I’ve just finished reading The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner (Page Stegner, Ed.) and have begun reading The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, Eds.). I have several other collections of letters – those of J. R. R. Tolkien, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Bruce Chatwin, and Dylan Thomas come immediately to mind without scrutinizing my library shelves more carefully – and I tend to read them leisurely, one author at a time, and never in a single sitting. They fascinate me for the view they give into a working mind, especially into the mind of a favorite author. The glimpse they give into a private world is so much more accurate than that of an author’s published works, for the art of writing for publication effectively masks what is and what isn’t an author’s true thoughts.
And the good writers are also good letter writers, with even their juvenile material being of interest. I have only scratched the surface of the hefty book of Willa Cather’s letters, but I have already learned that she couldn’t spell worth a damn as a youngster and took pride in her failure. In one of her poorly spelled letters to a close friend while in high school, she even adds a postscript purporting to copyright her unusual spelling and grammar usage. It is by such personal touches that you learn something much deeper about a person, in this case that the rather stern looking, exceedingly private author of the classic Death Comes for the Archbishop had a silly sense of humor that she kept from her reading public, and that the depth of her humor extended to laughing at her own foibles and shortcomings. I have long collected her work for its literary merit and I am now able to appreciate it more fully, given the knowledge she could be silly even while attending to the serious business of writing literary fiction.
I have often wondered why collections of letters fascinate me, and I have come to the conclusion that they do so because they are the closest thing we have to a lens into the inner workings of another’s mind. No one particular letter can offer such a glimpse, because the reader cannot be certain of the purpose of the specific letter, of the circumstances which provoked its composition, or of the mindset of its author at the given moment of its creation. But a collection of letters written over several years certainly does, for in the sequence of letters you glimpse strains of consistent thought as applied to a variety of subjects, viewing those thoughts from a variety of angles until you can gain some confidence in how the author thought and how his or her thinking changed over a lifetime of accumulated boredom, calamity, and joy.
I have come to believe that letter collections are the only medium offering a glimpse of what really goes on behind closed eyes.
But I wonder if future generations will have the luxury of collections of similar contemporary materials. Of course, the volumes of collected letters already in print will continue to be available in libraries, in used book stores, or even in reprinted versions in new book stores, but is there contemporary material from which to draw future, similar collections? I am skeptical that the digital age will produce much of merit in this regard, and whether the joy of published collected letters is almost a thing of the past.
Email is a thing usually written in haste, often about mundane details of a life that say more about the culture in which a person moves than his or her reactions to that culture. Much email is not only poorly written, it is written cutely and tells nothing of the inner workings of a mind. I am not complaining about the use of email, for I use it daily; I am only complaining that it is ephemeral, non-revealing, flimsy, mass-produced stuff that will not likely stand up for the most part to the scrutiny of future readers seeking to understand the inner workings of a contemporary mind.
Some small portion will, of course. For example, I exchange emails of a more serious sort with my friend and co-blogger, Eliot Mentor, and these I keep safely in a separate file on my computer – the modern equivalent of the oak and redwood hinged boxes in which I used to carefully store the tangible evidence of my memories, the kind of boxes it is becoming harder to find due to the lack of materials to put into them. Whether or not a future generation might find them of interest, these email exchanges are enjoyable for both of us, for they require thoughtful responses in consideration and examination of the subject matter before hitting the ‘send’ button. They further our understanding of one another in ways that an entire accumulation of emails merely confirming a dinner or luncheon location or sending along the joke of the day could never do.
But if our emails were ever to be of interest to anyone other than ourselves, were ever to be published in a collection, I would have had to remember to save them in the first instance, for so much of what is written in such haste and with such frequency in this society is not saved except upon a server somewhere, a server to which most of us will never have ready access.
As an aside, if a fascination for reading the emails of modern-day authors becomes a future fad, the undue interference with private communications exhibited by our very own government may prove a boon. Imagine the kinds of FOIA requests such a practice might eventually make possible for future editors and biographers. J. D. Salinger would have had nowhere to hide in the light of that sort of day!
Please don’t read this as a lament by an older man about things modern. While this is a lament of a sort, the lament is over the failure of most of us to take the time to record our unvarnished thoughts while negotiating our way through a society that doesn’t provide much time for reflection, doesn’t provide a meaningful medium for doing so, doesn’t seem to place much value on anything other than the stream of rude consciousness. I don’t lament the convenience of modern communication methods; I only lament their cost.
But costs of this kind can be dealt with, if only one will take – or find – the time to do so. So take this, instead, as a plea for you to take the time to record your innermost thoughts in something other than that next email to your aunt Vickie or your friend Sarah. You might actually take pen in hand and write a real, by-God letter to a close friend, the kind of letter that takes thought and a good while to compose, an envelope in which to place it, and a stamp by which to mail it. You could keep a written diary, the kind of thing I also like to read when finally released to the light of day due to someone having lived an interesting life and through the miracle of posthumous publication.
Or, you could even keep an electronic blog, and publish your thoughts in contemporaneous time for some unknown person to find and read if they have sufficient interest – as I’m about to do after I’ve re-read and edited this piece sufficiently for me to feel it safe to be released into the ether.
