THE LETTER
Angela Morgan Cutler
Click here for Angela's author page.
Following on from the success of her first book, Auschwitz, Angela Morgan Cutler offers us another work that defies easy definition or assignment to a fixed genre. The Letter takes the form of a reply to the anonymous author of a threat letter that was sent to the narrator’s husband, En. Instead of the natural response, to freeze or lose language in reaction to such a threat, the book releases a voice that faces the anonymous other who wrote it: a continuous, digressive reply that winds its way through daily observations, reminiscences and reflections that succeed in creating a distance from the potential violence imposed on the family. The Letter is also an affirmation of home and of the restorative power of storytelling as the book flips between the UK – in the days and weeks that follow the arrival of the letter, with all the paranoia and imaginative leaps that fear evokes – and Spain, months later, when the threat begins to subside. Interspersed throughout the text are accounts of other people’s stories – examples of written threats they too have received – and interviews with others caught up in the event: family, friends, a police officer, a postman, a counsellor; all sharing their own perspectives on the process of being threatened, bullied, or stalked. The Letter is a response that can never be sent to a written threat for which there is no return address. And yet, the narrator’s reply to the unknown author of the threat remains as a powerful trace of the experience, and a testament to so many stories left untold.
Praise for The Letter:
‘Nerve-wracking, The Letter will have you on the edge of your seat. Scary and involving, it’s a brave and unexpected book that makes you think about the nature of the imagination itself.’ Jackie Kay
'The Letter is inimitable. No one I know writes like Cutler: so uncontrived, so unself-indulgent , so observant of character, of people, of the places we find ourselves in, the things that surround us. Such a flow of words, but not just any old words. The right words. They don’t swamp the reader, we float on them. Our awareness is nourished by their unaffected honesty, their straightforwardness.' Henry Woolf
Praise for Auschwitz:
'Cutler's Auschwitz creates a category of its own ... Cutler's voice is undoubtedly a new voice of the post-Holocaust generations ... Her sophisticated and highly individual poetic style "shows the tracks of her labour" ... in an imaginative way and by doing so turns Cutler's debut into a superb novel on writing.' Scottish Review of Books
'Cutler does not preach or patronise, and her ability to deliver impressively poetic prose means that she never compromises the subject-matter. Her voice is refreshing, shocking and commanding, and represents an exciting departure for contemporary fiction.' New Welsh Review
‘Auschwitz stands like a tombstone for our civilisation. Angela Morgan Cutler has brilliantly infiltrated the borders of this landscape of desolation. Somehow she has found a voice that reflects the enormity of the horrors perpetuated there without being stifled by them. Unsentimental and richly worked … the words are more than mere messengers of thoughts and feelings – they glow with a life of their own … the whole package quite inimitable: the rarest quality in literature.’ Henry Woolf
‘Cutler writes like a British Hélène Cixous. Her invitation to visit with her the tourist attraction that modern-day Auschwitz has become is daring, shocking, profoundly moving – even, on occasion, funny. I loved its stylistic hybridity.’ Susan Sellers
‘When the story of the unspeakable has been told a thousand times, when the images of the unimaginable have been shown a thousand times, when the mind is numb - where do you go from there? You have to start anew. That is what Angela Morgan Cutler has done.’ Rex Bloomstein
About Angela Morgan Cutler
Angela Morgan Cutler lives with her two teenage sons and husband Ian. She worked for ten years as a psychiatric nurse, trained as a fine artist and went on to complete a Ph.D. in Critical & Creative Writing. She has been running creative writing groups since 2000. Auschwitz, her first book, was published by Two Ravens Press in 2008. For more about the author see www.angelamorgancutler.com
An extract from The Letter
At first it wasn’t clear that I wanted to write to you at all, having no face for you, no name, no forwarding address, little story, for what is it that happened – post-letter, just the opening up of a response, just the fear that plagues the imagination, begins a letter that may never be read by the one I call You. We of course had our suspicions of who you might be: those early weeks we talked of little else, but of course it shifts, it meanders, almost spoils what my imagination evokes. Imagination makes you mightier than the man, or men, whom we suspect sent the letter our way. I do not think of you as a woman – I will go on with that later. For now, I give you more than I could in person: in my fiction of you, you expand, rise, soar, you become something neither of us could have foreseen when we set out in each other’s direction. You and I may never recognise ourselves here. Nameless being: Mary Shelley in her outhouse playing with her monster.
In spite of this, you could say, I have always held a fascination for epistolary. I am what you might call a responder. I address, as-sign, give myself the task and duty to allot myself to you. That is of course the way letters work, a kind of excessive talking to oneself that all letters contain – the anonymous threat is maybe an exception, has to find new forms, leaps in the dark, hallucinations, paranoia, in this case is it absurd to imagine there is anybody there? Yes, on the whole we receive a letter and that old knee-jerk is to reply. We read the letter we are already composing a yes, yes, yes, as clear as Molly Bloom. This yes, over time, becoming all the words that accumulate in your direction. Home, your letter arrives and pulls open all we take for granted in the security we feel when we close the door. Home, the safety we feel in bricks and concrete, in doors and double-glazed windows closed, or come to that, cast open to the air. The privacy we imagine for ourselves, our ability to leave home each day without concern, without asking who is behind us, following, watching, waiting to jump out.
Home, come and go, pen in hand.
Home as a place of rest, waiting, writing.
Home: place of person or family – where we live together – En, the two boys and me. At home, holiday home, here or there, either place will do, a place to sleep and store and contain – sanitary enough, a place to prepare food.
Home: a place of refuge where worldly cares fade, or so it says in the big book of words …
***
I would begin this letter to you – this book to you – and give it such titles as Mountain of the Dead Woman. A mountain we travel to and from in the course of the weeks we spend in Spain. I could call this book to you The Gold Room. It could begin with the words I write from this room each morning when I wake with such happiness, such a rush of freedom, knowing we are safely tucked up and hidden away in a place you will never find us.
This is how it could begin – with the name of a small village that for weeks becomes a temporary shelter, a home of sorts, Adrada de Pirón. En, me and the three boys: Hugo, as my youngest son wants to be called here; D, remembering that when he was small we’d tag his name with Darling. How, those first days of school, he would argue without doubt that his surname was indeed Darling. When we’d insist it was now time to put aside foolish names, his hurt caused a retraction, caused us to double-barrel him, at least at home. Darling became D over the years, a trace of the original endearment.
Luke says he wants to be given – in this book at least – the name he had as a toddler, Snoopy the Bubble. I tell him it is cute but far too long. We end up with Bub for swiftness, but that doesn’t last. For ease he returns to his birth name. We laugh together and discuss names, those early mornings in Spain, Luke and me sitting together downstairs while everyone is still half-asleep. Luke finds my notebook, asks if we can write together. He tells me that he wants to use the time we have here to write some lyrics for his guitar, to write some stories that he can turn into songs, to try to write each day. He asks me to read to him, read what I wrote this morning … asks who Adrada de Pirón is, – Is it your pen name? Not realising it is the name of the village where we are staying. He puts the question to me very seriously. – I like the sound of that name, he says. Maybe that’s what you should remain in this story: Adrada de Pirón.
I tell him that by coincidence this morning I ended what I had written with a piece about names, wondering how to address the anonymous other of the letter, Dear Mr … A letter of sorts to the person who wrote the threat … to your father, I tell him. I explain that I do not want it to be an angry letter, maybe instead a love letter of sorts. – Is this possible, he asks. Could there be a right way to address you? To not sound off-key, ill-humoured, provoked … We make tea, Luke and me, we sit on the oversized sofas – one each – and I read the letter I have begun to you; small stories, meanderings, digressions abound while the other boys overhead are still asleep, while En joins us, potters in the small kitchen.
We are grateful to the Scottish Arts Council for a grant towards the publication of The Letter.
