“Did you ever meet, or was he before your day, that old gentleman - I forget his name - who used to enliven conversation, especially at breakfast when the post came in by saying that the art of letter writing is dead? The penny post, the old gentleman used to say, has killed the art of letter writing.” So begins Virginia Woolf’s letter to John Lehmann, a young man working as an apprentice for the Hogarth Press, the publishing house founded by Woolf and her husband, Leonard. The implication in this anecdote is tied to investment: is there any real merit in making a fuss over something as trivial as letter writing? Is it worth the bother to adorn such a humble medium with eloquence and music? Isn’t it tedious for the recipient of a letter to be forced to wade through someone’s lofty elaborations and taxing elocutions? Sometimes all we want is a simple answer, a clear, unembellished body of information regarding health, travel, moving, plans, aspirations, disappointments, dilemmas, relations, etc. Today’s emails are blunt; it’s rare to find a well-crafted letter elaborating a shared circumstance.
“There is some truth in
that remark, I think,” Woolf goes on to say, offering a balanced view of the
situation, such as it existed in Britain in the 1930s. “Naturally, when a
letter cost half a crown to send it had to prove itself a document of some
importance; it was read aloud; it was tied up with green silk; after a certain
number of years it was published for the infinite delectation of posterity. But
your letter, on the contrary, will have to be burnt. It cost only three
halfpence to send. Therefore you could afford to be intimate, irreticent,
indiscreet in the extreme.”
I’m not sure why the
letter would have to be burnt, but ok. I get it. The medium is cheap. Why keep them?
I’m the wrong person to ask. I have drawers loaded with letters. Boxes in
storage stuffed with letters, many of which go back to the 1960s.
The idea that convenience
and affordability would impact epistolary culture is a curious, somewhat wobbly
supposition. But it’s true. The convenience of the medium argues against the amount
of effort one may wish to put into it. Technology devalues the aesthetics. On
the other hand, the informality of the medium invites a broader, more playful
range of expression, the kind one used to find in the letters of John Keats,
for example. People have varying approaches and attitudes toward language; for a
few it’s joyful invitation to exercise some creative muscle, but for most
people it’s a hassle, a cumbersome and somewhat worrisome task with a strong
potential for embarrassment, misunderstanding and personal exposure.
I miss letters.
Especially when they come in the mail and the words have been put down on
actual paper. Typed or written, doesn’t matter. Ted Enslin’s letters were
always typed. On a manual typewriter, too, which made it even better. When I
held the letter, I could feel the indentation of the letters on the back of the
paper, which felt good to my fingers. The texture itself served as a text.
Letters are striking.
Like a peacock in frost. Emails are more tidy; they invite a more telegraphic
approach to sharing and dispensing information. Occasionally, someone will take the time to
construct a beautifully worded email. This has value. It’s an antidote against
the deadening impositions of modern life. Feelings are complex. Their inherent
confusions and ambiguities are a welcome challenge for those with a fascination
for language, and an empowering pleasure to fight the sterility of modern life
with the infinite possibilities languages offer. Words are always a potential
source for sorcery and conjuration. There’s power in it. But for many others who
understandably prefer to remain guarded about their internal life, verbal
expression is a thorny terrain. And there is never a perfect correspondence
between one’s feelings and perceptions and the medium of language, which is extramundane,
disembodied, disconnected from the empirical realm and its boorish
disenchantments. It’s easy to get carried away, easy to entangle one’s more
instinctual life with the mercurial allurements of language.
Culture used to be a lot
more literary than it is now. People have lost the appetite for reading.
Scrolling has replaced the architecture of thought. It’s a self-perpetuating
dilemma: the less people feel the urge to express themselves, and the less they
feel free to exercise their verbal acumen, the faster it deteriorates. Wittgenstein’s
statement that the limits of his language reflect the limits of his world is
true. The world we live in now is a dystopic, open-air prison engineered and
operated by reptilian oligarchs. AI and its robotic potentate loom over our
future.
I wonder, since the once
treasured virtue of free speech is being destroyed, and language has become a precarious,
slippery medium that can lead to possible indictment, as what has happened to
journalists like Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Medhurst, arrested for simply for
doing their job as journalists and getting the reality of an event transmitted
as fully and honestly as possible, if the art of letter writing will return.
There’s a bit more privacy in a letter written on paper and inserted into a
sealed envelope. The algorithms can’t get to it.
Are tattoos a form of
letter writing? I think they are. They seem that way. I assume the tattooed
don’t mind being stared at. They’re like walking totems. Spirits and symbols
all over their bodies. Aching to communicate. Provoke. Stimulate. What’s that skull
about? An attitude toward death? And how about that butterfly, or that dragon,
or that dagger, or that physics equation, or haiku, or frog plopping into a
pond on your back? Tattoos, like letters, are moments of impulse inscribed in
the sting of ink.
Someone will occasionally
send me a letter, but it’s more like a novelty, or a kind of joke. A nougat of
nostalgia.
The letters I both wrote
and received in the 60s were full of joy, discovery, confession, jubilations
and fabulous new encounters. Now the waters are poisoned by the toxins of
censorship.
“When you’re lost in the
rain in Juarez, and it’s Eastertime too, and your gravity fails and negativity
don’t pull you through, don’t put on any airs when you’re down on Rue Morgue
Avenue.” Even Bob Dylan’s songs sounded like letters.
I always feel like I’m
coming dangerously close to sounding like Andy Rooney. Fuck it. Since nobody
reads who cares? Language, like a wild animal, does everything on impulse.
Censorship has a lot in common with Rilke’s panther. A caged animal paces back and
forth. It can do no harm. I just wouldn’t want to be the person whose job it is
to feed it.
2 comments:
was thinking about a lecture i attended in the early '90s given by the authors of a newly published jackson pollock biography. pollock was laconic & rarely wrote letters. the biographers had to grapple with telling the story of a life without the usual tool of storytelling, i.e. letters, correspondence. they surmised that their problem would become endemic in the present age since the telephone, at the time at least, replaced letters. i was thinking of this lecture because we live in an age when markers of digital life, such as email, can easily be deleted or lost if the hard drives or servers break down. i have drawerful of letters too. i loved getting a crinkled letter that sometimes still smelled of cigarette smoke of the sender. how they felt in the hand, in the eye, & in the mind. but now, it is by email, & more commonly by texting, that i use in my correspondence. plus even social media too. like yours & my blogs. what does this mean for literary historians? will they use AI to scrape the internet of a writer's data to publish the collected tweets or texts of the writer instead of a volume of selected letters? or will they do what pollock's biographers did, just interview everyone they could who knew the great painter. we live in interesting times, n'est-ce pas?
Letters are funny marginalized entity in the realm of letters. They lack the full prestige of a published work. And for some poets and authors living in very spartan and impoverished circumstances there simply isn't room for them. Poet Ted Berrigan had to get rid of a lot of letters because he simply did not have room for them, which upset some colleagues and friends. I have letters from friends which go back to the 60s, and what's remarkable about them is none of these people were "writers," not in any formal sense. And yet their letters are very gracefully written with a lot of robust description and allusions to some of the luminaries of the time, such as Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure, who had the status of rock stars. It also testifies to a time when poetry seeped into mainstream culture and wasn't the exclusive property of ivy league universities, as it is now. There are authors whose letters have become treasures all their own, such as Gustave Flaubert, Madame de Sévigné and Virginia Woolf. And after Rimbaud stopped writing poetry, there remains the letters he wrote to his mother and sister and some robust correspondence with the Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg, who spent some 27 years working in Ethiopia. I haven't read them, but apparently Kurt Vonnegut was a robust and enjoyable letter writer. I worry, too, not just about the disappearance of letters, but literature itself. A college professor on Facebook recently disclosed that his class did not know who Walt Whitman was. I do what I can to lament and resist these trends, but I'm beginning to sound a lot like Andy Rooney. Maybe I should just go out and get a bunch of tattoos. That seems to be the new way to write letters to people. Tattoo quips and retorts all over my body.
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