The Amateur_An Independent Life of Letters

by Wendy Lesser

  “And that’s my only choice? Radiation or he dies?”

  “Well, Dr. Berger has a friend in Arizona who’s done some experimental surgery on cats with this kind of cancer. He cuts off their noses. Seems to work in just about all the cases so far.”

  “How much does that cost?” I asked.

  “Oh, say half as much—$700 or $800.”

  I didn’t really have seven hundred dollars, let alone fifteen hundred dollars—not to spend on “a cat,” especially “an old cat.” But when I stopped obsessing about the money I realized I didn’t have a choice: I couldn’t just let him die. And I also realized that the money was a safe distraction, a screen for all the other things I was trying to keep myself from obsessing about.

  “If we cut off his nose, he doesn’t have to have radiation too?” I asked the young whippersnapper.

  “Nope. See, in a cat this age, he’s going to die of old age anyway before the cancer has a chance to recur. Now, if it were a child—”

  “All right,” I shut him off. “Let me talk to Dr. Berger about it.”

  Back from his wolves, Dr. Berger assured me Ralph would be cute without a nose. That was the word he used: “cute.” I cleared out my savings account. The operation was a success.

  Cute is not the word that would have jumped to my mind when I first saw Ralph after the surgery. Horrifying, maybe. Repellent. Abnormal. There was a bleeding hole in the middle of his face. As I was leaving to take him home, other patrons in the vet’s waiting room turned away in disgust or fear.

  When I first came to Berkeley, over twenty years ago, I would sometimes run into a man on the street who had no face. He lived in one of the downtown hotels near the campus, and he could often be seen shuffling up and down Telegraph Avenue. Everyone who lived in Berkeley at that time remembers this man. I was told then—I never learned if it was true—that he was a former chemistry professor who had been in a terrible accident. I pitied this man, or thought I pitied the person I imagined him to be, and I tried not to look away when I passed him on the street. But I couldn’t help it. My eyes flickered involuntarily. Once I wrote down, in a notebook I was keeping at the time, a metaphor: “His eyes, surprising in the corrugated face—like a car whose headlights still gleam out from the midst of a badly crumpled fender.”

  When Ralph came home from his operation, I took him to my office to live. (I say “office,” but it was in fact my apartment, left over from pre-marriage days, strenuously held on to as a remnant of my independent life.) I had two reasons for taking him there. One was that I wanted to keep him indoors and I couldn’t do that with an allergic husband at home. The other was that I didn’t want my son to see him right away.

  “You can see him when he’s healed,” I said.

  “Will he ever get his nose back?” my son asked.

  “No,” I said. “But he’ll look better when it heals.” And he did.

  But still not cute. “He looks kind of terrible,” my son remarked when he first saw him. “Do you think he minds?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t think he knows.” But just in case, I tried not to mention the word “nose” in front of Ralph.

  Other people were not so delicate. “What’s wrong with that cat?” said someone who had come by to make a delivery. “He looks like something out of the movie Dick Tracy.”

  A few months later my sister and her husband came to visit from Los Angeles, bringing along their four-year-old daughter. “Do you want to come over to the office with me to feed Ralph?” I asked the children. My son told his younger cousin all about the operation. She agreed to come, but preferred not to see Ralph. (My niece is, like her mother, a very sympathetic and gentle soul.) While my son and I called him, she turned away her face. But by mistake she caught a glimpse. Then she reached down to pet him. “I was afraid at first, but really he’s kind of cute,” she said afterward.

  Toward the end of that school year, on my son’s kindergarten classroom wall, appeared a poster the teacher had made for the children. In one column were things that made them happy, accompanied by a smiling face. In the other were things that made them sad, with a frown. “When somebody you love dies” and “When a pet dies” were two of the entries in the sad column. At the end of the happy column, my son had contributed: “When a pet gets well.”

  For me, Ralph never got completely well. I missed the nose. I missed the way he used to look—any cat has it, that beautiful Egyptian profile. When Ralph sat on my chest and purred, I didn’t like looking up into those two rosy, gaping nostrils. And I hated the way he sounded when he sneezed. But I learned to live with it remarkably well, for me. Accommodation was never my strong point; it was always Ralph’s. But by the time he died—of old age, as the vet had promised—we had long since met halfway.

  THE CONVERSION

  his is not to say that I am entirely reformed. I am still one of the stubbornest people I know. My first response to any suggestion or criticism or recommendation is generally to say no; only later does it occur to me that it might have been a good idea. Change is always difficult for me, and resistance is at the core of my personality.

  I resisted e-mail for at least two or three years. Many of my Berkeley friends are academics, so they got it automatically as part of their jobs and then annoyingly sang its praises. “It replaces long-distance phone calls!” “You can dig up old recipes from libraries across the Midwest!” “It allows you to communicate instantaneously with colleagues from South Africa!” None of these seemed like things I particularly wanted to do. Moreover, I had strong if somewhat irrational reasons for resisting. I did not want my computer talking on the phone to anyone else’s computer, because who knew what could happen once you opened up those lines? I wasn’t just worried about viruses, though those were indeed a concern; but how could you be sure that someone wouldn’t sneak through the e-mail door and thereby penetrate your hard disk, stealing or at any rate messing up your closely held documents? I preferred to keep my computer chaste and self-contained, aloof from all potential communicants.

  And then, I didn’t see the point of getting those unreadable little messages that seemed to go on forever, with little or no punctuation. To judge by the e-mail I had read in newspapers and magazines (the kind that was always reproduced to show how fun and liberating this new mode of communication was), these emissions were somewhere below the level of the worst unsolicited manuscripts I receive in the course of editing a literary magazine. Why should I want to read more of the stuff, especially on a barely legible computer screen? What was the good of a technological form that erased the boundary between intimate friends and total strangers, reducing everyone to a digital printout? Where was handwriting in all this? Where was personal style?

  I should interrupt my screed to say that I am not a complete antitechnologist. I watch more television than just about anyone I know, and believe that Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue are among the substantial artistic achievements of late-twentieth-century America. I use the latest (well, the second-latest) desktop publishing equipment to put out my magazine, and rely on a rather complex database software to organize its subscriber list. I adore the fax machine and have long considered it the single greatest invention since the telephone—the fax machine, after all, respects and transmits handwriting, just as the telephone conveys the nuances of the individual voice. I am not, that is, a hermit. I constantly employ and enjoy electronic transmissions of many sorts, and I do not feel that they in any way sap my capacity to be an Emersonian individual. On the contrary, they enhance it: without all my little machines, I could not make a living as a self-employed, self-designated arbiter of cultural taste. In Emerson’s time you had to inherit a comfortable income if you wished to subsist as a man of letters; in our day technology can substitute for and even generate the freeing effects of wealth.

  But for some reason this dashing perspective, this resolutely cheerful optimism about mechanical progress, did not make a dent in my fear of e-mail. From the
viewpoint of one who has now crossed the great divide, I can see that my phobia stemmed in part from a category error. That is, I thought that “e-mail” and “the Internet” were identical: I believed that in order to communicate with my friends and colleagues I would have to place myself squarely in front of all the oncoming lanes of traffic in the Information Superhighway. Worse: I was persuaded that those snippets of generic e-mail clipped from the bulletin boards of the Internet represented what my own friends would sound like if I had to talk to them by computer. I wrongly supposed that the machine controlled its own content, that the medium (as we used to say, pace McLuhan, in the Sixties) would be the message.

  Why I should have believed Marshall McLuhan in this respect when I had long since discarded his views on television is a question that perhaps requires a cultural psychotherapist to answer. (I don’t know that there is such a thing as a cultural psychotherapist, but since I have recently learned of something called “ecopsychology”—which is designed to help us bond with Mother Earth—I assume there are no limits.) For some reason, fear makes us believe in false prophets, the more apocalyptic the better. Clinging to the printed pages of my old-fashioned literary quarterly and my beloved cloth- and paperbound books, I thought that e-mail spelled the end of reading as I knew it. After all, you couldn’t do it in the bathtub.

  I still wouldn’t want to read a novel or even a ten-page story on e-mail, and faced with that little message screen, I probably couldn’t compose an essay worth printing. But for daily correspondence, electronic mail has become my essential instrument. Like all tools, it is more than just a simple replacement of the previous technology—it acts on you as well as you on it, and it acts in ways you can’t always predict. In effect, e-mail has restored the personal letter to my life.

  If you are like me, you went through a phase when personal letters occupied a central place in your existence. You were probably in your late teens or early twenties. Possibly you were living away from home for the first time, or perhaps you had just embarked on your first long-term (and long-distance) love affair, or maybe you were traveling alone through Europe, or all of the above. The mail became your lifeline, and you honored it accordingly. You poured everything into your letters—the engaging details of daily existence, the special sights, the serious emotions, the witty observations—to such an extent that even journal-keeping, by comparison, seemed onerous and redundant. You tailored each letter to the personality of the recipient, delightedly imagining the eventual response to the in-jokes of a shared history. You received as good as you gave, and each day’s mail delivery marked an emotional high or low point. And then, at some stage, you grew out of all this, and household bills, business letters, magazines, and fundraising pleas came to fill your mailbox.

  Just as personal letters define a phase in an individual’s life, so do they also define a period in Western history. I didn’t realize this until I read P. N. Furbank’s review of the Oxford Book of Letters, wherein he remarks “how deprived the ancient world was, not having discovered the secret of personal letters—long, spontaneous, chatty letters, as funny as they can be made but not always just funny, and coming nice and often—the sort of letters you might have got if you had known Henry James or Bernard Shaw or Philip Larkin. You would have been expected to answer them, and that would have been marvelous too, at least for oneself. It would be like enjoying a second life.” Exactly. And, as Furbank goes on to say, “The ancients knew nothing of this. With what leaden spirits one would have received a letter from Cicero! One may hazard that this best kind of letter-writing began in the eighteenth century and really came into its own in the nineteenth.” Not coincidentally, this was just when the postal system was reaching a pinnacle of service, in terms of frequency and reliability.

  For one of the keys to the pleasure of letters lies in that half-buried little phrase, “and coming nice and often.” In London, where P.N. Furbank lives, mail is still delivered twice a day, and a letter posted first class will reach its destination anywhere in the United Kingdom by the next day. It is still possible to keep up a satisfying personal correspondence under such circumstances. For the rest of the world, however, mail is generally too slow to gratify the needs of the moment. You might choose to rely on the stamp and envelope on special occasions, or for particularly delicate communications, or if (like a young person in her teens or twenties) you live on a very limited budget; but when you have something important to say, you’re much more likely to pick up the telephone.

  The crisis in my attitude toward e-mail occurred when I realized that I would no longer be able to afford the telephone. I was about to leave America for four months, and to indulge in long-distance calling from England would be ruinously expensive. Nor could I tolerate waiting the two weeks it would take for the round-trip communication by post. It was e-mail or nothing.

  One problem with e-mail, though, is that it takes two actively willing participants. Anyone in the modern world can receive a postal letter, but only those with an e-mail hookup can receive e-mail. So I had to get my near and dear to join up at the same time I did. Among those I had to persuade was a writer in New York, a friend of over twenty years’ standing on whom I normally lavish at least one long-distance phone call a day.

  It always stops the conversation dead when I tell people, as I occasionally do, that I talk to Arthur every day on the phone. If my husband is present, he may get looks that imply, “What’s the story here?” Or sometimes I get looks that say, “Aren’t you a little old to have a ‘best friend?’” But the truth is, I’m not: I need to have someone there at the other end of the phone line who can sympathetically but analytically respond to all the little exuberances and travails of my daily life. And so, apparently, does Arthur—either that or he’s just humoring me. It’s not easy to explain our connection. Some people might say that the pleasure lies in vicariously experiencing an alternate life (the straight California woman who writes for marginal literary publications versus the gay New York man who works in the world of glossy commercial journalism), but that feels too schematic. I would say that, despite the obvious differences in our personalities (I am over-eager and intense, whereas Arthur routinely, and correctly, describes himself as “phlegmatic”), we share an essential element in our character; but that is no explanation, simply a circularly-arrived-at conclusion. Perhaps it’s just that we know each other very intimately—as well we should, after decades of daily phone calls.

  Since Arthur is even more of a technophobe than I am, persuading him to adopt e-mail was no easy task.

  “I feel very resistant to the idea,” he explained.

  “I know, I know,” I said. “I’ve already been resistant for three years, so can’t we take it as done?”

  Finally, I just cheated. I ordered his CompuServe introductory package when I ordered my own, knowing that when the user-friendly software slipped through his mail slot, he would be unable to resist trying it on. (Or, to put it more truthfully: I planned to make life miserable for him via telephone until he got around to applying his e-mail diskettes.)

  It was slow to catch on. At first Arthur and I used e-mail mainly as a toy, in between the more substantial communication of our transcontinental phone calls, and most of our electronic conversation was metaconversation, in that it dealt with the ins and outs of using e-mail. But when I left California on a Wednesday night, arrived in London on the Thursday morning, hooked up my computer, received Arthur’s welcoming message, and instantly e-mailed back—well, that was a revelation for both of us. Soon we were up to three or even four exchanges a day. The five-hour time difference meant nothing: he could post a note before he went to sleep, and I would receive it when I woke up the next day. And what I discovered, to my enormous pleasure, was that the electronic mode did not wash out his characteristic tones. On the contrary, he sounded in his virtual incarnation exactly as he did in real life: wry, observant, dryly affectionate, subtle, and sharp. Personal style, it turned out, did not get blotted out b
y the machine. In some ways it was even enhanced, with new opportunities for humorous self-expression and literary allusion afforded by the title spaces in our messages. “Internettled,” his title bar announced when he had been fiddling all day to make the machine do something new. “Later the Same Day,” I called one of my frequent messages, echoing Grace Paley. And it was inevitable, given the technology, that we would soon feel inspired to use E. M. Forster’s “Only connect.”

  Even in our differing responses to the availability of e-mail, Arthur and I were faithful to our respective personalities. Something of a self-styled loner, he built up a tiny, highly selective list of e-mail addresses and mailed only to those two or three people. (His willful resistance to technological self-education may have had something to do with this. “How do you communicate with those outside our parish?” he once complained, stumped by the difficulty of crossing over from CompuServe to America Online or Prodigy.)

  I, on the other hand, verged on epistolary promiscuity. Within my first week online in California, I had mailed to a number of my Berkeley pals, a long-lost classmate in Tasmania, three Londoners, my husband at his work address, my stepson at college, my father, my sister, a good friend who had temporarily moved to St. Louis, and my exercise teacher. I became an e-mail maniac, checking in every hour or so and collapsing with disappointment if I got the empty-mailbox beep. I found myself waxing expansive onscreen, chatting on about virtually nothing. I was responding, I now think, to the special enticements of the form’s mixed nature—at once private and public, solitary and communal, so that it seems to combine the two oldest types of American writing, the diary and the sermon. With e-mail, you begin with the former, alone at your desk, and end (if you use your “multiple send” button) with the latter, broadcasting to the whole congregation.

  One of the first responses I got from old e-mail hands, when I contacted them with my newly acquired address, was scorn at the impersonal nature of my mailing moniker. All of my friends, it appeared, had managed to craft idiosyncratic, sometimes poetic, always memorable labels for themselves. Using the loose conventions set up by most e-mail providers, they had come up with word combinations that were nearly as distinctive as their own names (and that often incorporated those names into the address). But CompuServe allowed for no such creativity: we were simply allocated a number. “Your address sounds like something from the Planet Zog,” one of my correspondents wrote. Another mocked me for my long resistance to e-mail. “This is just the kind of address I would expect a confirmed Luddite to get,” he noted. “Those who resist the machine are doomed to be punished by it.”