It’s a curious thing that in academic research so much store is placed on letters. For studying the departed, they are seen as prime primary source material.
In a review of the recently-published letters of Kurt
Vonnegut, Keith Miller puts his finger on one of the main problems with this
approach. “We don’t write to those we see every day,” writes Miller.
“Anthologies such as these are documents of absence, plaster casts of empty
rooms – involuted autobiographies.” Mere palimpsests of lives.
That’s why the letters of Robert Louis Stevenson written in
Samoa in the last years of his life are so important. They are at the very
heart of his relationships with friends old and new.
But, for most, better material surely comes from interviews and
personal acquaintance with surviving friends and relatives. The problem is that
these were often woven into biographic writing in an era when footnotes naming
dates, places etc were rare.
So, for example, as a consequence, in her biography of the
British-Australian artist, Charles Conder, Professor Ann Galbally virtually
ignores the revelations contained in earlier work by John Rothenstein, whose
father was one of Conder’s closest friends.
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