The My Dear Bessie Letters
This past week in class, we studied love letters written during World War II. I was personally not very excited about this topic of letter writing but after listening to a selection of the My Dear Bessie Letter’s, a collection of 500 letters written between Chris Barker and Bessie Moore, I came to appreciate the artistry. My preconceived notions before this assignment framed this style of writing as “gushy” and “on the surface” whereas now I see love letters as narrative and poetic.
Chris Barker and Bessie Moore first met each other while attending a training course for the Postal Office at Abbey Wood in southeast London and developed a platonic relationship. Upon completion from the course, they drafted letters to one another discussing politics and their hopes and dreams for the future. Now stationed in Libya and serving in the Royal Corps of Signals, Chris decided to mail a letter in which he addressed his love and feelings for Bessie, who at the time was seeing another man. The letter was received enthusiastically by her and she spent many weeks writing a response that would change the trajectory of their lives forever.
Baby, Just Say, “Yes”
While listening to the letters, I was struck by the parallels they had to the ideas of English Romanticism which William Wordsworth conveyed in his poems in the 18th and 19th centuries. Wordsworth is most well known for writing Lyrical Ballads, describing poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, equating these feelings to nature. He believes that we are one with nature; we are intertwined with it. I believe that Chris sees Bessie as nature. Throughout his exchange with Bessie, he writes that he wants to touch her, feel her, see her, and hear her. He wants to be enveloped by her and have this special type of relationship. Whenever he thinks of her, Chris is overcome by an irrational, nonsensical love fever where he puts Bessie on a pedestal just as Wordsworth elevates nature. These descriptions of love between Chris Bessie may sound like a work of fiction but it was a product of a 58 year wedding knot between the two.
