世新中文 ‧ 中國文學名著英譯選讀教室

Yu Guangzhong(1928-)

Thus Friends Absent Speak

Translated by D. E. Pollard

To get letters from friends, especially airmail letters from overseas that bear the stamp of exotic climes, is unquestionably one of life's greatest pleasures, provided, that is, that they do not call for a reply. Answering letters is a heavy price to pay for the enjoyment of reading letters. The inevitable consequence of tardiness or infrequency in answering letters is a corresponding reduction in, and ultimate cessation of, the pleasure of receiving letter, in which case friendship is prematurely broken off, until the day in sackcloth and ashes you summon up the willpower to put pen to paper again. Through this dilly-dallying the pleasure of receiving letters has turned to the misery of owing letters. I am an old lag in this respect: practically every one of the friends I have made in my comings and goings can recite from my crime sheet. W. H. Auden once admitted that he was in the habit of shelving important letters, preferring instead to curl up with a detective novel; while Oscar Wilde remarked to Henley: "I have known men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them complete wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters." Clearly Wilde's view was that to enjoy life one should renounce the bad habit of answering letters. So I am not the only one to be fainthearted in that regard.

If it is conceded that replying to letters is to be dreaded, on the other hand not replying to letters is by no means a matter of unalloyed bliss. Normally a hundred or so letters are stacked on my bookshelf, of diverse maturity of debt outstanding, the longest being over a year. That kind of pressure is more than an ordinary sinner can bear. A stack of unanswered letters battens on me like a bevy of plaintive ghosts and plays havoc with my smitten conscience. In principle the letters are there for replying to. I can swear in all honesty that I have never while of sound mind determined not to answer people's letters. The problem is a technical one. Suppose I had a whole summer night at my disposal: should I first answer the letter that was sent eighteen months ago, or that one that was sent seven months ago? After such a long delay even the expiry date for apology and self-recrimination would surely have passed? In your friends' eyes you have already stepped beyond the pale, are of no account. On the grapevine your reputation is "that impossible fellow."

Actually even if you screw up all your moral courage and settle down at your desk to pay off your letter debt come what may, the thing is easier said than done. Old epistles and new missives are jumbled up together and stuffed in drawers or strewn on shelves; some have been answered, some not. As the poet was told about the recluse he was looking for: "I know he's in these mountains, but in this mist I can't tell where." The time and energy you would spend to find the letter you have decided to answer would be several times that needed to write the reply itself. If you went on to anticipate that your friend's reaction to receiving your letter would be less "surprised by joy" than "resentment rekindled," then your marrow would turn to water, and your debt would never be cleared.

To leave letters unanswered is not equivalent to forgetting friends, no more than it is conceivable that debtors can forget their creditors. At the bottom of such disquietude, at the end of your nightmares, there forever lurks the shadowy presence of this friend with his angry frown and baleful looks: no, you can never forget him. Those who you really put out of your mind, and do so without qualm, are those friends who have already been replied to.

I once held forth to the poet Zhou Mengdie in this wise: "You must immediately acknowledge new publications friends send you. After the usual thanks and congratulations you can conclude with the sentence 'I will get down at once to a close and reverential perusal.' If you delay these congratulatory letters for a week or a month, then you are in trouble, because by that time you would be under an obligation to have read the book and could not get away with these general compliments." Mengdie was quite overcome. Unfortunately I have never followed my own advice and must have lost many friends as a consequence. But I do remember sending in a fit of enthusiasm a new book of my own to some friends. One of them took a couple of months to send a note of thanks, explaining that his wife, his daughter and his wife's colleagues had all been desperate to read this great work, and he was still waiting his turn, which showed how fascinating the book was, etc. To this day I don't know whether to believe this story of his, but if he was lying one has to own that his was a stroke of genius.

It is said that the late Dr. Hu Shi not only responded to all requests, he even personally answered letters from schoolchildren asking for advice. On top of that he wrote his famous diary, never missing a day. To write letters is to be considerate to others; to keep a diary is to be considerate to oneself. That such an éminence grise could after his intellectual labors be so thorough and methodical on both counts leaves one lost in admiration. As for me, having already confessed myself unable to cope on the epistolary front, diaries would be a sheer luxury.

I am inclined to think that few of my contemporaries can hope to emulate the natural and easy-flowing style of the older generation of writers and scholars in their exchange of letters. Mr. Lang Shiqiu, for example, is burdened with great fame, and because of his many connections naturally has a great deal of correspondence to deal with, but in the more than twenty years I have known him he has always replied promptly to my letters. Moreover, his own are unfailingly witty and written in elegant hand, revealing a different side of him to the joviality that characterizes our

tête-à-têtes. Given my fear of writing letters, I can't say I correspond with him very frequently. I also have to bear in mind the fact that he stated in one of his Cottager's Fascicles that there are eleven kinds of letters that he does not keep—no doubt mine are number eight on the list. As far as I know his most frequent correspondent is Chen Zhifen. When Chen was young he was always exchanging letters with celebrated writers like Hu Shi and Shen Congwen, and he built up a voluminous collection of famous men's autographs. Mr. Liang has humorously called him a "man of letters": perhaps by now his own turn has come to have his letters collected.

My friends fall into four schools on the basis of their letter style. The first school's letters are shot off like telegrams: just a few lines, maybe twenty or thirty scribbled words, with the momentum of a blitzkrieg. The trouble is that the recipient has to spend a lot more time puzzling out and deciphering the message than it took the sender's pen to gallop across the paper. Peng Ge, Liu Shaoming (Joseph S. M. Lau), and Bai Xianyong are representative of this school. The second school writes letters like a young lady embroiders flowers, finely drawn, the characters handsomely formed, a true study in calm and unhurriedness. As for content, apart from their practical function they express the writer’s feeling and have an engaging tone that it is a pleasure to listen to. Song Qi and Xia Zhiqing (C. T. Hsia) can be said to typify this school, especially Xia Zhiqing: how comes it that a great scholar writes such copybook tiny characters, and always uses economical aerogrammes? The third school comes between the first two and follows the golden mean: their letters are neither tepid nor fiery, their pace is well modulated, and they are written in big bold characters, open and candid in mien. Yan Yuanshu, Wang Wenxing, He Huaishuo, Yang Mu, Luo Men are all ”exemplary characters.” One might mention especially He Huaishuo for the wide sweep of his discussion, while Yang Mu spaces his characters far apart and leaves large gaps between lines, at the same time indulging his liking for parchment-gauge notepaper: his cavalier disregard for postage puts the rest of our gallant band in the shade. The fourth school employs the hair brush and covers the page with loops and whorls, the form of the characters being somewhere between the running and the "grass"; these are the celebrities who scorn to conform. Luo Qing is of their number.

Of course those who put on the most style are Liu Guosong and Gao Xinjiang: they don't write letters at all, they simply telephone from the other end of the earth.

1967