Dead Letter Department #142

weather report

Well, I’ve been sick for an entire week at this point, so can’t really promise any kind of coherency in this letter to you, but I will do my best. It started with an uncomfortable little throat tickle of the kind that makes you think, gosh, I hope I’m not getting sick, and progressed into Genuine Cold territory, dipping occasionally in and out of Is This Covid? I tested negative, for whatever that is worth, and only a couple of days were really dreadful, with fever and chills, hauling a heavy quilt along behind me in the house wherever I went, but by god this thing has lingered.

Fortunately I realized relatively early in the week what was going to happen & staggered down the street to do a supply run (orange juice, seltzer, food that is easy to prepare), but the brain-bad was already going on, so I ended up needing to use a delivery service the very next day for various Quils (Day & Ny), seltzer, and yogurt for breakfast.

It hasn’t even been that terrible physically, compared to actual Covid or the Lyme disease I had a couple years ago, except for the complete refusal of my brain to function while it’s been happening. For most of the days, I couldn’t even read, simply lay either in the bed or curled up on the couch draped in said quilt, either sweatily dozing or somewhat glassily looking at various social media. Occasionally I would haul out a video game, but I could only do the running around and foraging bits of anything, because actual boss fights, even the little ones, seemed way too hard and complicated. The only television I could tolerate was Midsomer Murders, which plays on one of those free services, leaving me exposed to the weird world of streaming ads, something I don’t usually encounter, and I kept trying to form some sort of theory about the world based on what I was being shown. Apparently, the average viewer is desperate for money (aren’t we all), enticed by the sound of people in a lot of makeup noisily eating sour candy, and in the market for a wig, a plug-in air freshener, and cheaper car insurance.

There also seems to be a strange obsession with portals, by which I mean multiple unrelated industries had ads featuring magical doorways, sometimes through a closet, that carry the inhabiter of the advertisement away somewhere, usually after using some kind of predatory app. We all still yearn for the wardrobe, I suppose, long to push past the slightly mothball scented fur coats and step out into the cold air of a winter in Narnia.

When I started being able to read again, the book of MFK Fisher’s letters had just arrived, and that turned out to be perfect, because the letters themselves are relatively short, by their nature independently constructed, but over the course of 500 pages and to any number of correspondents, she slowly tells the story of her life. The early letters are scarcer, a few retained by her family, it seems, and of course one always wonders what was simply too revealing or scandalous to be kept, even at the time, but it does present an astonishing picture of her mind over the years.

A couple of mysteries don’t become clear to me even as I’m reading, leading me to do some rather unhinged searches online when her wikipedia doesn’t unearth the answer either. It seems that her first daughter, Anne, was born in 1943, two years after the death of her second husband. At first Fisher claimed to have adopted her—claimed, in fact, in one letter, to be doing some war work that would keep her away for some time, until Anne was born. She never revealed the identity of Anne’s father, and the issue is simply never discussed in any of her letters.

There is also a mysterious lover (well, I assume there were several, but one important one), somewhere between her third husband and a long, occasionally fraught correspondence with a married former editor, Arnold Gingrich, a lover Fisher only ever refers to, over the course of several years as ‘my love.’ Never a name, an initial, any identifying detail, not even a pronoun, which does make me wonder.

(Side note on Gingrich: after a very passionate correspondence, the two of them quite clearly mad for each other, Fisher sends a terse (for her) note telling Gingrich she has read letters of his that were published and has discovered, to her horror, that he has not only revealed a great deal more of himself than she finds remotely appropriate, but that he was actually writing the same letters to other people as he was to her! Not just similar, retelling the same story to multiple correspondents, which I am sure happens all the time, the way you retell a story to three or four friends, but the actual identical letter! Can you imagine?? Thinking you are writing to someone you love, sometimes multiple times a day, only to find that you were just getting the same rehashed paragraphs as another person entirely! They do continue their correspondence, but her tone in writing to him is never the same.)

I am at the point in the letters where Fisher has, in her sixties, chosen to very carefully release her hold on her previous lives, especially that of being a caretaker: of various husbands and their ailments, of her elderly parents, of her children, now grown. She sells the big house in St. Helena which has often held her whole family, rather than living, as she describes it, the life of a hostess waiting in an big empty house for the next visit. She has been persuaded by a good friend, an architect, to move onto his ranch near Sonoma, California (near the Valley of the Moon, she says, of all the delightfully fairytale sounding places), where he built her what she called The Last House: two rooms, 2,000 books, built to her specifications down to the tiles, with sweeping views of the glorious hills.

As she moves in, she is very clearly thinking of the end: of old age, of death. She talks as though she will inhabit this beautiful house for a very few years before that inevitability, and instead she spends two full, active decades there; traveling back and forth to visit France, Japan, hosting friends, and always, always writing. I find it encouraging, the same way I find her description of her reduced appetite as she ages encouraging: she finds she wants less in volume, or less frequency, but not less excellence, or delight, or pleasure.

More soon, and in the meantime if you’ve found the app that does open the door in the wardrobe, you know who to write to.