My Autobiography: Part 2

VOLUME ONE:
CHAPTER THREE: LETTERS
"The very texture of history....."
Abstract: Very few of my letters are on the internet since they are either
personal, private or professional and I prefer to keep them confidential until
my passing from this mortal coil. I now have about 10,000 letters, emails
and internet posts in 50 volumes.
Notes: This collection of letters, what has become by degrees a voluminous
epistolarium, comes from my Bahai life, 1959 to 2009, from my years as an
adolescent and then as an adult, at the early, middle and late stages of that
part of human development as the psychologists call them. Now, into the
early years of the evening of my life, the early years of late adulthood, I post
this reflection on a lifetime of writing letters within the context of my
society, my Bahai life and especially my pioneering life. Although I have
not been able to locate any letters before 1962, before my pioneering life
began, the first letter I recall writing was in 1959, some 50 years ago, to a
fellow Bahá’í-youth in Japan.
In addition to the 4000 letters, there are 6000 emails and internet posts. I
have not kept the internet posts. They are scattered throughout the world-
wide-web and, in many cases, will be untraceable. Virtually this entire body
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of epistolary material was written during the dark heart of an age of
transition, as the Universal House of Justice characterized our time back in
1967. It is an age which was my life, perhaps the darkest in history but also,
paradoxically, an age bright with promise.
This collection of 10,000 items including, as I say, those hybrid forms of
letter--the email and internet post--which emerged as a new millennium was
opening are written by and to a homefront(1962-1971) and then an
international pioneer(1971-2009). They are communications written to: a
friend, a colleague, a fellow Bahai, a person or persons at one of 1000s of
sites on the internet, a Bahai institution at the local, national or global level,
one of a multitude of other organizations, a family member and some
association or other. Readers will find here mainly general commentaries on
my letters and letters as a genre, prose-poems on letters, mine and those of
others in history and literature. Except for the occasional letter the body of
my correspondence is not included here.
Another 10,000 letters and assorted items of correspondence were written in
connection with my employment from the mid-1960s to the early years of
the new millenium, but virtually none of them were kept. The number of
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emails received in the first two decades of email correspondence(1989-2009)
was beyond counting, but 99% of these emails were deleted. The small
number of emails that required a response in some detail were kept as were
the responses and they were kept in my computer directory after August
2007. On my demise some or all of this collected correspondence may be
published. Some of it may be kept in the national Bahá'í archices of
Australia if they are interested. We shall see on both these counts. I shall
not see for I shall have gone to the land of those who speak no more, as The
Bab put it so succinctly. He might have added to the land of those who
write no more. Those mysterious dispensations of Providence and my
executors will determine what happens to this lifelong collection of attempts
to connect with the minds and hearts of others by means of the traditional
letter and its modern variants.
Note 2: beginning in August 2007 all correspondence of significance was
kept in my computer directory files; the only hard copies kept were an
assortment of quasi-epistolary and literary material that did not seem to have
a logical place in my computer directory.
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Note 3: Some of this section of my autobiography is found under “Personal
Letters” at the Baha’i Academics Resource Library. The description there is
as follows: Letters of Ron Price: 1958-2008 Pioneering Over Four Epochs:
Section VII—Letters by Ron Price Editor:Bill Washington Published in
Pioneering Over Four Epochs: An Autobiographical Study and a Study In
Autobiography Section VII: Letters "
The thousands of letters and thousands of hours that this homefront and
international pioneer for the Canadian Bahai community has spent writing
letters, emails and internet posts in the last fifty years, 1959-2009, I dedicate
to the great letter writers in Bahai history. I dedicate these hours and these
communications to the Central Figures of this Faith, Shoghi Effendi and the
Universal House of Justice--individuals and institutions that have produced a
treasure house of correspondence. Then there are the many whose names are
on Bahai lists but who have played little to no part in the Bahai community
in their years of membership; as well as the not-so nameless and traceless,
each of whom has their story and their varying degrees of writing and who,
collectively, have written what I have little doubt are literally billions of
letters, emails and written communications of an epistolary nature. To these
I also dedicate my collection of letters. If I also include in my dedication, the
massive quantities of correspondence that has been written by the
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institutions of this Cause on the appointed and elected side of its
administrative structure; and the epistolary work of the two chief precursors
of this Faith, those two chief luminaries in the earliest history of this
emerging world relgion, and those who also wrote letters in responding to
the seeds these precursors sowed and were involved in different ways in the
earliest days of the history of this new Faith as far back as the time that
Shaykh Ahmad left his home in N.E. Arabia in 1770 to 1783(circa)---the
letters of this multitude to whom I dedicate my own epistolary efforts might
just reach to a distant star if they were laid side by side!
Many, if not most, of the epistolary communications of this nearly two and a
half centuries of Babi-Bahai history are now lost to historians and archivists.
Saving letters is not a popular sport and, some would argue, neither is
writing them. But, still, the epistolary paper trails of this newest of the
worlds great religious systems spread back, as is obvious, to well before the
French revolution in 1789 and these trails are significantly more than just a
trace. No other religion has placed so subtle and significant a value on this
method of exchange, writes Bahiyyih Nakhjvani in her book Asking
Questions.(George Ronald, Oxford, 1990, p.6.)
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At some future time, when the tempests we are living through in these early
decades and, perhaps, centuries of the Formative Age of this Faith, an Age
which began in Bahai history in 1921, are over and a relative calm has been
produced in the affairs of men, historians, archivists, biographers and
analysts of many a kind will possess a literary and epistolary base of a
magnitude undreamt of in any previous age for an analysis of the times, the
epochs of the first two centuries of this Bahai Era(B.E. beginning in 1844)
and the century of its precursors, 1744-1844. My focus here is not on this
wide and many-genred literary base, however, it is on the letter and, more
recently, the email and internet postings of many kinds, kinds resembling the
letter in many basic ways. Letters give us a direct and spontaneous portrait
of the individual and they are also useful in providing an analytical resource
for social and institutional analysis. I could include here, diaries and journals
since they are letters, of a sort, letters to oneself, a book of thoughts to and
by oneself. But these genres, too, are not my focus in this review of my
letters and this form of communicaton that are part of the history of this
Cause.
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As the poet and philosopher Emerson once said: My tongue is prone to lose
the way; not so my pen, for in a letter we surely put them better.(Emerson,
Manuscripts and Poems: 1860-1869) This pioneer, in a period going back
now fifty years, has often found that one way of doing something for another
was: to write a letter, since the mid-1990s send an email and, since the late
1990s, post on the internet. Not endowed with mechanical skills and
proficencies with wood and metal; not particularly interested in so many
things in the popular culture like sport, gardening, cooking, heavy doses of
much of the content in the print and electronic media; indeed, I could list
many personal deficencies and areas of disinterest, I found the letter was one
thing I could do and write and in the process, perhaps, document some of my
sensory perceptions of the present age, perceptions that were relevant to the
future of a religion whose very bones spoke of a golden age for humankind
which was scarcely believeable, but was worth working for and was at the
basis of my own philosophy of action in this earthly life. Hopefully my
letters would evince some precision and, perhaps, for a future age they
would be of value. I often wondered, though, how useful this interest, this
skill, was in its apparent single-mindedness for it was not, as a I say, a
popular sport! The exercise resulted, too, in a collection of many a dusty
volume of paper which, as T.S. Eliot once put it with some emphasis, may in
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the end amount to an immense pile of stuff with absolutely no value or
purpose.
There is, too, some doubt, some questionableness, as to whether anyones
letters should be taken as a reliable guide to biography and still less to
history. Letters often tell us more about postures that replace relationships
than about the relationships themselves. Sharon Cameron points this out in
her analysis of Emily Dickinsons letters in her book: Lyric Time: Dickinson
and the Limits of Genre(Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore, 1979, p.p.11-12).
Some writers of letters spring to an intimacy in their correspondence that
they do not possess in reality, in their day-to-day life. I am one of those now
in my sixties, for I am not particularly keen on intimacy any more, at least
outside of cyberspace. Life has given me decades of it and I have grown
tired after the many years of conversation and the many degrees of intimacy
that went with it. In letters I can spring to an intimacy and then forget it in a
moment. Such was the experience and view of George Bernard Shaw, as
voluminous a letter-writer as there ever was. Shaw once said: a full life has
to be cleared out every day by the housemaid of forgetfulness or the air
would become unbreathable. Shaw went on to add that an empty life is
peopled with the absent and the imagined and the full life--well, I'll let you
examine the life of Shaw and draw your own conclusions to this somewhat
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complex question of what constitutes a full life.(Frank Kermode, The Uses
of Error,Collins, London, 1990, p.253. Im sure this quite provocative
thought of Shaws is partly true, especially in our age of radio, television and
assorted media that did not exist in Shaws time when the letter was,
arguably, one of the chief means of civilized discourse.
No matter how carefully crafted and arranged a letter is, of course, it is
harmless and valueless until it is activated by the decoding reader. This was
a remark by one Robert McClure in another analysis of Emily Dickinsons
letters(The Seductions of Emily Dickinson, p.61). I leave this introduction at
BARL, the following commentary and whatever letters I have written that
may be bequeathed to posterity to these future decoding readers. I wish them
well and I wish them a perceptiveness in order to win, to attain, from the
often grey, familiar and accustomed elements of the quotidian in these
letters, any glow, flare and light in these 5000 pieces of writing, written at a
time which may well prove to be the darkest hours in the history of
civilization when a new Faith expanded slowly, imperceptibly in some ways
and emerged from an obscurity in which it had long languished since its
inception in the 19th century and its earliest historical precedents in the mid-
to-late 18th century. Over these four epochs in which my own life and letters
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found their place in history(1944-2021), as the first streaks of a Promised
Dawn gradually were chasing away that darkness; and as this Cause slowly
became a more familiar and respected feature on the international landscape,
these letters became, for me, an example of my attempt, however
inadequate, to proclaim and name and the message of Bahaullah.
These letters illustrate, and are part of, the struggle, the setbacks, the
discouragements over these same epochs and especially the years after the
unique victory that the Cause won in 1963 which has consolidated
itself(Century of Light, p.92) in further victories over more than four
decades(1963-2007), the period when virtually all these letters were written.
These various communications are also, from my point of view anyway, part
of the succession of triumphs that the Cause has witnessed from its very
inception. However exhausting and discouraging the process has often
been--and it has often been--I can not fail to take deep satisfaction on a
number of fronts: one of these fronts is these letters and the mysterious
dispensations of a watchful Providence that, for me if not for others, are
revealed therein.
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My letters surprise me. If earnestness and sincerity could give them
immortality they would be immortal; sadly in letter-writing as in life
earnestness and sincerity, however dogged and plodding, are rarely enough.
If thirst for contact and intimacy could give them immortality they would be
immortal. Sadly, again, thirst is not always present and intimacy is not
always desired and even when they are present in letters, these qualities are
never enough as a basis for the longevity or the popularity of a corpus of
letters mixed as letters always are with a quotidian reality that is enough to
bore most human beings to death. The boredom is sufficient to prevent
nearly all readers from ever getting past a brief examination of the cover of a
book of such letters on library shelves. If immortal they be, it will be due to
their association with a Cause that is, I believe, immortal. These letters will
possess a conferred immortality, conferred by association, as the Hebraic
and the Greek traditions would have expressed it each in their own historic
and cultural contexts.
The American poet, Theodore Roethke, once said that an incoherent yet
sincere piece of writing often outlives the polished product. I'm not sure how
much this truth, if truth it be, applies to letters. Letters have enough of a
problem surviving and even more of a problem ever being read in some fine
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collection usually made after a writer's death and, if one adds
inarticulateness to the recipe, the salt may just lose all of its savour. The
letters will float unread on some literary bath-water, back-water. Letters, in
some ways, possess the shapeless urges of the unconscious and try to catch
the movement of the mind of the writer amidst a practically practical and a
humanly human everydayness. They often remain, for most readers, just
that: shapeless and beyond the mind and the interest of the general, the
ordinary, reader. Often neither the recipient nor posterity take any interest in
the individual product or the entire epistolary collection, as the case may be.
Even when given a fine shape, as the letters of Queen Victoria have been
given, they come over time to catch fewer and fewer peoples eyes. Still, her
letters give ample testimony to her character, her everyday life and the
times. One does not write a letter to increase ones popularity and if, as Eliot
implies, one writes with one eye on the future, when that future arrives one
will be pulling up the proverbial daisies.
Words in Air(Faber 2008): The complete correspondence between two
American poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, is a deep and
abundant treasure-trove of letters. It is an unrivalled collection of letters for
lovers of the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. They will relish the advent of this
bulky 800-pager. Added to her equally extensive collected letters, One Art
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(Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1994), these volumes allow us direct access to her
private voice, and we can construct a vivid sense of Bishop as a person, in
all her benign and complex aspects. Perhaps the greatest tribute one can
offer to such a wonderful letter writer as Bishop who outshines Lowell is
that it makes us wish we had known her. The same is true of Keats, Byron,
Sydney Smith, Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Dickens, Nancy Mitford and
a select few others. These letters form the perfect accompaniment to one of
the most precise, thoughtful and beautiful poetic oeuvres of modern times.
Whether this will be true of my letters in relation to my poetry only time will
tell and future readers in that future age.
Inventivess and humour are two wonderful assets and, if they are possessed
by a letter writer, the letter can come alive. The letters of the poet Roger
White possessed these qualities and they had a narrative momentum without
which his letters would have grown static and repetitive. Sadly, I have often
felt that my letters expose the limits of my literary, my epistolary and
certainly my humorous sensibility. My letters often grow limp, or so it
seems to me, perhaps because I have often felt limp; or they become
crowded with quasi-mystical, quasi-intellectual, abstractions as I have tried
to deal with concepts that I only half understand and ideas far beyond my
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philosophical and literary capacity to put into words. In some of my earliest
letters, letters to my first wife which we used to call my love-letters, written
in the early months of 1967, I fell back into an emulation of the Guardian's
writings, hardly appropriate Judy and I often felt later, when we read them
on a quiet Sunday afternoon, to express my feelings for her. Of course, the
feelings they expressed were ideological and intellectual and not aesthetic
and romantic. These letters were, in the end, thrown away.
Sometimes, especially in the first three decades of my letter writing, say,
1957 to 1987, a letter will contain a certain inwardness and at other times I
gamble with an intensity of emotional expression. And so, by the 1990s and
the turn of the millennium, I had gradually, insensibly, found a voice, a
balance, to put my emotions and thoughts into a form I was comfortable
with. Although I had emerged from a literary milieux in my adolescence and
young adulthood(1957-1971) confidence in my literary ability was slow in
developing and did not really take on any solid form and shape until I was
28(1972) and living in Whyalla South Australia as an international pioneer
for the Canadian Bahai community. Confidence, though, is no guarantee of
the ability to connect with a reader or readers. I am sure some found my
emails and letters far too long for their tastes and interests. One advantage of
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a long letter I found was that I was able to express an idea, even mention the
Cause in some tangential fashion. In a shorter letter this would not have been
possible given the social and cultural climate in which I was writing.
Occasionally, someone shocked me with their feedback, especially on the
internet and I slowly learned to package my words in small doses on most of
the sites on the WWW. Shock is often a useful antidote for some policy one
is pursuing or some behaviour one is exhibiting in letter writing or in other
areas of life.
Letter writing is a little like gambling; you have to stake a great deal,
everything it often seems, on one throw. Unlike gambling you often have no
idea whether you won or lost. But this is often the case in relationships and
in life: one cannot possibly evaluate what happens to our letters, to our acts,
to our lives--or anyone elses--in terms of whether they will result in justice,
harm or benefit--since their fruition, ultimately, is destined for another plane
of existence. But, still, we do judge and we do evaluate, as I do here in this
lengthy analysis at the Bahai Academic Resources Library Site.
MASTER FILE TO MY COLLECTION OF LETTERS
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The outline below of the categories for the collection of my letters has
existed for the last half-dozen years(2001-2007)--since the official opening
of the Arc Project on Mt. Carmel. This collection tends to get altered from
time to time due to the changing nature of what is still a live body of work.
Only the occasional letter is found here at the Bahai Academics Resource
Library or on the internet in various places since these letters are either
personal, professional or private. I prefer to keep this body of writing
confidential until at least my passing. At the present time there are some 50
volumes under ten major Sections delineated below by roman numerals.
Section III below contains my contacts with sites on the internet and there
are some 25 volumes of site contacts at: site homepages, forums, discussion
boards, postings, replies, inter alia. The headings, the categories, of the
letters are as follows:
I. Personal Correspondence:
1. Volume 1: 1957-1984
2. Volume 2: 1985-1988
3. Volume 3: 1989-1994
4. Volume 4: 1995-1996
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5. Volume 5: 1997-1999
6. Volume 6: 1999-2001
7. Volume 7: 2002-2003
8. Volume 8: 2003-2004
9. Volume 9: 2004-2005
10.Volume 10: 2005-2006
11.Volume 11: 2006-2007
12 Volume 12: 2007-indefinite
II. Writing to/from Baha’i Institutions
1. Magazines/Journals
2. Individuals
3. Baháí World Centre
4. Universal House of Justice
5. International Teaching Centre
6. NSA of the Baha’is of Australia
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7. Hands of the Cause
8. Continental Board of Counsellors
9. BROs and RTCs
10.1 LSAs; 10.2 Auxiliary Board Members and 10.3 Assistants
11. National Committees of the NSA of the Bahais of Australia
12. NSA and National Committees of the Bahais of the United States
III. Contacts with Publishers, Magazines and Journals
Vol 3.1 to 3.11
Vol 3.12.1 to 3.12.16
Vol 3.13 to 3.17
IV. Communications with Canada:
Vol 4.1
Vol 4.2
Vol 4.3
V. Roger White:1981-1992
Vols. 1 to 4
VI.1 Association of Bahai Studies
1. Association for Baha’i Studies: Australia
2. Association for Baha’i Studies: Canada
Vols.1 and 2
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VI.11 Other:
3. Bill Washington
4. Judy Hassall
5. Writing Articles for Magazines:1980s
6. Dialogue Magazine: Editor of Arts and Culture
VII. 1. Baháí History in WA and the NT
Vol. 1 to Vol.4
-Letters, Essays and Notes
VIII Other Individuals:
1. Dennis MacEoin: Issues and Essays
2. Graham Hassall
IX. Correspondence For Writing Novels/Essays
1. From 1987 to 1991
X Correspondence For Job Hunting
1. 1960 to 2007
XI. On-The-Job Correspondence
1. 1960 to 2007
Some 10,000(circa)letters were written in connection with job applications,
job inquiries and on the job responsibilities: 1957-2007. An uncountable
number of emails were received and sent since about 1987 but, as I say
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above, 99% of them were deleted. Virtually none of the communications
from the job world were kept, except for a few in two two-ring binders. Very
few letters or items of literary memorabilia remain from the years 1953 to
1967. Even if ninety-nine-hundredths of the emails I received were sent to
oblivion since 1987 a small but significant body of this hybrid type of letter
was kept in the last two decades, 1987-2007. One day all of the
introductions I wrote to each of the many volumes of my letters and emails,
internet posts and replies and the several general statements I wrote
concerning my letters may be included in a collected letters since half a
century has been spent in my Bahai life and in the pioneering process
writing letters. For this first edition of The Letters of Ron Price: 1957-2007
on BARL the above outline and comment on the overall layout and
organization of my letters and emails that I have written and received and
thrown away and deleted will suffice.
There are three categories of my letters that one day may be found in the
event of my demise and in the event that such a search is desired:
1. extant letters or fragments of letters that I have written or received, in
public repositories or private collections including my own collection, that
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have been examined in the original manuscript or typescript, in photocopy or
email;
2. published letters written or received for which no extant originals have yet
been located; and
3. unlocated letters for which varying types of evidence--photocopies,
emails and complete or partial typed transcriptions have been located.
The database of information for these three categories of letters, at this stage
far from complete, aims to contain the following fields or information bases
for each written and received item:(a) year and date, (b) addressee, (c)place
and (d) original.
It is hoped that the terms: manuscript, typescript, postcard, photocopy, typed
copy, handwritten script, email or some combination of these terms (for
instance typed copy of handwritten script) will accompany each item.
Minimal descriptive information—fragment or mutilated—is provided
parenthetically where relevant.
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The technicalities of presentation when complete are those of convention;
namely, (a) intrusions into the text are marked by square brackets; (b)
spelling and punctuation is to be silently corrected; (c) some mannerisms are
to be maintained; (d) dates are to be made uniform and (e) et cetera.
I have provided below some analysis and some illustration, some context for
whatever creativity is to be found by readers when and if this collection is
ever published. Letters are always, it seems to me, exemplary illustrations of
a writers creative capacity and the significance of his epistolary skills. I do
not claim that my letters are masterpieces of the letter-writing art. If they
disclose a personality that is well and good, but the world has millions of
personalities now disclosed for the public eye, stories of individuals
overcoming tribulation and achieving success. Another such story is not
required. And I have no intention nor do I wish to make any claim to my life
being a representative of that of an ideal Baha’i or a Baha’i pioneer. This is
not an account of an exemplum. Claims to representativeness, it seems to
me, are at best partial and at worst highly misleading to those who might
glean some context for mentorship. I find there is something basically
unstable or slippery about experience or, to put it in even stronger terms, in
the words of Baha’u’llah, there is something about experience that bears
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only “the mere semblance of reality.” There is something about it that is
elusive, even vain and empty, like “a vapour in the desert.”
There are so many exegetical and interpretive problems that accompany
efforts to tie down the meaning of a life, of an experience, of a relationship.
There is something divided, duplicitous, something that has happened but
has yet to be defined and described or, as is usually the case, never
described, at least not in writing, depending of course on the experience of
the person and their literary skills. There are innumerable and indispensable
points of reference in a life and yet so many of them take on the feeling of a
mirage, as if they are not really there, like a dream, particularly as the years
lengthen into later adulthood and old age. Some of the disclosure that takes
place in a selection of letters can make the world better off, but this is not
always the case and I certainly could not guarantee a positive result for my
disclosures here. For most people, of course, the exercise, my disclosures,
are totally irrelevant. If these letters disclose something of the Bahai Faith,
some new perspective over these four epochs, I will feel that this amassing
of correspondence has been worthwhile.
These letters of mine are not so much examples of carefully crafted writing
as they are of unstudied informality, spontaneous indiscretions and a certain
cultivated civility. I like to think these letters possess a wonderful
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chameleon-like quality for it is necessary that I reshape myself for each
correspondent. Each letter is a performance and an impersonation. These
letters contains many voices. On the occasions when I send out form letters,
at Christmas and Ayyam-i-Ha, this diversity and variety is not achieved. For
some respondents to my letters my reshaping is not appreciated or enjoyed,
indeed, no response was forthcoming at all to many of my letters. As in the
world of interpersonal interaction, of verbal exchange, so in the world of
letters: not every communication is meaningful to both parties and, as in the
world of the teacher that I was for years, not every comment of mine was
returned.
The next section of this somewhat long posting here at BARL comes from
chapter 3 of my memoirs. Not all of chapter 3 is included here but enough to
give a taste and a critique of the letter-writing process from the point of view
of this Bahai who began his pioneering life 45 years ago in 1962 and who
wrote his first letter to a Japanese Bahai youth in 1957. It seems to me that
those who read these letters one day, if they ever do, will have difficulty
grasping the nature of my personality inspite of, or perhaps because of, the
extensive literary base I have provided. The only impeccable writers and the
only personalities we feel we understand, William Hazlitt noted nearly two
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centuries ago, are those who never write and people we have only briefly
met. I would add to Hazlitt's analysis here that we often feel we understand a
personality, but it is always in part. Getting to know people is a bit of a
mystery at the best of times whether they are beside you on a bus, a train, a
kitchen table or a bed. One is always adjusting ones mask for correspondents
and, in the process, one creates a series of self-portraits, a mosaic of true and
false, real and unreal. The quality and maturity of my relationship with
others is, as William Hatcher pointed out 25 years ago, the best measure of
spiritual progress and growth, acquiring the capacity for such mature
relationships depends essentially on an intense inner life and self-
development. The letter is a reflection of this inner life but, in the end, it is
but a reflection of a spirituality which lies at the centre of ones heart and
soul.(William Hatcher, The Concept of Spirituality, Bahai Studies, Vol.11,
1982, p.25.)
I assume that human personality is essentially unknowable, that it is the
revelation of a masquerade in a stage play--for all the worlds a stage. This is
not to say that there are not some aspects of life that are revealed through
letters, but readers must keep in mind that they are dealing with fragmentary,
often ambiguous and decidedly opaque material over which they will be
unable to wield any kind of imperial authority and comprehension. Whatever
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insights they gain in readings, they will be inevitably partial and will have a
distinct tendency to crumble in a epistolary world that is often obtuse, dull
and vulnerable from the onslaught of the quotidian. Collections of letters are
not the most favorite fare in the popular periodical press, journalistic studies
and at book launches. They exist, letters that is, in a somewhat secret, fenced
off area of privacy, an island of subjectivity, where even the external world
is experienced as an inner world. This, the sociologist Georg Simmel once
said, is the essence of modernity.
Readers will find, too, that however much a letter reveals the springs of
action, there exists a nice and secret world to which he or she is never privy.
Oftentimes neither is the writer aware of his motivational matrix, for
mystery abounds in our worlds. The writer, namely myself in this case, turns
his letter like a historical microscope with some sensitivity and with some
attention to minute causality, but it is a causality he never fully grasps and a
sensitivity he only attains to partially. The road these letters describe I'm not
sure I would ever have entered either the road of the letters or the road of the
analysis, if I had known of its length when I wrote that first letter fifty years
ago.
Performance struggles with ideal when one writes and when one lives. That
is the name of the game. My choice and my command of language, to
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whatever degree of imperfection and perfection I attained, were the fruit of
exercise and with the arrival of more leisure in my mid-fifties that exercise
was able to find much fuller expression. Some of the facts of my past, my
religion and my society are presented in these letters in a language that is
rich in a type of coherence and a type of embedded comment. I like to think
that the cumulative effect of this comment is to predispose readers in favour
of a particular interpretation of reality and the world. But my more skeptical
self is more inclined to the view that a collection of letters is not likely to
change the world view of readers no matter how open and receptive they
may be. The stubborn testimony of unexceptionable facts, the facts of my
life, gradually bring me to the bar of history and the sober discretion that I
trust these same facts embody are a statement about my present age and
hour. At the bar there is no final verdict only a series of temporary
assessments and the discretion results in no final judgement.
These letters present a divergent and unfocused, an unconnected and
bewildering mass of material. The collection is just too immense, the
expression too forcible, the factual matter too inescapable for my intellect or
the readers to close down any questions with definitiveness, decisiveness
and precision--with answers. Rather, it seems to me, these letters open
questions up and enlarge what is and was a narrow circle in which nature has
27

confined me. If complete answers are found they simply carry the seeds of
more questions. As the years went on, too, my thoughts became more
complicated and, although my perspective could be said to remain the same,
it was within such a different context that my letters came to be written.
From the late fifties and early 1960s, to the years as they passed over the
decades, my letters might as well have been written by a different person.
The questions I dealt with changed from decade to decade, person to person
and my inclusion of the responses to my letters provides a thorough
contextualization not so much to my influence, an entity which is difficult to
measure at best and at worst quite irrelevant to my reasons for including
them, but to the letters themselves and the backdrop they provide to a period
over several epochs of various urgent and interlocking challenges,
painstaking and frustrating individual and community work.
Writing often draws attention to itself. This is especially true of letters where
attention often does not pass through to the subject but gets stuck on the
personality of the writer. For ours is an age, par excellence, of the celebrity.
The awkward and tangled reality of the past, though, is displayed for all to
see from my perspective in these letters. The surface of my past gazes out
upon history, from my letters with all their quotidian dryness, everydayness,
28

tedium and boredom. The past seems to elude the net of language as that
language gets caught up in minutiae, in the tedious and the toilsome. And
anything called certainty is endlessly deferred, although there are pockets of
certainty enough to go on and give us a feeling that the sky will not fall
down. At least not in my time.
I think there is little doubt that these four epochs are the scene for the
greatest and most awful period in the history of humankind. Gibbon once
said this of Rome in the 2nd century AD. My account here of the immensity
and wonder of this period is an account from a quite personal and limited
perspective. It is an account, too, which renders my version of a vision and
my interpretation of a plot and script that derives from two god-men in the
19th century. My letters are pregnant with delightful observations that are as
deep and as shallow as the person I am and they are pregnant as well with
the most trivial images and thoughts as watery and limpid as amniotic fluid.
For my letters, like the letters of most others, contain what is often called
telephone talk, talk which nullifies serious artistic or psychological
exchange, talk about life's simplicities, talk about life's conventionalities like
the weather and the events of daily life.
29

Readers may find my letters something like the way that Carlyle found
Scott's letters. They are never without interest, he pointed out, yet they are
seldom or never very interesting. Id like to think that my letters might impart
something of my soul, my joys and anxieties, and something that may
engage the sympathies and pleasures of those who happen upon them in
their journey. In an age in which communication has become more audible,
with animated and electronic emails and sound systems improving in quality
decade by decade, it seems that communication has also become more, or at
least often, ephemeral; with billions of emails biting the electronic dust each
week, if not each day, I offer this collection of letters as one mans record of
his age.
PIONEERING OVER FOUR EPOCHS
VOLUME ONE:
CHAPTER THREE: LETTERS
The very texture of history.....
Perception, reflection and social interaction are at least three of the many
psychologically diverse contexts in which the word self appears in our
everyday discourse. Autobiography is an important part of the narration of
this self and this autobiography, like all autobiographies, finds its home in
30

all of these contexts.1 But since the reality of man is his thought and what
endures, after life has completed its course, is the soul, it is hardly surprising
that there is a curious intangibility,2 an inherently spiritual abstraction,
associated with defining, with expressing, who we are. And it is hardly
surprising that this work of mine, this autobiography, contains a great deal
that is better described as thought and not so much that one could describe as
action. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Jens Brockmeier and Donald Carbaugh,
editors, Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography: Self and Culture,
John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2001; and 2Hannah Arendt in Relating
Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, Adriana Cavarero, Routledge,
NY,2000, p.ix.
Although there is this curious intangibility that makes up any attempt to
describe who we are, men’s beliefs in the sphere of human conduct are part
of their conception of themselves and are intrinsic to their picture of the
world. Both these beliefs and this conduct can be found expressed again and
again in my letters.-Ron Price with thanks to Isaiah Berlin quoted by Robert
Matuozzi, “When Bad Things Happen to Other People,” Philosophy &
Literature, Vol.25,No.1, 2001, pp. 173-177.
31

On the dust jacket of The Selected Letters of Marcel Proust: 1880 to 1903
the publishers, Doubleday and Company, have written “letters are the
strongest indicators of personality, perhaps the purest form of
autobiography. We look at them as a means of knowing the author as a
human being, of gaining perspectives on his life and work and, perhaps,
divining the secret foundation of his creativity.” I think there is some truth in
this remark. There is also, from my own experience, some truth in the
sentiments of Thomas Wolfe who is quoted by Elizabeth Nowell in her
introduction to the Selected Letters of Thomas Wolfe “a writer writes a letter
in order to forget it.” Once down on paper, I find, the emotion or experience
loses its compulsive force and can be stored away and forgotten. I have
stored away some 5000 letters in over fifty volumes. Since beginning to
collect these letters in 1967(with some retrospective findings and
recollections going back to 1957) I have come to see them as an
autobiographical tool. I leave it to readers to assess just where this
autobiography is strongest and where it is weakest, where it is useful and
where it is irrelevant. This is difficult for me to assess.
If this autobiography works for readers, it will not be because I have filled it
with facts, with details, with the minutiae of life documented with great
32

enthusiasm and eagerness in letters to friends and a variety of institutions.
Success in this life narrative that has been going down on paper over many a
year will be due to its basis, its centeredness, in ideas, the quality of the
writing and this narratives connection with an emerging world Faith. If it
becomes a success, at least in the short terms, at least in the next, say,
several decades, as I have indicated before, in all likelihood that success will
still be one that resonates with only a few people. But whether it resonates
with many or a few, I believe, as Gilroy and Verhoeven argue, these letters
are marked by and sent to the world. They counter, too, tendencies to flatten
out the uniqueness of the individual in some falsely understood
egalitarianism or sense of human equality. The Bahai teachings make clear
that equality is a chimera. Our uniqueness as individuals derives from our
constitutive relation with others, from our living in community, indeed, a
number of factors.
The epistolary form was long associated in the western tradition with the
feminine and the history of female subjection. As far back as Cicero in the
first century BC, it was associated with everyday speech. Here in this
autobiography my letters function as a crucial form of communication in the
teaching and consolidation work of a pioneer. Indeed, one could say that my
story, the narratability of my life, my very uniqueness, arises within the
33

context of an interaction process that the letter goes along way to illustrate.
The following Latin expression contains some truth: vox audita perit littera
scripta manet--The voice heard vanishes, the letter written remains.
The dynamics of epistolary writing have been much studied in recent years.
Analysts who read and study letters see them as something more than simple
documents of a particular time and place. They, or at least some, see the
letters as text that are only partly susceptible to explication or
decipherability. Such documents bear a different relation to the world for a
future reader than for the writer at the point when the letter was originally
written. In some ways this is only stating the obvious. The act of reading a
collection of published letters is inevitably shaped by a series of decisions
made by both the letter-writers themselves and the readers. Letters are often
exchanged, perhaps for years, usually without either participant considering
them as an exercise leading to publication. There are at least two people I
wrote to over more than ten years and a sub-collection of these letters would
fill a sizeable book but, when they were written it was for the immediate
purpose at hand not with the view to being read at some future time. T.S.
Eliot puts this process well: The desire to write a letter, to put down what
you don't want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but
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which you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved
for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. (T.S. Eliot, English Poets As
Letters Writers, From a lecture given in 1933 at Yale University) Certainly
the extensive collection of my letters sent and received to these two
individuals might take a future reader into the hearts and minds of three
people at a unique, a significant, time in history and shed light on the period
in question in ways that other genres of writing cannot and will not do. This
sub-collection could be said to be (a) a dramatization of the appreciation of
one man for the poetry of the most significant poet of the epochs under
review and (b) the effort of one Bahai to explore his Faith en passant,
indirectly, to a friend, colleague and fellow retiree. These two interlocutors
are not so much possessed of a literary calibre superior to others I wrote to,
although in most cases that was true, but the correspondence went on for
many years, more years than that of others.
Eliot goes on:We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and
we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read
what we have written. There are several components in what we could call
this selective and personal epistolary machine: the act of writing, the act of
reading and the world of interpretation. To focus on reading is to bring to
light the complexity of the communication process, to recall that not all of a
35

readers questions are going to be answered by reading the said letters.
Readers may only have partially formulated questions in their minds or,
perhaps, they may not even understand their own questions. Any message,
including a letter, encounters a scrambling process upon entering the readers
zone of associations and responses. I wish readers well dealing with the
inevitabilities of scrambling which they will have to deal with in my letters.
There is a conceptual intersection in each letter between reader, writer and
world. And it is a busy intersection. And the discourse that takes place at
these intersections possesses a paradoxical entwinement of minds and
words. This is true of snail-mail or fiber-optic-borne email. Like the view at
a busy intersection, much of what is seen is predictable while at the same
time the specific details are to a large extent unknown or seen so differently
by each spectator.
A recent essay that I wrote introducing a volume of letters gathered in the
first years of my retirement will serve to illustrate many of the things Id like
to say about this overall collection of letters. They were letters written just
before and just after the completion of the Arc Project in 2001. I think, as
Emerson wrote, that letters often put things better than verbal
communication and provide perspectives that are timely here in this ongoing
autobiographical statement. The letters of James Boswell, to chose for
36

comparison one historical example from collections of letters, open a
window onto the real man, a man hidden behind his great biography, his
biography of Samuel Johnson. Of course, one must be sensitive, too, to
epistolary disguise, posing, theatrical attentiveness to the social presentation
of self, concern for appearances, standardization of responses and what
might be called mannerisms in letter writing. As in life, there are many
selves which write letters, many social conventions, courtesies, honesties, et
cetera. and there are many worlds about which a writer writes.
It is the fate of those who toil at many of life's employments, particularly the
more introspective arts of which letter writing is one, to be driven more by
the fear of evil, sin, personal inadequacy, regret and remorse, the sense of
disappointment and the many discouraging aspects of life, than they are
attracted by the prospect of good, of virtue, of praise or of victory, of giving
pleasure and peace to readers. Many of the scribblers on the journey of life,
ones I have met and ones I have not, are often exposed more to censure, with
little hope of praise. They feel the disgrace of their miscarriages, the
insufficiency of their language and the punishments they might receive or
have received for their neglect of duty, principle or person. Their success, if
any, has often been, if not usually, without applause and their diligence has
37

reaped no external reward. Also, as Susan Sontag noted parenthetically in
her preface to Letters: Summer 1926, the greatest writers invariably demand
too much of, and are failed by, readers. It would be pretentious for me to
claim to be a great writer, but I have been aware of the implicit and explicit
demands I may make on readers and of the importance of keeping my
expectations low. I have tried for many a year to put these principles into
practice for Sontag is right.
Among these unhappy mortals is the writers of letters. Humankind seems to
consider them like pioneers of literature doomed to work in societys private
spaces with their home in little mailboxes and, more recently, in optic space.
Every other author aspires to publication and praise. Letter writers, while
they may enjoy a certain wild exuberance, must resign themselves to the
tyranny of time and fashion--and the mind of one or, at the most, several
readers. Each letter has no hope of a mass audience. There on the page they
must disentangle perplexity and regulate life's confusion for themselves and
their lone readers. They must make choice out of boundless variety and do it
without any established principle of selection. They must detect
adulterations without a settled test for purity.
38

It happens, and especially in letter , that in things difficult there is danger
from ignorance and there are so many difficult and complex things in life. In
things easy there is danger from confidence and there are many an aspect of
life that is easy and hardly requires any thought. The mind, afraid of
greatness, and disdainful of littleness, hastily brushes over the more
important aspects of life and/or dwells far too little on the everyday. It
withdraws itself from painful epistolary dialogue and from the search
required and so passes with scornful rapidity over tasks not adequate to its
powers. Sometimes it feels too secure to exercise caution or too anxious for
vigorous effort. It is afflicted by a literary idleness on plain and simple
paths; and is often distracted in the labyrinths of life and interpersonal
exchange. Dissipation stalks his literary intentions as words roll off his pallet
onto the page. Readers may wonder what these phrases I have just written
have to do with the art of writing letters. I leave you to ponder. In an age
when little letter writing goes on, I'm not sure how much meaning readers
need to find here in these complex epistolary ideas.
A large work is difficult because it is large, even though all its parts might
singly be performed with facility; where there are many things to be done,
each must be allowed its share of time and labour, in the proportion only
39

which it bears to the whole; nor can it be expected, that the stones which
form the dome of a temple, should be squared and polished like the diamond
of a ring. Those who have much leisure to think, will always be enlarging
the stock of ideas, and every increase of knowledge, whether real or fancied,
will produce new words, or combinations of words. When the mind is
unchained from necessity, it will range after convenience; when it is left at
large in the fields of speculation, it will shift opinions. If any custom is
disused, especially the literary, the words that express that custom often
perish with inactivity. As any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech
in the same proportion as it alters practice. Since I retired from full time
work in 1999 my mind has been unchained but, as yet, my opinions are not
popular. They are, though, growing in the public place at a faster pace than
ever. I leave it to readers to assess the junction, the intersection, between my
letters and the pace of change in society on the subjects that occupy both me
and that wider milieux. By 1999 my life had become more speculative than
active, more literary, than people centred with its endless listening and
talking. This shift in my literary and daily avocation is strongly reflected in
the quantity and content of my letters and coalesced in my first extensive
publications on the internet.
40

In the hope of giving longevity to that which my own nature repels me,
forbids me, to desire, namely, the fame of my letters and my immortality
through them, I have devoted this collection of letters, the labour of years, to
the honour of my religion and as a testimony to one of my life's
achievements. There is a glory to life from its arts and its letters. Whether I
shall add anything of my own writings to these arts and letters, to English
literature, must be left to time. Much of my life has been lost under the
pressures of illness, lack of direction, a certain frivolity, jobs that were fill-
ins, conversations that seemed to go nowhere, activities that functioned
largely to fill in time, the desire to be entertained regularly and daily, inter
alia. Much of my days have been trifled away.
Much time each day has been spent in provision, in functioning, for the tasks
of the day that was passing over me, doing what was in front of my nose. I
have not thought my daily labour wasted; I have not thought my
employment useless or ignoble. If, by my assistance, foreign nations and
distant ages might gain access to the propagators of knowledge and
understand the teachers of truth, or if my labours might afford light to some
of the multitude of the repositories of learning, then my employment will be
more worthwhile than any contemporary achievement. For vision and a
sense of the future inspires so much that I do. When I have been animated by
41

this wish, I look with pleasure on my collection, however defective, and
deliver it to the world with the spirit of a man that has endeavoured well.
Useful diligence in the microcosm of letter writing may in the end prevail.-
Ron Price with thanks to Samuel Johnson, Preface to the Dictionary From
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, London, 1755,
Edited by Jack Lynch.
I wrote the essay which follows as part of the second edition of this
autobiographical work, a second edition I worked on from 1993 to 2003. It
was one of my essays that was, in that process of ten years in the evolution
of this autobiography, simply gathered into an appendix and not integrated
into the body of that edition. In the third edition I achieved a better
integration of material, of my autobiographical resources. My imaginative
function became more fertile in the third edition. As the poet Wallace
Stevens writes, referring to imagination: I am the necessary angel of
earth/Since, in my sight, you see the world again, I am seeing the world
again with greater vividness than I once did. Robert Graves, a prolific letter
writer, saw his letters as a sort of spontaneous autobiography and his poems
as his spiritual autobiography. I like the distinction. Perhaps, one day, a
42

selection of letters from my spontaneous autobiography will become
available.
Here, then, is some of that essay.....As the 38th, 39th and 40th years of
pioneering took their course in the first years of my retirement, 1999 to
2002, I wrote some of the following about the letter-writing experience....
Across the line of time I thought I would try to make a brief summary of this
letter writing experience, an experience which goes back to the first letter I
received from the international pioneer Cliff Huxtable in St. Helena in 1967.
Cliffs wife Cathy had just died at the age of thirty-five. Cliff is still in St.
Helena thirty-five years later. He has remarried. He never wrote again. I
replied but I did not keep a copy of the letter; indeed I kept few of my
personal letters until about 1982, twenty years into the pioneering venture.
As I have pointed out on previous occasions I wrote and received letters
going back as far as about 1962 when this pioneering journey began; before
this back to the age of 13 in 1957 as a Bahai youth and junior-youth as the
period before 15 is now called a few letters were written. But I have not kept
the letters from the earlier period before 1967, except a rare item of the
species. There were many letters after 1967, at least up to about 1980, which
43

were destroyed. Some of these may be in private hands but, since I have no
fame, no significance in the general public eye, it is unlikely that many, if
any, letters are being kept privately by their recipients. The most assiduous
search will, in all likelihood, not come up with the discovery of any
epistolary manuscripts. I find it interesting and more than coincidental that
virtually the entire corpus of my letters comes from a period that began with
what the Universal House of Justice in 1967 called ‘the dark heart of the age
of transition.’ Even the letters before 1967 which were not kept come from a
period that the Guardian described in 1957 as one hovering on the brink of
self-destruction. Such was the widest context for that first letter to Hiroshi
Kamatu in Japan in 1957.
By those dates, from 1957 to 1967, “a mood of cultural crisis: a sense that
something had gone terribly wrong in the modern world, something that we
could neither assimilate nor put right,” had entered our psyches. One writer
called our society a post-traumatic culture. Indeed there have been, since the
fifties and sixties, a host of characterizations of the shift, the crisis, of these
days. It was in many ways an insensible process without a beginning date,
but it was like a tempest which blew and blew decade after decade, a
44

tempest that had already begun in the lives of my parents and, arguably, my
grandparents.
If one tried to get a picture of the hey-day of my letter writing I think it
would be in the 1980s when I lived, first in Zeehan on the west coast of
Tasmania, and then in the north of Australia, north of Capricorn, although in
the early years of the new millennium, after my retirement, there was a new
lease on letter-writing life in the form of emails. I do not have any interest in
going through this collection of letters that I wrote north of Capricorn or,
indeed, from the full period 1957 to 2002, now in over 50 2-ring binders and
arch-lever files. Perhaps a future day will see me making some minute
analysis of the extent and the content of these letters. Perhaps, should their
potential value become more evident to me, I shall take a more serious
interest in them. Thusfar I have made only the occasional annotation to these
letters. As the first editor of this collection, I have given them order and
shape; I have set them in context, but I have made no attempt to correct their
errors, to improve their expression or comment on their individuality: whom
I wrote to, why I wrote and under what circumstances.
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I have, though, taken a very general interest in the collections of letters of
other writers to help provide useful perspectives on my own collection. I
have opened a file of introductions to collections of letters obtained from
books of the letters of famous writers and have kept additional notes on the
genre because I think in the years ahead I may write a history drawing on
letters, mine and those of other Baháís in the world during these four epochs.
The analysis of the letters of other writers also helps me enrich and
understand the context of my own pieces. These letters are like arrows from
the same quiver. I send them just as high and far as I can. In my journal it is
the same. Perhaps these letters and my journal are simply the product of a
peculiar self-centredness. Their appeal I’m sure will not be due to my wit,
my humour, the adventurousness or the romance of this narrative, but rather(
if there is to be any appeal at all) to the ordinariness of the content and, most
importantly and as I have indicated before, their association with this new
global Cause. Their appeal for me, for me as the writer, is the sense of
surprise. V.S. Naipaul said the same thing in his nobel prize lecture given in
2001.
Some of that surprise comes from the fact, says Naipaul, that the self that
writes is not the everyday self. They are very different. The everyday self is
46

essentially superficial and, if not superficial, it is at least domestic and
practical and must deal with the minutiae of life just to get from one day to
another in one piece: fed, housed and clothed-and hopefully loved. I’m not
so sure about this characterization of the double self, but that sense of
surprise I find on every page I write and this surprise certainly possesses an
appeal. It helps to keep me going, keep me writing. “The secretion of ones
innermost life, written in solitude and for oneself alone, that one gives to the
public,” writes Naipaul. “What one bestows on private life—in conversation,
however refined it may be—is the product of a quite superficial self, not of
the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world
and the self that frequents the world. While I’m not sure this is entirely true,
it certainly is in part.
Maugham puts this idea a little differently. I had an impression, this is
Maughams summing up of the writer Thomas Hardy, that the real man, to
his death unknown and lonely, was a wraith that went a silent way unseen
between the writer of his books and the man who led his life, and smiled
with ironical detachment at the two puppets. Somewhere in all of this lies
the real writer, the real me. Is this real me to be found in the id, the
unconscious, the reflexes, the hormones, in a socialization process, the roles
of a protean man, in feeling good? This complex question really requires a
47

book on its own, but I think from a Baha’i perspective the real me is best
found in thought and action guided by the behavioural principles of this
Cause to put the case as succinctly as I can.
This is not a collection of letters of a famous person or to famous people,
like the collections of letters of Einstein to President Roosevelt, or the
collection of Jane Austen's letters or those of, say, one of the Presidents,
Prime Ministers or other prominent members of the community. My
collection has no curiosity value like the letters to Santa Claus or to lovers or
to mothers or from children, suicide victims or entertainers to an assortment
of people. Whatever significance this collection has is tied-up with the
emergence of a new world Order and a new religion and whatever future that
religion may have. These letters bear the traces of contemporary historical
practices, literary styles and tastes and they are surrounded by what could be
called the envelope of contingency. In this sense they are communications to
and with the world, with society, however personal and private they may
appear to the casual observer. There are few communications with famous
people either in the Bahai world or out. Outstanding thinkers, artists,
political figures, scientists or significant Bahais on the elected or appointed
48

side of the Cause will not be found here. The pivotal figures of these epochs
are virtually absent.
That is not to say that fascinating personalities are not present, that
individuals with great charm are not found among the pages, that devotion
and faith, patience and understanding are not here. There is a storehouse of
humanity, a kalaidescope of personalities, here that I met on my journey.
There was a certain excitement which I found pleasant but transitory and, as
I look back over it, not something I would want to repeat or make
permanent. There is something tumultuous about existence and these letters
reflect that quality. This tumultuous quality is due to many causes that are
not my purpose to describe here. Even the most intimate of relationships
contains a trace of strangeness and, inevitably, this is reflected in letters.
These letters are, for me at least, part of a potential global epistolary
collection, part of the literary expression of a global diaspora, a national and
an international pioneering movement, that was only in its second generation
when I got into the field in the 1960s. The recent eighteen-volume series on
global diasporas and the six volume work of the International Library of
Studies of Migration, will, in all likelihood, have no mention of the Baháí
diaspora when they are completed. The former is or will be made up of
49

original works, while the latter is a collection of previously published
articles on selected themes. International migration and diasporas have come
to constitute distinctive fields of inquiry and there is considerable overlap
between them.
The study of international migration is broader in scope and partially
subsumes diaspora studies. Diasporas arise from international migration.
Constant interaction between diasporic communities in dozens of sovereign
states and with various homelands is one of the defining features of this
international migration. After nearly seven decades of international
pioneering as part of an international teaching Plan, this interaction and
these many diasporas seem to me, in many ways, to have just been initiated
and only briefly been given any academic study. The major events of this
pioneering venture, the various processes concerning its growth and
development, and aspects of the diasporic life of, say, Baháís from North
America in Australia would necessarily interest only a small body of people
at this stage of that groups history. Indeed, at this early stage, however
massive the exercise involved, and the global pioneering venture is indeed a
massive one, the significance of collections of letters is hardly appreciated as
50

yet; indeed, I would think for most people including the pioneers themselves
there would be very few collections of letters extant.
What are termed Baháí studies or international Baháí pioneering studies will
one day, though, I am confident, be a part of an extensive study of the great
Baháí international diaspora of the last sixty-seven years(1937-2004), a full
two-thirds of the first century of the Formative Age. So I am inclined to
think, anyway. These letters are part of what is, in fact, a grand narrative.
Specific letters relevant to the history of the Cause in the Northern
Territory(NT) I kept for two decades(1982-2002) in special files as resource
material to help me write the Baháí history of that region. I have now given
them to the Regional Baháí Council for the Northern Territory. Much more
collecting of letters written by Baháís in the NT could be done by history
writers and archivists with greater enthusiasms than I now possess and I
hope some day such an exercise will be accomplished. In the disintegration
of society that is part of the essential backdrop to these letters and the
contrasting integration, the generation that took part in the pioneering
venture of the years 1962 to 1987, marks the first years of the tenth and final
stage of history. It is a stage coextensive with a crucial stage in the
51

institutionalization of the charismatic Force, the routinization of that
charisma to use Webers term, in the Universal House of Justice.
If these letters appear to indicate an aloofness from the controversies of the
day, from the endless issues that occupied the front pages of the newspapers
and the images and sounds from the electronic media; if they refrain year
after year from any association by word or deed with the political pursuits of
the various nations of the world, with the policies of their governments and
the schemes and programmes of parties and factions, it is because this is the
advice, the position, taken by the leaders of my Faith following principles
and practices laid down by the Founders and leaders of this Faith beginning
in the 1840s. I, too, following these considered views, have tried to further
the aims of what is to me a beloved Cause and to steer a course amid the
snares and pitfalls of a troubled age by steering clear of partisan-political
subjects. Many writers do the same. They steer clear of politics and go in for
sex, religion, humour, theology, inter alia, in their writing. They belong to
no lit crit school, have no followers and simply cannot be easily labelled
politically.
52

What does occupy the Baháí often appears trifling. Such is the feeling I have
frequently had in relation to these letters. The words of Thomas Henry
Huxley, the nineteenth century biologist and educator, I find encouraging.
He opened his autobiography with a quotation from a letter from a Bishop
Butler, a bishop of the episcopal seat of Aukland, to the Duchess of
Somerset. The bishop wrote: And when I consider, in one view, the many
things . . . which I have upon my hands, I feel the burlesque of being
employed in this manner at my time of life. But, in another view, and taking
in all circumstances, these things, as trifling as they may appear, no less than
things of greater importance, seem to be put upon me to do. As archaic, as
anachronistic, as the style of the good bishops words may be, the point for
me is important, namely, that Huxley saw his autobiography, even the
humble letter, as something put on him to do, by the interpositions of a
watchful Providence, the eye of a necessary Fate or the simple needs of
circumstance, however trifling it appeared to be.
I am reminded, in this context, of the words of Roger White from A Sudden
Music. White says that the highest service a Baháí can often render is to
simply do the thing under his nose that needed doing. For me, writing letters
was often this thing. And so it was, that over time, as the years went on,
what was once seen as a trifling exercise took on a patina of gentle
53

significance, perhaps even the sense of letters being a small example of what
the Universal House of Justice called nobler, ampler manifestations of
human achievement in their discussion of the subject of freedom of thought.
If I was not a good cook, a good gardener, a good mechanic, a good painter,
indeed, if I did not operate successfully in so many areas of life, as indeed
most of us can say about so many domains of activity, I could at least write a
letter and do it well, at least such was my personal view. Perhaps, like one of
the greatest letter writers of all time, Voltaire, I would do most of my best
and significant work in the years ahead. He did his best writing from the age
of 64 to 84.
I’ve always appreciated the words of Evelyn Waugh in terms of this
particular capacity to write letters. Beware of writing to me,” he once said,
“I always answer.” He referred to his letter writing habit as “an inherited
weakness,” part of his “great boringness.” It was partly due, he said, to
“never going out or telephoning.” Like Thoreau my life showed a devotion
to principle, but by the time I was sixty I was only too conscious of just how
far my life had been from the practical application of that principle. I have
little doubt that were many more individuals, more sincere and more genuine
in their devotion to that same principle or principles, than I have or would
54

be. As Clausewitz notes in his series of essays On War to be faithful in
action to the principles laid down for ourselves this is our entire difficulty.
The many things to which the Duchess’s correspondent here refers are the
repairs and improvements of his episcopal seat at Auckland. I doubt if
Huxley, the first great apologist of Darwinian evolution, this largely self-
educated man, one of Englands founders of primary schools for all, this
father of eight children, this coiner of the term agnostic, saw himself as an
instrument of the deity. But, like the good Bishop Butler, I'm sure he felt he
had things of great importance to do and that they had been put upon him.
Even the humble letter. Virginia Woolf wrote that it was not until the
nineteenth century that self-consciousness had developed so far that it was
the habit of men to describe their minds when they wrote their letters and
their autobiographies. I write in this new tradition, although I am conscious,
as Woolf puts it plainly, of the worlds notorious indifference. And it may be
many years, if ever, before this collection of letters has any interest to even a
coterie of people.
Letter writing has occasionally been a routine, perfunctory, exercise;
occasionally a joy, a pleasure, a delight; occasionally part of some job or
community responsibility. “Letters were the very texture” wrote Henry
55

James “of Emerson’s history.” There is certainly a texture here that is not
present in the other genres of my wide-ranging autobiography. Some letter-
writers are janus-faced and some, like Truman Capote, the author of
Capote’s letters in Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote are
three-faced. There was the face for gay friends, the face for non-gay friends,
and the face for the friends he made in Kansas while writing In Cold Blood.
I think I have a multiple-faced letter writing persona: one for Baha’is of a
conservative type, one for a more liberal orientation, one for those who are
Baha’i in name only, one for youthful types, one for old people and one
for...and on goes the list, the persona. Letter writing partly overcomes,
together with my writing in other genres, the ancient enmity between life
and the great work. And it was apparent that, if I was to achieve any ‘great
work,’ it would be in bits and pieces spread out over many years, many
decades. Like the great work of inner life and private character,
achievements in my life seem to have been small steps backward and
forward. The texture of these largely private communications is also a result
of a new written form, the email, a form which was present in Volume 5 of
my personal letters as well, but makes a strong appearance in this Volume
6(the year I retired from full-time work) of these letters. Nine out of ten
communications by then were emails not letters. I think the first email I
56

received was in 1990 or 1991, but I have kept few emails before the mid-to-
late 1990s when email traffic began to replace the letter and, for me at least,
by 2000 the telephone to a significant extent. Even the emails over the last
dozen years, 1995-2007, were largely deleted. So much of what has come in
since the email entered my life has not been worth keeping in my archive.
Like the ten thousand letters I wrote in the organizations which employed
me over more than 40 years and which either lie in files now or are on the
scrap-heap, the detritus, of one of historys myriad paper-trails no one will
ever follow, a vast quantity of emails I have received have disappeared in an
electronic void. Their electronic successors, like the mobile phone and text
messages, have not been part of my experience in their early years of
operation and so there will be nothing in this collection of messages over 50
years from these additions to the electronic industry and their
communications functions.
In the early years of retirement, 1999 to 2002, I rarely used the telephone. In
retirement I had come to find the telephone an intrusion after more than forty
years of my finding it a pleasure, a convenience or a necessity. Of course, I
still owned a telephone and answered it when circumstances required with
courtesy and kindness and, when possible, with humour & attentiveness.
57

A great deal of life is messy work offering to the artist irrelevant, redundant
and contradictory clutter. Much of letter writing falls into this category; it
spoils a good story and blunts the theme, like much of conversation, much of
life, it is random, routine and deals with the everyday scene, ad nauseam.
But these letters tell of a life in a way that is unique, not so much as a
collection of letters, for collections are a common genre over the centuries,
but as a collection of letters in the third, forth and fifth epochs of the
Formative Age of the Baháí Era. They present pictures that tell of a concrete
reality, a time and an age, that I hope will stand revealed to future readers.
For these epochs were characterized by what Toynbee calls a schism in the
soul in an age of social disintegration. A fully seasoned universal state with
its supreme authority and its supreme impersonal law, argues Toynbee, were
not part of the cosmology and the basic unit of social organization, for
humankind in this half century, although some serious and significant
beginnings to that process were made in that direction.
What is here in these letters and in my other writings is, in part, some signs
and signals of the embryo of that unit of social organization at the global
level. The Bahai Faith has been central to my education, my ambitions and
my assumptions as far back as the early 1960s and late 1950s. Much of this
58

education was peripatetic and that of an autodidact. What is here is spiritual
autobiography and psychological revelation in a different literary form than
my poetry and it tells of a period during which the Baháí Faith made a
significant leap forward in its numbers and in the maturity of its community.
Often, to the Baháís working in their personal lives and in their communities
this maturity and this growth was either not evident or not appreciated. So
often it was the struggle itself that dominated their perspectives, their
emotional life and their thoughts.
Often, too, readers awareness of the many Ron Prices that make up my life
and whatever maturity I have or have not attained is sharpened by their dip
into the pool of my letters. But perhaps most importantly the number of
collections of letters from international pioneers during this period may not
be that extensive given the busyness of peoples lives and what seems to me
to be a quite natural disinclination to keep letters beyond a salient few of
some personal importance. If, as Anthony Burgess suggests, artists must be
judged not merely by excellence, but by bulk and variety, then at least Id be
in the running, if ever I should want to be running. Sometimes, though, bulk
compromises quality. Perhaps that is the case here. I leave that to readers to
judge. As yet my literary landscape has not been surveyed professionally or
59

by amateurs. I certainly hope I escape the fate of Burgess, at least as it was
held in the hands of biographer Roger Lewis who wrote: From an aesthetic
viewpoint, all of Burgess relentless productivity was one vast waste of
words and paper. But one never knows for sure.
Film critic Gerald Peary notes in his essay on the biography Clint: The Life
and Legend, there are at least two Clints. I think it is fair to say there are
probably more than two Clint Eastwoods. There are certainly more than two
Ron Prices with hopefully a golden thread joining all the selves as well as
threads of many other colours. On the internet I found by the year 2007 at
least 50 Ron Prices: car salesmen, writers, poets, evangelists, Deans, Board
Members, harpists,insurance salesmen, etc. etc.
After more than fifty years of excessive contact with human beings, the
quiet, only child, the self who had learned in his early childhood(up to 1949)
how to occupy himself in a solitary way, seemed to want more of that
solitude. Price was ready by the turn of the millennium for televisions more
metonymic contact with others. He found in this medium, a medium which
had been part of his life on and off for half a century, that all of those
storytellers, priests, wisemen and elders which in many ways had become
60

lost to society in the years of its disintegration in the previous century and
especially in recent decades, the decades of his life, had become restored to
cultural visibility and to oral primacy in his nightly fare on TV and in the
daily fare of radio programs. With embellishments from the internet and
books, embellishments which were usually more satisfying to the mind, he
felt little need for any human contact at all. And society, he felt, seemed to
have little felt need, for his story, drowned as society had become in a
plethora of stories, day after day, night after night and year after year from
the tidal wave of productions of the print and electronic media
Those storytellers came along in the convincing guise of highly literate
specialists: newsreaders, commentators, scientific and artistic experts as well
as writers and producers with their endless capacity to generate stories in the
form of movies, interviews, who-dun-its, soap-operas, a cornucopia of stuff
that rested the eyes and stimulated the mind in varying degrees. It was here
in the media that the sophists of ancient Greece were reborn. The sophists
with their emphasis on the power of the intellect arose as Greek society in
the fifth century BC was becoming more complex. They were rootless
people without any commitment to community. And they are very much like
many of the worldly wise who come upon the scene and pontificate,
61

publicize and entertain millions but, unlike Socrates of old, they generally
have no commitment to community except in the most generalized sense.
Our troubled times approximate more closely the conditions of Greece and
Rome and comparisons like those I make to the sophists are useful. The
media now tend to direct not only our knowledge of the world but our
knowledge of ways of knowing it. And the new sophists play an important
role in this mix. Not to mention this important aspect of contemporary social
and intellectual life in an autobiography of this nature would be a serious
omission.
A new nonliterary culture had come to exist at about the same time that my
pioneering life began. “Its existence, not to mention significance, most
literary intellectuals are entirely unaware, wrote Susan Sontag in her
groundbreaking 1965 essay, One Culture and the New Sensibility. While
this work does not focus on this complex theme, the presence of a large
group of people in my society, a group who reads to such a limited extent, is
a simple reality of life whose implications I can not possibly dwell on.
Readers, if interested in this topic, can examine this article by Skinner and
his discussion of the new sensibility of a non-literary culture. This not
62

literary sensibility had implications for my letter writing, but I will not go
into them here.
The media had many functions. It allowed me to get back to my writing day
after day, having been gently and alternatively amused, stimulated,
entertained and informed. I could see why millions had no need to write
letters for they had had sufficient human contact on TV. Those with a higher
degree of need for a particular type of sociability could use the telephone
and/or join one of many volunteer organizations that came to be dotting the
landscape by the time I retired. As I mentioned above though, by the year
2000, I seemed to be writing more letters than ever. By nine oclock at night
my eyes and mind were so tired from reading and writing--usually at least a
six to eight hour minimum of the days time and a ten hour maximum--that I
was happy to consume televisions products. With an average of two hours of
TV consumption nightly I could finish my eight hour reading-writing day
after 11 pm and before 3 am. Millions of my words were slowly permeating
some of the literally millions of internet sites. Yes, I was writing more letters
than ever.
63

Perhaps this is why so many events in my life, events that could be stories,
did not become stories. Baháí holy days, Feasts, deepenings, secular
holidays by the bundle, a seemingly infinite number of birthdays, annual
dinners, suppers for friends, good-grief, the list of repeated activities one
engages in over lifes years could go on and on. Over fifty years at, say, fifty
events a year, makes for at least 2500 special days, special occasions. And
little of it appears here in these letters. One might ask why? Is it the
repetition, the routine, the sameness? Is it that these events are part of the
very texture of life and, like the air, are difficult to write about in a book like
this. They come to occupy two or three lines in a letter; they become the
base of an occasional poem; they fill hundreds, thousands of hours of life
with a million eventualities. At best, they provide suggestive openings for
readers of a letter, unobtrusive patterns of juxtaposition, recurrence, contrast
and familiarity out of which fresh and unpredictable understandings may
emerge.
There is something about the routines, the repetition of events in the
ordinary life of the individual and I refer to this repetition frequently in this
autobiography, that is like the experience of the criminal in prison. The crim
discovers on his release that he is not the only one to perceive the lagging of
time in terms of suspended animation. His old friends do also. They act as
64

though he has returned from a brief trip to the toilet or out of town for a few
hours, even though he may have been in the nick for a decade, greeting him
casually and then going about their business. Ones actions so frequently
point to somewhere, some time, when and where one has been before and
frequently. One often resumes a relationship as if one has only, as Withnell
puts it in that humorous turn of phrase, been to the toilet. This is part of the
backdrop that often gives one the feeling that little change has occurred in
ones being, behaving. It is this terrible sameness that takes the experience of
writing a letter completely out of the realms of meaningful activity and is,
perhaps, one of the main reasons why relatively little takes place.
My letters were, among other things, strands of experience woven into
patterns, patterns in a channel, a channel that in the early years of my
retirement became filled with electronic signals; they came to fill many arch-
lever files and binders and, after 2007, lists of items in my computer
directory. They were an expression of an art, a means of communication. By
the time Volume 4 of this collection of personal correspondence was
gathered in 1995 I had, as I have indicated, become exhausted by personal
contacts. Perhaps this was due in part to my proclivity for solitude in
contrast to a more social inclination, a more social mode of existence that
65

had been such a strong part of my life for half a century. I was more inclined
to think that this social disinclination was due to many things in a list too
long to enumerate here. This may be part of the reason for any apparent
aloofness and any insistence on solitude that is found in either my letters or
my poetry, especially after about 1995 when I was in my early fifties. In
1985 a second volume of personal correspondence was opened. Part 1 of
Volume 1(1957-1974) and Part 2(1974-1984) of Volume 1 opened the
series. The first fifty years of my letter-writing life had their home by 2007.
The several themes which analysts might want to follow through the letters
had begun to be apparent.
My autobiography arose out of the juxtaposition of several temperamental
disinclinations that rose up in my life over several decades and came to a
head in the years 1992/3 to 2002/3. Curiosity about the future and the
afterlife among other interests also played their part. Evelyn Waugh says
that it is in these temperamental disinclinations that one finds the origin of
autobiography. Perhaps, like Rilke, I had been for decades too responsive for
my own peace of mind.(1) Perhaps my letters are, like Rilkes, an indication
of a great need of imparting the life within me.(2) Perhaps they are simply a
matter of pouring experience into a mould to obtain release, to ease the
66

pressure of life. When inspiration to write poetry lagged I often turned to
correspondence. It was a handicraft, a tool among several others, that could
keep me at work in constant preparation for the creative moments.(3)
As the social dimensions of my psycho-social life were waning by the mid-
1990s and, like Rilke, I began to thirst for solitude, the wider world was
experiencing 56 wars being fought around the globe. Among other
devastating effects, these conflicts created at least 17 million refugees and
left 26 million people homeless. Another 300 million individuals suffered
because of disasters not related to war. This state of affairs, following the
end of the Cold War in 1989 and the proclamation of a new world order,
indicated serious disarray among the community of nations. And yet, each
day dedicated human beings -- among them international civil servants,
government officials, nongovernmental workers, and a broad spectrum of
volunteers -- continued to cope with complex and seemingly intractable
problems, in efforts to alleviate suffering and advance the cause of peace.
This wider drama, a drama that was always present in the background as my
own life winding its way down the road, was simply beyond one’s
imagination to understand in any detail. I got broad pictures, but the details
were usually complex, overwhelming and elusive.
67

The drama of my life became largely an inner one as the 1990s came to an
end. The external battle, its pleasures and anxieties, went on but in a much
more subdued form. Perhaps, like Thoreau, I lacked a certain breadth and
coarseness of fibre and by my fifties I came to prefer, as Thoreau had been
all his life, to be more isolated from my surroundings, more insular and
solitary. I came by my late fifties to plant myself near the sea with a granite
floor of principle beneath me, although often there were layers of
intervening clay and quicksand which, even in my solitude, seemed to entrap
me. Of course, that trap was the one I had seen all my life: the trap of self, of
ego, of natures insistent self and of lifes inevitable complexities. Was I too
quick or too slow to answer lifes call, too inclined or not inclined enough to
switch off its insistent urgings? Lacking the right words for the right time or
failing to come up with the right verbal package did I rush in where angels
feared to tread? Was this equally true in the letters I wrote? One could not
always frame the words to say-it-right in every letter and email. I hope, I
believed, I was saying it better in my poetry which Russian poet Yevgeny
Yevtushenko said is the poet’s true autobiography.
68

These letters, it seems to me, stand in sharp contrast to what Frederic
Jameson refers to as the four losses that are symptomatic of our age of
postmodernism. These losses have come to characterize our society
increasingly since the 1970s: the suspension of subjective inwardness,
referential depth, historical time and coherent human expression. These
letters in some basic ways define my identity and my communitys by telling
the story of myself, the community I have been part of and the events of the
time. There is clearly referential depth here, subjective inwardness, the story
of a search, an open-ended drama of personal narratives, a sense of the
complexity of these historical times. There is also here in these letters what
Roland Barthes calls an image of literature to be found in ordinary culture.
This image, he goes on, is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his
life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism consists for the most part in
saying that my failure is the failure of Ron Price the man. The explanation of
a work, he concludes, is always sought in the man or woman who produced
it....in the voice of a single person, the author confiding in us.
While the art and craft of letter writing have declined in this century, letter
stories have thrived. Cast as love letters and Dear John letters, as thank-you
notes and suicide notes, as memos and letters to the editor, and as exchanges
69

with the United States Post Office, examples of epistolary fiction have been
published by the hundreds, among them the work of many of our most
notable authors. Why has this form of fiction writing remained so popular?
Gail Pool, the editor of Other Peoples Mail says it has something to do with
the rhetorical question: Who is immune to the seduction of reading other
peoples mail? I like to think my letters offer a similar seduction. That is
what Id like to think. Time, of course, will tell.
Although epistolary fiction enjoyed its greatest popularity in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, a time when letters were central to daily life, this
style of writing still has a place and a popular one it would seem. Letter
stories are about communication and they are effective in framing our
modern concerns: the struggle to find meaningful stories, relationships, and
lives amid the social and moral disarray of the era and the blurred
boundaries between fact and fiction, artist and audience, private and public
domains. My own letters accomplish this similar framing exercise.
Written and received over nearly fifty years, my collection of letters
delineates the themes of our time as do the themes of the stories in Other
Peoples Mail. Offering seventeen stories written by a culturally diverse
group of authors, Other Peoples Mail represents what letter tales, at their
70

best, can do. They may be written from the Canadian wilderness, a private
school in Geneva, a concentration camp, or beyond the grave. They may be
comic or satirical, poignant or tragic, but all are united in their distinctive
format. For letters are distinctively individual. Other Peoples Mail is the first
collection of its kind. It is a unique and important anthology. Pools highly
informative introduction explores the nature of letter fiction. Literature and
writing instructors may find in this lively anthology a useful resource. My
collection offers a single perspective, a single individual, a single
background to a life, a distinctive format, at times satirical, at times
poignant, tragic, humorous and lively and, no doubt and inevitably--as
collections of letters are for most people--boring and therefore unread. In
that tidal-wave of print and visual stimulation that occupies todays world,
collections of letters, for the most part, slip into a quiet niche, unknown and
unnoticed and not missed. It often takes many years after a persons death for
the entire collection of a writers letters to be published. It took 125 years for
Gustav Flauberts letters to be fully published in five volumes. Even
assuming my letters get published and, if I was to follow in Flauberts
footsteps, readers could anticipate the publication of the full oeuvre of my
letters in, say, 2150!--or thereabouts!!
71

The tangled root and the tranquil flower is here: cool detachment,
indifference, and an anguish of spirit.4 I leave it to future readers to find
these roots and flowers, these several temperaments. I trust their search will
have its own reward. I hope, too, that this opening comment on Volume 6 of
my personal correspondence in Section VII of Pioneering Over Four Epochs
sets an initial perspective of some value. These words above written on
several occasions from 1999 to 2002 for the third and fourth editions of this
autobiography were completed after living for more than four years in
George Town Tasmania. Some writers move to enclaves where many other
writers live. Brooklyn USA is a good example. George Town, with its small
population of perhaps 6000, has hundreds of gardeners; people who fish,
water ski and go boating can be found in abundance. So can artists, cooks,
cleaners, factory workers, inter alia. But writers are a rare lot and Im happy
with it this way.
During the time the letters in this particular part of the collection were
written I began work on some thirty-two instalments on The History of the
Baháí Faith in the Northern Territory: 1947-1997; I also completed my book
The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature, organized
and refined the second edition of my website Pioneering Over Four Epochs
into fifteen hundred pages and gathered together a body of resources for
72

what became the third edition of my autobiography which I wrote later in the
twenty-first to twenty-fourth months of the Five Year Plan(2001-2006).
During this same period a feeling of approaching apocalypse was tending to
drown out humanist beliefs in history as the progressive development
towards a better world. Endtimes or apocalyptic thought and theory, of
course, is not new. Some argue that it was formulated for a popular audience
for the first time in 1970,(5) but I wont go into detail here on the evolution
of this line of thought which is really quite complex. Baháís, of course,
remained optimistic but often the battle tired the spirit and, in some cases, at
least in mine, turned that spirit to letter-writing. I would like to think that
readers will begin with an endless pile of words but end up with a world.
Perhaps it is a world which will endure, a trace from the twentieth century
and beyond into the twenty-first that will last forever.
_______________________________FOOTNOTES___________________
1 Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892-1910, trans: J. Greene and M. Norton,
WW Norton, NY, 1945, p. 12.
2 idem
3 idem
4 ibid.p.13.
73

5 John Sutherland, Apocalypse Now, Guardian Unlimited Books, June 2003
Ron Price
17 February 2003
PS. The genre that Henry Miller enjoyed writing most was the letter. Long
letters to close friends, wrote Mary Dearborn,(1) were his favourite pieces of
writing. I must add that I, too, have come to enjoy this form of writing much
more since retirement, but they are rare occurrences these long letters, if one
defines a long letter as, say, four typed pages, 2000 words, or more. The
attitude that many have in my time is: why write it if I can say it on the
telephone? Many are like famous Samuel Johnson who wrote letters with
great difficulty and reluctance. And although I take delight in conversation
over limited periods with some people, I am equally happy now to have little
to no conversation except with my wife. However fine, too, that my letters
may be, the greatest of lifes arts is the art of living.
-(1)Mary Dearborn, The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller,
Harper Collins, London, 1991, p.12.
I have read or browsed through many books of the collections of the letters
of famous and not-so-famous writers and have found them enlightening.
They have served to provide stimulating perspectives for my own work.
74

Keats, the nineteenth century poet, seems to be the most attractive of the
letter writers, at least for those like myself who write poetry. He seems
likeable, lovable, someone we would enjoy travelling with. But you would
have to get him young for he was dead at 26. Unlike Shakespeare or even
Jane Austin, who remain impersonal, elusive, inscrutable, enigmatic, we feel
we know Keats through his letters. He does not hide himself. My letters
clearly bring me closer to a Keats or an Emily Dickinson, than a
Shakespeare, although I know I shall never be in the league of any of these
great writers. Dickinson tended to blend poetry and prose in her letters and,
in the last decade this has been true increasingly of my letters. I strive to
fashion a lively interchange between poetry and prose and, as yet, I have
really only just begun this process with any effect. A cosmic and
cosmopolitan range in the written word is as evident in the literary
homebodies like Socrates, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson as in the
literary travelers like Xenophon, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.
Having been both a homebody and a traveller perhaps I might more easily
find that range.
Ceremony and necessity, vanity and routine often require something to be
written. To be able to disentangle oneself from these inevitable and several
75

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