At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays

by Anne Fadiman

  Sir Walter Scott liked to tell the story of how he had once had to pay “five pounds odd” in order to receive a package from a young New York lady he had never met. It contained an atrocious play called The Cherokee Lovers, accompanied by a request to read it, correct it, write a prologue, and secure a producer. Two weeks later, another large package arrived for which he was charged a similar amount. “Conceive my horror,” he told his friend Lord Melville, “when out jumped the same identical tragedy of The Cherokee Lovers, with a second epistle from the authoress, stating that, as the winds had been boisterous, she feared the vessel entrusted with her former communication might have foundered, and therefore judged it prudent to forward a duplicate.” Lord Melville doubtless found this tale hilarious, but Rowland Hill would have been appalled. He had grown up poor, and, as Christopher Browne notes in Getting the Message, his splendid history of the British postal system, “Hill had never forgotten his mother’s anxiety when a letter with a high postal duty was delivered, nor the time when she sent him out to sell a bag of clothes to raise 3s for a batch of letters.”

  Hill was a born Utilitarian who, at the age of twelve, had been so frustrated by the irregularity of the bell at the school where his father was principal that he had instituted a precisely timed campanological schedule. Thirty years later, he published a report called “Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability.” Why, he argued, should legions of accountants be employed to figure out the byzantine postal charges? Why should Britain’s extortionate postal rates persist when France’s revenues had risen, thanks to higher mail volume, after its rates were lowered? Why should postmen waste precious time waiting for absent addressees to come home and pay up? A national Penny Post was the answer, with postage paid by the senders, “using a bit of paper… covered at the back with a glutinous wash, which the bringer might, by the application of a little moisture, attach to the back of the letter.”

  After much debate, Parliament passed a postal reform act in 1839. On January 10, 1840, Hill wrote in his diary, “Penny Postage extended to the whole kingdom this day!… I guess that the number despatched to-night will not be less than 100,000, or more than three times what it was this day twelve-months. If less I shall be disappointed.” On January 11, he wrote, “The number of letters despatched exceeded all expectation. It was 112,000, of which all but 13,000 or 14,000 were prepaid.” On May 6, the Post Office introduced the Penny Black, a gummed rectangle, printed with lampblack in linseed oil, that bore the profile of Queen Victoria: the first postage stamp. (Some historians—a small, blasphemous minority—confer that honor on a prepaid paper wrapper, inscribed with the date of transit, introduced in 1653 by Jean-Jacques Renouard de Villayer, the proprietor of a private postal service in Paris. But his wrapper wasn’t sticky and it wasn’t canceled, and thus, in my opinion, it bears the same relation to a stamp as a mud pie to a Sacher torte. In any case, Villayer’s plan failed because practical jokers put mice in his postboxes and the mail got chewed.) The British press, pondering the process of cancellation, fretted about the “untoward disfiguration of the royal person,” but Victoria became an enthusiastic philatelist who waived the royal franking privilege for the pleasure of walking to the local post office from Balmoral Castle to stock up on stamps and gossip with the postmaster. When Rowland Hill—by that time, Sir Rowland Hill—retired as Post Office Secretary in 1864, a Punch cartoon was captioned, “Should Rowland Hill have a statue? Certainly, if Oliver Cromwell should. For one is celebrated for cutting off the head of a bad King, and the other for sticking on the head of a good Queen.”

  The Penny Post, wrote Harriet Martineau, “will do more for the circulation of ideas, for the fostering of domestic affections, for the humanizing of the mass generally, than any other single measure that our national wit can devise.” It was incontrovertible proof, in an age that embraced progress on all fronts (“every mechanical art, every manufacture, every thing that promotes the convenience of life,” as Macaulay put it in a typical gush of national pride), that the British were the most civilized people on earth. Ancient Syrian runners, Chinese carrier pigeons, Persian post riders, Egyptian papyrus bearers, Greek hemerodromes, Hebrew dromedary riders, Roman equestrian relays, medieval monk-messengers, Catalan troters, international couriers of the House of Thurn and Taxis, American mail wagons—what could these all have been leading up to, like an ever-ascending staircase, but the Victorian postal system?

  And yet (to raise a subversive question), might it be possible that, whatever the benefit in efficiency, there may have been a literary cost associated with the conversion from payment by addressee to payment by sender? If you knew that your recipient would have to bear the cost of your letter, wouldn’t courtesy motivate you to write an extra good one? On the other hand, if you paid for it yourself, wouldn’t you be more likely to feel you could get away with “Having a great time, wish you were here”?

  I used to think my father’s attachment to the mail was strange. I now feel exactly the way he did. I live in a five-story loft building and, with or without binoculars, I cannot see my mailbox, one of thirteen dinky aluminum cells bolted to the lobby wall. The mail usually comes around four in the afternoon (proving that the postal staircase that reached its highest point with Rowland Hill has been descending ever since), which means that at around three, just in case, I’m likely to visit the lobby for the first of several reconnaissance trips. There’s no flag, but over the years my fingers have become so postally sensitive that I can tell if the box is full by giving it the slightest of pats. If there’s a hint of convexity—it’s very subtle, nothing as obvious, let us say, as the bulge of a tuna-fish can that might harbor botulism—I whip out my key with the same eagerness with which my father set forth down his driveway.

  There the resemblance ends. The excitement of the treasure hunt is followed all too quickly by the glum realization that the box contains only four kinds of mail: 1) junk; 2) bills; 3) work; and 4) letters that I will read with enjoyment, place in a folder labeled “To Answer,” and leave there for a geologic interval. The longer they languish, the more I despair of my ability to live up to the escalating challenge of their response. It is a truism of epistolary psychology that a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than Middlemarch will do.

  In the fall of 1998 I finally gave in and signed up for e-mail. I had resisted for a long time. My husband and I were proud of our retrograde status. Not only did we lack a modem, but we didn’t own a car, a microwave, a Cuisinart, an electric can opener, a CD player, or a cell phone. It’s hard to give up that sort of backward image. I worried that our friends wouldn’t have enough to make fun of. I also worried that learning how to use e-mail would be like learning how to program our VCR, an unsuccessful project that had confirmed what excellent judgment we had shown in not purchasing a car, etc.

  As millions of people had discovered before me, e-mail was fast. Sixteenth-century correspondents used to write “Haste, haste, haste, for lyfe, for lyfe, haste!” on their most urgent letters; my “server,” a word that conjured up a luxurious sycophancy, treated every message as if someone’s life depended on it. It got there instantly, caromed in a series of digital cyberpackets through the nodes of the Internet and restored to its original form by its recipient’s 56,000-bit-per-second modem. (I do not understand a word of what I just wrote, but that is immaterial. Could the average Victorian have diagrammed the mail-coach route from Swansea to Tunbridge Wells?) More important, I answered e-mail fast—sometimes within seconds of its arrival. No more guilt! I used to think I didn’t like writing letters. I now realize that what I didn’t like was folding the paper, sealing the envelope, looking up the address, licking the stamp, getting in the elevator, crossing the street, and dropping the letter in the postbox.

  At first I made plenty of mistakes. I clicked on the wrong icons, my attachments didn’t stick, and, not yet having learned how to file a
ddresses, I sent an X-rated message to my husband (I thought) at gcolt@aol.com instead of georgecolt@aol.com. I hope Gerald or Gertrude found it flattering. But the learning curve was as steep as my parents’ driveway, and pretty soon I was batting out fifteen or twenty e-mails in the time it had once taken me to avoid answering a single letter. My box was nearly always full—no waiting, no binoculars, no convexity checks, no tugging. I began to look forward every morning to the perky green arrow with which AT&T Worldnet beckoned me into my father’s realm of the unplanned and the unplannable. What fresh servings of spam awaited me? Would I be invited to superboost my manhood, regrow my thinning hair, cleanse my intestines with blue-green algae, bulletproof my tires, say no to pain, work at home in my underwear, share the fortune of a highly placed Nigerian petroleum official, obtain a diploma based on my life experience from a prestigious nonaccredited university, or win a Pentium III 500 MHz computer (presumably in order to receive such messages even faster)? Or would I find a satisfying little clutch of friendly notes whose responses could occupy me until I awoke sufficiently to tackle something that required intelligence? As Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald, de scribing the act of letter-writing: “Such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.”

  My computer, without visible distension, managed to store a flood tide of mail that in nonvirtual form would have silted up my office to the ceiling. This was admirable. And when I wished to commune with my friend Charlie, who lives in Taipei, not only could I disregard the thirteen-hour time difference, but I was billed the same amount as if I had dialed his old telephone number on East Twenty-second Street. The German critic Bernhard Siegert has observed that the breakthrough concept behind Rowland Hill’s Penny Post was “to think of all Great Britain as a single city, that is, no longer to give a moment’s thought to what had been dear to Western discourse on the nature of the letter from the beginning: the idea of distance.” E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.

  Alas, our Penny Post, like Hill’s, comes at a price. If the transfer of postal charges from sender to recipient was the first great demotivator in the art of letter-writing, e-mail was the second. “It now seems a good bet,” Adam Gopnik has written, “that in two hundred years people will be reading someone’s collected e-mail the way we read Edmund Wilson’s diaries or Pepys’s letters.” That may be true—but will what they read be any good? E-mails are brief. (One doesn’t blather; an overlong message might induce carpal tunnel syndrome in the recipient from excessive pressure on the down arrow.) They are also—at least the ones I receive—frequently devoid of capitalization, minimally punctuated, and creatively spelled. E-mail’s greatest strength—speed—is also its Achilles’ heel. In effect, it’s always December 26. You are not expected to write Middlemarch, and therefore you don’t.

  In a letter to his friend William Unwin, written on August 6, 1780, William Cowper noted that “a Letter may be written upon any thing or Nothing.” This observation is supported by the index of The Faber Book of Letters, 1578–1939. Let us examine the first few entries from the d section:

  damnation, 87

  dances and entertainments, 33, 48, 59, 97, 111, 275

  death, letters written before, 9, 76, 84, 95, 122, 132, 135, 146,

  175, 195, 199, 213, 218, 219, 235, 237, 238, 259, 279

  death, of children, 31, 41, 100, 153

  dentistry, 220

  depressive illness, 81, 87

  Dictionary of the English Language, Johnson’s, 61

  Diggers, 22

  dolphins, methods of cooking, 37

  I have never received an e-mail on any of these topics. Instead, I am informed that Your browser is not Y2K-compliant. Your son left his Pokémon turtle under our sofa. Your essay is 23 lines too long.

  Important pieces of news, but, as Lytton Strachey (one of the all-time great letter writers) pointed out, “No good letter was ever written to convey information, or to please its recipient: it may achieve both these results incidentally; but its fundamental purpose is to express the personality of its writer.” But wait! you pipe up. Someone just e-mailed me a joke! So she did, but wasn’t the personality of the sender slightly muffled by the fact that she forwarded it from an e-mail she received and sent it to thirty-seven additional addressees?

  I also take a dim, or perhaps a buffaloed, view of electronic slang. Perhaps I should view it as a linguistic milestone, as historic as the evolution of Cockney rhyming slang in the 1840s. But will the future generations who pry open our hard drives be stirred by the eloquence of the e-acronyms recommended by a Web site on “netiquette”?

  BTDT

  been there done that

  FC

  fingers crossed

  IITYWTMWYBMAD

  if I tell you what this means will

  you buy me a drink?

  MTE

  my thoughts exactly

  ROTFL

  rolling on the floor laughing

  RTFM

  read the fucking manual

  TANSTAAFL

  there ain’t no such thing as a

  free lunch

  TAH

  take a hint

  TTFN

  ta ta for now

  Or by the “emoticons,” otherwise known as “smileys”—punctional images, read sideways—that “help readers interpret the e-mail writer’s attitude and tone”?

  :-)

  ha ha

  :-(

  boo hoo

  (-:

  I am left-handed

  :-&

  I am tongue-tied

  %-)

  I have been staring at this screen

  for 15 hours straight

  {:-)

  I wear a toupee

  :-[

  I am a vampire

  :-F

  I am a bucktoothed vampire with

  one tooth missing

  =|:-)=

  I am Abraham Lincoln

  *:o)

  I am Bozo the Clown

  “We are of a different race from the Greeks, to whom beauty was everything,” boasted a character in an 1855 novel by Elizabeth Gaskell. “Our glory and our beauty arise out of our inward strength, which makes us victorious over material resistance.” We have achieved a similar victory of efficiency over beauty. The posthorn, a handsome brass instrument that once announced the arrival of mail coaches and made a cameo appearance in the sixth movement of Mozart’s Posthorn Serenade, has been supplanted by an irritating voice that chirps, “You’ve got mail!” I wouldn’t give up e-mail if you paid me, but I’d feel a pang of regret if the epistolary novels of the future were to revolve around such messages as

  Subject: R U Kidding?

  From: Clarissa Harlowe

  To: Robert Lovelace

  hi bob, TAH. if u think im gonna run off w/ u, :-F. do u

  really think im that kind of girl?? if your looking 4 a

  trollop, CLICK HERE NOW: http://www.hotpix.com. TTFN.

  I own a letter written by Robert Falcon Scott, the polar explorer, to G. T. Temple, Esq., who helped procure the footgear for Scott’s first Antarctic expedition. The date is February 26, 1901. The envelope and octavo stationery have black borders because Queen Victoria had died the previous month. The paper is yellowed, the handwriting is messy, and the stamp bears the Queen’s profile—and the denomination one penny. I bought the letter many years ago because, unlike a Cuisinart, which would have cost about the same, it was something I believed I could not live without. I could never feel that way about an e-mail.

  I also own my father’s old copper wastebasket, which now holds my own empty Jiffy bags. Several times a day I use his heavy brass stamp dispenser; it is tarnished and dinged, but still capable of unspooling its contents with a singular smoothness. And my file cabinets hold hundreds of his letters, the earliest written in his sixties in small, crabbed handwriting, the last in his nineties, after he lost much of h
is sight, penned with a Magic Marker in huge capital letters. I hope my children will find them someday, as Hart Crane once found his grandmother’s love letters in the attic,

  pressed so long

  Into a corner of the roof

  That they are brown and soft,

  And liable to melt as snow.

  MOVING

  rom time to time, after we decided to move from New York City to western Massachusetts, my mind came to rest on the dispiriting example of James Montgomery Whitmore, my great-great-grandfather. Whitmore was a Mormon convert who traveled by covered wagon from Waxahachie, Texas, to Salt Lake City in 1857. Five years later, believing he had received a divine call to serve as a missionary along the Utah-Arizona border, he sold his mercantile business, hauled his family down to Pipe Spring, bought livestock, planted grapevines, and started spreading the word. In 1866, a band of Paiute Indians stole a flock of sheep from his pasture, and when Whitmore and a companion followed their tracks onto the open plain, they were ambushed and shot. A posse of ninety men found their bodies twelve days later, buried under the snow.

  Though the chances of ambush in western Massachusetts were slim, I did not feel my family history augured well. My great-great-grandfather should have stayed in Waxahachie; maybe we should stay in New York. But every time I walked past my husband’s desk, I saw a yellow Post-it on his bulletin board on which he had copied a quotation from Elaine May: “The only safe thing is to take a chance.”