But perhaps my favourite single letter hangs above my desk. I have very little idea of what it actually says (and it is not the original letter, but a photo of it). It was written by Edouard Manet in 1879 to the art collector Albert Hecht, and the words are certainly less significant than what sits alongside them – two beautiful little colour sketches of plums and cherries. I have always coveted letters with illustrations – Edward Lear and Beatrix Potter sent fine ones with drawings of some of their most famous creations, while other artists such as Magritte drew sketches and cartoons they would never exhibit; another loss to email. I first saw the Manet letter at the Frieze art fair in London, and for a brief caffeinated moment thought I might buy it. It’s a small thing, about 25cm × 15cm, elaborately framed, and I thought I would spend a bit of my book advance on it, although I didn’t quite know how much the gallery, Stephen Ongpin, was asking. I figured maybe £5,000–£8,000, but how I dreamt up this figure I’m not sure. I made an enquiry. They wanted £180,000.
In April 2013, Unferth wrote that she had married her boyfriend with the loft space, and she had an update on her Letters in the Mail postbag.
I am still receiving letters from strangers! I just received one from Australia yesterday. I’m only getting a trickle now (You know, you should write a letter for them, for Rumpus). All the people I wrote postcards to wrote me back. One kid, who had written a very sad letter about feeling life was meaningless and about feeling suicidal – I wrote him a postcard with a list of things to do and he wrote me back with a photocopy of the postcard and a list of ways he was trying all the things I suggested.
I’m writing this in my small house in Cornwall. The place is called The Old Post Office Garage, and is built on the land where the St Ives post office used to maintain its delivery vans. It was converted in about 2000, and when I bought it a few years later it still had, under the stairs, one of those large wicker baskets with GPO (General Post Office) on the side. It used to contain bags holding thousands of letters, and now contains beach stuff like boogie boards and fishing gear, none of which I use but one of my kids occasionally roots around in. One might regard this as symbolic.
Earlier today postwoman Tracey rang the doorbell to ask whether the Royal Mail could install a sort of staging post somewhere on my driveway where she and her colleagues could store their letters midway through their rounds, so that they wouldn’t have to carry the whole lot on their backs or in trolleys. By ‘letters’ I think she meant to include Amazon parcels, other online purchases and junk mail. What it entails is erecting a grey steel box by a side wall on a concrete plinth, apparently all fully removable in a flash. There’s no money in it, but I get some sort of reward in stamps, and a warm feeling for contributing to the smooth running of the local postal service. I said yes.
Manet’s fruit stall from 1879.
There does appear to be a greater awareness these days of the value of letters as items of instruction and delight. I’m cheered by the huge number of online hits at Letters of Note, and by the enthusiasm for the recently published collections of P.G. Wodehouse, Kurt Vonnegut, Benjamin Britten, and the correspondence between Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee. But the future for letters looks bleak. The apparatus is changing – the privatisation of the Royal Mail was announced in 2013, the US Postal Service is planning to end Saturday deliveries – and who knows what will happen to communication now that emails are seen by the young as old hat, and tweets and instant messaging compel us to keep everything brief? When, in the not too distant future, email correspondence is published as an ebook, the ebook will look just like our inbox.
‘Ceci n’est pas un ballon a air chaud’: Magritte writes to a friend.
Recently at a dinner party I sat opposite a young bookseller who told me that one of her favourite books was – perhaps unsurprisingly – 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. She’d also seen the brown and melancholy film with Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft, and she’d liked that too. Hanff’s is the one book of letters almost everyone I know seems to have read: a true account of the postwar correspondence between a single bookish television writer in New York (Hanff) and the staff at a London booksellers called Marks & Co, located at the address in the title. She’s bullish and generous, and ever eager for clean, readable, affordable copies of Plato, Austen and the like, and the booksellers are erudite, proper, and keen to fulfil her wants list as best they can. In particular she strikes up a touching relationship with a man in the shop responsible for dealing with her demands called Frank Doel, who clearly likes his new client’s reading habits and forthrightness. And reading it now, of course, with Marks & Co long gone and the book trade undergoing another of its life-long uncertainties, it has an added poignancy. I like to think I’m maintaining that grand transatlantic airmail tradition with my new correspondent in Connecticut, albeit without the exchange of slightly foxed Hazlitts and austerity hams.
What accounts for the grand appeal of the book? Its brevity and simplicity play a part, as does its wistful elegy to a lost world. 84 Charing Cross Road is compelling because it’s about love: a love for reading, a love for writing, a love for the divergences of class and culture in what was perhaps the last period (the 1950s) when the Anglo-American divide meant more than just the missing ‘u’ in color. But it is also a love affair served up in a way only letters can – subtly, cerebrally, gradually. The book is an old-fashioned courtship, and its slowness engenders thoughtfulness and an honesty born of care; it makes us care, too, for in these letters we recognise ourselves.
Not long ago my editor noticed an interesting thing while watching Postman Pat with her kids. (For those without kids I should explain that Postman Pat is a preschool television classic, running since the early 1980s, a felt stop-go animation in which nothing really happens: so long as Postman Pat and his black and white cat are on their daily rounds averting tiny crises and spreading good cheer through the village then they are spreading good cheer throughout all villages, and, by karmic extension, the whole world.) In the most recent series, Pat’s world has been updated in small ways (he now carries a mobile phone). But most things are as they were, with only a small amendment to the famous theme tune. A while ago, the Royal Mail decided it didn’t want to be associated with Mr Pat anymore, as his show no longer fitted its go-ahead corporate image. So every child’s favourite postman saw the way the wind was blowing and changed the words to his song. In the new version he no longer brings ‘letters through your door’, but rather ‘parcels to your door’. And thus do empires crumble.
The decline in personal letter-writing has clearly accelerated in the last decade.* But the sense of the decline is nothing new: we have already seen how it had been remarked upon frequently in the decades before. In the mid-70s, in one of his letters to Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, writing from Hull University where he ran the library, says how good it was receiving a letter from him. ‘I don’t get many letters now, except ones threatening to cut off the gas or the telephone, or wanting £5,000 by 1st July 1976.’ What he wanted was a letter from one of the queen’s servants offering a new job in charge of the library at Windsor, where he would be given a house in the grounds. Better still would be a letter that began: ‘I am directed to inform you that under the will of the late Mr Getty . . .’
The way it’s going: a letter box pageant in Somerset.
In his introduction to Counting One’s Blessings, the collected letters of the Queen Mother, the editor William Shawcross remarks that in 1964, when Roger Fulford was editing the correspondence between Queen Victoria and her daughter Victoria two phrases he heard all over the place were ‘Nobody writes letters nowadays’ and ‘The art of letter writing is dead.’
The letters of the Queen Mother are surprisingly amusing, tracking the British century in a unique way. Her later correspondences, including one with Ted Hughes, are full blooded and feisty, but perhaps the best of all are her thank-you
notes for diplomatic and exotic gifts, which serve as fine examples to kids having to reply to unusual birthday presents. The last letter in the book is a thank-you note to Prince Charles for a set of large fluffy bath towels for her 101st birthday, in which she luxuriates in the thought of the towels wrapping her entire body (‘heavenly’) and reflects upon the shininess of the sea and sun in Scotland. And when, on an earlier occasion, she received a lavish box of chocolates, one would assume that a cursory ‘delicious chocs!’ would do, but no: they were ‘too excellent for words’ (perhaps the Queen Mum is being sarcastic here, not a regularly acknowledged Windsor trait). She then insists she has never had a box like them. ‘The extraordinary thing is, that they are all so good.’ (I can’t shake the image of her eating them in bed, propped up Cartland-style on a hundred frilled pillows, going ‘Mmmm! Caramel! Another winner!’)
The letters also track a century of brilliant valedictory sign-offs. Her first letter, from February 1909 to her father Lord Strathmore, when she was eight, mentions a ‘donky’ on an Italian holiday and ends with ‘Xxxxxxxxxxxxx Oooooooooo’. (I had assumed that the hugs suggested by ‘o’ were a fairly recent thing, but apparently not – I do know that the ‘x’s on a letter developed from the practice of drawing a cross on a document in medieval times as an act of god-fearing sincerity and faith, and then kissing it; the ‘x’ just became shorthand.) Writing to her mother seven years later, in the middle of the war, having just that morning taken some exams in Hackney (travelling by bus and tram, seven years from becoming a duchess) Elizabeth still ends with ‘ooooooxxxxxxxxx’. And gradually, as her responsibilities deepen and her letter duties increase, we get the spread of ‘I am, Yours very sincerely’ (to Churchill) and ‘Ever yours affect’ (to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia) and ‘your sincere friend’ (to Eleanor Roosevelt). But the best sign-off of all – now famous I think, or if not it should be – came in the midst of war in February 1941. Elizabeth was in Buckingham Palace, writing to her friend Elizabeth Elphinstone, a nurse who had recently lost a brother in the conflict. The queen sends her sympathy, and admits she is as frightened of bombs and gunfire as she was at the beginning of the war, and how her heart still ‘hammers’ at the sound. And then she says goodbye. But it is not just any farewell. It is:
Tinkety tonk old fruit, & down with the Nazis
Always your loving
Peter
No idea what the Peter thing is about, but she may have picked up ‘tinkerty tonk’, with an ‘r’, from P.G. Wodehouse.
Katherine Mansfield once wrote to a friend, ‘This is not a letter but my arms around you for a brief moment,’ and perhaps all personal letters should feel like that at the end.
So how to close a book about letters? You can’t go wrong with the simple ‘Yours’ of course, and ‘Farewell’ has survived intact for more than 2,000 years. But I think I’m going with the Queen Mum on this one.
So tinkety tonk old fruit, and down with the Nazis forever. It’s been a pleasure writing to you.
Acknowledgements
Thank-you letters are among the last to disappear. Here is mine. I owe a considerable debt to those who have helped me explain the true and lasting worth of correspondence. In a general survey such as this, an author necessarily relies upon a great deal of scholarship to provide both context and expert detail, and I am grateful to all the authors listed in the bibliography. If you require further illumination, it’s the perfect place to start.
A number of people also shared their wide-ranging experience and analysis in person, and the book would have been much poorer without them. In addition to those interviewed and mentioned in the text, I would like to thank Stephen Carl-ing, Craig Taylor, Paul Tough, Lenka Clayton, Michael Crowe, Lucy Norkus, Simon Roberts, Richard Tomlinson, Suzanne Hodgart, Richard Ferraro, Emma Banner, and Geoff Woad.
The remarkable wartime narrative threaded through the book is testament not only to the power of letters, but to the rigours of careful stewardship. Chris Barker and Bessie Moore are responsible for the first act, and Bernard Barker and Katy Edge for the second. The latter pair not only recognized the letters for what they are (ie a significant and highly entertaining read), but they have ordered and transcribed them into a form that has made them accessible to all. I only stepped in once this initial legwork had been done, and without it I may have found my own editing role far too daunting a task. The letters you have read should be regarded as merely a taster of the whole correspondence; perhaps in the near future a longer version will reveal further rewards. Chris Barker’s papers (the letters and many other documents) have found the ideal home at the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex, where they are under the watchful stewardship of Fiona Courage, Jessica Scantlebury and their colleagues.
This book has benefitted greatly from the inspiration of three main custodians at Canongate. I would like to thank Nick Davies, Anya Serota and Jenny Lord for their careful suggestions and creative editorial stewardship – it’s been a pleasure working with three such talented and inspiring individuals. Natasha Hodgson has proved a tireless editorial assistant in securing permissions and illustration rights, and Vicki Rutherford has guided the manuscript through every process with seemingly effortless grace. I also wish to thank Jenny Todd for her long-range vision, Anna Frame for her publicity nous, Rafaela Romaya for the beautiful cover design, Sîan Gibson for her sales knowledge and Caroline Gorham and Laura Cole for managing production. And then there’s Jamie Byng, a force of nature and a force for irrepressible literary good. Thanks for making me feel instantly at home.
In the United States, Gotham has again proved itself the perfect transatlantic companion. In particular I wish to thank Bill Shinker, Jessica Sindler, Charlie Conrad, Lisa Johnson and Beth Parker.
I’ve been blessed once again with the witty inventiveness of James Alexander at Jade Design, while Seán Costello saved me from multiple embarrassments with his painstaking copy-editing. I have always relied on the staff and the shelves at the London Library to lead me to the best material, but never more so than with this subject. My agent Rosemary Scoular at United Artists has become a true friend.
I met my wife, Justine Kanter, at a point where love emails and texts had already taken over from love letters, so this book is an attempt to reverse the process.
Select Bibliography
Abelard and Heloise, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, translated by Betty Radice (Penguin Books, London, 1974)
Bannet, Eve Tavor, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005)
Beale, Philip O., England’s Mail: Two Millennia of Letter Writing (Tempus, Stroud, 2005)
Beard, Mary Confronting The Classics (Profile Books, London, 2013)
Bishop, Elizabeth, Words in Air: the Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Faber and Faber, London, 2008)
Bowman, Alan.K. et al., Oxyrhynchus: A City and Its Texts (Egypt Exploration Society, London, 2007)
Bowman, Alan K., Life and Letters on the Roman frontier: Vindolanda and Its People (British Museum, London, 2003)
Bradford, May, A Hospital Letter-Writer in France (Methuen, London, 1920)
Brown, Richard D., Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America 1700–1865 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989)
Campbell-Smith, Duncan, Masters of the Post: the Authorized History of the Royal Mail (Allen Lane, London, 2011)
Chartier, Roger et al., Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997)
Cicero, Letters of Cicero, translated by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (George Bell and Sons, London, 1899)
Creswell, Harry B., The Honeywood File (Architectural Press, London, 1929)
Daybell, James, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture
and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2012)
Dearborn, Mary V., The Happiest Man Alive: a Biography of Henry Miller (HarperCollins, London, 1991)
Decker, William Merrill, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1998)
Earle, Rebecca, ed., Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter- Writers, 1600–1945 (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999)
Freeman, John, The Tyranny of E-mail: the 4,000-year Journey to Your Inbox (Scribner, New York, 2009)
Garfield, Simon, The Error World (Faber and Faber, London, 2008)
Hafner, Katie and Lyon, Matthew: Where Wizards Stay Up Late: the Origins of the Internet (Touchstone, New York, 1996)
Hanff, Helene, 84, Charing Cross Road (Andre Deutsch, London, 1971)
Henkin, David M., The Postal Age: the Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006)
Hughes, Ted, Letters of Ted Hughes (Faber and Faber, London 2007)
Keats, John, Selected letters of John Keats, edited by Grant F. Scott (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2002)
Kerherve, Alain, ed., The Ladies Complete Letter Writer (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2010)
Klauck, Hans-Josef and Bailey, Daniel P., Ancient Letters and the New Testament: a Guide to Context and Exegesis (Baylor University Press, Waco, Texas, 2006)
Lewins, William, Her Majesty’s Mails: The British Post-Office (Samson and Marston, London, 1864)
Little, Peter, Communication in Business (Longmans, London,1965)
Mallon, Thomas, Yours Ever: People and Their Letters (Pantheon, New York, 2009)
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