Editor’s note He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth—such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club, his ‘lower race,’ his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities—all that was open. —Anton Chekhov
I remember reading this Chekhov passage—from “The Lady with the Dog”—as a teenager, and underlining it, realizing it meant something, though not, at the age of seventeen, prepared to fully understand what that meaning might be. I had a sense by then that not everything was quite what it seemed, that the adults around me were concealing more complicated inner lives than they were willing to let on. But I didn’t yet know what strange combinations of public and private life could occupy a person. In the case of this character, Gurov, a married man who has become entangled with a mistress, the real scandal isn’t that his eye has turned toward another—this would be much too simple an emotion for Chekhov to explore—but that he has at last found himself capable of real love. It is a perfect bind: at the very moment Gurov is first consumed with true inner feeling, he is unable to speak of it, as the trappings of his public life prevent him. Reading these lines now, what strikes me is how layered the work being done here by Chekhov is—in this passage, he is not only describing what is going on in the mind of Gurov, but also curing the problem he speaks of in the very writing. These few sentences
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demonstrate what writing and reading allow us to do. As writers, we are able to put words to what is hidden; as readers, we experience the often humbling privilege of gaining access to others’ hidden lives—a privilege we almost never experience in the real world. So many of the stories, poems, and essays collected in this issue of New Letters are exploring the tension between the public and private self, between what can and cannot be seen from the outside. Kate Gaskin and Chelsea DesAutels testify to some of the ways in which motherhood differs from its public image, speaking not only to its joys, but its complications and dangers as well. In Nicole Hazan’s “Shelter,” a character thinks she is falling in love with a man she encounters almost nightly in the dark confines of a bomb shelter, and yet, in the light of day, things look different. In “A Dublin Fairytale,” Andrew Peters gives us a character so private, so isolated, we can’t be sure if the young stranger he takes in is a real person, or a figment of his imagination. P.L. Watts’s essay “Negative Space” displays the self as an exhibition of portraits, exposing how the innermost self, as a survival mechanism, can conceal its own history. For Christopher Howell, in the poem that opens this issue, the inner self is a mystery, but perhaps, he suspects, a benevolent one. At the center of the issue, we’re featuring the brilliant paintings of artist Harold Smith, who describes his work as addressing “issues of the complexity of the black male experience in the Western world through exploring the tension between Westernized societal perceptions of and attitudes toward black masculinity and how these perceptions and attitudes impact it.” The images here are often private—solitary figures in moments of contemplation—and yet we register the presence of public perception even in these solitary moments; we feel the weight of the public self in conflict with the true self. All the work in this issue seems to us to be coming from a place, to paraphrase Chekhov, that is essential, that is sincere, that does not deceive itself. We hope you enjoy spending time with these works, inside the privacy of the minds that created them, as much as we have. Until next time, we wish you the very best. —C. Hodgen