On Letter Writing

If we stop writing letters, who will keep our history or dare venture upon a biography?
Roger Angell

Before me sits a three page, typed letter plus an essay the writer included in her mailing. I have never met this person and it is unlikely I ever will, as she lives on the other side of the country in a remote New England village and is no longer doing any traveling. I am about to write a reply, quite similar in kind and no doubt will include one or two recent pieces I’ve written.

We have been sending letters back and forth like this for over five years. We discuss the books we are reading and mention a few notable passages from them. We discuss our writings and recent reflections on all matter of things. Rarely do we talk much about ourselves, although inevitably that intrudes. The letters are pretty serious stuff.

In her latest letter, she discusses Proust’s views on the suffering involved in writing a novel, a new book she is writing, and what Sholem Aleichem said about wisdom. “Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.” etc.

I “met” the letter writer while conducting a survey of individuals who keep a commonplace book. Her returned questionnaire was the most stimulating and detailed of any in the sample. There were many issues I wanted to know more about and I was led to write her a letter in reply.

We have maintained our correspondence ever since. She does not use e-mail, believes it leads to much mischief and our friendship is not of the sort that calls forth a telephone call on occasion. Besides, she is dedicated to preserving the fine and lost art of letter writing, a practice she often refers to as “one of the good old ways.”

I learn a great deal from her musings. Not long ago I sent her a book I had written. Because her eyesight is gradually failing, she asked her husband to read a few pages to her each evening. After finishing the volume, she wrote to me:

Your book, [her husband] says, ought to be read by every thinking person on the planet. I enthusiastically agree…Since completing the reading of A Literary Collage, one of us still asks the other, “Do you miss reading Katzev’s book?” Invariably the answer is a wistful Yes.

This amazed me. Never before have I heard anything like it. I have few readers anyway, but this! This was surely the most remarkable.

I miss the days when there was a personal letter or two in my mailbox every day. Don’t you feel the same? In the belief that it would be nice to get a letter in the mailbox once in a while, the literary website, “The Rumpus” recently announced a subscription ($5 a month) which will send a “author-penned letter a week, delivered to mailboxes rather than inboxes.”

The founder of the notion said: “I got this urge to get back to sending paper letters and I also knew a lot of authors who I knew would be really excited about it.” As of last month the following letter-writers have agreed to participate—Dave Eggers, Stephen Elliott, Nick Flynn, Margaret Cho, Tao Lin and Jonathan Ames.

Ever since I heard about the project I have been betwixt and between about taking out a subscription. It isn’t the $5. Rather, it just seems a bit phony. I don’t know any of these writers and of course they don’t know me, so there’s little common ground between us.

For now I’ve concluded I am not that desperate for a letter in the mailbox. Besides, I have the pleasure of waiting for the next gem from my letter-writing friend in the East.

Write a Prisoner

I first learned about Lorri Davis and Damien Echols on one of Piers Morgan’s CNN interview shows--why they were being interviewed, how they met, and the reason Echols had been a death-row inmate in Arkansas.

Echols had been sentenced to death as the leader of two other teenagers, both given life sentences, who were convicted of murdering three young second grade boys.

Before they met, Lorri was living in Brooklyn and working as a landscape architect. She first became aware of Echols in a documentary film about the three young boys and the three older teenagers convicted of murdering them.

After viewing the film, Lorri wrote her first letter to Echols: “I came home that night and couldn’t sleep…It breaks my heart that you are where you are and forced to endure it, so I am committed to doing whatever I can to make your life a little bit more bearable.”

So began their correspondence, writing letters to each other, sometimes several during the same day. There is no Internet in the Arkansas penitentiary. In one she wrote, “It’s great, isn’t it? Getting to know someone by writing. It’s quite wonderful and mysterious…”

Five months after they met, Lorri moved to Little Rock, and began managing the movement to arrange his release, obtaining financial support from several celebrities. They were married while he was still in prison and eventually, through a DNA analysis and unusual plea bargain, Echols, at the age of 36, was released from prison having spent half his life on death-row.

I write about Lorri and Damien because it illustrates the power and unexpected consequences of letter writing, that all but extinguished tradition of communicating with another person. Yes, Echols release is cause for celebration; so too is the love that developed between the couple. But it was the way in which their letter writing correspondence made both possible that first drew me to their story.

Writing letters to prison inmates may be one of the last contexts in which it survives. It is often the only channel for self-expression that prisoners have, especially those who are isolated from the Internet, telephone, or any other link to the world outside the prison. Writing to a prisoner may also appeal to anyone who may find themselves socially isolated, with few if any friends, and quite simply in need of someone to whom they can express themselves, particularly someone who might also benefit from the exchange.

Write a Prisoner is an organization devoted to facilitating letter-writing relationships among prisoners and their pen pals. The organization posts prisoner profiles, photos, and details about their crime. In turn, the inmates are charged a nominal fee that the organization claims is used to fund their other programs—educational materials, house and employment information for released inmates, and a scholarship fund for their children.

According the Write a Prisoner website: “Research shows that inmates who establish and maintain positive contacts outside of prison walls are less likely to return to prison. In fact, they are less likely to return to crime and substance abuse and more likely to find employment and remain productive members of society.”

If you wish to write to a prisoner, click on the link at the bottom of their home page.

Lorri and Damien now live in New York, no doubt still getting acquainted with one another and adjusting as to the hustle and bustle of life outside the walls. They are still writing to each other. But instead of writing letters, they are now sending text messages. I should have guessed.


I thank Geoffrey Gray for background information in his New York Times Magazine article (10/13/11), “My Dearest Damien.”

Preserving E-Mails

Do you save your e-mails? If so, how do you organize them? Do you keep them permanently? On what basis do you decide which messages to save?

I don’t save my e-mails other than those I need for short-term purposes and then they go to the trash. From out of the thousands I’ve received by now, those that I want to save I copy as a Word document or enter in a previous document that deals with its subject. On the other hand, a friend of mine saves almost all of her e-mails. She says she is a bit of a neurotic about this matter.

“I delete almost nothing except for junk mail and group emails that don't really apply to me …I have a lot of folders/subfolders…I have a "library school" folder with folders in it for individual classes I took. I have a general work folder for my department, and one for the whole company. If there is something involving a lot of correspondence, I set it up its own folder. I have a "friends" folder but I separated out my Pratt [her library school] friends and jewelry-making friends …an "orders" folder since I buy a lot of stuff online and at some point, I decided to make a subfolder for book orders …”

The preservation of electronic mail extends well beyond personal practices. It is a matter of considerable concern to historians and biographers of all disciplines who hitherto have had a rich source of written materials to draw upon in their research. Are we loosing too much information of this sort by communicating on the Internet rather than in written letters?

It is generally assumed that written letters have a degree of permanence that is quite different than messages sent over the Internet. In a review of M. F. K. Fischer’s A Life in Letters, Betty Fussell comments: “Had she lived in another decade, many of her letters might have been lost forever, flashed on screen to be read and discarded in a matter of minutes. A Life in Letters reminds one of what is lost in the magic of electronic mail: permanence.”

Robert Crease, a physicist, makes a similar point in discussing the future work of science historians faced with the fact that e-mail, rather than written letters, has become the normal method scientists use to communicate with each other. He cites the famous 1941 meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Nils Bohr in Nazi occupied Denmark to discuss the development of the atomic bomb. There are several accounts of this meeting, not all of them in agreement, but according to Crease, recently discovered draft letters that Bohr had written about their meeting serve as a “corrective to Heisenberg’s version, showing it to be deceitful and self-serving.”

The same is true for literary correspondents. In Literary Letters, Lost in Cyberspace (New York Times 9/4/05) Rachel Donadio says publishers who routinely correspond with writers have not developed a systematic way to preserve their e-mails. She notes the New Yorker routinely purges their e-mails and reports that Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor at the magazine, admits that she doesn’t always save the messages from the many writers she corresponds with.

“Unfortunately, since I haven’t discovered any convenient way to electronically archive e-mail correspondence, I don’t usually save it, and it gets erased from our server after a few months.” Donadio also reports that Blake Bailey, who has written biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever, worries, “It often occurs to me that e-mail may render a certain kind of literary biography all but obsolete.”

While methods of electronic communication may be useful for rapid communication among scientists and cultural historians, it remains uncertain whether they will be preserved at all and how this might affect historians in the future. I am aware there are various proposals to promote the preservation of electronic documents, but I have no knowledge of their present state.

I do know, however, that e-mail messages can also be every bit as tangible and as permanent as a written letter. They can be saved in computer folders, zip drives, an external hard drive or printed so that they are physically indistinguishable from a traditional letter. It is a simple matter to print and then file hard copies of e-mail messages so that you can, in fact, have a paper trail of your correspondence while at the same time benefiting from the advantages of rapid electronic communication.

In short, e-mail messages do not simply disappear after they have been sent. And there is nothing about e-mail messages per se that prevents them from being every bit as useful to future historians and interested readers as traditional letters. Had Virginia Woolf been able to send her voluminous correspondence over the Internet, there is no inherent reason she could not have filed away her hand-written drafts or printed copies of her messages so that they could drawn upon for the multiple volumes that have been published to date.

The example of Zadie Smith, a writer of considerable contemporary renown, is instructive. She says she has preserved 12,000 e-mail messages that she has exchanged with her literary friends. “The great majority of it is correspondence with other writers, my editor, my copy editor, etc. Some of them are amazing e-mails from writers whose hem I fear to kiss, etc.” Donadio reports Salman Rushdie is one of several other writers who save their e-mails. “Yes, I have saved my e-mails, written and received since the mid-90’s when I started using computers regularly…”

So it is not only possible, it is easy, and it is being done. The matter of preserving electronic communications may not be quite as serious as some envisage.

Thanks to Stefanie Hollmichel of So Many Books for stimulating me to consider this issue.

Letters to Fictional Friends

Have you ever wanted to write a letter to one of your fictional friends? For example, one to Emma Bovary to give here some badly needed advice? Or to Nathan Zuckerman telling him to cool it? Or how about one to Michael Beard to tell him what a bastard he is? How often I’ve thought about writing to one of the characters in a book I’m reading.

Letters with Character is a blog where readers can post letters directed to their favorite or not-so-favorite characters. Readers are invited to submit letters (LettersWithCharacter@gmail.com) that are “funny, sad, digressive, trenchant, or trivial.” The site apparently receives far too many submissions to publish them all. The only requirement is that a real person write the letter to an unreal person in work of fiction.

Here are a few that have been recently accepted.

To Jay Gatsby in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Hey Gatsby,
How's it going? What're you up to Saturday night? Wait, let me guess: A party. Again. With the same goddamn bores. Can I make a suggestion? Cancel the band. Turn off your lights. Lock your doors, for once. (Jesus, seriously. It's just not safe having people waltz in and out willy-nilly.) Instead, come over to my place. We'll watch a movie and kick back with a few beers. Have you seen (500) Days of Summer? What about Forgetting Sarah Marshall? Maybe we'll stay away from High Fidelity, but you've already seen that a thousand times, I know. Anyway, email me back or just drop on by. You're always welcome.
Your other neighbor,
Brian Kim

To David Kepesh in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal

Dear David Kepesh,
Spare me.
Thanks,
Lawrence Levi

Of course you can still write to one of your literary friends without submitting it to Letters with Character.

Here’s one I recently drafted to Raimund Gregorious the central character in Pascal Mercier’s still memorable, still re-readable Night Train to Lisbon.

Dear Mundus:
I understand they are going to make a movie of your life? Should I be impressed? Are you pleased? Do you know who will play your role? Perhaps it will be someone like Robert Redford? He’s about your age now.

Imagine a life of a language professor and linguistic scholar thoroughly fixed in his ways and pillar of his school in Switzerland who takes off on the spur of the moment one day for Lisbon after discovering a remarkable book by the Portuguese writer Amadeu de Prado. I have no idea how a movie can be made of this sojourn let alone the tale of the philosophical treatise that led you to abandon your settled days in Basel.

You wondered if the best way to make sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else? Did you find that to be the case as you learned more and more about Prado? Did his life and his relationships as they were unfolded to you in A Goldsmith of Words and the encounters they led you to give you a better understanding of yourself?

In reading your recent letters I’ve noticed you mostly ask questions. I don’t recall you ever answered them. I confess I found that “conversational style” rather fascinating. Where did you learn to write that way? Do you also converse in the same fashion?

In my experience, most people never ask questions. The person who does becomes an instant friend. I think we have in this linguistic style something very revealing about human behavior. But for the life of me I don’t quite know what it is yet. Do you?

Thanks for staying in touch. I look forward to your next set of questions.
Yours,
Marks in the Margin

Dear Colleague

“To be a writer is to have hope, and to a writer, no matter how old, hope is belief in one more work yet to be written, another book that is somehow the capstone or distillation of all that has been written before.”

This is how Yi-Fu Tuan begins the Introduction to Dear Colleague: Common and Uncommon Observations. In a way, isn’t it the hope of every person, writer or not, a hope to set off on one more path, another life, another place, one last adventure?

In Tuan’s case, as it was mine recently, he had just finished his autobiography and was searching for another work that would bring together his lifetime of observations and experiences. This is what he has done in Dear Colleague, an unusual book, something between a personal journal, set of fragments, and letter writing collection.

The volume has a rather curious origin. Remarking that “real” conversations at a research university are rare, Tuan began writing his reflections as short letters sent biweekly to his friends and colleagues. The letters were brief, most them short one or two paragraphs in length. In a way, they were not unlike present-day blogs.

In Dear Colleague Tuan has assembled a fair number of them under twenty topical headings. The topics have been arranged to follow a path that “leads from nature and human nature, through society and culture, geography (Tuan’s professional discipline at the University of Wisconsin), history, morality, and religion, to stages of life and a sense of ending.”

In the section Home, Rootedness & Place Tuan wrote, “I am reluctant to admit that mere physical environment can affect my mood. Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was likewise reluctant. “Change of place” should make much difference, for the true source of happiness or misery lies in ourselves, he opined. But then he remembered who said, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” It was Satan—the fallen but still defiant archangel in Milton’s Paradise Lost.”

One more from the section on Nature, “A human being can go blind, lose a limb or two, or a third of the brain, and yet in time adjust so well that these losses are barely missed. The same would seem to apply to external nature. Suppose for reasons of pollution and urban glare we can no longer see the stars. W.H. Auden, for one, honestly admits that he would learn to look at an empty sky and appreciate its “total dark sublime,” though this might take him a while."

Reading an unrelated set of fragments on a set of diverse topics may not be to everyone’s liking. But Tuan invites the reader to browse as you would in a bookstore. There’s nothing about his observations that command they be read in order. They can be dipped in and out of, skipping from comment to comment, independent of topic or order. He suggests his book might be enjoyed at the airport as you wait to board your flight. Given the conditions of most air travel these days, most travelers should be able to finish the book in one sitting.

Tuan also maintains an easy-to-read blog with his current and past “letters, “as well as links to his various publications. He concludes his Introduction by asking what reward is there in reading a book like Dear Colleague?

“Well,” he says, “they will get to know one person and his world better. It doesn’t sound like much, yet I think the effort worthwhile—as worthwhile as getting to know stock options, baseball, or a cat.”

Write a Letter Today

At a party one night in New York, the then-young heroine and wife-to-be in Rafael Yglesias’ A Happy Marriage exclaims to her suitor:

“Don’t call! Write me a letter. That’s what’s wrong with men and women today. There’s no letter writing. We need to get back to the way it was in Jane Austen’s day.”

I think a great many people bemoan or “complain about the lost art of letter writing now that we’re all busy texting and tweeting and Facebooking and whatever” as Jenna Krajeski writes at The Book Bench.

What is lost is the opportunity for the letter writer to compose a reasoned expression of an idea, an experience, to speculate and describe in more than a word or two a series of events or beliefs. There is also the loss to the recipient who has the pleasure of reading the account, giving it some thought, and then replying in turn.

The historian also loses the record of the exchange, one that makes it possible for others, regardless of their purpose, to learn about the exchange and the relationship between the correspondents.

Krajeski points us in the direction of a Web site, Letters of Note that “…is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and even emails.” (I am not quite sure how Shaun Usher, the letter collector, manages to obtain copies of emails, unless those who write them are in the practice of saving their gems.) Letters of Note has links to its most read letters and a set of categories that include art, cinema, law, politics, religion, technology, etc.

Krajeski writes optimistically, “Maybe it will renew young folk’s interest in the dying art.” I wouldn’t bet on it--that is for sure. It is hard enough to read a full page of electronic text, let alone compose one of equal length, electronic or otherwise.

Of course, you could also go in search of Jen Hofer, who recently set-up a letter writing stand in New York’s Union Square. Just head over her way, tell her what you’d like to say and to whom, and bingo for $3.00 she will write, address, and stamp the letter for you. Perhaps it won’t be long before she or someone else creates a Web site where the letter-writing-challenged can do the same.

This will no doubt lead to a letter writing Renaissance that will please historians and letter writing collectors and that may turn out, after all, to confirm Karjeski’s prediction that the letter writing traditions of yesteryear will make a comeback.

A War Time Experience

On this day when we pause to reflect on the victims of the wars this country has fought, I have chosen to post a recently translated letter that I received in the mail the other day. It was written to my father-in-law from his mother shortly after World War II. It is the only letter of hers known to have been preserved. She writes of her war-time experiences in the town of Mistek-Frydek on the Eastern border of what was then occupied Nazi Czechoslovakia.

…we have a baker across the street and so we did not suffer from hunger like others. Fat, soap and meat were the most scarce. There are many potatoes grown here and people mostly ate bramborachku (potato soup). But you can’t make a rue for soup without fat. And if you do have fat and use it for rue, there is not left to put on the potatoes. Everything was purchased with ratio coupons. For three weeks we received 20 dkg (ten grams) of meat and in the fourth week only 15 dkg. Soap was rationed at 3 centimeters for one month. This was like a toy size for a doll.

Those who had pigs were required to give 4 kilo of fat. Those who had hens had to give 65 eggs. If anyone killed a hen for the black market, they would be shot immediately.

We did not think of the food much because there was no certainty that we would live to another day. Five workers walking home down from Paskov from the iron mills were hung in the railroad station as a warning example to others.

After Heydrich [Gestapo head assassinated by Czech partisans in 1942) was shot, it was a nightmare. In the newspaper they report each day how many people were killed in retaliation for that killing. Sometimes it was 50 people at once. Most of them were intellectuals. People walk around sad and tearful. During another year they punished the Jews. That was also a horror, how they treated them. They chased them out of there homes, the Jews had to leave everything behind and could take only that which they could carry, even those who were 80 years old. Then they killed them all in the gas chambers, and day and night burned their bodies in Auschwitz. Those who were taken to Auschwitz never returned. It was plagued with typhoid fever. …We did not have the will to live. We were emotionally destroyed by this.

[The most important event of the resistance was the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (SS leader Heinrich Himmler's deputy and the protector of Bohemia and Moravia) during the Operation Anthropoid. Infuriated, Hitler ordered the arrest and execution of 10,000 randomly selected Czechs, but, after consultations, he reduced his response.[4] Over 10,000 were arrested and at least 1,300 executed. The assassination resulted in one of the most well-known reprisals of the war. The village of Lidice and Ležáky was completely destroyed by the Nazis; all men over 16 years of age from the village were murdered and the rest of the population was sent to Nazi concentration camps where many women and nearly all the children were killed. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Heydrich]

Novosad [son-in-law] is at home, but you never see him smile. Ne he feels like he cannot eat enough to feel full. When he was locked up in Breslow he was not that hungry because he worked in printing shop and received extra rations. But Karel Hutak [son-in-law] became sick from the hunger….

The year in January when the Russians were very close, the Germans tried to transfer them all to Germany. This was a 50 kilometer walk, again with heavy labor and extreme hunger. They received 16dkg of bread each day, and only water. They said that if it had lasted one more month, they would have all died from hunger.

…We were afraid of the army coming. We took everything from up in the house into the cellar, because we were afraid of fires. We boarded up our windows from the outside. On Wednesday morning Mara [daughter] opened the door, and a German soldier immediately aimed at her. So we stayed hidden until Friday afternoon…and then for three days we sat is the cellar. Mara said she heard screaming outside and that certainty someone had been killed. But when she looked outside, she saw flags waiving and all the people were hugging and celebrating the end of the war.

Power of Pen

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is an epistolary novel, a literary form with a long and at times popular history that extends to the current day. I think of Helene Haff’s 84 Charing Cross Road, and Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine, as well as novels by Jane Austen (Lady Susan), Samuel Richardson (Pamela) and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein).

A few years ago I tried to read a novel consisting of the e-mails of an online romance. While it was in vogue with contemporary epistolary trends, it quickly put an end to my epistolary novel reading days. That is, until the recently published The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. I waxed and waned about reading book but in the end I succumbed and I very pleased I did. The novel is a charming account of the life of Guernsey islanders during World War 2 when the Germans occupied the island. It also affirms the power reading to sustain people enduring harsh times.

“We read books, talked books, argued over books, and became dearer and dearer to one another.”

“I came to love our book meetings—they helped to make the Occupation bearable. Some of their books sounded fine, but I stayed true to Seneca. I came to feel that he was talking to me—in his funny, biting way—but talking to me alone.”

The farmer, Dawsey Adams, writes a letter to Juliet Ashton whose name he finds on a volume of Charles Lamb’s essays. Since there are no bookstores on Guernsey he wants to know if she might suggest dealer to write to in London. She replies by sending him a copy of Lamb’s letters and asks about the strange name of the literary society mentioned in his letter. In turn, this gives rise to a cascade of letters between Dawsey and Juliet that are soon followed by other correspondents on the island who wish to chime in about the their experience during the German occupation and how the literary society got them through the war.

Juliet is enchanted by these simple people and thinks their story may just be the very topic she will write about for her next book. She goes to the island, gets caught up in the lives of these people, learns about the occupation and ends up adopting the orphan child of a heroic woman, Elizabeth McKenna, who was sent away to a concentration camp for befriending a German soldier. The islanders wonder if she will ever return; sadly she never will be able to. But Juliet stays on the island, falls in love with Dawsey, whom she marries, and together they raise Elizabeth’s child.

“Sea air, sunshine, green fields, wildflowers, the ever-changing sky and ocean, and most of all, the people seem to have seduced her from City life.”

Unfortunately Mary Ann Shaffer did not live to see her book become such a widely read bestseller; her niece, Anne Barrows, completed it. However, before Ms Shaffer died, she penned the following wish for the book’s Acknowledgement:

“I hope these characters and their story shed some light on the sufferings and strength of the people of the Channel Islands during the German Occupation. I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art—be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music—enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised.”

The Inner Life of Letters

It is widely claimed that an e-mail differs from a written letter in several notable respects. In The Inner Life of E-Mail (Salmagundi Winter-Spring 2007), Philip Stevick claims that a “highly stylized, ritualized performance” takes place when we write an e-mail but not in writing a letter.

“Although the recipient is obviously not present, a rather considerable range of performance strategies are available. Writers of letters would seem to be free to manipulate their texts, disarranging lines, marking emphases in various ways, drawing little pictures. But writers of conventional letters almost never do. It seems vulgar and indecorous to do so in a letter….But all writers of e-mail know that their texts are remarkably malleable and many people do indeed manipulate their texts unthinkable in a letter.”

Is this the case? In a letter to Nadejda von Meck, Tchaikovsky wrote:

“It seems to me that letters are not perfectly sincere—I am judging by myself. No matter to whom I am writing, I am always conscious of the effect of my letter, not only upon the person to whom it is addressed, but by any chance reader. Consequently, I embroider…I am not quite myself in my correspondence….When I read the correspondence of great men, published after there death, I am always disturbed by a vague sense of insincerity and falsehood.”

Isn’t this true for almost any form of communication? A friend wrote to me:

“…the same could be said of all evidence. Do you not think that the same thing could be said of many a diary keeper? …No biographical or historical evidence should be taken as fact in isolation. The historian or biographer can only say if it all adds up to a coherent picture. …is anyone ever really writing JUST for themselves when they write a diary? I don’t think so—even when they think they are. I think, even if just unconsciously a writer has to be aware of the potential “audience” as soon as the mental becomes physical.”

There is also reason to doubt the claim that e-mails are sent without much deliberation or, as Stevick suggests, in a rather “casual, improvisational” manner that is “unthinkable in a letter.” It certainly isn’t characteristic of messages composed offline, which I often do, especially when I want them to be written carefully. They are not necessarily written in a frenzy or carelessly edited.

I have known others who do the same. A friend writes: “I can assure you that I spent ample time crafting those expression [sent in an e-mail] that was equal if not greater than most of my paper letters.” In turn the recipient may take just as much time and care in replying, so that the entire exchange may take several days or weeks to complete. In this way, an online exchange can mirror the delicate temporal features of sending and receiving a traditional letter sent through the mail.

Thus, I find wanting the claim that an e-mail message differs significantly from a letter. In some cases, they are functionally indistinguishable. An e-mail message does not simply disappear after they have been sent if the writer takes pains to print a copy. Nor must they be replied to or composed instantly. There is nothing about an e-mail message per se that prevents it from being every bit as literate as a traditional letter often is.

Do we write e-mails when we should be writing traditional letters instead? I grappled with this problem a few years ago in writing to the parents of the woman my son became engaged to marry. I spent a good deal of time crafting my letter. Naturally, this was done on the computer. When I had finished, I puzzled over how to send it.

Should I print the letter, put it an envelope and post it in the mail? Or simply e-mail it to them? Yes, the posted letter still seemed the proper thing to do and I didn't want them to think I didn't know my manners. But I wanted to communicate with them right away. I knew the letter would take the better part of a week to reach them. What would be so wrong about e-mailing it to them? In either case, the message would be identical. "Get with it, Richard," I declared. I e-mailed the parents my letter. They replied in kind the very next day. We have been e-mailing each with pleasure ever since.

Losing Permanence

When was the last time you received a personal letter in the mail, one written or typed from a person you know? When was the last time you wrote such a letter? In the days before the Internet this is the way we communicated. I miss those days. I miss getting a letter in the mailbox once in a while.

And those who wish to study the past and learn more about it will miss the treasure chest of such letters if the practice of writing them succumbs to the lure of e-mails. What will happen when it becomes time to write the histories of our era? No more letters to be found in the archives. What will happen to the biographers of the future? No more letters between the poets and their writer friends. Who saves their e-mails these days?

I am writing this note because I wish to encourage a return to fine art of writing letters, to what Yeats called one of the excellent old ways. I am also writing this note while reading a delightful new book, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, written in the manner of an epistolary novel, a literary form that could claim some degree of popularity a century or so ago.

In the introduction to The Oxford Book of Letters published in 1995, the editors, Frank and Anita Kermode, make the following claim. “Most of us write at least half a dozen letters of one sort or another every week, so that in the fifty or sixty years of a normal letter writing life many people must dispatch 18,000 letters.”

Who in the world could they be talking about? Since they are English, they are no doubt referring to people who live in Great Britain. But it is hard to imagine the British are much different in this respect than individuals who live in the United States. I suspect most of us are lucky if we write less than half a dozen genuine letters in a year.

Of course, now we write e-mails instead of letters, a mode of communication that many commentators claim is indistinguishable from a traditional letter. In my view, electronic epistles bear only a distant relationship with such letters. They are shorter and usually far less serious or reasoned than a carefully composed letter, especially when they are drafted as rapidly as e-mails usually are.

In a New Yorker essay a few years ago Noelle Oxenhandler maintained they also differ greatly in the temporal features and in the rhythms associated with they way are composed and then sent. She wrote:

“....I used to love the feeling of dropping a letter into the box. For several days, the letter-in-transit would hover around the edges of my consciousness. This delay was an intrinsic part of the pleasure of letter writing. It had a special tense all its own: when the “must do” turns into the “just done.” And, as the letter hovered, I also savored a kind of prescience in relation to my friend. During those two or three days, I knew, at least in some small measure, what would befall her: a letter in the box! As Iris Murdock has written, “The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.” But now the old magic has given way to the new. And though a fax or an E-mail may lie in wait for its recipient, it nonetheless gets from here to there in a matter of moments, and its waiting has none of the sealed mystery about it that attends a letter in its envelope.”

Others have pointed out that letters have a degree of permanence that is quite different than messages sent over the Internet. In a review of M. F. K. Fischer’s A Life in Letters, Betty Fussell comments: “Had she lived in another decade, many of her letters might have been lost forever, flashed on screen to be read and discarded in a matter of minutes. A Life in Letters reminds one of what is lost in the magic of electronic mail: permanence.”