A Forgotten Form
The art of letter writing.
ONE summer, when I was nineteen and living in Key West, I rented a typewriter. In the early 1990s one could still do that. On a July afternoon I walked into a copy shop—there was no air conditioning; the room was filled with the smell of warm ink—to photocopy a short story I’d just finished. While I was waiting in line a paunchy man with leathery skin and a long beard said to me, “Are you a writer?” His eyes flashed, as though he were daring me. “I guess so,” I said.
He introduced himself as children’s author and poet Shel Silverstein, whose poem “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out” I had memorized for oral presentation in third-grade summer camp. “If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day,” he said. “Do you write every day?” I paused, nearly said, “Almost,” then settled for the most honest answer: “No.”
Not long after, another great writer, Tess Gallagher, told me unequivocally that, while it is true a writer must write every day, writing letters “counts.”
I had never before seen letters as a form of expression akin to real writing. My great-grandfather Ernest Hemingway was a prolific letter writer. In his correspondence there is a crossover between great literature and something that is often playful, satiric, and spiced with inside, often bawdy, jokes. His letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Janet Flanner, Ezra Pound, and many other great writers are filled with a humor and poignancy that is meant to be appreciated only by the recipient. Through Hemingway’s correspondence one can glimpse his penchant for nicknames, his ingenious combination of humor and gravity, and his extraordinary gift for painting with words. In a 1925 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald—which appears in Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917–1961 (Scribner, 1981), edited by Carlos Baker—Hemingway says he likes to write letters “because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.” In his famous “Grace under pressure” letter to Fitzgerald of April 20, 1926, Hemingway shows his appreciation for his friend’s work by satirically comparing his own soon-to-be-published first novel, The Sun Also Rises,
with Fitzgerald’s recently published masterpiece, The Great Gatsby:
We go to Spain May 12. If Bumby is not well then I’ll go on ahead and Hadley come later. We go to U.S.A. in End [sic] of Sept. Antibes in August. I’ll have a copy of Sun etc. there and w’d [sic] welcome your advising me or anything about it. Nobody’s read any amount of it yet.… I have tried to follow the outline and spirit of the [sic] Great Gatsby but feel I have failed somewhat because of never having been on Long Island. The hero, like Gatsby, is a Lake Superior Salmon Fisherman. (There are no salmon in Lake Superior). [sic] The action all takes place in Newport, R.I. and the heroine is a girl named Sophie Irene Loeb who kills her mother. The scene in which Sophie gives birth to twins in the death house at Sing Sing where she is waiting to be electrocuted for the murder of the father and sister of her, as then, unborn children I got from Dreiser but practically everything else in the book is either my own or yours. I know you’ll be glad to see it. The Sun Also Rises comes from Sophie’s statement as she is strapped into the chair as the current mounts. Well why not write?
Regards to all yr. [sic] family,
Herbert J. Messkit.
Yesterday I wrote a letter to my friend April, a lawyer who lives in Portland, Oregon. We met in 2009, when we were both just out of law school and working as judicial clerks. A year later I moved far away to Georgia, and we began writing letters. Handwritten on stationery or, in my case, on the flyleaves torn from books—a habit I’d picked up working in a bookstore where old books were often thrown away. (When I’d seen them in spine-torn piles behind the store, it had occurred to me that their brown, moisture-mottled pages would make great stationery.) When I began writing by hand again, my handwriting was unfamiliar, a combination of print and cursive. My fingers felt tight, scratching on the page with the unfamiliarity of carving. When I received April’s first letter, I noticed that her handwriting was straight up-and-down and loopy, like a fourth grader’s.
After all, who bothers anymore to make artful letters, doing the recipient the honor of using proper cursive with elegant f ’s and p’s? The most writing I’d done in years was to scrawl notes in the margins of a printed page or onto a piece of scrap paper. Most often, between my fingers and thoughts lay an electronic instrument, distracting me and absorbing my own current— and perhaps even many of my own thoughts. When I write longhand each pass of the ink on to paper is a physical creation. And as with sculpture, textiles, painting, and furniture, it contains remnants of myself.
The first epistolary letter is said to have been written by the Persian empress Atossa in 500 BCE. Since that time many great writers have left a wonderfully intimate picture of the moments in which they lived through their correspondence. Imagine how little we would know of the personalities of Gustave Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, or Victor Hugo if they had sat down at their desks and written novels, stories, and essays but no letters. Think of how much would be missing from history if the correspondence of world leaders had not been recorded and saved on paper. Who wants to sift through millions of e-mails, let alone tweets, to piece together a patchwork of substance?
When I lived in New York City, there was a place in Manhattan referred to as the “secret bookstore” (Michael Seidenberg’s Brazenhead Books at 235 East Eighty-fourth Street). Inside what had once been a two-room apartment with a cloakroom and primitive bath was a wall-to-wall collection of books, an island with many bottles of whiskey and mixers, a settee of ancient origin, the mumble of conversation with bursts of laughter, and the smell of reefer and cigar smoke. One of the most pleasant evenings I ever spent was a rainy one, when I rode up after work on the 6 train, walked through
construction barriers past the corner pizza place, and was admitted to this most magical of hiding places. After the normal greetings and introductions, I found myself in conversation with two journalists in the back room, and after they had gone back to the main room for smokes and highballs, I picked up a book from a line resting against the table in front of me. On its cover was the smoky photograph of someone I recognized: my step-greatgrandmother Martha Gellhorn. It was a book of her collected letters. I lay back on the settee as though I were at home. In the letters I learned of her emotional affair with H. G. Wells and of her close friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. In one letter she described in detail a terrible chest infection that she was fighting while on assignment as a war correspondent in Europe. Through her letters I entered the private, often dingy, chambers of her life—alone, resolutely courageous, and dedicated to the truth.
As frequent as communication via email, text, messenger, and WhatsApp can be, for me it’s often utilitarian, like, “Hey! Can you pick up some hummus and Lucky Charms?” or to document a whimsical happening: “Check out this guy! He looks like Mike Myers on ’roids!” Over time e-mails have earned the reputation of being too clinical for the expression of deeper feelings (love letters must be on paper), and the other forms of electronic communiqué too short. There are still cards sections at supermarkets and drugstores for birthdays, anniversaries, thank-yous, and condolences, preserving the notion that even the smallest handwritten sentiment is more intimate.
Without the more intimate form of writing letters, I drift apart from those who are not in my daily life. My friend April and I rarely send each other messages, and never e-mails, but I know more about her thoughts and her relationship with the world—how she is actually doing—than I do about most of my other friends. In her last letter, which is covered in ironic rainbow and unicorn stickers, April told me about a visit she’d had with her family in Wisconsin, where she wondered how she had become the person she is. She wondered how she had escaped being corrupted by their narrow-minded views and, with humor, recounted her frustrations with their intended-tobe-subtle expressions of racism. She described her own home life—the growth of her avocado tree, the state of her wine grapes, the health of her cats, and her deep satisfaction with her longtime partner. I came away from reading her letter with a full sense of her current state of being—something that I cannot fathom getting so fully in any other way—the understanding of which gave me a profound sense of peace.
While it’s true that some things may have changed by the time I receive her letter in London more than a week later, even the things that were already outdated still hold their importance. And while I lament the things I’ve missed in the time between letters, apart from seeing her they are by far the best way we have to stay close. I can’t tell you how any of my friends with whom I exchange
comments on Facebook or exchange the occasional message are actually living their lives, even though I might know what job they have, where they fall on the political spectrum, and what they had for dessert when they went to a fancy restaurant. If I sent them a Facebook or WhatsApp message asking them how they were, I’d likely get a trite reply or a specific complaint, maybe even an explanation of how they’re feeling, but nowhere near the depth I would get from a letter. A letter is, after all, a piece of writing in which we give ourselves the space to reflect—to distill our emotions and reactions, to choose the things that are important and flesh them out in detail. It’s the difference between a novel and the CliffsNotes version of it. When feelings are expressed in emojis and interpretations become snippets, much of the honesty and substance are lost. When I communicate this way I feel as though I’m lying to myself—not only about how I feel and think, but about who I am, and maybe even changing that truth.
So what of longer written communication? A portion of it—a very important portion—has been lost. Things come out in letters—in the chance to pour out one’s thoughts in an uninterrupted stream—that cannot come out in conversation or through electronic communication. In this way, writing a letter to a friend is similar to writing literary fiction. There’s an intimacy—an opening of the mind—that appears when we sit down and decide that this tool, this pencil or pen, is going to be allowed to unleash our innermost thoughts and feelings. It is what intrigued me about writing in the first place and what drew me to the psychological intricacies of Kafka, Sartre, and Camus; the idea—ironic though it may be when not tucked away inside the privacy of a journal—that I could sit down to describe, in all the dusty and smelly detail I wanted, any room, person, thought, or experience, and potentially have someone across the world read and experience it too.
The exercise of writing, whether it be in the form of a letter or a story, is all good practice. As my greatgrandfather demonstrated in his colorful letters to friends, there can be just as much creativity in letter writing as in any other form. Similar to freewriting exercises, writing a letter loosens the knots in neural pathways, leading to subjects and characters lying just below the surface. When I write to April, I describe my life in scenes: “Here I am, sleep-deprived after a bout of insomnia, which I attribute to the vicious heat, lying on the couch in the living room—way too much red, way too little art—after watching Federer lose at Wimbledon. I’ve been reading Fathers and Sons, which reminds me of Vermont, which in turn reminds me of New York, since they followed each other. Remember when you came to Brooklyn and we played pool and went to that diner? There was the lady with the big glasses leaning over her blueberry pancakes who looked like she should have an imaginary cigarette dangling from her mouth and ash falling into her egg cream? I swear she was a ghost.” The letters have characters, just like in a story. I explore the thoughts and motivations behind recent events in my life, and I prioritize—choose what to leave in and what to leave out—just like I do when I write fiction. In addition to all of its other virtues, writing letters can be a great warm-up exercise, as well as fertile ground for material. A writer is always working.
I recommend starting a correspondence with a dear friend consisting of real, ink-stained letters. You will discover things about yourself and them that you’d both forgotten and never known. Letters invite us into channels of deep thought, much like dreams. We are spinning versions of our lives that can have as much somber detail as Grimms’ Fairy Tales, or as much joy and exuberance as Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. Plus, you’ll be leaving something of yourself behind—decorated, if you like, with rainbows and unicorn stickers.