Fingerprint of the Heart

Likely there are many in the world today who take no cognizance of the sad state that letter writing has come to. The US Postal Service is losing money hand over fist while email works just fine to keep the wheels and cogs turning and to help people stay in touch. Of course, email has created the desire for further abbreviation and additional shortcuts, anything to make it happen NOW, to bring ever faster gratification. Then we come to text messaging which has made of ‘written’ communication an ugly half-breed type of expression. Yeah, say what you have to say in 140 characters. Do you suppose such practices are leading people (especially the young) to think in short bursts of half-language? Finally we have the gradual loss of cursive writing in schools, prompting visions of a future where people can read only printed words and like computers, everything is a matter of communication by ones and zeroes. How does that old line go? They’ll have to pry my fountain pen from my cold dead fingers.

Spent part of this Wednesday reading and looking over a short book on the art of letter writing, one sent by a friend who knows my fondness for the handwritten word. My impressions of the book are not all glowing however, since the overall mark of Writing Letters with Pen & Ink is a tad too Victorian for my own ideas on letter writing. Modern letter writing can be a vibrant experience without struggling to making your letters look like something from the writing desk of Mrs Hemphill-McPherson-Fitch. Relevant to the notion of a well-rounded ‘O’ and other graceful handwriting tips, consider this quote from modern novelist Jeffrey Deaver:

‘Handwriting is a part of a human being. It’s like our sense of humor or imagination. It’s one of the only things about people that survives their death. Writing can last for hundreds of years. Thousands. It’s about as close to immortality as we can get. Whatever somebody wrote is a reflection of who they are. It doesn’t matter how the words are made or what they say; it doesn’t matter if you made a mistake, or if the words you wrote are nonsense. Just the fact that someone thought of the words and their hands put those thoughts on paper is what counts. Your handwriting is a fingerprint of your heart and mind.’

On each of the pages in Writing Letters with Pen & Ink are quotes from prominent writers and others who have or had a few telling ideas on the art of letter writing…

Writing by hand, mouthing by mouth: in each case you get a very strong physical sense of the emergence of language…print obliterates it, type has no drawl. — William Gass, writer

Life would splinter asunder without letters. — Virginia Woolf

More than kisses, letters mingle souls;

For, thus friends absent speak. — John Donne

Machines have no grace. It cannot make a flourish, vary the thickness of a line, or tantalize the reader with a lapse into an indecipherable but lovely style. A good penman can make rivers that race to the sea, rivers as wild and dizzy as a flume in the Alps, as choppy as the Isarco, as wide and smooth as the Tiber at Ostia, or as deep as the Po where it rolls into the Adriatic. — Mark Helprin, writer

Like their modern counterparts, ancient envelopes were intended to protect the documents they contained and to ensure confidentiality. Most materials used for the document itself—papyrus or parchment, for example—were also physically suitable for its wrapper, and would have been close at hand. The Babylonians even encased their cumbersome clay tablets in thin sheets of clay that were crimped shut and then baked…the custom eventually developed of simply folding and sealing a letter in such a way that no outer wrapper was necessary. This was especially practical when paper was relatively expensive…the use of envelopes was discouraged in England before 1840 by the fact that postal costs were assessed by the sheet. Any form of wrapper, therefore, “would have resulted in double postage being charged.” — Joe Nickell, historical document consultant

If letters did not exist, what dark depressions would come over one! When one has been worrying about something and wants to tell a certain person about it, what a relief it is to put it all down in a letter! Still greater is one’s joy when a reply arrives. At that moment a letter really seems like an elixir of life. — from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon

The two quotes below are favorites of mine not found in Writing Letters with Pen & Ink:

MILLIMANT: O ay, letters—I had letters—I am persecuted with letters—I hate letters—no body knows how to write letters; and yet one has ’em, one does not know why—They serve one to pin up one’s hair.

WITWOUD: Pray, Madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters: I find I must keep copies.

MILLIMANT: Only with those in verse, Mr Witwoud. I never pin up my hair with Prose. — from Act II, Scene 2 of William Congreve’s play, The Way of the World (1700)

An odd thought strikes me: — we shall receive no letters in the grave. — from The Life of Samuel Johnson

A Lost Art

Letters arriving in the mailbox are always a welcome treat, especially those that display themselves as the real thing, or at least real in the sense of being handwritten in fountain pen and ink and with a stamp that isn’t merely faint red lines from a postal meter. No doubt many people lament the fact that these mailbox surprises are growing rarer by the year. Truth is, I’m surprised much of the time that my local post office is able to get anything delivered in semi-accurate fashion. Last week my houseguest sent five postcards to Tokyo. Not knowing that it wasn’t necessary, he included a return address (mine) on the cards. The following Monday all five cards were delivered—postmarked—to my mailbox.

Apart from receiving ‘real’ letters from time to time, I also enjoy reading the published letters of writers and other people with a special talent for interesting communication. In the letters of someone like E.B. White, Dorothy Parker or John F. Kennedy we can almost sense through the published typescript that their thoughts and comments were originally brewed and steeped in pen and paper. It’s not usual that we find letter collections that include the writing of a wide range of diverse names and personalities. Easy enough to find individual collections, but an ‘anthology’ of letters from a long list of familiar names is more uncommon.

America 1900-1999: Letters of the Century is just such a book. Naming only a few on the list, this book includes the correspondence of James Baldwin, Clyde Barrow, George Bush, Truman Capote, Albert Einstein, Cher, George Washington Carver and Janis Joplin. Editors Lisa Grunwald and Stephen Adler have done a good job of compiling an ecletic view of American thought during the decades of twentieth century America.

One of my favorite letters was written by the author of the Uncle Remus stories, tales that gave us the indelible characters of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. On Thursday, April 5, 1900 Joel Chandler Harris wrote to his twenty-two year-old son Evelyn…

Dear Evelyn: Your letter was waiting for me when I came home, but was not the less interesting because I had seen you in the meantime. We usually say more in a letter than we do in conversation, the reason being that in a letter, we feel that we are shielded from the indifference or enthusiasm which our remarks may meet with or arouse. We commit our thoughts as it were, to the winds. Whereas, in conversation we are constantly watching or noting the effect of what we are saying, and when the relations are intimate, we shrink from being taken too seriously on one hand, and on the other not seriously enough. —But people no longer write letters. Lacking the leisure, and for the most part the ability, they dictate dispatches and scribble messages. When you are in the humor you should take a peep at some of the letters written by people who lived long ago, especially the letters of women. There is a charm about them impossible to describe, the charm of unconsciousness and the sweetness of real sincerity. But in these days we have not the artlessness nor the freedom of our forbears. We know too much about ourselves. Constraint covers us like a curtain. Not being very sure of our own feelings, we are in a fog about the feelings of others…

Poet, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was an unusual man in that he pursued lifelong careers as both a businessman and as a poet. Until his death he was an executive of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, and in the meantime winning one Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards for his poetry. On March 21, 1907 he wrote to his future wife…

Dear Elsie—

I am so full of misery to-night that I am ridiculous. Every Spring I have a month or two of semi-blackness and perhaps the mood is just returning. Perhaps, it is simply a revulsion against old things—habits, people, places—everything: the feeling the sun must have, nowadays, when it shines on nothing but mud and bare trees and the general world, rusty with winter. People do not look well in Spring. They seem grimy and puffy and it makes me misanthropic. Spring fills me so full of dreams that try one’s patience in coming time. One has a desire for the air full of spice and odors, and for days like junk of changing colors, and for warmth and ease, and all other things that you know so well. But they come so slowly. Earth and the body and the spirit seem to change together, and so I feel muddy and bare and rusty.

…………………

Unrelated to anything but spring bloom is a photograph of my pet geranium, a small clump of leaves planted in the white urn about three months ago, and now….