‘She’s got this from a whole international literature of New Age writing, much of it in French, much translated from Anglo-American into French. What causes me to hesitate somewhat about that as a major element in explaining this text is that New Ageism as I understand it tends to indulge in fantasy solutions of one kind or another; it tends to envelop things in spiritual happy-talk. But what this writer is doing instead is reintroducing the heavy tread of mortality into the sentences: “I had you, you were mine, you were close to me and you’ve gone, and there’s nothing I can do about it. And my writing in one sense can just keep on retelling the story of your loss, of your being lost.” So there’s something down-to-earth and dour and minimalist about the writing as well. This is what it feels like to be a bereaved mother, this is the inescapable absence that my life is permeated by. And that runs counter to the New Age optimism and rosy-huedness in very interesting ways.’

The Professor had put his finger on the essential bleakness of the letter, the inexorable fact of Maurice’s death.

Did he think she was a professional writer? ‘I would say not. She is somebody who has written before, and read a lot. Possibly she’s a teacher, used to helping others with their writing, used to writing personal letters to friends and family. She prides herself on her literary craft. But she is not somebody who works at this for a career. There are no real indications of professionalism; the handwriting, the punctuation, occasionally the spelling suggests a sort of spontaneous overflow of literary language directed towards the expression of personal feelings.’

I then told the Professor about the film from which the writer had drawn some paragraphs. I had first let him dig a hole for himself with his literary analysis, but he had avoided the trap. He expressed his relief at not having made any erroneous deductions about the literary sources of those particular lines from Message in a Bottle, and without missing a beat he absorbed the information into his analysis. ‘Of course knowing that there’s a Hollywood movie in the background causes one to ask all sorts of further questions about authenticity or otherwise. Now, it could be that the film produced a sudden sense of empowerment, suggested an available format for saying something that was highly personal. So it could give one the licence to make statements that otherwise would be impossible. Or could it be that the message-in-a-bottle formula, being a cliché, is just a part of the general ebb and flow of human communication that doesn’t mean anything in particular? It’s the clichédness of the message-in-a-bottle formula that I would question. These are forms that have the power to imprint themselves on our imagination.’