Yours Ever Read online

  ALSO BY THOMAS MALLON

  FICTION

  Arts and Sciences

  Aurora 7

  Henry and Clara

  Dewey Defeats Truman

  Two Moons

  Bandbox

  Fellow Travelers

  NONFICTION

  Edmund Blunden

  A Book of One’s Own

  Stolen Words

  Rockets and Rodeos

  In Fact

  Mrs. Paine’s Garage

  In memory of

  FRAN WALKER

  (1927–2003)

  faithful correspondent, fast friend

  Contents

  Introduction

  ONE Absence

  TWO Friendship

  THREE Advice

  FOUR Complaint

  FIVE Love

  SIX Spirit

  SEVEN Confession

  EIGHT War

  NINE Prison

  Selected Bibliography

  Introduction

  IT EMBARRASSES ME to admit that I began writing this book when a first-class stamp cost twenty-nine cents. Well, here we are, the price half again as much and I a third again as old, and my excuses no better than what one usually offers when finally answering a letter that’s been under the paperweight for ages longer than one ever meant it to be.

  But a person can’t adequately procrastinate without at least one semi-valid rationalization, and so here’s mine: if this book had come out, as it was supposed to, around 1997, it would have appeared just as e-mail was reaching Everyman and beginning to kill, or revive (there are both schools of thought), the practice and art of letter writing. Whichever the case, the book would have come ashore just as a sea change was making the waters even more interesting.

  Letters had always defeated distance, but with the coming of e-mail, time seemed to be vanquished as well. It’s worth spending a minute or two pondering the physics of the thing, which interested Charles Lamb even early in the nineteenth century. Domestic mail was already a marvel—“One drops a packet at Lombard Street, and in twenty-four hours a friend in Cumberland gets it as fresh as if it came in ice”* —but in his essay “Distant Correspondents” (1822), Lamb seemed to regard remoteness and delay as inherent, vexing elements of the whole epistolary enterprise. Considering the gap between the dispatch and receipt of a far-traveling letter, hewrote: “Not only does truth, in these long intervals, un-essence herself, but (what is harder) one cannot venture a crude fiction, for the fear that it may ripen into a truth upon the voyage.” In Lamb’s view, sentiment, unlike revenge, “requires to be served up hot … If it have time to cool, it is the most tasteless of all cold meats.” He even imagines poor sentiment being “hoisted into a ship … pawed about and handled between the rude jests of tarpaulin ruffians.”

  And yet, once the sentiment-carrying letter arrives, Lamb will be “chatting” to his distant correspondent “as familiarly as when we used to exchange good-morrows out of our old contiguous windows.” The letter will have reconnected them, however imperfectly, by the slenderest and most improbable of threads. With e-mail and its even realer-time progeny, the IM and the text message and the Tweet, we get to ask simply “how have you been?”—in, that is, the twelve minutes since we were last in touch.

  In a history of the mails that he published in the frantic year 1928, Alvin F. Harlow proudly insisted that “the history of postal service has been the history of civilization,” and he debunked the idea that Queen Atossa, daughter of Cyrus the Great, wrote the first letter, from Persia, sometime in the sixth century B.C. Mr. Harlow felt certain that these civilizing instruments had been on the road, if not the wing, “hundreds of years” before that. Setting aside the question of precedence, we do know that Greeks had their fleet-footed hemerodromes and the Romans their Cursus publicus for the delivery of communications between one part of the government and another. Couriers and messengers made the Dark Ages a little less so, before Louis XI established what Mr. Harlow calls “the first royal, regular message service” in the fifteenth century, which allowed Henry VIII to imitate and expand the institution forty years later, across the Channel. Not long after that, private carriers began servicing non-royal folk, bequeathing us the phrase “post haste”—a shortening of the injunction (“Haste, Post, haste!”) that customers sometimes inscribed on their dispatches.

  During the seventeenth century, government delivery service appeared in England, along with postmarks and complaints from messenger boys against the unfair competition. (One thinks of how the lethal bicycle messengers of 1980s Manhattan cursed the faxes that suddenly ran them off the road.) The mail coach transported England into its golden epistolary age, a time of such confidence in the quality of letters that, as Daniel Pool points out in his book about nineteenth-century British life, the recipient paid the postage. That changed with the advent of the penny post, around 1840, by which time envelopes had replaced sealing wax.

  In America, as the Pony Express began racing alongside train tracks, speed of delivery came to trump all else, though the cozy convenience of home delivery did not arrive in most places until after the Civil War. Here, where I live in Washington D.C., a walk down F Street will take you past the building that served as the city’s post office in Lincoln’s time; the sidewalk that’s now filled with tourists—the building has become a hotel—once teemed with wives and sweethearts and women who didn’t yet know they were widows, all of them come to collect the mail they hoped was arriving from the battlefield.

  Anthony Trollope arrived in the capital just a few years later—“in June the musquito of Washington is as a roaring lion”—to negotiate a postal treaty between the United States and England. (The Victorian appetite for work being what it was, writing several dozen books didn’t mean Trollope couldn’t hold a full-time government job, too.) According to R. H. Super, the treaty “settled almost nothing.” Trollope’s real postal success would remain more domestic than international: his introduction of the red pillar box that allowed for easy mailing of the letters upon which events in his novels so often turn.

  WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT. Trollope may not have lived into the age of air mail, but his postal career was spent under the whizzings and clicks of the telegraph wires, through which some could hear the first of many premature dirges for the old-fashioned letter. Writing to Flaubert in 1869, the ever-forward-looking George Sand considered “What an effect telegrams have had on things” and imagined “how full of fact and free of uncertainty life will be when such procedures have been still more simplified.” One can almost hear the electronic in-box beginning to chime.

  A few intermediate marvels, like the radio and telephone, were enough to make Alvin Harlow put the word “so-called” before one late reference to the “civilization” he hymned in the pages of his history. “The art of beautiful letter writing has declined” with our supposed advances, he lamented—a cry we have been hearing ever more often in the eighty years since his book appeared. Those of us with a strong inclination toward the past must remember that, to its early writers, the handwritten or even chiseled letter must itself have seemed a marvel of modernity, and surely, even in Queen Atossa’s time, there were those who complained that letter writing—by its nature a “virtual” activity—was cutting down on all the face time that civilized Persians had previously enjoyed.

  Is e-mail even mail? It’s a question that’s provoked more debate than margarine and the aluminum bat. In terms of its transmittal—in its first years over phone lines and these days via satellite—it would indeed seem closer to a telephone call. But its mode of composition argues for classifying it as a form of the letter, and to anyone who’s ever used it, e-mail’s quaint, snail-mail iconography—a blank pad and pencil for the “Compose” function, an “envelope” th
at lights up with a message’s arrival—makes perfect sense. (E-mail “arrives,” of course, at the big central computer of one’s Internet service provider, and when we log on, we’re more or less taking the sort of trip to the post office that those Civil War sweethearts had to make.)

  More than one fine literary stylist has found e-mail actually to be more in keeping with letter writing’s early vitality than were the stuffy epistolary conventions that grew up over later centuries. Reflecting on her correspondence with a friend in France, Phyllis Rose writes, in The Year of Reading Proust: “Like a collagen cream or estrogen which restores to the skin its lost elasticity, e-mail has given me back the spontaneity I had lost to the laziness of age. I can receive Jack’s newsletter at noon, read it after dinner, write him a note, and it will pop up on his computer screen when he arrives at work the next morning in Paris.”

  It’s peculiar how much less effort e-mail seems to require compared to its predecessors. But really: how difficult was it to roll paper into the typewriter, extract an envelope from the drawer, lick a stamp and then set the finished production upon that table in the hall? Not very, and yet the relative ease of e-mail feels undeniable, as does—to give the downside its due—the glaze of impersonality over what pops up on that computer screen. Even if nowadays, thanks to the computer, everybody can type, we once got to know and recognize the quirks of a person’s typing, and typewriter, almost as readily as his penmanship. In retrospect, one realizes that typewriting had more in common with the ink of a pen than the uniform pixels on a monitor. Of course, handwriting, that even more irreducible mode, has an intimacy and force that can never be matched by either medium. The reader of this book will meet several presidents in its pages, and it’s worth noting here the biographer Edmund Morris’s point about how, because it was handwritten, Ronald Reagan’s letter announcing his Alzheimer’s disease had a distinctly greater public impact than it would have had otherwise.

  For all the wild calamities of indiscretion that cyber communication has excited, in and of itself it is far less sexy than a gartered clutch of letters that were once sealed with a kiss and had the words “I Love You” secretly written under the stamps. Does anyone really want to buy Casanova’s hard drive, or Milady’s printouts, at auction? And yet, to flip sides once again, electronic mail has a few of its own oddball, endearing traits: the subject line that hangs around long past the point at which it has anything to do with what the correspondence is now discussing; the whimsical screen names that it shuttles between. Shipboard cable addresses, temporary handles for the transoceanic traveler, used to have something of the same charm. Jessica Mitford’s was ELKSHATRACK, chosen after a friend told her “You need news from home like an elk needs a hat rack.”

  But the lack of emotional affect to much e-mail is a trait conceded even by the form’s enthusiasts. E-mail is so bluntly efficient that it often seems downright angry. When it means to be angry, it is sent in haste and repented not at leisure—no one has any of that anymore—but in a horrified burst, about three minutes after the offending words have been dispatched. In their book Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, David Shipley and Will Schwalbe take a sensible, mixed view of what’s out there in the ether, and they exonerate e-mail from the most serious charge against it: “Email has been blamed for the death of the letter. We think that’s unfair. Email is responsible for the death of the useless phone call. (And, by the way, it was the telephone that killed the letter.)”

  People complain about e-mail’s supposed evanescence, but Shipley and Schwalbe argue that its actual cockroachlike endurance is greater cause for concern: “Not only everything you’ve sent but also everything you’ve received can come back to bite you.” The authors warn against the form’s indiscriminate movements with the sternness of an old army training film: “Never forward anything without permission, and assume everything you write will be forwarded.”

  If you’ve bought or borrowed this book, I’m guessing you’re the sort of person who deplores the absence of salutations and polite closings in electronic correspondence. And yet, I’ll bet that, like me, at some point in the last couple of years, on your own digital road to Damascus, you’ve been thunderstruck by the realization that you’d just sent a text message that read, in its entirety: “r u there?” We are all living in Mr. Jobs’s world now. Its addictive instant gratifications have replaced the old, slow anticipation of the daily visit from the mailman, who now brings mostly junk and whose bosses at the United States Postal Service have, for the past dozen or so years, been pleading with customers to come back. One advertisement from 1996 already implored:

  In this electronic age, a letter is personal and permanent. It says you took the time and trouble to communicate. The impact of a letter is unique, whether you’re complaining about a disappointing purchase or declaring your love.

  The point is, write. A letter or card is truly a unique gift—a piece of yourself.

  Lest we over-romanticize letter writing, we should remember that it could sometimes be terrible drudgery. On January 14, 1958, C. S. Lewis reminded one of his correspondents, a bit churlishly, that his letter to her was the eighth one he’d already written that day, and at the end of the following year, he asked the same woman to join him in a pact that “if we are both alive next year, whenever we write to one another it shall not be at Christmas time. That period is becoming a sort of nightmare to me—it means endless quill-driving!” (One wonders if he’d have been happy living into the age of the word-processed Christmas letter—“Dear Everybody”—that goes into the mail, or out through the ISP.)

  The Christmas card is only one epistolary subgenre of dozens, from the chain letter to the mash note, the Collins (see Jane Austen), the bread-and-butter letter, the ransom note, the begging letter, dunning letters, letters of recommendation and introduction, the unsent letter, letters to the dead (sent by the Egyptians more than four thousand years ago), letters from the dead (“to be opened in the event of …”). Some of these, along with reports of travel, Valentines, war-zone dispatches, pleas from prison, advice to the lovelorn and j’accusing jeremiads, will surface in the chapters that follow.

  AS THEIR CLOSELY variant subtitles indicate, Yours Ever has always been intended as a kind of companion volume to A Book of One’s Own, the study of diaries I published back in 1984. Readers of that earlier volume may find less overlap of its dramatis personae with this book’s than they might expect. Only a few of the old cast are back (George Sand and Byron are two of them), mostly because being a “natural” at one of the forms doesn’t often extend to a talent for the other. Among plenty of exceptions (I can already hear them coming to your mind), Virginia Woolf may be first and foremost. Her absence here—except as the recipient of Vita Sackville-West’s love letters—stems mainly from a sense that I didn’t have much to add to all that others have written about her letters. But the sheer uninclusive arbitrariness of this new book (something it has in common with its predecessor) also kept me from laboring to overcome my disinclination—in this instance and some others.

  Over the years, diarists who’ve read A Book of One’s Own have sent me a wonderful heap of letters (“I guess I just couldn’t resist one more opportunity to put my thoughts on paper”), and the only querulous note I believe they’ve struck has always come as an interrogative: How could you have left out …? I’m afraid it will be the same here, with only space limitations, and a belief that it’s better to convey enthusiasm than obligation, as my mitigating pleas.

  Some things are quite different about this new book. Diarists are a less numerous and odder lot than letter writers: the assassin and the masochist and the crackpot Elizabethan astrologer, all denizens of A Book of One’s Own, are more drawn to unanswerable monologue than to exchange. There are, for sure, plenty of flamboyant characters in the pages that follow—I wouldn’t trade Flannery O’Connor, FDR and Madame de Sévigné for any of the aforementioned three—but they are writing in a form, letters, that has bee
n used by almost every literate person. If the material feels less rarefied than the diaries in A Book of One’s Own, it may also feel more welcoming and accessible. One common feature is indisputable: the pleasure to be had in violating someone’s privacy. Whether we’re reading his diaries or her letters, we’re reading material that wasn’t intended for us—at least originally.

  If this book seems less antic than the earlier one, so is the author finally publishing it. I was a young man when I wrote A Book of One’s Own, and while I’m fond of certain stretches, some overeager portions of it make me cringe a little, in the same healthy way one recoils a bit when rereading one’s own diaries—or letters. The chance to get your hands on the latter comes infrequently—perhaps when a lover throws them back in your face, or the parent who saved them dies—but if you don’t find the experience at least slightly mortifying, then something’s gone wrong with your growth.

  There’s a difference in the reading of diaries and letters, not just in the writing of them. From the first genre, one is getting the whole story; however selective, the diary is the total narrative that the author chose to provide. A letter is rarely more than half the story; if its forerunner or reply aren’t available, one has to infer the other half of the conversation, which can be as frustrating as listening to a cell-phone caller on the train. There are signs, however, that the genres are blending. The blog would seem to hover between the two, as half diary, half letter-to-the-world, a sign that we are entering the post-private age at least partly of our own free will.

  For six months of the year 2000, when blogging barely had a name, a magazine editor named Paul Tough ran a website called Open Letters. As Dinitia Smith reported in The New York Times: “There was one from a man confronting his estranged wife, who was spending the night with another man; another from a 29-year-old woman having chemotherapy; and one from a well-known author who uses his bird feeders as a distraction from writing.” (How unexotic this already sounds in the age of YouTube and Wonkette!) The real sign that the era of the blog was being hatched came with Smith’s taking note of how “Some of the letters became mini-series that readers followed.”