Don't Write Any Letters

By Roger Rosenblatt

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.

But their packets are comparatively small. Stacked up against them, the size of alps, are the letters that ought not to have been written. Oscar Wilde's salacious letter to "Bosie" (Lord Alfred Douglas), for instance, with its reference to "red rose-leaf lips," which was read aloud in court where Wilde's homosexuality was at issue. "Suppose," asked the opposing lawyer, "a man who was not an artist had written this letter, would you say it was a proper letter?" Wilde answered: "A man who is not an artist could not have written that letter." Which was true and witty. And Wilde went to jail.

In our own backyard, Jackie Onassis was stung by the publication of her "Dearest Ros" letter to Roswell Gilpatric, which was said to have driven Ari to Callas behavior. Billie Jean King's recent revelations were due less to a spasm of candor than to more than 100 letters she wrote her secretary. So it goes, from post to pillory. Lee Marvin made legal history a few years back when he lost a "palimony" suit to Michelle Triola Marvin. One of his letters to Michelle closed: "Hey baby, hey baby, hey baby, hey baby, hey baby, hey baby." It proved that he loved her.

Yet the damage done by love letters is peanuts compared with what letters have wrought in the spheres of politics, especially when love and politics collide. Warren G. Harding had a close shave in his quest for the presidency thanks to a love affair with Mrs. Carrie Phillips--or "Carrie Darling Sweetheart Adorable," as Harding once addressed her. Luckily for Harding, his fellow Republicans were able to buy off Mrs. Phillips and send her on a vacation that extended through the campaign. Yet even the passionate Harding must have had an inkling of danger when he wrote the adorable Carrie: "Destroy these letters!"

The mail piles up. There was the incident when Grover Cleveland was made to appear a lackey of Great Britain because Sir Lionel Sackville-West, then British Ambassador, was tricked into writing a letter stating that in the election of 1888 England favored the Democrats. There was the famous (and forged) Zinoviev letter, supposedly a directive from Moscow to the British Communist Party, that toppled the government of Ramsay Mac Donald. There was the Zimmermann telegram that pushed the U.S. into the first World War, and the letter General Douglas MacArthur sent Congressman Joe Martin from Korea indirectly attacking the Truman Administration, after which Truman directly attacked the general, and fired him. Truman of course wrote a splendid impulsive letter to Paul Hume, the Washington Post music critic, after Hume had savaged a concert of Margaret's. But the impulse was canny since Truman knew that every father in the country would be steaming on his side.

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."

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.

All of which seems to argue for taking the President's advice. Not that anyone will. Not that anyone should. All the prudence involved in not writing letters can't hold a candle to the brave helplessness of putting oneself on the line. "I have concealed nothing from you," Johnson closed a letter to a woman he loved, "nor do I expect ever to repent of having thus opened my heart." --By Roger Rosenblatt

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