NEWS FEATURE: Letters communicate more than mere words

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Could it be? There, in the mound of glossy catalogs and garish fliers, a glimpse of script on an envelope tells you that here is a letter from a friend. You’ll put all else aside for a moment as you devour its contents. Then you might tuck it […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Could it be? There, in the mound of glossy catalogs and garish fliers, a glimpse of script on an envelope tells you that here is a letter from a friend.

You’ll put all else aside for a moment as you devour its contents. Then you might tuck it back in the envelope to peruse later, lingering over the words, warmed by the thought that someone has taken the time to write.


Just to you.

She didn’t merely pick up the phone or boot up the laptop. Rather, she selected paper and thoughts, wrote them by hand, double-checked the ZIP code, found a stamp and dropped the letter in a mailbox. Nearly a primitive amount of effort in an era when impatience makes us zap “baked” potatoes in the microwave.

All of which makes receiving a letter even more pleasurable.

But when it comes to writing letters, here’s the chorus we usually sing: “I don’t have time.” “I’m no good at writing.” “It will take me forever just to write one page.” “I’m a lousy speller.”

Perhaps the last time we were good correspondents was in college, writing not just to our parents for money, but to friends in other cities to lessen loneliness.

Is it any surprise that often now, when we see the words “letter-writing,” they are accompanied by the phrase “the dying art?”Vanquished first by the telephone, finished off by e-mail.

That’s the popular conception. And indeed, U.S. Postal Service records for the period between 1987 and 1996 do show a slight decrease in the number of personal letters written _ from 2.7 percent of the mail received by a household to 1.7 percent. And that was before e-mail exploded.

Yet some people continue to write letters, often several each week. Others are recent converts to corresponding, inspired by old family letters they have found or by the longing to produce and receive something personal and tangible.

A few years ago, Jenny Clark of South Russell, Ohio, found boxes of letters that her maternal grandparents, Gordon and Marion Seagrave, wrote to her mother. The Seagraves were missionaries in Burma.


“I was young when they died,” said Clark. “Their letters _ besides being full of personal, family things _ were really a record of their lives in Burma from the 1920s to the 1950s.”

Clark, who teaches adult education courses in writing for Case Western Reserve University, had gradually stopped writing letters. To get back into the habit, she decided in the spring of 1996 to teach a class called Recovering the Lost Art of Letter Writing. Now she writes several letters a week, to family, friends and former students.

“We all long for connection with people, and letters have the ability to create greater intimacy,” Clark said. “They bring you close to someone who is far away in a way a phone call won’t do. It lights up your day to write them.”

Andrew Carroll never thought much about letters, though he had written and received a few. Then, when he was 20, his family’s home in Washington, D.C., burned down.

“The books, the CDs, those I could replace,” Carroll said. “But the letters, they were gone, including some I had gotten from a friend of mine who had been in China and had written to me about Tiananmen Square.”

A few months later, Carroll watched Ken Burns’ PBS documentary on the Civil War and was particularly struck by a letter written by Union Maj. Sullivan Ballou to his wife just before he was killed at Bull Run.


“He wrote, `Oh Sara! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you.’ It was poetry. And I thought maybe a collection of great American letters could be put together to really remember and honor these letters,” Carroll said.

He spent nearly seven years collecting letters from archives and libraries and from “everyday folks who told me about a story about a letter” to create the book “Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters” (Kodansha). It is now in its fifth printing and features letters from famous people and others, like soldiers and American Indians.

Carroll said that letters and letter-writing have now become a mission for him. He has started what he calls the Legacy Project to encourage people to find and save old letters and to spur children and teenagers to write letters to veterans.

“To me, letter-writing is the most democratic art form there is,” he said. “Anyone can sit down with a pen and paper and compose a masterpiece.”

Or just a simple, heartfelt message.

“I think that’s why so many people have responded to the book, because there’s a sense in society that we’re losing this craft,” said Carroll, 28, who still lives in Washington. “In other forms of entertainment, movies, the Internet, the human element is being pushed out.

“We need human contact. And a handwritten letter has the implicit message, `You are worth the time.”’


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Carroll quotes Thomas Paine: “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”

“It’s the difficult that’s valuable,” Carroll adds. “A letter instead of a phone call, a well-cooked meal instead of fast food.”

Carroll applies his belief in the importance of letters to his own life. “I’m adopted,” he said. “A couple of years ago my birth mother contacted me. I said, `Before we meet, let’s write to one another.’ And we did, for about a year. It was a wonderful way for us to get to know one another.”

His professional research showed him the stories letters can tell, beyond just the words on paper. “There’s a letter in my book that a soldier wrote to his father, just after he walked through the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp,” Carroll said. “I actually held the letter in my hands and I could see his handwriting and the flecks of mud. He probably wrote it in a jeep. That brings history alive like nothing else.”

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Many scholars worry that a dearth of letter-writing will cripple future research, particularly biographies, not just because of the details in those handwritten letters, but because of the subtler meanings the writing conveys.

Historian Edmund Morris wrote in the New Yorker in 1995 about all that he learned from reading the handwritten “farewell” letter Ronald Reagan addressed to the nation in November 1994, to say he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Since his youth and into his presidency, Reagan was known for writing several letters each day.

“After nine years of studying him with objective coldness, I confess that I, too, cried at that letter, with its crabbed script and enormous margin, so evocative of the blizzard whitening his mind,” Morris wrote. “… If Mr. Reagan’s letter had been keyboarded to the world, instead of handwritten and issued in facsimile, its poignancy would have been reduced by half.”


Eds: Anyone who would like to assist author Andrew Carroll with the Legacy Project on letter-writing can write him at 1058 Thomas Jefferson St. N.W., Washington, D.C., 20007.)

IR END THEISS

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