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Then too, one writes a letter simply to say something well, since so little is ever said well in normal conversation. A love letter may not be quite as satisfying as a love affair, but it requires a higher form of invention. The grandiloquent similes of which love letters are made—similes reduced to grunts and sighs when people are face to face—serve not only to heighten passion, but to make a frieze of it, to turn the lover into a craftsman. This may not be true of Mrs. Thomas Carlyle, who addressed a letter to her husband, "Goody, Goody, dear Goody" and signed it "Goody" as well; or of Zelda Fitzgerald, who once focused on the sartorial—"I look down the tracks and see you coming and out of every haze and mist your darling rumpled trousers are hurrying to me"—but it is true in the general.
It was certainly true of the sensational "Scarsdale letter" of Jean Harris to Dr. Herman Tarnower. That letter, with its confluent currents of rhetorical cunning, heartbreak and hysteria, is a remarkable work of art. One cannot imagine Mrs. Harris dashing off a note that read: "Dear Hi. Miss you. Jean." Yet one can too easily see Tarnower writing back: "Dear Jean. Good to hear from you. Hi"—the absence of things in certain letters being more devastating than their presence in others. Nothing says more than a light, frisky note to a friend in despair.
Yet the whole process is strange. Even the mechanical act is strange—hand takes up Bic or hovers over the Smith-Corona, while the inner voice, heaving between aggressiveness and trepidation, murmurs with all the subtle power of an orator on trial. But no one is there. First one addresses a letter to someone not present, then proceeds to praise, cajole, implore, indict, belittle or seduce the absentee, whom he greets as "dear" and to whom he finally pledges his devoted sincerity. Between the formalities he wants something, but it is not an immediate response. He knows that there will be none. A letter is not written for response but for effect. In that, it is not only art but a statement of esteem, since the effect is sought of a particular person. Even the bitterest letter is a form of homage. Samuel Johnson once wrote Lord Chesterfield, giving the earl a piece of his mind. But the mind of which the letter was a piece was the greatest in England.
Perhaps the best reason for writing a letter is to get rid of it, to take the words that have been lolling about the brain like summertime teenagers, and putting them to work. But here we come full circle. For, as experience proves, one is not rid of the words by writing them. Too often they boomerang, are snagged in the wind and snap back with amazing ferocity.
Odd to think that our moments of greatest candor are also our moments of greatest danger; that the same thoughts inscribed at the pitch of pure freedom return to place you under arrest.
So love becomes public ridicule, philosophy a loss of position, ambition a ruined career, and so forth—as if the gods were showing the full extent of their capriciousness.