Our rapid-fire exchange reminded me of London in the eighteenth century. Or James Joyce’s Dublin, at the beginning of the twentieth.
In those times and places, people were accustomed to sending a letter to a friend and getting a response delivered on the very same day! In an age without telephones, the postal service made correspondence almost instantaneous.
On the fourth of this month, my friend Bob sent me, from Needham, a three-page typewritten letter in response to one of my recent columns. In it, he shared his view of spirituality, an outlook that differs sharply from my own.
The letter also carried less lofty news such as usually travels between friends. To my surprise, the envelope contained, in addition, a welcome bonus: a sheaf of eight new poems.
Bob is no kitchen poet but rather a serious artist whose work has been widely published. These particular poems focus largely upon his recent experience of surgery. Reading them, I marveled at his ability to develop insights into deep reality while under hospital-induced physical duress.
His material moved me to respond promptly. In fact, I sent a letter back to Bob on May 7th, the day after I received his. I expected that this swift exchange would most likely bring our letters to a halt for a while.
To my astonishment, however, I found in my mailbox another letter from my friend, on May 9th, the second day after I had sent mine. I thought it impossible that a reply from him could reach me in that short a time. The U.S. Postal Service, I told myself, is simply not that efficient.
This latest letter was a mere two typewritten pages long. It was sparked largely by something I had said about Stoner, a novel that I wanted to recommend to Bob.
I had never heard of this novel until our book group selected it for reading in March. Contrary to my expectations, I found the work a fine piece of fiction. Why, I wondered, had Stoner, first published in 1965, been so neglected and its author largely forgotten?
To my astonishment, Bob replied that, not only had he read the novel with appreciation, but that its author, John Williams, had been one of his mentors in graduate school. In the early 1960s, Bob had been at the University of Denver where Williams was on the faculty, teaching English and creative writing.
In addition to novels, Williams also wrote poetry, and good poetry at that. My friend Bob credits this teacher with nurturing his own efforts at poetry more effectively than all of his other teachers put together.
According to his former student, Williams was not without his personal problems. William Stoner, the protagonist of the novel, was also an academic beset with problems; and I wondered which of them the author might have shared.
I share these perhaps homely details of private correspondence as pointers to the pleasure that old-fashioned letter-writing can hold. The satisfactions of this activity are particularly well suited to later life. Many of us have more leisure than we once did. And we have accumulated a whole lot more experience to write about.
Yes, email provides almost instant gratification, but it also lends itself to sloppy expression. Walk into a bookstore and search for somebody’s collected emails.
You won’t find any. And, if you did, they probably would not make engrossing reading.
Most mail received at home by most people is not worth reading either. Unless you are a frequent writer of personal letters, you are quite unlikely to receive any such letters yourself. The advertisements and bills you get, no matter what, make the arrival of the letter carrier a non-event.
By contrast, Anne Fadiman, a favorite essayist, writes of the pleasure her father, the editor Clifton Fadiman, used to feel each day when the mail was delivered. In her book, At Large and At Small, she tells of the delight he found in this weekday ritual.
As the morning moved on, he would focus his binoculars on a mailbox at on the road below his house. When the flag on the box showed that the mail had arrived, he would tramp down to retrieve it and his day had begun.
He loved opening the mail, and finding whatever surprises it contained. As he experienced it, “the morning mail functions as the voice of the unpredictable and keeps alive for a few minutes a day the keen sense of the unplanned and the unplannable.”
Most of us have long since lost such pleasure, if we ever knew it. Modern technology, with its insistent rhythms, has drowned out this kind of subtle satisfaction.
My friend Bob and I, however, are resolved not to let time pass without at least occasional flurries of writing letters, promptly answered and quickly delivered.
Richard Griffin