New West Book Review

Letters to a Young Poet: “The Delicacy and Strength of Lace”

By Jenny Shank, 12-14-09

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters
by Leslie Marmon Silko & James Wright, edited by Anne Wright
Graywolf Press, 112 pages, $14

In 1978 the poet James Wright wrote a fan letter to the young New Mexico novelist Leslie Marmon Silko. Wright and Silko had met briefly at a poetry conference in Michigan in 1975.  Silko published her first novel, Ceremony, in 1977 when she was 29 years old, to universal critical acclaim.  That book, the story of a Native American man’s struggle to return to his old life after serving in Vietnam, has gone on to become a contemporary classic and a staple of high school and college reading lists.  Wright admired the novel too, writing, “I could call Ceremony one of the four or five best books I have ever read about America and I would be speaking the truth.  But even this doesn’t say just what I mean.  I think I am trying to say that my very life means more to me than it would have meant if you hadn’t written Ceremony.”

Wright’s enthusiasm for Silko’s book sparked a literary correspondence between the two writers.  At the time, Wright was one of the nation’s most celebrated poets, having won the Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems in 1972.  Wright’s letter found Silko in a state of personal distress.  She wrote him back, “Your letter came at a time when I needed it most.  So many sad things have happened with my marriage and my children—it is good to know that my work means something.” They began exchanging letters, sharing poems and stories and reflections on their lives, quickly becoming close, evolving from closing the letters with “Sincerely” to “In Friendship” to “Love.”

Graywolf Press recently published a paperback reissue of the correspondence between Silko and Wright, The Delicacy and Strength of Lace, edited by Wright’s widow Anne.  In an age in which shorter, less considered communications through email and text messages are customary, is refreshing to read these carefully written letters, and to see the profound friendship blossom between the two writers through the mail.

Wright and Silko share tales and observations with each other that they later work into their poems and stories.  They test out ideas, too, such as when Silko, who at the time was working on screenplays for films of Laguna folktales, writes to Wright, “I need to wean myself from involved descriptions of the land,” and Wright wisely counsels her that the descriptions of the landscape are essential to her fiction:

“For it is just those descriptions that, in the novel, and the stories, do so much to create the stories that you are telling there.  I did not feel that your descriptions of landscape were merely ornamental or in any way superfluous.  On the contrary, one of the many great strengths to be felt in Ceremony, for example, is your ability to describe beyond description, so to speak—your way of dealing with landscape there is not just a point up of details, but the evocation (I can’t think of a better word) of something—a spirit perhaps?  Anyway, the effect is, for me, that of almost hearing the landscape itself tell the story.”

Exchanges like this suggest that while writing is typically a solitary pursuit, it can be helpful for a writer to escape the echo chamber of his or her head once in a while by discussing ideas with a sympathetic listener.  The exchange of ideas became so valuable to Wright and Silko that they kept up their correspondence even while Wright traveled with his wife for months in Europe, directing Silko to send letters to different countries every few weeks, and Silko darted across the United States on various speaking engagements and visiting writer positions.  They commiserate over the stresses of making a living in academia while trying to write, and confess to each other personal heartbreaks: one of Wright’s sons from a previous marriage rejected him, and Silko’s ex-husbands gain custody of their sons. 

When Silko declares that she is quitting her job as a professor at the University of New Mexico because it leaves her with little time to write, Wright replies, “I confess that I’ve been wondering about your present condition, the circumstances under which you are living and working, and your plans for the next year or few years.” She writes back about how she is making do on very little money, and Wright encourages her to apply for the Guggenheim fellowship, which she feels too intimidated to do.  It’s interesting to read about Silko’s financial difficulties, because she didn’t know that a windfall was just around the corner: in 1981 she would be awarded a MacArthur grant.

But the grant award would follow a great loss: on December 18, 1979, Wright wrote, “I have some bad news about myself which I nevertheless want to tell you.  I have learned that I have cancer.  It is very serious, but it is not hopeless.” Silko traveled to meet Wright for the second time in February 1980 at his room at Mount Sinai Hospital.  Because of his cancer, he could not speak, but he communicated with her by writing on a legal pad.  Wright died the next month, a sad end to a beautiful correspondence between a writer of one generation and one of the next.  Three decades later, the preferred methods of communication have changed, but hopefully there will be future volumes of established writers’ letters to young poets that are as inspiring as The Delicacy and Strength of Lace.

Leslie Marmon Silko will appear at the 2010 Associated Writing Programs conference at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, April 7-10.

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