Thomas Mallon’s book is a successor, 25 years later, to “A Book of One’s Own,’’ a spirited exploration of diaries. That one, Mallon acknowledges in his introduction, may have been feistier - “antic,’’ is his word - but then so was he. He is less brash now, he implies, and perhaps less incautious.
Indeed, for the reader “Yours Ever’’ seems a bit less lively. Some 100 letter writers crowd into nearly 340 pages, each with a scene-setting background and Mallon’s comments; at times it seems like a series of snippets. William Faulkner, for instance, gets a couple of not particularly memorable pages selected only from his early years.
But Mallon, drawing largely from published collections, burrows shrewdly and to rewarding effect. Furthermore he can be a memorably witty commentator.
The writers are so various that their arrangement by themes is cheerfully conceded to be of the loosest. This reader’s own arrangings are even looser. One is to suggest that the letters of professional wits - Groucho Marx, S.J. Perelman, Alexander Woollcott - tend to be little more than performances. Memorable letters strike inwards.
Some, though ostensibly for instruction, do more. Madame de Sévigné’s mix of news and advice to her daughter movingly reveals a mother’s anguish over her child’s exposure to a merciless 18th century society. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes his daughter Scottie a catalogue of warnings. But Mallon quotes Malcolm Cowley: Consumed by alcohol and a sense of failure, Scottie’s father “wasn’t writing those letters to his daughter at Vassar; he was writing them to himself at Princeton.’’
A few lines from V.S. Naipaul reveal the coldness of a coldly brilliant writer. Telling his parents of his prospective and eventually long-suffering wife, he describes her as “not unintelligent, nor altogether unattractive.’’ His sister and his clone in chill had previously advised him: “best to marry the person who is mad after you - almost worships you - than marry one you love.’’
