We have entered an era when biographers and literary scholars bemoan the fact that most of us have stopped writing letters, the ones composed with a pen on paper, folded into an envelope and posted to be received and perhaps kept under a pillow or in a jacket’s pocket because of the precious content they contain. For centuries, such letters were frequently lifelines to others and bore testimonies to our lives in ways that our modern world, despite all our inventions and our seeming connectedness, is no longer capable of reproducing.

Jolyon Nuttall was a journalist and media manager before retiring and returning to his love of writing. He published Vintage Love, a book of essays about his personal and professional life, in 2018. Last year, before his death of cancer, he compiled Letters Home, a collection of letters he wrote to his family in the early 1960s while he was assigned by a South African newspaper to the foreign correspondent desk in New York. The book also contains essays which contextualise the letters and record the time’s influence on Nuttall’s subsequent life.

Letters Home is dedicated to Misa Ban, a Japanese actress Nuttall met and fell in love with during his stay in New York. The letters tell the story of a young man trying to find his way in the turbulent world of the 1960s, in South Africa and abroad, and experiencing an impossible love, forbidden by the apartheid laws of his home country. The personal essays which follow describe the consequences of the choices Nuttall felt compelled to make as a result of these socio-historical tensions.

Published posthumously, Letters Home is a beautiful homage to the letter as an art form and to the rich life of a man who did not shy away from difficult questions.

Letters Home

Jolyon Nuttall

Staging Post, 2019

Review first published in the Cape Times on 6 March 2020.