Mourning the Letters That Will No Longer Be Written, and Remembering the Great Ones That Were
By Dwight Garner
Before the telephone wounded them and email administered the death blow, handwritten letters were useful: They let you know who the crazies were. A lunatic’s barbed wire script would lurch in circles across the page, like a fly with a missing wing. No longer. On Twitter and Gmail and Facebook and elsewhere, the justified left- and right-hand margins can temper a lot of brewing delirium.
That’s one reason I miss correspondence. A more essential reason is that, perhaps like you during these months under quarantine, I’ve rarely felt so isolated. I speak with my family and friends on the phone, but my heart is only two-thirds in it; I’m not a telephone person. I dislike Zoom even more. Is that really my walleyed gaze in the “Hollywood Squares” box on my laptop?
Last fall I moved out of New York City, for a year, to work on a book. The person I now see most often, besides my wife, is our cheerful and fiercely sun-tanned postal carrier, out on her rounds. I find her appearances on our side porch oddly moving. They’re a sign of normality, proof that government is still clicking on some of its old tracks. The Postal Service has come to mean more to many people during lockdown, and it’s incredible that the president wants to smash it.
Each day when the mail carrier arrives, I find myself longing for a surprise letter — a big, juicy one, in the way that, in the wonderful comedy “Bowfinger,” Steve Martin’s character longs for the delivery of a FedEx package (any FedEx package) to prove he is somebody. I do trade big, juicy emails with some people in my life, but receiving them isn’t quite the same as slitting open a letter, taking it to a big chair and settling in for the 20 minutes it takes to devour it.
If it’s been a long time since I’ve received a proper letter, I do visit them in captivity. Books of letters are among my favorite sorts of books, and during quarantine I’ve consumed my share. The best recent one is, without doubt, Ralph Ellison’s. His letters mix literary and social concerns with a real sense of a lived life — of food and sex and airplanes and dogs and missed trains. He really fills up his rucksack.
It’s hard to read letters as good as Ellison’s without considering how unlikely it is that we’ll ever get a similar book from Colson Whitehead or Hilary Mantel or Jesmyn Ward or Martin Baron or Samantha Power or Chris Ware or Dave Chappelle or Gabrielle Hamilton. There will be no (or vanishingly few) books of collected emails, and who would want them? The age of proper correspondence has ended, and there’s been no pan-ecumenical service to mourn its passing.
“My letters are my society,” the poet Donald Hall said in a Paris Review interview. “Letters are my cafe, my club, my city.” In his memoir “A Question of Freedom,” the poet Reginald Dwayne Betts wrote that, in prison, letters were called “kites” because they flew up and out.
What made a letter good? “Letters should aspire to the condition of talk,” Iris Murdoch wrote in one of her own. “Say first thing that comes into head.” This is harder to do in emails, which are less private. On cream-laid paper there is no “forward” button.
Jack Kerouac said he got the idea for the spontaneous style of “On the Road” from reading his friend Neal Cassady’s buzzing letters. In “The Vanity Fair Diaries,” Tina Brown wrote that, as an editor, she often advised novice writers to simply write a letter to her, to pour the story out.
Letters were so often sexy. “A correspondence is a kind of love affair,” Janet Malcolm wrote in “The Journalist and the Murderer.” When Lionel and Diana Trilling were courting in 1928, he wrote to her: “Often I want to make a big literary gesture to you, a superb piling up of the best and truest words I know.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne is said to have washed his hands before reading his wife’s letters, lest he sully them in the slightest way. Georgia O’Keeffe’s and Alfred Stieglitz’s letters are so steamy they will still burn your fingers. Her: “the kisses — the hotness — the wetness.” Him: “the hands — the mouth — & eyes.” Someone get these two a room, and some commas.
In her sex and food novel “Blue Skies, No Candy,” Gael Greene wrote: “I don’t remember Emma Bovary ever getting caught up in the seamy mechanics of cheating phone calls. Adultery must have been much more elegant before the telephone. A man had to dispatch an epistle. By messenger. On horseback.”
In the recently published correspondence between Albert Camus and one of his lovers, the actress Maria Casarès, we learn that on the day before his death in a car accident, Camus posted letters to three separate women arranging rendezvous.
Many letters, like many emails, began with an apology for a belated reply. There was an art to these regrets. One of the best came from S. J. Perelman, who wrote to a friend on March 16, 1945, “Your letter of December 22 has been hanging in the rafters like a haggis and is now of a ripeness to be answered.”
I like this almost as much as Lionel Trilling’s late response to a 1951 letter from Norman Podhoretz. Trilling explained that “nothing less than the totality of The Modern Situation, the whole of Democratic Culture, has kept me from writing to you.” Reader, if I owe you an email, ditto.
I miss Manhattan and, during quarantine, think of the ringing empty buildings. James Agee was a young staffer at Fortune magazine and working in the Chrysler Building in the summer of 1932 when he wrote to Father Flye, his mentor, about how good his phonograph sounded late at night.
“An empty skyscraper is just about an ideal place for it — with the volume it has,” Agee wrote. “Something attracts me very much about playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony there — with all New York about 600 feet below you, and with that swell ode, taking in the whole earth, and with everyone on earth supposedly singing it; all that estranged them and all except joy and the whole common world-love and brotherhood idea forgotten.”
Good letters were often composed when an author was tiddly on gin or bourbon. “This has been written with the aid of whiskey as you doubtless guess,” Jean Rhys noted in one of her excellent and often testy letters. Samuel Beckett, an indefatigable letter writer, wrote in one that losing his dentures made eating difficult but, happily, didn’t impede his consumption of alcohol.
Sometimes these observations were darker. John Cheever wrote in his journals: “I can write myself a letter. Dear Myself, I am having a terrible time with the booze.”
I have written letters I have never sent. Philip Roth, in “Reading Myself and Others,” called the unsent letter “a flourishing subliterary genre with a long and moving history.”
Unwritten letters are yet another subgenre. A famous one is referred to in “Titanic,” the James Cameron movie. At the end, when Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are in the freezing water, barely clinging to life, he rallies, teeth chattering, for a heroic final joke.
“I don’t know about you,” he says, “but I intend to write a strongly-worded letter to the White Star Line about all this.”
