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If letter writing is so perilous, why does anyone engage in it? The practical answer is that it is not letter writing that holds the dangers, but letter sending, since the trouble of epistolary communication, while it may incubate in the mind, only begins to hatch when the innocent sheet, scribbled upon, is folded into an envelope and propelled to its destination, where the egg reveals a harpy. Among Hemingway's recently published letters is one to Cardinal Spellman accusing him of "mealy-mouthed arrogance," but no one knows if the letter was sent. On the other hand, Andrea Emmons collected Letters I Wish I'd Mailed to the Man Who Divorced Me to Marry a Waitress, clearly regretting her restraint, along with her husband's lack of it. Were letters written but not mailed, penmanship might improve and no harm would be done. The great (and unacknowledged) virtue of the modern U.S. postal system is that it delays as long as possible the interval between inspiration and scandal.
Of course, the real romance of letter writing lies in the sending. That after all is the irrevocable act, the sign that one has the courage of his frenzies. In a way the sending of a letter is more interesting than anything the letter contains, since it implies an enormous faith in providence, which faith, unfortunately, is often betrayed by providence taking the form of a recipient's avarice, carelessness or revenge. One of the law's oddities is that a letter itself belongs to its recipient and the words to the writer; yet the words remain stuck to the paper nonetheless. Why write letters? To create at least a few moments in a life where thought and deed are amaranthine, and will not be fudged or withdrawn like spoken language with "I said no such thing" or "I didn't mean it that way, not that way." You meant it, all right. And that way. With all the patent dangers that letter writing affords, it allows us to face the fact that once in a while we really do mean something that way.
There are other reasons as well. A honing of the mind, for one; a chance at a brief surge of clarity before one's thoughts recede to their normal Floridian swamp. "Writing maketh the exact man," said Bacon, which is often the problem, since written exactitude and lawsuits are directly proportional. Not that letters automatically inspire clarity. Proust once began a note:
"I am writing to you out of an exaggerated sense of conscience and the fear of continuing to be dishonest in simply replacing with a different feeling one whose expression can persist in the other person's mind as the statement of a constant truth." That is a bit more oblique than Richard Wagner's opening of a request for a loan: "Dear Hornstein, I hear that you have become rich."