Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Letters

I love reading letters. It is a shockingly invasive idea if you think about it. I would not want anyone who did not already love me very much to go through my email 'Sent' box. I am not big on grammar in my emails. I do not always take the time to say exactly what I mean. An outsider reading my email written to a close friend or family member would not be able to make sense of the fragmented jumble of tangled references. An outsider reading an email from me to my mother would think I was a repetitive, unlettered but affectionate loon.

Letter writing is no longer an art. Correspondence is not something we make room for in our day. We squish lopsided, frothy emails into whatever negative space is left after we finish doing what we really need to do. The email often just reports the doing.

Rebecca. I remember reading about the Second Mrs. de Winter's first morning at Manderley. Du Maurier was wonderful about giving this sad, loving character just enough obstacles to trip over. The Second Mrs. de Winter did not know the routine of the house and so went to the Library. But the fire was lit in the Morning Room. Rebecca always went to the Morning Room after breakfast to do her correspondence. I imagined letters written at an efficiently organized, slender legged desk on stationery embossed with her long sloping "R". That normality of Rebecca's routine shows the shift in the twentieth century away from penmanship, skill, effort in letter writing.

My father writes in a beautiful slanting script with a heavy fountain pen. He takes fountain pens very seriously. I would have no idea how to write with a fountain pen. Virginia Woolf threw fire lit arrows of possessive prose out to her lover, Vita Sackville West. F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters to Zelda. Antoine de St. Exupery's letters to his wife, his rose. Byron's letters to his sister. Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne. Napoleon's letters to Josephine. They reek of thought, love, effort and artistry. Mmm. Must try that sometime.

18 comments:

  1. you should check out sothere.com . It's nothing but letters.

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  2. Sadly letters are a dying art! Where once I wrote to my pen friends I now communicate via email and social networking sites with friends I get to know often before meeting them, just like it was with pen friends really!

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  3. i like that symmetry. ok. that makes it better!

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  4. Now you have hit a tender chord with me. I love written letters - the kind with stamps. When I was younger there was nothing more exciting, ripe with anticipation than opening the mailbox and finding an envelope addressed to you in the familiar handwriting of a friend, a sweetheart, a parent, a brother or sister. In college, it was what you hoped for every day. I believe I've saved each and every letter I've ever received. I hate to sound trite - but they really are tied together with ribbons. Sometimes, especially when I've lost one of these people, I dig out their letters and laugh again, or cry again, or experience them once again through their letters. And, by the way, I do write with a fountain pen. I have two left that work: a Mont Blanc and a Waterman. The rest, though they have died, I've also kept. (It is getting harder to find ink, however.) Love this post; beautifully written. Sorry my comment was so long, but letters are so dear to me.

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  5. i love that! i love the sentiment, the stamps, the fountain pen, the ink and the ribbons. that is lovely. long comments are lovely too! that note made me want to write long letters to people i love!

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  6. Letters are one of the best things in life. I still can't quite reconcile myself to email... When I was young my family moved around a lot and my friends and I wrote letters back and forth several times a week--I'm not quite so prolific now, but I still have saved every one of those letters!
    thanks for stopping by my blog!

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  7. that is so wonderful that you have those letters. they are so much more meaningful than email.

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  8. I love letters, too. My best friend from childhood moved when we were fifth graders. We wrote for years (though now we mainly FB and email). I had an old blue suitcase where I kept her letters. She kept mine in a red toolbox.

    Our mothers only let us telephone on birthdays and Christmas. It's interesting to note we're now both agented authors. Maybe those letters helped build the groundwork for our later years...

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  9. by novel is actually an epistolary novel to boot. it is a pastiche of primary documents (lots of letters) within an overarching diary frame. did you love the book daddy long legs when you were younger?

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  10. I went to summer camp for many many many years and used to love writing letters home and getting letters from home. I still tried to send cards, just cause, to good friends and family but it isn't the same.

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  11. Did you know that most elementary schools in the US are no longer teaching cursive writing? They may gloss over it some, but don't focus on it. My son's 4th grade class has worked on cursive a few times this year . . . in art class. (!!)

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  12. beth, that is wonderful that you make that effort! i am terrible!

    kathy, art class! oh no! but then i just realized that i do not really remember cursive either!

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  13. i loved reading this. i have thought about letter-writing a lot, and writing in general. i have one friend (in her 30s) who amazingly does not use email, and still writes long letters as a way of communicating. but just like penmanship, and letter-writing, language itself has changed. i once saw a video of little kids talking in the 70s and realized that they TALKED differently! their inflections and ways of enunciating were markedly different than my own or kids of today. just like when you watch old American movies from the 40s and 50s - everyone seemed to have this SLIGHT english accent back then! language and communication just keep on shifting and it bothers the crap out of me! my husband works on the cutting edge of computers and is always using email/twitter, etc... meanwhile i am trying to read actual books and can my own food and secretly try to throw the computers in the trash! life moves forward in all of its many facets, and i hate to see good, old-fashioned ways die!

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  14. Yep, Grad's thoughts on letters strongly echo my own, except I have rubberbands instead of the much more whimsical lengths of ribbon... I really miss writing and receiving letters. I still write them to some friends but hardly ever receive one back these days - it's a genuine tragedy to me that these precious relics are such a dying art. I think that's why I persist, and always shall. As for the fountain pens, I have promised myself a very fine pen if my MS is ever accepted for publication. I spend time drooling at the glass the way children gather out the front of the chocolate shop.

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  15. ariel, i know--if you listen to grace kelley she absolutely pronounces words like 'grass' with a long 'a'. i love that your friend is putting up such a valiant struggle against email! i did too but unfortunately just stuck to the phone rather than the more artful medium of letters!

    doctordi, that is what my dad said i needed as soon as my book got accepted. 'now you need a proper pen..."

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  16. I love letters! I love recieving them, I love sending them! My friend and I used to send them quite frequently and we used to write pages and pages, usually nonsense, but we'd fill the envelopes with tacky things.

    It's so sad that letter writing is a dying media.

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  17. Your dad was absolutely right! Clearly a very wise man with exceptional taste.

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