We Should Write More Letters

Thoughts on paper. What a concept!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the practice of cleaning up the work of certain dead writers who were usually not great people in the first place. I just can’t wrap my head around how removing clues that add context to the time and place and give you a better insight into the characters in a novel helps anything. It’s not like I’m worried about Roald Dahl or Agatha Christie’s ghost being upset their precious, sometimes racist words are being toyed with; I just think trying to blot out the past to fit the present is a dangerous practice, one that ultimately only serves the people that make money off those books continuing to sell.

That’s why I continue to read letters written by writers I love and even some that I loathe. I know I’m a little obsessive about things, but if I’m a fan of a book or multiple books by somebody, then I really like to get into their heads a little more. I’ve always found it makes the experience more interesting and you get clues about the person behind the words in a way that you sometimes can’t from a biography that might have the writer or the people trusted with their legacy overseeing the process.

That’s especially true with A Private Spy: The Letters of John Le Carré. I’ve been working through it slowly these last few weeks since le Carré is a writer whose work I’ve been obsessed with for a long time but always wondered what he was like in private. His books are classics because he was a great writer, but also because he knew the world he was writing about, and he used spies and government workers to tell great stories but also as a way to explore human fallibility and show how the democracy sausage really gets made. His books are deep and le Carré’s background as an agent working for the crown always made me wonder what the guy was like. I got a lot out of his essay collection The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, but he wrote that for the public. It is filtered in some way. It’s the version he wants you to see. Letters, on the other hand, provide a different POV. They’re still hand-picked and likely edited by whoever is in charge of the project, but they still give you more of the story.

I’ve been thinking more about letter writing lately. I fire off countless e-mails a day to people. Some are a few words, others are hundreds or even—God help me—more. Some are to editors “just checking in” on things, others are to friends and some are correspondences with other writers that have little nuggets that I’ll think “Hmmm. That’s a good line.” I’ve been wondering how many writers out there are saving their e-mails. I know that’s a funny thing to think about, but sometimes I’ll wonder when I see writers who lived and died in the time of the internet whether or not there are electronic correspondences included when you hear news about where Toni Morrison or Joan Didion’s archive is ending up. I’d read “The Collected E-mails of Denis Johnson” if it’s possible for such a thing to exist.

I wish more people would write letters. Not me. My handwriting is trash. Pure garbage. I can’t even read it. But when I get the occasional letter, I’m often moved by how personal it feels and I always put it away in hopes that someday it’ll have a deeper meaning for some reason to people that didn’t know me or the person who wrote it. It’s a grandiose thought, sure. But I think sometimes it’s good to think that way. Who knows? Maybe one day you’ll find yourself sitting there, a bestselling and widely-acclaimed author and you’ll realize something is missing. You wish you could give readers something more than your work, but you can’t put your finger on what that is. I think that’s the nice thing about letters. They’re like that one meme, they’re a little treat for readers. And whenever I see a new collection of them come out I wonder if I’m going to continue seeing many more of them as we send all of our letters from our password-protected Gmail accounts.