'As Permanently a Monument As Anything'

Once it was a commonplace: a letter in the mailbox, handwritten or typed, in an envelope most likely moistened with the sender’s tongue and sealed. A person-to-person letter, not junk mail, credit-card come-ons, campaign postcards, jury summonses and the rest of the direct-to-recycling refuse. The real thing arrived this week from a reader. Best of all, the message was commonplace, a greeting, a thank-you and good wishes, not a pastiche of what letter-writing manuals tell you to write. Reading it felt positively analog.

 In 1922, George Saintsbury published A Letter Book, subtitled With an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing. In his amusing and heartfelt introduction to the anthology Saintsbury writes:

 

“Cowper is perhaps the accepted classic in this style who has the least of apparatus: but even Cowper bestows a certain amount of care—indeed, a very considerable amount—on the dress of his letter's body, on the cookery of its provender. If you have only small beer to chronicle you can at the worst draw it and froth it and pour it out with some gesture. In this respect as in others, while letter-writing has not been inaccurately defined or described as the closest to conversation of literary forms that do not actually reproduce conversation itself, it remains apart from conversation and subject to an additional degree of discipline.”

 

Think of the great letter writers in English, in addition to Cowper – Keats, Lamb, Byron, Carlyle, Stevenson, Flannery O’Connor. Saintsbury includes all but the last (born in 1925). A good letter is an exercise in courtesy and a gift to its recipient. Marianne Moore (one of literature’s grand quoters -- a generous impulse), in an April 1927 column for the journal she edited, The Dial, cites Saintsbury’s book and writes:

 

“Of things purporting to be transitory, letters can be seriously a pleasure and as permanently a monument as anything which has been devised. With John Donne one ‘makes account that this writing of letters when it is with any seriousness, is a kind of extasie, and a departure and secession and suspension of the soul, which doth then communicate  itself to two bodies.’ One can safely affirm at any rate that a writer of letters is not one of those who know much and understand little.”