Eric Mottram admits to being only "an assistant to the professor" at the University of Gröningen, and --despite our differences in age, education, status and experience -- proffers a hand to uplift a dusky-skinned Asian in a way few can...a story of intense literary friendship based on mutual respect and assistance.

A-weg 39,
Gröningen
June 29, 1958

Dear Wignesan,

I didn't imagine I was about to draw the heavens down on my head as a consequence of my remarks in my last letter. As it is, besides being overwhelmed, I do feel honoured and remorseful, reading your pages. Without actually having the details and without constructing much in mind, I believe I intuited most of what you say: it's not difficult to make two and two equal six when you are interested in a man and know something of his possible background and worries. It is your honesty that I was not prepared for: I don't mean I did not think you were honest, but that I did not expect so much frankness all at once. I am myself incapable of it, and although I bitterly expect it from my friends, I have no right to what I can't do myself. My only justification is this: no one has ever expected me to explain myself. It sometimes seems to me that I have been doing little else these last fifteen years but listen and then speak out as decently as I could or wanted. I want to know and feel people , but have found little such curiosity, at least to such an intensity, in others; so you can see how you came to be the victim of my -- I now see -- rather abrupt interrogations, and I feel absolutely that I don't want to know more until I have digested and contemplated all over this much. [As I'm using photocopies of the correspondence, I'm not certain of the last few words. Sorry.]

Let me say, too, that I was a bit shocked to find that you think of me as "a professor, a man much above my bracket" etc. [Indecipherable word] in that way, and I don't think I showed any such beastly superiority. Anyway, I'm only a professor's assistant, and your "bracket" seems to be so different to mine -- I mean your kind of life startles me -- excites me a bit -- in its total difference/ attractive in a way. Do you mean to tell me I behaved professorially all the time? I can't quite believe that.

But judging [?] from your letter, I can see somewhere where we overlap, as it were , I understand completely, your trying to slip away out of too tying attachments to people, and your betrayed feelings when your neat plans for keeping apart simply melt, and the guilt that follows. This is my experience too.

As for you trying to anger me, which you admit: I noticed this, of course, and only swallowed the hook when I was too tired to keep on playing that kind of game. After all, I didn't have to know you, if you see what I mean !

Why you "really do not trust anyone" I cannot imagine: you obviously trust them more than you think, otherwise you would not have married [here EM is wrong: I was inveigled into marrying a younger - by three years - student who was left pregnant by an American veteran who wasn't particularly interested in her and the latter insisted I was the prospective father even without my having inseminated her. That's the kind of DOPE I was and still am !] and you would not have written to me so openly. You give as the the "empirical cause" an acoount of your Malayan background which is partly what I intuited -- it wasn't difficult. I feel tremendously sympathetic: I even wish I had known you in Singapore -- I often went up into the Federation with my Malayan friends and several times by air to K.L. [Kuala Lumpur] -- and once right into the middle of Pahang by dug-out boat to an aboriginal settlement ! But you obviously weren't old enough, I suppose, to know the students at the University. A pity. I still think, by the way, that it would have been so much better for you had you been at the University there, despite its faults -- especially as the philosophy instruction is good. I shared a flat with the lecturer, a great friend of mine whom I want you to meet if you ever go back (he's in K.L. now).

The Ampang Street - where ? - past and -present is indeed a problem: it will just have to wait. I can't see any solution and you seem to me right to just accept it for the time being. After all, they do have the gossip about you to embroider and live on, and it's not as though you had done positive wrong !
As for your importuning me or any other friend by letting us have your experience -- can't you see that this is not the case ? It's difficult to sympathise and be understanding with a cypher [?] ! Main source of irritations, too, probably.

Your wife and you stands on my bookcase for the Dutch world to see -- no one else will , or hear of your marriage, since you ask me to be discreet. I can only wish you both the greatest, longest happiness together; and hope that one day we can all sit somewhere and talk together -- that's my personal wish, at least. Your account of your feelings for her is what made me feel honoured by your letter: it seems to me that your frankness with yourself here is the best possible foundation for your marriage. Now to make a great positive out of it all.

I'm saddened about your wife's singing: perhaps she will feel settled enough with you to begin again. My psycho-analysing mind had been brooding over her 'case' and that's what I think. And it's a sad problem all the same: you seem to be the only one [who?] could save it.

You don't "owe" me -- your word -- anything: I accept your letter with the openness with which you sent it, with the gratitude one feels when another human being offers to confront one with himself.

You don't actually tell me that you personally approved that introduction to your poems: and this [is] important. I explicitly told Mr. Fogg [the lecturer in English at Heidelberg University who wrote to EM for an introduction to my poems as a connoiseur of my work] he was not to print it without your definite yes. The thing was only thrown off hurriedly in response to his urgent request and very short time limit, so I would quite understand your loathing it. About the Cambridge publication of your poems: isn't the magazine called "Granta", not "A-grante" as you say it is? My essay can go with your poems provided you want it to: otherwise not. Incidentally I have no copy of it, so please may I have (a) a copy of your poems as they are printed in Heidelberg with my introduction, and (b) a copy of the whole thing in "Granta" ?

I still don't like the idea of your giving up your philosophy studies, although I completely respect your experiences in Berlin with Eva CASSIRER:
[Professor WEISCHEDEL, the department head, asked her to take charge of my thesis as my German was yet not good enough. Her appointment was to begin only at the following semester. She wanted me to produce a chapter a week, and after three essential chapters, decided to get rid of me. Her father was the philosopher Ernst CASSIRER's brother, and her mother's family were Germans and bank-owners, and as such she spent the War years in the USA and England. One has to consult my novel: "Ice in My Eyes, Smoke in Yours" to know the details of what took place. The persecution at the hands of JEWS - for me - began then and there and has never stopped.] -- philosophers as a breed are notorious falsifiers and hypocrites: I speak from experience, too.

As for regulations in universities, it's the same everywhere: the medieval days of students merely arriving at a university to study have long been finished. Quite frankly, I had wondered how you were managing to get round the authorities, [I had at 21 already obtained 2 school-leaving certificates from Cambridge University and another 2 from London University which would entitle me entry into any university, but I do admit I didn't have either Latin or Greek under my belt.] but I supposed the German rules were less rigid than elsewhere. May I add that the University of Malaya is easy to get into, once you pass the entrance exam ! I'd like to teach you, but not philosophy, which is beyond me -- only literature. But that's very impracticable.

The new title of your poems is ridiculous: infinitely corny, and too long. No publisher in England would accept it and would probably be positively put off by it: cheap cynicism. Take a hint from the title of the book which won the Hawthornden prize -- see enclosed cutting.

As for my poems, there's a very slender chance a few will come out in Chicago of all places ! But I'm past caring at this moment. I've been very busy here with exams and finishing off my own work. I am trying to publish a book on Hemingway I have written. I'm going to England for the summer next week -- until September.
In the end, I can only hope for the best for you at what seems to be a turning point for you -- a wife, poems published, and leaving university studies behind.

Yours sincerely,
Eric

(c) T. Wignesan - Paris, 1958-2023