In the first three pages of The Correspondence, a tightly written, often brilliant, occasionally exasperating collection of essays by the American writer JD Daniels, we are treated to a jockstrap, some football players, a gymnasium, pool playing, a toilet, a street fight, and the phrase “Big Tony knocked me down and sat on my neck.” Cigars, booze and drugs are soon to follow, along with a page-long list of books the author has read, a dig at “professional writers” and their penchant for pontificating, and a lament at having a piece spiked at the London Review of Books.
These details come from “Letter from Cambridge”, an essay ostensibly about the author’s experiences training for, and competing in, Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It seems to satisfy the promise of the book’s PR and blurbs, which would have it reinventing masculinity or some such nonsense; and it doesn’t bode well for the rest, which I fully expected to hate.
But The Correspondence defied my expectations. I should probably have known; even these opening pages, misguided or not, are alive with deft asides and daring intuitive leaps. Daniels is a very good writer, and once it’s through with its twitchy throat-clearing, The Correspondence reveals itself to be a very good book.
The collection’s title refers to its organising principle, the familiar notion of essays as dispatches from somewhere; a couple of these pieces really do function as travelogues, but the book also embraces, fairly successfully, the idea of the past as a destination, and the self as correspondent. Raised by a drunk, tortured by mental and physical ailments and haunted by career and relationship disasters, Daniels dramatises his suffering and failure with blackly comic verve. “Letter from Majorca” gives us a sea voyage repurposed as a cleansing of body and soul, and populated by damaged loners whose misery shines light on the author’s. (One sailor, asked for an example of the memory loss he complains of, says that “in the army he had once carried a dead man on his back for two days and now he couldn’t remember the man’s name”.)
In “Letter from Kentucky”, the first really fine essay, Daniels transforms a doomed magazine assignment about his own home state into an unexpected – even to him – profile of his father, which then itself defies expectations. “Where has this nice old man,” he writes, bewildered, “hidden the menacing ogre of my childhood?”
“Letter from Level Four” begins as a deadpan profile of a crazy acquaintance, but soon pivots to the author’s own precarious hold on sanity: “Edgar, in the dairy aisle, saw me seeing him and he winced, he froze, he was afraid even to wave – or was it my own fear it seemed I saw myself seeing in him?”
“Letter from Devils Tower” is a formally inventive third-person account of intertwined romantic fiascos: “All of it had begun years ago as a kind of performance art. Who was he fooling? Not even himself.” And “Letter from the Primal Horde”, initially presented as a neo-gonzo immersion in a geographically isolated psychotherapy quasi-cult, ultimately serves as a meditation on the dynamics of group psychology, and the relationship between writing and writer, wherein Daniels contemplates “how and why I have chosen my line of work (we might call it the emotion-recollected-in-tranquility racket), in which I spend one-third of my time having experiences in groups and the other two-thirds sitting alone in a room, thinking about what went wrong”.
Ultimately, the self is the well from which all these essays are drawn; or perhaps it’s the sewer into which all these essays drain. We’re never allowed to forget that Daniels is flawed, that he’s a writer, that he’s a flawed writer and he’s writing the essay we’re reading, right now. I can understand why this might represent a legitimate and informative framing for a first essay collection, but I do think it undersells Daniels’s talents, which are at their most prodigious when focused outward, and brought to bear on other people and the strange social and mental worlds they inhabit. He transcribes dialogue with a documentarian’s ear, catching, in just a handful of lines, the strange syntax and diction of the characters he encounters, like the seafarer who complains that “My brain is fucking,” or the internet-avoidant paranoid who tells him: “You have no idea what their technology can do. They tore me down and showed me to myself.” His evocations of place are vivid and economical, giving us just enough failed US commerce, Christian talk radio, bland bucolic conference campus. He dispenses with an entire ocean in a few adroit strokes: “black sea, night sky, burning moon, a foretaste of death”.
Daniels’s prose is restrained, but leaves room for unexpected metaphors and bouts of unabashed sentiment; a page about his father’s family ends with these surprising lines: “But twenty years later my father’s foster mother is dead, as anyone but me might have foreseen, because she was a person and not a tree, and I would eat a photocopier in exchange for two more bowls of her soup beans and cornbread – one for me, and one for my father, to whom it would mean the world made young again.”
It’s a shame that the book leads with “Letter from Cambridge”; it’s far and away the worst piece of writing here, and undersells many of the delights to come. Indeed, each essay is better than the one before it; the second half of the book dispenses entirely with the cycle of boasting and self-negation that mars the first, and the final piece, “Letter from the Primal Horde”, is one of the funnier and more disturbing pieces of reportage I’ve ever read.
At one point, Daniels writes about the frustration of seeing someone else labour under the weight of personal problems that he, the author, has already solved for himself. “But the world is not my private fiefdom,” he goes on, checking himself; “it is our common property.” The best parts of the book never forget this wisdom. The Correspondence is a complete work about a work-in-progress, the self-portrait of a writer slowly coming into his own.
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