Excerpt from a 1981 letter from Harry Fainlight to Ruth Fainlight

This short feature in issue 17 of The Wolf prints an extract from a letter written by the poet Harry Fainlight to Ruth Fainlight on 6 September 1981, sent from a village in Powys, Wales. The page states that the letter reached the magazine after Niall McDevitt reviewed Harry Fainlight's From the Notebooks in issue 15. The extract is a single passage, and this note summarises it rather than printing it.

In the letter Fainlight urges its recipient to take on a particular duty: to help keep his poems, both those written before his time in America and those written since, within the literary world to which they belong. He argues that a cut-off three-year stretch has been seized by those who wish to exploit it, because its associations are profitable and can be repeated at will, even though the rest of his output has moved far beyond it.

He describes those American years as a body of water, a lake set within a much larger stretch of land, and says it is not where he lives as a writer. What worries him is the lack of anyone who cares enough to take responsibility for the whole body of work and protect it from philistine treatment. He warns that if no one does, the philistine drift will continue, to nobody's benefit. The only people to gain, he says, are the many who share in the cultural spoils handed out by the mass media.

The letter ends on a bleak assessment of poetry's place in that culture: turned into a do-it-yourself hobby trade, a depth to which he fears many periodicals and societies are sliding. For readers of Fainlight's poetry or of the debate about his reputation, it gives his own view of how his work should be read.

those years exist in it only as a body of water, a lake in a far greater surrounding land mass.

Harry Fainlight, The Wolf, issue 17