To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  There was still a fondness for tradition: of the 190 people who replied to the survey, 82 per cent sent in their written answers by post.*

  But the behavioural details of the survey provide a valuable anecdotal glimpse into the attitudes of general users at a time when email was becoming part of the fabric of our lives. Nine years since the survey, the replies seem both quaint and touching, but they reveal more than mere nostalgia; the impact of receiving hand-delivered mail clearly extends beyond words on a page.

  ‘I can remember receiving my first mail as a young girl and the thrill it gave me,’ wrote a 68-year-old woman from Surrey. ‘Sometimes I would send off for something, like a sample of face cream or a film star’s picture.’ Her first pen pal was an American girl from Pikeville, Kentucky, who sent her Juicy Fruit chewing gum and a subscription to a girl-scouting magazine. Later she wrote to a Swedish boy in Landskrona and a Turkish naval cadet.

  An 83-year-old woman from Belfast remembered wistful letters during the war. ‘One used to put SWALK on the back of the envelope [sealed with a loving kiss] but my mother and father did not quite approve.’*

  A woman from Blackpool received four round-robins every Christmas, ‘mostly about people we don’t know or care about . . . No-one who sends them seems to have children or grand-children who are not brilliant. The minutiae they go into (We rise at 8am with the alarm and I bring tea in bed to F) is amazing. It’s especially difficult when someone you don’t remember or may not even have known is reported dead.’

  A 45-year-old man from Gloucester wrote that ‘real letters are quite rare and are usually much appreciated. They do make you feel that someone cares about you.

  I especially appreciate the rare letter I receive with beautiful handwriting on it. I do have one friend with lovely writing. It seems a shame to open the envelope, and she doesn’t write at all often.

  Not so long ago her much-loved husband died very suddenly aged 60, and she sold their house and moved. When she was clearing the cellar, the last cupboard in the farthest corner buried behind all sorts of stuff was found to contain both sides of an extremely lurid, passionate (and current) correspondence between her deceased husband and a Russian woman whom he was having a very steamy affair with and of which she was entirely ignorant. He had repeatedly promised to leave his empty marriage of 33 years for her (my friend loved her husband dearly and had thought the marriage, sex and all, to be going really well). The contents of all her husband’s meticulously copied love letters were appallingly wounding to her as indeed was the revealed fact of his unfaithfulness, just when she could no longer tackle him about it. Just when she thought things couldn’t get any worse.

  A librarian from Middlesex believed letters were ‘like a luxury, a gift – to be able to spend time thinking what to say to someone and trying to send them something that will cheer up their day.

  I hardly ever feel sending letters is an obligation. I find letters of condolence hard to write, but I know how much the recipient will appreciate them [and] I put in the effort.

  Often I’m not sure how to sign off. I used to write ‘Love’ to everyone but guess I’m now more cautious. With someone, e.g. a man, I don’t want to give the wrong impression, so I’ll end ‘best wishes’. Most female friends it’s ‘love’, some it’s ‘lots of love’. I may or may not put kisses after my name – fundamentally I think it’s naff. I miss having pet names, the way I did with my ex – the new incumbent doesn’t do that sort of stuff. Shame.

  How other people write to me . . . Well, not as often as I’d enjoy. Openly, usually, telling me about their lives, sharing jokes and silly things that have happened. They pick up on things I’ve said and ask about them. A bit like a long slow game of tennis.

  I enjoy reading published letters – especially the Bloomsbury Group, Frances Partridge, Dora Carrington (hers were brilliant, especially the little sketches she drew), Ruth Picardie (so poignant), Laclos’ Liaisons Dangereuses is an example of a fantastic collection of (fictional) letters; I was always very fond of the 18th century tradition of the epistolary novel.

  GAAA! A reader writes to David Foster Wallace's editor.

  I did get a nasty Valentine once, implying I thought I was wonderful and I wasn’t. Otherwise the closest to that has been the ones I found my soon-to-be-ex writing to his sister and former girlfriend, where he described me in less than glowing terms and wrote memorably ‘The sex was all right but I didn’t like the foreplay’. Maybe a little practice, interest or application might have helped?

  Love letters. Oh yes . . . In my time I must have written hundreds. The one disconcerting thing is that when I read them now (I have kept copies of a few) I realize that the style and content never varies much.

  ‘My darling X, I was so sorry when you went. I miss you. Today I have been . . . Yesterday I . . . Next week I will . . . I want you so much; I’m longing to see you again. You are so much in my thoughts. All my love.’ The sort of letter that I think Tom Lehrer memorably described as ‘To Occupant’.

  I have kept all the love letters I have ever received, with the exception of those sent me by my ex (now in a landfill site somewhere, or maybe recycled as loo paper – that would be apt). I have re-read some of them – it comforts me a lot to think that yes, I did love and was loved in return, and to think on the whole what nice people they were. It was very strange to find all the love letters my current partner wrote to me when we were together for the first time around. Nice, though, to realise that 25 years on we are back together now. So, despite the potential embarrassment to my son, I keep all my love letters and I hope I always shall.

  In the spring of 2013 I spoke to Megan Barnard about how an archivist may secure our historical future. Barnard is assistant director for acquisitions and administration at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and as such is responsible for one of the greatest collections of writers’ and artists’ papers in the world, particularly of the twentieth century. I’d encountered a few of the acquisitions when I was talking to Glenn Horowitz and Sarah Funke Butler in New York: Norman Mailer, David Foster Wallace, the Watergate papers. But there was rather more than this: some 40 million manuscript pages from the pens and ribbons of Conrad, Joyce, Beckett, Wilde, Eliot, Lawrence (T.E. and D.H.), Golding, Lillian Hellman, Updike, Stoppard, Anne Sexton, James Salter, Toni Morrison and Julian Barnes. These included original drafts, typescripts, diaries and letters, but there was also stuff for non-readers: Robert De Niro’s costume collection, a reproduction of Scarlett O’Hara’s dress made from the green baize curtains in Gone With The Wind, unique photographs by Walker Evans and Edward Steichen, a Mercator globe from 1541. Because the intention of the collection was clear – the best of the best available – and because it was Texas, it made perfect sense, as the Center was proud to point out, that a Gutenberg Bible would lie under the same roof as the first ever photograph (made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in about 1826) and the mask of the chainsaw maniac in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  In 2007, in celebration of the Ransom Center’s 50th anniversary, Megan Barnard edited a mouth-watering book about the institution, Collecting the Imagination, in which she introduced the documentary evidence of six centuries of creative toil and the lengths to which skilled and privileged people have gone to gather it. There is none of the ‘what we stole on our holidays’ feeling you sometimes get from visiting the British Museum; the Ransom Center is glass, money and auctioned culture all proudly employed for the air-conditioned inspiration of future generations. At the close of her book the editor anticipates the challenges of receiving the discoveries of the future. But in the six years since it was published, the challenges have hardened: only the obstinate are not on email today; few but the deeply recalcitrant won’t send their novels to their editors in Word (which may, if the ‘track changes’ option is enabled, allow an eye-straining but intricate insight into a manuscript’s drafting and ed
iting). The future storage of what archivists call ‘born digital’ material – that is, emails and documents that don’t exist on paper – is a headache not just for storage (preservation, multiple software programs and disk formats, copyright protection) but also for presentation and display.

  To ease their pain and share their solutions, Barnard and a group of forward-thinking curators from some of the world’s leading institutions – the British Library, the Bodleian at Oxford, the Beinecke at Yale, the Rubenstein Library at Duke and the Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library at Emory – have for months been working on a guidance document designed to help themselves, dealers and authors establish a framework for the future management of digital archives. ‘The stewardship of born-digital archival collections promises nothing if not routine encounters with the unexpected,’ the document reasons. Among the recommendations for dealers and donors was the need to ‘avoid manipulating, rearranging, extracting, copying, or otherwise altering data residing in the original source media’ before they were offered for sale. There was the issue of intellectual property: ‘A computer may be shared by co-workers or by an entire family and contain files created by children and spouses’; there was clearly going to be a problem in spending $1 million on an archive if a proud son was later going to make the same material freely available on a blog. Then there were things best kept quiet all round. ‘Donors may want to screen email files for sensitive and/or extraneous messages prior to transfer . . . If a donor is not able or willing to screen for sensitive messages, the repository will need to make a decision, in accordance with policy, regarding whether and to what extent to devote staff time to searching for information above and beyond what a repository is required by law to restrict.’ And then there was another problem not previously associated with the acquisition of papers from Emily Dickinson or Virginia Woolf: ‘In some cases computer media will have long ago sustained damage. Examples of damage to computers, disks, and tapes include a bent computer chassis or disk drive, a cracked cartridge case, an exposed internal magnetic disk, a scratched optical disk, and a floppy disk that is covered in dust.’

  ‘It’s a tricky time,’ Megan Barnard told me. She has been at the Ransom Center for 10 years. ‘We’ve been acquiring digital materials for a while, but in rather small quantities. But now that’s changed, and every archive that we acquire has a digital component, and that will only continue to grow. The initial question is how to get the material here in the first place. A lot of writers at the moment don’t think of their digital files as being a part of their archive. If we ask someone “would you be willing to send us all of your emails?” that frightens people.’

  Be your own Salman at this Mac Performa 5400.

  At Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, Salman Rushdie has suggested he has few such qualms. He has not only sold them his emails, but the rest of the contents on his computer too, and for good measure he’s thrown in the actual computer. One can now be a virtual Salman: in February 2010, Emory allowed researchers into ‘an emulated environment’ in which one could sit at Rushdie’s 1996 Macintosh Performa 5400, with floppy disc slot and CD-ROM tray (but no USB ports or FireWire and only 8 MB of memory). From here you can access his work files and selected emails and, all being well, write The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

  The Ransom Center does not, at the time of writing, have any archives made up solely of emails. One collection of correspondence between the novelist Russell Banks and his brother Stephen, four decades strong, is made up of a combination of emails and letters, with the electronic side emerging in 1994, the year Russell observed, ‘I just started using it and find it a fast and easy way to stay in touch with lots of people I’d otherwise write to only once in a while.’ Megan Barnard has begun to perceive subtle differences. ‘The contents still talk about writing, family, what their kids are doing,’ she says. ‘But the main contrast is that the response time is so dramatically reduced, which I think changes the conversation.’ The gap between the letters was sometimes substantial, perhaps a couple of months. The emails are rarely as long as the letters, although when printed out they do look fairly formal. ‘He’s still a wonderful writer,’ Barnard says, ‘but the emails are less of a unique, discrete work.’

  Not, of course, that this is a bad thing: but it is a different thing. Instead of envelopes with their clues of posting dates and place of dispatch we have electronic date stamps and other concealed forensics. Often, if one ticks the right box in the preference pane, they may automatically store both sides of a correspondence. Reading just one of Russell Banks’s emails next to one of his letters one detects slightly less of a literary tone, with afterthoughts quickly appended in the next message. We may assume a certain amount of deletion and back-spacing, because that is how we write emails ourselves; we don’t need such a clear head these days, for the same reason we do not need a pencil eraser or a blotter, or even a wastepaper bin: the machine does that for us now. And emails are simply less of an event and less of a struggle; the memory of that terrible aural whining that prefixed itself to any dial-up encounter with America Online and CompuServe is almost as archaic as the rattle of the Spinning Jenny. In the case of the Banks family, it’s as if the brothers are speaking to each other from adjoining rooms, and we should acknowledge this for what it is: a great and modern thing. We may miss the formality and pageantry of the post, and the luxury of thinking a little more before we write and send, but the informality and ease of email is our compensation, and few wouldn’t accept that as a trade. We now commonly regard email as a hybrid between a letter and a phone call – the pleasure of writing as one speaks, or at least how one soliloquises – the holy grail of letter-writers since Pliny the Younger felt the rumbling of Vesuvius.

  At the Ransom Center, and at the Mass Observation archive and the Kleinrock Internet Museum (and all other institutions that safeguard our creative past), a new comparative form of evidence is emerging – not just of the way we write, but the way we think about writing. Could it be, for instance, that our increasingly democratic access to email wherever we go in the world, albeit with some restrictions, has destroyed many centuries of social and political hierarchies? Is this anything but a good thing? And what have we lost, psychologically, by no longer owning our mail in physical form? Is a hand-held, ink-written letter more valuable to our sense of self and worth on the planet than something sent to a fortress of cables in the Midwest that likes to call itself a ‘cloud’?

  Creatively, the next stage of this thinking is just around the corner: ‘It will be interesting to see the correspondence from people who grew up only with email,’ Megan Barnard says, ‘who have never sent a handwritten letter. What’s really interesting is that we have a lot of young interns here, and a lot of them don’t even email anymore – they communicate by text or social media. That just seems shocking to me.’

  In other words, our current ways may already be history. What if email is just a fleeting distraction from the fact that we no longer want to communicate with each other in the way our parents did, or the way we have communicated for 2,000 years? What if we find that our standard substitute for letter-writing is but a temporary and illusory bridge to not writing at all?

  In the Flesh

  14232134 SIGMN. BARKER H.C., 30 WING SIGNAL SECTION, G COMPANY, AIR FORMATION SIGNALS, CMF.

  29th and 31st January 1945

  My Dearest One,

  I have just heard the news that all the Army men captured by ELAS are to return to their homes. Because of the shipping situation we may not commence to go before the end of February, but can probably count on being in England sometime in March. It may be sooner. I have only just left our Major giving the signal as received from Alexander. It has made me very warm inside. It is terrific, wonderful, shattering. I don’t know what to say, and I cannot think. The delay is nothing, the decision is everything. Now I am confirming in my head the little decisions I have made when contemplating just the possi
bility. I must spend the first days at home, I must see Deb and her Mother. I must consider giving a party somewhere. Above all, I must be with you. I must warm you, surround you, love you and be kind to you. Tell me anything that is in your mind, write tons and tons and tons, and plan our time. I would prefer not to get married, but want you to agree on the point. In the battle, I was afraid. For you. For my Mother. For myself. Wait we must, my love and my darling. Let us meet, let us be, let us know, but do not let us, now, make any mistakes. I am anxious, very anxious, that you should not misunderstand what I have said. Say what you think – but – please agree, and remember I was afraid, and I am still afraid.

  Chris Barker in Rome.

  How good for us to see each other before I am completely bald! I have some fine little wisps of hair on the top of my head. It is not much good me trying to write about recent experiences now that I know that I shall be able to tell you everything myself within such a short time. What I have my eye on now is the first letter from you saying that you know I am alright, and the next, saying you know I am coming to you. I must try to keep out of hospital with some of these post P.O.W. complaints. Plan a week somewhere (not Boscombe or Bournemouth) and think of being together. The glory of you. What a bit of luck I got taken P.O.W. When I was captive I used to try and contact you and think hard ‘Bessie, my dearest, I am alright. Do not worry.’ I never felt that I got through, somehow. But now it is over, and you know that I am alright and going to be with you soon, to join and enjoy. Do not get very excited outwardly. I am conscious of the inner tumult, the clamour, but I am not too much outwardly joyful. Moderation is my advice. Watch the buses as you cross the street.