To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  [At the pyramids] when I found a preventative on the place I had chosen to sit down on, I thought it was a nice combination of Ancient and Modern! Whoever told you Pyramids told the time was pulling your leg. No iron or steel was used, cranes or pulleys. Ropes and Levers only. Their erection was due to Superb Organisation, Flesh and Blood, Ho Heave Ho, and all the other paraphernalia of human effort.

  I am afraid this letter is not what it set out to be, but I have little doubt you find it acceptable. What paper do you read nowadays?

  I luckily secured a bed, a great help when one remembers the many crawly things. Flies are nauseatingly numerous, and fleas annoyingly active. (I got two from my left leg while writing this, earlier. It’s not often you can kill them.) Washing is a difficulty, petrol tins are our bath tubs. Squeeze a rag at the shoulder, and the water trickles interestedly down for re-use. Mice are a nuisance, scratching around. The ubiquitous, utilitarian petrol tin is here made into a trap, properly baited and it gets three or four a day for a time. They go in the tin which is on its side, then a lid comes down and they are trapped. Killing them afterwards is a nasty business, stunning, drowning, then burying. I have avoided it so far. Much rain lately has made an ornamental lake of the wide flatness; but we have now got grass and some tiny flowers where before was merely sand. I have transplanted some of the flowers into a special patch we have made into a garden. Bert and I play chess most of our spare-time, on a set we made with wire and [a] broom-handle. There are some dogs about the camp which is far from anywhere. No civilians. We have two pigs fattening for Xmas, poor blighters, though I believe the uxorious male has given the sow hope of temporary reprieve.

  I hope you hear regularly from your brother and that your Dad and yourself are in good health.

  Good wishes,

  Chris

  Chapter Five

  How to Write the Perfect Letter, Part 1

  There is a new pope. Hooray for his holiness. But how, in 1216, should you write to him about the management of your church? Or about a terrible miscarriage of justice? How best to address your student son about the dangers of excessive study? Or give warning regarding the unhappy events that befall students at the outset of their courses?

  All these problems may be solved with the purchase of the Boncompagnonus (also available as the Boncompagnus) a six-volume manual featuring all of the real-life examples above. There are others: how to write a grant application and a letter of recommendation, how to persuade people to go on pilgrimage and how to compose a letter to settle a matrimonial dispute. You could also learn how to write to jugglers about their fees. The guide was composed in 1215 by Boncompagno of Signa. A Bolognese professor of rhetoric and a master at chess, he had a reputation as a megalomaniac* and a bit of a prankster, but his letter guide is all business, particularly when it comes to money and the law, and how to write a letter of condolence following bereavement. The condolence templates, which formed the 25th section of the first book, were so diverse as to allow no room for error. There was consideration of the particular practices of the mourning habits of the Hungarians, the Sicilians, the Slavs, the Bohemians and the Germans, and the different ways to interpret the ‘bliss of priests and clerics’ and the customs of ‘certain provincials’.

  What was Boncompagno’s motivation for writing such a guide? He hoped that the well-written letter might go some way to correcting society’s ills, with the prime targets being injustice and jealousy. These ills, he believed, would plant the teeth of the hydra upon you, a beast that ‘never rests, but surveys the world, tracking down any sort of good fortune, and always it tries to find any sort of excellence, which when it cannot harm, it is confused, grumbles, shrieks, rages, becomes delirious, swallows up, harasses, becomes livid, becomes pale, clamours, becomes nauseated, hides, barks, bites, raves, foams at the mouth, rages, seethes, snarls’ and that kind of thing. But motivation and effect are different things.

  Aristotle, who believed one should write as one speaks.

  The medieval epistolary expert Alain Boureau has observed that Boncompagno’s manual was one of our earliest proofs of the complex and changing hierarchy of European society, with a classification that relied on a wide variety of positions and ranks rather than just divisions in the Church and nobility. Letter guides such as this bear witness to the emergence of a middle class, and the influence of the universities. They gave voice to a new grouping of people in villages and towns that had previously not been incorporated into either feudal or ecclesiastical worlds, many of them in the burgeoning legal professions. Soon merchants would demand letter-writing guidance of their own.

  But the Boncompagnonus was not the first guide to the art of letter-writing. For that we should credit a man called Demetrius, date uncertain, background unknown. This Latin tract has been dated somewhere between the fourth century BC and the fourth century AD, and the Demetrius at the helm may be Demetrius of Phaleron or Demetrius of Tarsus, although most bamboozled scholars have found it easier to consider the author as anonymous.

  What is clear is the certitude of the advice. The author’s brief is far less specific than many of the manuals that followed it, but its generality should be useful to all. He begins by questioning the advice once given by Artemon, the editor of Aristotle’s letters, that ‘a letter should be written in the same manner as a dialogue’, a letter being one of two sides of a conversation.* ‘There is perhaps some truth in what he says, but not the whole truth,’ Demetrius contends. ‘The letter should be a little more formal than the dialogue, since the latter imitates improvised conversation, while the former is written and sent as a kind of gift.’

  He remarks that the sort of sudden sentence breaks that are so common in dialogue do not translate well to letter-writing: ‘abruptness in writing causes obscurity’. Letters can do some things much better than speech. ‘The letter should be strong in characterization,’ Demetrius observes. ‘Everyone writes a letter in the virtual image of his own soul. In every other form of speech it is possible to see the writer’s character, but in none so clearly as in the letter.’

  With regards to length, a letter should be ‘restricted’. ‘Those that are too long, not to mention too inflated in style, are not in any true sense letters at all but treatises with the heading “Dear Sir”.’ It is also ‘absurd to be so formal in letters, it is even contrary to friendship, which demands the proverbial calling of “a spade a spade”.’ And there were some topics for which a letter was just plain unsuitable, not least ‘the problems of logic or natural philosophy’. Rather, ‘A letter’s aim is to express friendship briefly and set out a simple subject in simple terms . . . The man who utters sententious maxims and exhortations seems to be no longer chatting in a letter but preaching from the pulpit.’ Demetrius allowed for one or two exceptions to this, such as letters addressed to ‘cities or kings’, which permitted a little more elaboration. ‘In summary, the letter should combine two of the styles, the elegant or graceful and the plain, and this concludes my account of the letter.’

  By the thirteenth century, when Boncompagno crafted his advice, the range of letter templates available had expanded greatly, and their abundance fulfilled a need: letter-writing was not an intuitive skill. The craft of letter-writing was only beginning to be taught in European schools, and although Cicero and Seneca would shortly be back in vogue, their antiquity was not always suited to contemporary challenges. So there were two choices: the professional paid scribe who set up a stall in the market as if he was selling root crops, or the ars dictaminis, the self-help manual. The ars dictaminis would soon have a sibling, the ars notariae, which specialised in writing advice for legal and patent matters, but its main purpose was to provide a guide to writing ‘familiar’ or more personal and general letters, albeit ones that still bowed firmly to rhetorical tradition (and were usually designed to be read out loud to whoever was gathered when they arrived).

  Italy and France led t
he way, with England following their trail, and there were soon so many that it was hard to distinguish between them, the faddy self-help books of their day. The earliest available inspiration came from a guide by the Benedictine monk, Alberic of Monte Cassino, published around 1075, while a short and anonymous manual published 60 years later in Bologna was one of the earliest to give detailed instruction on the correct forms of opening address, the salutatio that was to remain a standard entry in general etiquette guides, cleverly combining the benevolentiae captatio, the securing of goodwill by flattery (the best technique was to induce a sense of fatherly or brotherly feeling, or failing that a sense of ‘fellowship’). A pupil may get his way with his master if he sticks to something like ‘To [master’s name here] By divine grace resplendent in Ciceronian charm, [your name here], inferior to his devoted learning, expresses the servitude of a sincere heart.’ The next three categories of advice were not too far removed from something we might expect today: the naratio (the latest news), the petitio (the real reason for writing) and the conclusio.

  One of the first such textbooks in English was compiled by an Italian, Giovanni di Bologna, specifically for use by the Archbishop of Canterbury, while Lawrence of Aquilegia wrote some of the first recognisable examples of the ‘form letter’, whereby a user fills in the blanks on a template by picking the relevant words from a list. The choice of recipients alone provides quite a range, from kings and archdeacons to heretics and ‘falsos infidelos’, the latter perhaps more deserving of a pub brawl than flawless correspondence.

  Soon the university cities of Bologna and Orleans were offering so many different professional guides that their authors, the master épistoliers, were called dictatori, a term which underlined their overbearing political influence. Many were members of the clergy, some also held teaching posts at universities. Their names were famous in their day: Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Arnulf of Orleans, Peter of Blois, Ludolf of Hildescheim and Conrad of Zurich.

  As with the more refined reaches of academia, many dictatori seemed to be writing for the sole benefit and approval of fellow dictatori; many of their letter templates describe the masterful art of letter-writing, a hall of mirrors. A prime example is supplied by Hugh of Bologna in his Rationes Dictandi from the twelfth century. After a slow and suitably grovelling start (‘To X, a very great scholar in the science of letters, a very eloquent man’ etc), the letter considers its navel: ‘The grace of God was not content, oh master and most revered lord, to make you a peerless scholar in the liberal arts; it has also provided you with a great gift in epistolary art. This is what is reported by an insistent rumour that fills the greater part of the world; this rumour could not persist were it not true.’

  Portrayed thus, master letter-writers of late medieval Europe bestrode society as an enviable combination of healer of the sick and rock god.

  Indeed, through the operation of an incomparable grace, you have known how to teach to your disciples that which God has given to you to know, much more quickly than other masters. That is why so very many disciples forsake the other masters and hasten from all sides towards you, as fast as they are able. Under your instruction, the uneducated are immediately cultivated, the stutterers are immediately eloquent, the dull-witted are immediately enlightened, the twisted are immediately made straight.*

  The letter-writing manual changed significantly during the Renaissance as humanism embraced Petrarch’s influence and, by default, Cicero’s. By the beginning of the sixteenth century we had certainly arrived at the modern sort of guidebook we would have still acknowledged as useful 20 years ago, the methodus conscribendi epistolis. The latest champion of the art was Desiderius Erasmus, the masterful Dutch humanist and perhaps the foremost scholar of his day; he not only ushered in the Protestant Reformation, but also found time to write thousands of tracts and letters on non-theological themes. His tracts confronted head on the Seneca-toned concerns of how best one should live one’s life (and not waste it: one of his most famous treatises was about folly). And his letters, of which about 1,600 have survived (he claimed to have spent about half of his life writing them) range from his rational defence of his stance against new Catholic doctrines, through his translations of classical literature, to far more personal matters such as the disappointing vintage of the local wines to his poor finances and health (he had debilitating arthritis, and in later years had to pass on writing duties to an assistant). And of course several of the letters contained the one recurring topic we’ve seen before and may see again: Erasmus chiding his friends and family for not writing sooner and more often.

  Writing in about 1487 from a monastery near Gouda to his older brother Pieter, a monk based near Delft, Erasmus pushed the guilt button from the start:

  Have you so completely rid yourself of all brotherly feeling, or has all thought of your Erasmus wholly fled your heart? I write letters and send them repeatedly, I demand news again and again, I keep asking your friends when they come from your direction, but they never have a hint of a letter or any message: they merely say that you are well. Of course this is the most welcome news I could hear, but you are no more dutiful thereby. As I perceive how obstinate you are, I believe it would be easier to get blood from a stone than coax a letter out of you!

  Erasmus’s letters were strewn all over Europe: he wrote to correspondents in London, Cambridge, Dover, Amsterdam, Cologne, Strasbourg, Bologna, Turin, Brussels and Lubeck. He believed there was ‘almost no kind of theme which a letter may not treat’, but he was largely a traditionalist, believing it preferable to have a studied letter than a spontaneous one: ‘rather . . . a letter should smell of the lamp than of liquor, of the ointment box, and of the goat’. Above all he liked the idea of the letter, the material artefact, the letter as the great discursive template for the modern world. If you write a letter well (which you could do if you took his strict advice), then you would surely declare yourself a man of that world.

  His letter-writing guide, compiled while he was a teacher in Paris in the early 1500s, covered some familiar ground (the clarity and aptness of expression), and he wrote particularly well about how the writer should above all be versatile: a letter should be ‘as closely suited as possible to the argument, place, time, addressee; which when dealing with weighty matters is serious, which with mediocre matters is neat; with humble matters elegant and witty; which is ardent and spirited in exhortation, soothing and friendly in consolation.’

  Half his life writing letters: Erasmus in furs by Holbein.

  But perhaps the most noteworthy element of both the manual and the collections of his own letters that Erasmus supervised towards the end of his life was that they were formulated not for the scribe but for the printing press, initially in Cambridge in 1521, and then widely disseminated through several other printing houses in Italy and Germany. However ironic it seemed, the art of letter-writing had found its greatest ally in moveable type. Far from inhibiting the art, machines only amplified its significance to history and ideas.

  Letters could now be collected and bound; printing ensured archiving, and a greater shot at survival; the unique letter cache, the rare fair manuscript copies – these would still be posterity’s wonderful and invaluable things. But now, for the great public thinkers whose collected letters were regarded as both history and currency, their discovery and safe-keeping may not be so necessary; libraries would take care of that from here on. The printing press brought with it the collected letters and the man of letters (and, within two centuries, women of letters too). Erasmus claimed that his letters were not history but literature, and now both arts would have their day, and it would be a lasting one.

  Two English publishers produced manuals that swiftly became vernacular classics, and to turn the pages of the first of these at the Bodleian Library in Oxford is to experience an early tang of Machiavellian intrigue notably absent from previous guides. The new letter specimens continued to be predominantly concerned wit
h respect – the correct form, the ever-humble approach – but now there were new considerations: technique, mild manipulation, clever compromise, advice on the use of letters to get one’s way. Cicero had employed letters to his political ends, and now there was guidance on how we could all do it.

  William Fulwood’s The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568) was the first bestselling guide published in English, enjoying ten editions in the next 50 years.* One reads it with a clear sense of the growing importance of letters in Elizabethan society, not least their use in bonding a society; largely through trade and other economic necessities, families were beginning to disperse. Fulwood’s work was translated from a successful French guide, but the author was careful to adapt as much of the local colour and situations as possible to his English readers, although he kept most of the addresses in his examples as either Lyons or Paris. Fulwood’s main appeal lies in his acknowledgement that most letters are replies to others, and the fact that the hypothetical situations he presents are not only practical but highly engaging. In one, he ponders the scenario of a merchant father suspecting his son of selling their silk goods at far below their market value. In the first letter, the father writeth unto the sonne.*

  Verily my sonne, though wilt be the occasion through thy evill behavior, to haste me sooner than I thought unto my grave: for one of these dayes in this Towne of Lyons many gentlemen and marchants confirmed unto me that all the clothes of scarlet which thou didst cary with thee are lost. Also I am advertised by my trusty frends, that sundry dames in Lyons go sumptuously arayed with our clothes of Silke, and thou of them hast none other payment, but that thou takest accompt secretly in ye night.