When Edwin Morgan was called up to do military service in 1940 he destroyed most of his correspondence, including all but one letter from W.S. Graham. The sole survivor was a crumpled page that Morgan salvaged for his essay ‘A Poet's Letters’. Edwin Morgan chose to begin the tribute to his friend with this early letter because ‘it show[ed] two things which were always important to Graham: the reading aloud of poetry and the influence of music.’ That small remnant of correspondence is a fitting point of entry for my essay too because of the differing notes on which it begins and ends. Graham starts his letter in robust voice: ‘Dear Morgan, It is indeed myself, Graham’. There is a hint of urgency to this signing on, as though Graham worried that he might not get to the end of his letter, the conventional place for signing off; and as it happened, he didn't, or didn't quite. The remains of that same message greet the reader who embarks on the nightfisherman's Selected Letters, and in that embodiment the note to Morgan ends like this: ‘… I feel I am disintegra … [fragment of a torn page dated by E.M.]’. With ‘disintegra …’ Graham very nearly finishes himself off. His untimely end, and the coincidence between his own ellipsis and the editorial bracket that follows it, may have been accidental, but it would be nice to imagine that the letter had anticipated and resigned itself to the fragmentary end it was to meet in the hands of its recipient. In this epistolary version of himself gra(ham) really did disintegrate.

W.S. Graham knew the risk he took every time he committed himself to paper. The conscript sent out to cross the ‘abstract scene / stretching between’ poet and reader or letter writer and recipient is dispatched on a perilous mission and lives a precarious existence. Knowing that he survives only at the whim of the medium that carries him, Graham resists his dissolution as often as he submits to it. His poem ‘No, Listen, for This I Tell’ begins with a plea for unmediated contact, but, as though slipping between the faultlines of its own script, that same poem ends in the giddy liberation of failure: ‘We fall down darkness in a line of words’ (CP, pp. 23–24).