To the Happy Few: Letters

“There is no writer like him, at all, anywhere. He is an utterly unique personality, not that you can qualify uniqueness. His letters are a kind of log of the self, and they’re very cleverly calibrated in this way to the correspondent…Stendhal wrote wonderful letters to his sister, which we might perhaps find patronising – she was younger than him and had less experience of the world – but you constantly get a sense of the value he puts on the presence of the other person. And correspondingly (if one can use that word) there is the sense that this other person might betray him, might not rise to the challenge of the value that he sets on them. And that so often happened. Many of Stendhal’s friends disappointed him. They weren’t Stendhalian enough, at crucial moments when he needed them to be.” Read more...

The best books on Great Letter Writers

Jonathan Keates, Biographer