Mourning the letters that won’t be written

And remembering the great ones that were

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 suntanned 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.

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 panecumenical service to mourn its passing.

“My letters are my society,” poet Donald Hall said in a Paris Review interview. “Letters are my cafe, my club, my city.” In his memoir “A Question of Freedom,” poet Reginald Dwayne Betts wrote that, in prison, letters were called “kites” because they flew up and out.

“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 creamlaid 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.”

I’ve tended to be alert to the food writing in books of letters, which holds news of interest beyond the kitchen. In a very good book called “Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, 1974-1989,” Parker sends Lorde a letter that speaks to our moment.

“I went to lunch today in a black restaurant here in Oakland and as I was sitting at the table I noticed that they were serving Hunt’s Catsup,” Parker wrote. “The thought struck me that probably the owners of that restaurant had no idea about H.L. Hunt and how he spends his money trying to undermine the position of black people in this country and that it would be a very simple thing to gather that kind of information and pass it on to black radio stations, newspapers, and simply to make up flyers, basically form letters to people like that restaurant owner so that they don’t in fact spend their money and give it to organizations that are working against their interest.”

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.”