Letter writing, while a sign of civilization, is also a high-risk occupation, and it is a wonder that anybody does it. To be sure, there are those who cannot help themselves—teen-age girls, for example, or the members of the National Rifle Association (who all write the same letter), or the people with urgent messages for public figures, which are usually written in green ink on triangular Kleenex. These are the extreme compulsives. But there are many calmer citizens, as well, who cannot bear to leave the stationery stationary, and thus get themselves into deep trouble. President Reagan's son Mike was among these recently when he wrote a letter soliciting military contracts, and dropped his father's name. The President advised him: "Don't write any letters." Much wisdom is in the warning.
There are exceptions, of course. Had Lord Chesterfield's father shared the President's sentiment, Lord Chesterfield's son might never have received those noble letters to which he paid no attention, but which have instructed the world for centuries. Zola would not have fired off his blunt "J'accuse" on the Dreyfus case.
Mann would have withheld his cool wrath from the Nazis in his letter to the University of Bonn. There would have been no greeting from Emerson to Whitman "at the beginning of a great career"no Groucho Marx to T.S. Eliot ("my best to you and your lovely wife, whoever she may be"). Had St. Paul decided to speak instead of write, the New Testament would have become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
Worse still, the world's great love affairs would never have been put to paper. Heloise would not have written Abelard; Abelard would not have written back. Ben Franklin would have quashed his flirting wit; James Joyce his raging jealousies. There would have been none of the sublime torture of the letters of Swift and Vanessa; none of the zest of Franz Liszt:
Marie! Marie! Oh let me repeat that name a hundred times, a thousand times over; for three days now it has lived within me, oppressed me, set me afire. I am not writing to you, no, I am close beside you. I see you, I hear you ... Eternity in your arms ...
Heaven, Hell, everything, all is within you, redoubled . .. Oh!
Leave me free to rave in my delirium.
If a man could not get that sort of thing off his chest once in a while, he might lose his self-control. Without letters the London Times would be devoid of its liveliest pages; there would be no great literary epistles like Pope's to "Dr. Arbuthnot"no epistolary novels like Pamela and Clarissa—a minor loss, but a loss nonetheless, the loss of a form. That is what a letter is, after all: a literary form, like a sonnet. It is not as defined as a sonnet. Still one looks for things to be said in letters that are not said elsewhere, expecting truth most of all. Even falsity in letters divulges a kind of truth—the false wit employed in writing to a clever enemy, the false cheer to a dull friend, the false authority to children, the false self-confidence to colleagues. Letters conceal almost nothing, which accounts for their power. Those few who have done them well ought never have been told: Don't write any letters.