George Craig: LETTERS ARE BETTER

Rereading George's letters from the start is an old habit. His early letters in 1967/68 when I was in Paris and he was the serene advisor back in Sussex, were eight sides of tight black biro. We may not be the same person but we meet on the page and then we are. 'Is that a novel?' asked the maid as I sat in the kitchen turning pages, rapt, au pair no longer. This was a piece of life in the wrong order. I could scarcely remember what George Craig looked like. Wasn't this what I'd always missed, innerness with another person, recognition, with all the detail of a book, to release the unknown into its own land. Then I was une pomme verte in a flat with the German journalists, the cuban flag flying from the balcony: le ciel m'appelle, le ciel. The journalists trashed my self-absorption, stripped me down like an onion or an artichoke. I gave nothing, they said, but they liked my red dress hanging on the wall. Meanwhile, in another part of the universal university, economists were working so I could live this way. I was teaching, so-called, I was reading, learning, in french, what I was unable to say in any language, separating fantasy from dream and then letting them coalesce again. Our letters revolved around a central honesty — his words. Jane Fonda said she liked to be close to the bone. Our letters were close to the bone. George became, in our letters between Paris and Sussex, the mean, the level that guaranteed the rest of life. I dreamt of looking over George's shoulder at a letter he'd written which I couldn't quite read. 

On the face of it, George was my serene advisor back in England — he wrote me a two-line playlet about Jupiter & the Girl. We may not be the same person but we meet on the page and then we are the same person, in the writing and the reading. He explained, in great rushed arcs of language, apologised for explaining, he only knew what he thought when he'd written it, he was at pains to situate us, his life, my life, our life. I was lyrical, he was analytical, he said, I was a writer, he said. Do people know what they say as they say it? Is all the above a subset of beauty, lust and endless receptivity? 

The last time I saw George was in Brighton Station in the early 80s, under a banner that read LETTERS ARE BETTER.