An Unknown Friend

On this picture postcard with a grand and gloomy view of the shores of the Atlantic by moonlight, I hasten to write my warm thanks to you for your last book. This place⁠—my adopted country⁠—is the furthest point on the west coast of Great Britain, so you see from how very far one of your unknown friends sends you greetings. Be happy and God keep you.

Here is another view of the desolate country where I am destined to live for the rest of my life.

Yesterday in a terrible downpour of rain⁠—it is always raining here I went to the town on business; I happened to buy your book and was reading it all the way back to the house where we have been living for the last year on account of my health. It was almost dark with the rain and the clouds, the colour of the flowers and the trees in the garden was unusually bright, the empty train rushed along throwing out violent sparks and I read on and on feeling almost painfully happy, I do not know why.

Goodbye, thank you again. There is something else I want to tell you, but what? I do not know, I cannot define it.

I cannot resist writing to you again. I expect you receive too many letters of this sort. But then they are the response of those very minds for whom you produce your work⁠—so why shouldn’t I write? You were the first to communicate with me by publishing your book, for everyone⁠—and therefore for me⁠—to read.

Today, too, it has been raining ever since the morning; our garden is almost unnaturally green and it is half dark in my room; I have had a fire all day. There is much I would like to tell you, but you know better than anyone how difficult, almost impossible, it is to express oneself! I am still under the impression of something insoluble, incomprehensible, but beautiful which I owe to you⁠—tell me, what is this feeling? What is it people experience when they surrender themselves to the influence of art? Is it the fascination of human skill and power? Is it the longing for personal happiness⁠—a longing that is never extinguished in us and becomes particularly intense when something affects our senses⁠—music, poetry, visual image, a scent? Or is it the joy of recognizing the divine beauty of the human soul, revealed to us by a few such as you, who remind one that this divine beauty does, after all, exist? It often happens to me to read something⁠—even something horrible and suddenly to say to myself, “Oh, how beautiful it is!” What does this mean? Perhaps it means that life is beautiful, in spite of all.

Goodbye, I will soon write to you again. I do not think there is anything improper in this, writing to authors is quite a recognized thing, isn’t it? Besides, you need not read my letters⁠ ⁠… though, of course, I should be grieved if you did not.

Forgive me, perhaps it doesn’t sound nice to say it, but I cannot help telling you: I am no longer young, I have a daughter of fifteen who looks quite grown up, but there was a time when I was not bad looking, I have not changed very much since then.⁠ ⁠… I do not want you to imagine me different from what I am.

I wrote to you because I wanted to share with you the emotion which your talent caused me. It has the effect of melancholy and noble music. Why does one want to share things? I do not know, and you don’t know either, but we both know quite well that this need of the human heart is ineradicable, that there is no life apart from it and that there is a great mystery in this. You, too, you know, write solely because of this craving, and indeed you give yourself up to it completely.

I have always read a great deal and kept diaries like all who are dissatisfied with life; I had read some of your things, too, but only a few, though, of course, your name was familiar to me. And then came this new book of yours.⁠ ⁠… How strange it is! A hand far away writes something, a mind shows the tiniest glimpse of its hidden life⁠—for what can words express, even your words!⁠—and suddenly space and time and difference in destinies seem to vanish and your thoughts and feelings become mine, become common to us. Truly there is only one single soul in the world. Don’t you understand then my impulse to write to you, to express something, to share something with you, to complain? Are not your books exactly the same thing as my letters to you? You, too, say things to someone, you send your lines to some unknown friend out there in the distance. You, too, complain for the most part, you know, for complaining, or in other words, asking for sympathy is the most essential characteristic of man. How much of it there is in songs, in prayers in poems, in declarations of love!

Perhaps you will answer me, if only with two words? Do!

I am writing to you again in my bedroom at night. An absurd desire torments me to tell you something that it is so easy to call naive and that cannot in any case be expressed adequately. It really comes to very little⁠—only that I feel very sad, very sorry for myself, and yet that I am happy in this sadness and in being sorry for myself. I am sad to think that I am in a foreign land, at the furthest edge of Western Europe, at a strange house in the midst of the autumn darkness and the sea mist that stretches right out to America. I am sad to be alone not only in this cosy and charming room but in the whole world. And the saddest thing of all is that you, whom I have invented and from whom I already expect something, are so infinitely far from me and so unknown and alien to me in spite of anything I may say⁠—and are so right to keep aloof.⁠ ⁠…

In reality everything in the world is beautiful⁠—even this lampshade and the golden glow of the lamp, and the glistening white linen on my bed, and my dressing gown, and my foot in the slipper and my thin hand below the wide sleeve. And one feels infinitely sorry: what is the good of it all? All will pass, all is passing and all is in vain⁠—just as my everlasting expectation of some thing which takes with me the place of life.

Write to me, I beg you. Just two or three words, simply so that I might know that you hear me. Forgive my insistence.

This is our town, our cathedral. The deserted rocky beach⁠—the view on the first postcard I sent you⁠—lies further north. The town and the cathedral are black and gloomy. Granite, slate, asphalt and rain, rain⁠ ⁠…

Yes, write to me briefly, I quite understand that you can have nothing but two or three words to say to me and believe me, I will not mind in the least. But do write!

Alas, there is no letter from you. And it is already a fortnight since I first wrote to you.

But perhaps the publisher has not yet forwarded my letters to you? Perhaps you are taken up with urgent work, with social engagements? It would be a great pity, but it is better to believe this than to think that you have simply taken no notice of my entreaties. It wounds me to think this. You will say I have no claim on your attention and that, therefore, there can be no question of my being wounded. But is it true that I have no claim on you? Perhaps I have, since I have a certain feeling for you? Has there ever existed a Romeo who did not claim reciprocity, even if he had not the slightest ground for it, or an Othello who had not a right to be jealous? They both say “If I love you, how can you not love me, how can you be false to me?” This is not a mere desire for love, it is much deeper and more complex. If I love someone or something, it is already mine, it is in me⁠ ⁠… I cannot explain it to you clearly, I only know that this is what people have always felt, and it seems to me that there is something very profound in it. Everything in the world is wonderful and incomprehensible.⁠ ⁠…

But be that as it may, still there is no answer from you and I am writing to you again. I invented all of a sudden that you are in some way near to me⁠—though, again, is it a mere invention on my part? I came to believe my own fancy and began writing to you persistently and I already know that the longer I go on with it the more necessary it will be to me, because some bond will be growing up between you and me. I do not picture you to myself, I do not see your physical form at all. To whom do I write then? To myself? But it does not matter I, too, am you.

And yet⁠—do answer me!

It is a lovely day today, I feel lighthearted, the windows are open and the warm air and the sunshine make one think of Spring. This is a queer country! In the summer it is wet and cold, in winter and autumn⁠—wet and warm, but now and again there are such lovely days that one wonders whether it is winter or Italian Spring. Oh, Italy, Italy, and myself at eighteen, my hopes, my happy trustfulness, my expectations on the threshold of life which lay all before me, bathed in a sunny haze like the hills, the valleys and the flowering orchards round the Vesuvius! Forgive me, I know that all this is anything but new, but what do I care?

Perhaps you have not written to me because I am too abstract for you? Then here are a few more details about me. I have been married for sixteen years. My husband is French, I met him one winter in the French Riviera, we were married in Rome and, after a wedding trip through Italy, settled here for good. I have three children, a boy and two girls. Do I love them? Yes, but not like most mothers whose whole life is in their children and their home. While my children were little I looked after them and shared all their games and occupations, but now they no longer need me, and I have a great deal of leisure, which I spend in reading. My own people are far away, our lives have lain apart, and we have so little in common that we seldom write to each other. Because of my husband’s position I have to go out a great deal, to pay calls and receive people, to go to dances and dinner parties. But I have no intimate friends. I am different from the women here, and I do not believe in friendship between men and women.

But enough about me. If you answer this letter, say something about yourself. What are you like? Where do you live? Do you like Shakespeare or Shelley, Goethe or Dante, Balzac or Flaubert? Are you fond of music, and of what kind of music? Are you married? Are you bound by an old tie of which you are weary, or are you just betrothed and still at that tender and beautiful stage when everything is new and joyous, when as yet there are no tormenting memories that deceive one into believing in a happiness that one missed and passed by?

Write to me if you can.

There is no letter from you. What agony! Such agony that sometimes I curse the day and the hour in which I ventured to write to you.

And the worst of it is that there is no way out. I may assure myself as much as I like that there will be no letter, that I have nothing to expect, and yet go on expecting it: for how can I be sure that it will really not come? Oh, if only I knew for certain that you will not write! Even that would make me happy. But no, no, hope is better! I hope, I wait!

There is no letter, and my misery continues, though really it is only the morning hours that are bad. I dress very slowly with unnatural composure, my hands cold with secret anxiety; I come down to breakfast and give a music lesson to my daughter, who practises with such diligence, sitting at the piano charmingly straight, as only girls of fifteen can do. At midday the post comes at last, I rush to it, find nothing and grow almost calm till the following morning.

This is a lovely day again. The autumn sun is shining brightly and softly. Many trees in the garden are bare and black, the autumn flowers are in blossom, and unutterably beautiful is the fine blue haze in the valley beyond, seen through the branches of the trees. And there is gratitude in my heart, I do not know to whom and what for. What for, indeed? I have nothing, and nothing to look forward to.⁠ ⁠… And yet, is it true that I have nothing, once there is this heart melting feeling of gratitude?

I am grateful to you, too, for having given me the chance to invent you. You will never know me, you will never meet me, but in this, too, there is much melancholy charm. And perhaps it is a good thing that you do not write to me, that you haven’t written me a single word, and that I do not visualize you at all. Could I have written to you and felt about you as I do now if I had known you or had a letter from you? You would then certainly have been different, certainly have been a little worse, and I would not have felt so free in writing to you.

It is growing cool, but I do not shut my window, I keep gazing at the blue mist over the hills and valleys beyond the garden. And that blue is painfully beautiful⁠—painfully because one feels that one ought to do some thing with it⁠—but what? I do not know. We know nothing!

This is like a diary, and yet it is not one, for I have a reader now, if only an imaginary one.

What is it that impels you to write? A desire to tell a story or to express yourself, even indirectly? The second, of course. Nine-tenths of writers, even of the most renowned ones, are merely storytellers and have really nothing in common with that which deserves the name of art. And what is art? Prayer, music, the song of the human soul.⁠ ⁠… Ah, if only I could leave behind me a few lines just to say that I, too, have lived, loved, rejoiced, that in my life, too, there had been youth, spring, Italy⁠ ⁠… that there is a remote country on the shores of the Atlantic where I live and love, expecting something even now⁠ ⁠… that there are in this ocean wild and barren islands and people, poor and savage, whose obscure language, origin, and destiny no one knows or ever will know.⁠ ⁠…

I am still waiting for your letter. It is an idée fixe with me now, a kind of mental disease.

Yes, it is all very wonderful. There is, of course, no letter. And would you believe it⁠—because there is no letter, no answer from a man whom I have never seen and never shall see, no response to my voice calling to a dream in the unknown distance, I have a feeling of terrible loneliness, of the world being terribly empty, empty, empty!

And again there is rain, fog, the usual workaday weather. And it is a good thing indeed, all is just as it should be. It calms me.

Goodbye, may God forgive you your cruelty. Yes, after all, it is almost cruel.

Three o’clock, but it is quite dusk because of the rain and the fog.

At five we have people coming to tea. They will come in their motors in the rain from the gloomy town, which in wet weather seems blacker than ever, with its wet black asphalt, wet black roofs, and the black granite cathedral whose spire is lost in the rain and the mist.

I am dressed and seem to be waiting to come before the footlights. I am waiting for the moment when I shall be saying all that one is supposed to say, will be kind, solicitous, lively, and only slightly pale⁠—which is natural in this awful weather. In these clothes I seem younger, I feel as though I were my daughter’s eldest sister, and I am ready to burst into tears at any moment. After all, I have been through a strange experience, something like love. For whom? Why? There is no understanding it, but it is so.

Goodbye, I expect nothing now⁠—I say this quite firmly and sincerely.

Goodbye, my unknown friend. I end my unanswered letters as I began them⁠—with gratitude. I thank you for making no response. It would have been worse if you had. What could you have said to me? And at what point could we, without awkwardness, have broken off our correspondence? And what could I have found to say to you, except what I have said already? I have nothing more⁠—I have said everything. In truth, about every human life one can only write two or three lines. Yes, only two or three lines.

With a strange feeling⁠—as though I had lost someone⁠—I remain alone again, with my home, the misty ocean close by, that everyday life of autumn and winter. And I return again to my peaceful diary, though why I need it⁠—or why you need to write⁠—God alone knows.

I dreamt of you a few days ago. You were somehow strange and silent, and I could not see you in the dark corner of the room where you were sitting. And yet I did see you. But even in my sleep I wondered how I could dream of one I have never seen in my waking life. Only God creates out of nothing. And it felt uncanny, and I woke up frightened and with a heavy heart.

In another fifteen or twenty years probably neither you nor I will be in this world. Till we meet in the next! Who can be certain that it does not exist? Why, we do not understand even our own dreams, the creatures of our own imagination. But is it our own imagination⁠—those things which we call our fancies, our inventions, our dreams? Is it our own will we obey when we strive towards this or that soul, as I strove towards yours?

Goodbye. And yet, no⁠—till we meet.