Yours Ever: People and Their Letters
By Thomas
Mallon
(Pantheon, 338 pages, $26.95)
“Oh, my dear
friend, my heart was trembling as I
walked into the post office, and there you were, lying in Box 237.
I took you out of your envelope and read you, read you right
there.”
So sighs Klara Novak in the 1940 film The
Shop Around the Corner. Fast forward to 1998, and
Kathleen Kelly in Nora Ephron’s “reimagining” You’ve Got
Mail sighs the same thing, but not at the post office. In tiny
sentences, she types, “I turn on my computer. I wait impatiently as
it connects. I go online, and my breath catches in my chest until I
hear three little words: You’ve got mail. I hear nothing. Not even
a sound on the streets of New York, just the beating of my own
heart. I have mail. From you.”
It’s difficult to not ponder what unites these movies across the
technical gulf when reading Yours Ever,
Thomas Mallon’s scrumptious new book about letters. He began
writing it in the early ’90s, just as dial-up modems were starting
to ferry e-mails over telephone wires and when, he is embarrassed
to admit, a first-class postage stamp cost just 29 cents. As our
words are made increasingly of pixels instead of ink, in movies and
in life, Yours Ever stands out
as a timely, eloquent, and appreciative profile of the letters that
make up our mailbag.
Of course, letters is a vast, if casual, branch of
literature. Mallon wisely resists the encyclopedist’s urge to be
exhaustive. Yes, hundreds of letters are sampled here, most by
people with starry names like Roosevelt, Freud, and Keats, who, it
is no surprise to learn, liked to inject the sinewy adjective
“real” into his missives. But Mallon does not choose the
correspondence he writes about merely out of “obligation.” Better,
he says, to let “enthusiasm” lead, a dictum he followed in
A Book of One’s Own: People and Their
Diaries, the sister volume to Yours
Ever published in 1984. This loose precept allows
him to include lesser-known sets of correspondence, like that
between the blind British tailor and blind British seamstress
during World War II who loved in word but never
met.
Only a few of the letters he mentions stand out as
boring or routine. Reading Yours Ever
feels like dancing, not wrestling, with Proteus; every time
you think you have the step down Mallon surprises—and delights. The
book is built to resist organization and to capitalize on that
element of surprise. Its nine categories—including “Absence,”
“Advice,” “Love,” and “War”—are “non-categorical,p;rdquo; he says.
This gives Mallon the freedom to talk about letters in whatever
order he wishes, and to return to certain writers, such as his
seeming favorite Charles Lamb, who compares letter-writing to
“whispering through a trumpet.”
True, readers might complain that some well-worn
favorites or mega-belletrists like St. Paul get a mere paragraph or
two—and in this apostle’s case, he shares those paragraphs with the
Sufi mystic Ibn Abbad of Ronda—but such complaints can’t travel
very far, simply because they’re to be leveled against books
written to different purpose. Yours
Ever is the product of Mallon’s spirited reading,
and in that way it is personal—and it is fitting that it would be
such, with a subject as personal as other people’s
mail.
Mallon reveals some of the interior temperatures of
letters—but not to the ungentlemanly point of being a gossip or
muckraker. He notices, for instance, that there are those who write
not just to the addressee, but also to themselves, like F. Scott
Fitzgerald. Flustered and at times detailing Gatsby-esque schedules
in his letters, he cautions his daughter Scottie. He tells her not
to be like her parents, though people will be quick “to deck you
out in our sins.” And as he notes at least once, he kept a carbon
of his own letters to see if she responded to all his points. “But
the copy’s real job,” Mallon writes, “was to keep those points,
especially the last one—‘Please work—work with your best
hours’—face up and available to the man still struggling in the
Garden of Allah Hotel.”
Within each chapter are several 1,000-word essays, a
form Mallon mastered decades ago when writing for periodicals
like National Review and
The American
Spectator. Entries on individual letterwriters
rarely exceed the few pages needed to meet that word count (which,
in fact, is the count of a meaty letter), but these clear, gem-like
glimpses are often biographies, or at least character studies, writ
small. As Mallon observes, “we are most ourselves when frantic and
fidgety” and letters, catching us unbuttoned in the off-hours, do
have a way of carrying the imprint of our emotions. Even our
pencils know when we’re mad.
A TYPICAL MALLON TURN goes
something like this: In the chapter “Spirit” there is discussion of
Emerson, who refuses the “velvet life” and believes “that Goodness
is the only Reality.” Suddenly this turns into talk about Flannery
O’Connor, who, while keeping her peafowl and walking on crutches,
her “flying buttresses,” warrants that the intellect “will cease to
be tyrannical” only once it is inside the Church and that, in
writing, “everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not
you.” O’Connor’s passing comment about the letters of Gerard Manley
Hopkins and Robert Bridges becomes a bridge into their letters,
which had trouble keeping “the separation of church and verse.”
Hopkins kept trying to bring Bridges to God. And so on Mallon goes,
as if he is opening nesting dolls every few pages.
The pace of the book is quick, especially when Mallon goes
for laughs. Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote more than 150,000 letters,
talked a lot about animals. Our critic-guide writes:
[Roosevelt] was also the most popular attraction in a
self-assembled zoo. Throughout his letters he is either pampering
animals (“I am acting as a nurse to two wee guinea pigs”) or
slaughtering them (“P.S.—I have just killed a bear”)….He observes
that a guinea pig (another one, not the one above) is “squirming
and looking exactly like Admiral Dewey.”
There are several completely off-the-cuff stretches of
beauty, too. Four years before he was shot in the head by a Nazi
officer in 1942, Polish artist Bruno Schulz wrote a letter Mallon
flags as “one of the most vivid assessments ever made of the
imaginative challenge posed by letter writing ”:
Spatial remoteness causes the written word to seem too
weak, too ineffective, powerless to hit its target. And the target
itself, the person who gets our words at the end of that road
through space, seems only half-real, of uncertain existence, like a
character in a novel….One probably shouldn’t say such things but
fight instead that weakness of imagination which refuses to believe
in the reality of remote objects.
And yet it is easy for the recipient of the letter, and
for us, to believe in “the reality of remote objects.” History
seems to take place in our present tense. There is famous,
frustrated, cloistered Heloise, writing to Abelard in the 12th
century, “Among those who are wedded to God I am wedded to a
man…What a monster am I!” There is “Billy” Faulkner, on his own in
New Haven at age 21, telling his mother that all he needs are
“shirts—shirts— shirts.” You can nearly feel the cotton when he
specifies to her to buy them with one button, please, not two, at
the collar.
Mallon notes the tendency for the e-mail—which dismantles
not just space, as the letter did, but time, too—to be brusque,
prickly, to be “so bluntly efficient that it often seems downright
angry.” Often the e-mail is not even “topped and tailed”;
salutations disappear and, when they do appear, they can seem
quaint, not simply unnecessary. Still, we’d do well to recall
Flannery O’Connor, who, instead of worrying about the death of the
novel, fretted over whether “the one I’m working on is dead” and
even embraced technology, as it was, preferring the typewriter to
the pen because it allowed for more expression; on it, you use ten,
not three, fingers to write.
The same, of course, can be said of the keyboard.
Thankfully Mallon doesn’t write to tell us what we have lost, veer
into nostalgia over hot pools of sealing wax and the turreted edges
of stamps, or roar about cultural decay. Yet, again, the appeal and
intimacy of letters is obvious, especially after reading this book.
As Mallon asks, “Who really wants to buy Casanova’s hard
drive?”
