Robert McLean

Letters of Denis Glover, selected and edited by Sarah Shieff(Otago University Press, 2020), 800pp, $79.95

Letters are perhaps the least likely genre to produce good enduring writing. Unlike writers’ diaries, that most self-conscious genre so memorably manipulated by a Pepys or a Woolf, letters, especially those written in long-hand, are transactional, at once spontaneous and habitual, and seldom submitted to revision. They are the medium most likely to induce regret in the writer and discomfort in the reader given that they often seem to induce writers to show off and parade themselves at their unbuttoned worst, such as the epistolary bawdiness, hokum and spleen of T.S. Eliot or Phillip Larkin addressing their pet-named pals. But for readers who manage to find writers’ lives interesting, collections of letters are frequently read as a substitute for an unwritten autobiography, albeit one that is even less reliable than the latter’s self-curated disclosures, given the myriad manners literary letterists assume for their various recipients. [Read more…]