makes ‘The Letter Writers’ so memorable is how, after a short time in a room together, the bridge of words that bound Emily and Edmund falls down, and wounds them. “Don’t say anything. Don’t talk of it,’ she begged him, standing with her hands pressed hard against the door behind her. She shrank from words, thinking of the scars they leave, which she would be left to tend when he was gone.”
First published in The New Yorker, May 1958, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Blush and Other Stories, Peter Davies 1958, republished by Virago Modern Classics, 1986. Also in Complete Short Stories, Virago, 2012. Picked by Emma Cummins. Emma manages the Guardian Bookshop and has written for The Guardian, The Quietus and Aesthetica Magazine. She was shortlisted for Fish Publishing’s Short Memoir Prize and tweets @EmmaCummins.
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