Writing to No One

a book of WWII letters, plus Norm Macdonald

Eileen Alexander is one of my favorite writers of the 20th century. I use “favorite” carefully, as a potential cop-out. Is Eileen Alexander one of the best writers of the 20th century? Is she one of the most important? Is she anyone you will ever hear about except from me, fan-boy ground zero? (And even then, would she crack my top ten, or even twenty, of absolute favorites?

¹

) Well, no, probably.

What’s more, she published nothing of note while she was alive, and although she was Cambridge educated, edited here and there, and had writing ambitions, I doubt she’d have described herself as a writer. But in 2020, her previously unpublished WWII letters—all to her fiancé and eventual husband—were bound together and released for general consumption. A lot of critics hate when anyone talks about media or books as food (“consumption”), but they can go yell their complaints into their cardigan closets. Eileen Alexander’s published letters are a feast.

At times—consistently, even—she reaches Austenian heights of wit and satire. Never as pointed as Austen, her gaze flits and ponders and destroys, but merrily. I won’t get too much into her writing here, for a reason I’ll disclose in a second, but she is a compelling stylist, if an essentially casual and uncareful one. What I keep thinking about today, though, is the more banal question of whether or not she’d be honored, or horrified, to see her letters pass into the wider world.

She was never writing to a general audience, but she was also never writing to no one. Her readership was an audience of exactly one: her true love, Gershon. In one letter, the editor tells us, she even jokes about being asked if she’s preparing the missives for publication because she takes so much time over them. No, she insists. The quality matters because her love for Gershon matters. It’s all very sweet and so forth, but it also got my hamster-sized brain spinning.

The truth is that it’s hard to keep writing when no one cares about your work. Don’t mistake this for an outbreak of self-pity. No one caring is almost a physical reality, like a comedian learning to bomb. I’ve also been told the initial anxiety of wanting to be published never goes away, it just climbs the ladder. I hope I get an agent, I hope I get a good editor, I hope I get great reviews, I hope I get great sales, I hope I get an award, I hope I destroy even the memory of Leo Tolstoy. That first anxiety will always offer itself, if you allow it. What no one caring about your work becomes, if the anxiety is left behind, is not a question into the meaning of life or a question of making money or a question of how much you do or don’t want people’s approval, but a question of design.

Eileen Alexander was a literary talent pointed at a concrete object: her lover-cum-fiancé-cum-husband, Gershon. With reception assured, she produced words at graphomaniac levels. There is no audience that concrete for the novelist, not really. There are readers I keep in mind, my wife and my family and some buddies and (too often) other writers, but when I sit down and pretend a bunch of dogs die mysteriously, or whatever, I don’t think, “Yes! Emilie will love how these innocent creatures perish in my make-believe mind palace!”

All of this might sound academic, and it probably is. This isn’t a newsletter meant to solve anything real. But unless you’re writing a journal, and unless that journal is burned upon death and written with burning in mind, writing is for other people. Maybe at one point you were taught, like me, that technology is neutral. I assume you were then berated, like me, about how this is actually false. A shovel, it turns out, makes for a terrible stylus.

Writing is a technology and its limits and materiality restrict its interface. Maybe writing for oneself is possible, but in my experience, writing even therapeutically addresses the future self, the past self: stand-ins for actual readers, a self which may be myself, but which is chronologically other. Writing is meant to preserve what is known or felt or experienced or believed or whatever, and unless that whatever is received, what’s the point? Excellent writing must be aimed, which is not the same thing as writing to be published.

Well, maybe.

Honestly, I don’t think I agree with this conclusion.

I keep trying to agree with it, to force it into a shape that’s somehow radically convincing. But the idea that writing is social enough its social component must be faked—I’m writing to my future self, not nobody—is an idea I like, but is not consistent with my experience. Clear writing is a result of clear thinking, and almost every time I’ve written an essay for publication, its been the result of wanting to understand the issue or book or idea better. That’s it. A tool of refining my own messy thoughts first, and a repository for others second. I have a backlog of unfinished essays that all died for basically the same reason. I clarified the issue in paragraph one, and there wasn’t enough left-over to shop around.

As for Eileen Alexander, I wrote about her WWII letters in 2021, in an essay recently unpaywalled. I didn’t intend to write as much as I did, but I was struggling with the pandemic time distortions, the way I felt both freed and imprisoned by social media, and I wanted to understand how her letters had captured and inflected those experiences at a formal level. And the thinking just kept spilling out. The idea that she was writing for someone, that she couldn’t escape the gravity of his expectation, was an idea I guess I couldn’t leave alone either.

My essay on her work wasn’t designed for anyone as I wrote it, but it also wasn’t designed for “no one.” It was crafted for you, if you read and respond to it, and for Eileen Alexander if no one ever does.

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Having failed to untie any of the knots I gathered in the above, let’s just enjoy these quotes from comedian Norm Macdonald’s Based on a True Story:

The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you’re not careful it’s too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth.

Well, I wouldn’t call that “laugh out loud.” Maybe another will do the trick.

Old Jack stood [with his] back to me now and it was blocking out the light of the moon. I suddenly remembered that I’d read somewhere how the light of the moon was just an illusion and the moon was only a cold, cold stone. I watched Old Jack look from side to side before he turned his gaze on me, and his eyes flashed black like the wing of a crow.

Okay, funny guy. That’s enough figurative what-for. Do your job!

The boy swung again and again until he was awash with a delight of blood and he was a figure of bright red with the everlasting white [of the Arctic] behind him. It was as if the creature’s very life had somehow leaped into the boy. And the three of us were silent in the witness of this wicked miracle.

Damn it, Norm! No one’s supposed to have two talents!

I’ll write more about Norm Macdonald at some point—his book is more concerned with being funny than it is being literary—but I just wanted to share that it was much, much more successful as an actual piece of fiction than I expected. And I already loved Norm Macdonald, that horrible old sock. A filthy boar whenever he deemed it necessary, even when he was wrong to do so, and the one writer who more or less became a literary influence on me before I ever read his prose.

I love you all.

1. I use the word “favorite” loosely. I can’t help it. (Anyone looking at this footnote for a list of my actual favorites: apologies. Suffice it to say the list begins with funny British ladies and also Denis Johnson.)