The Letter Opener

by Kyo Maclear

  I remember the relief of reaching the end of the letter without shattering into a thousand pieces. And I remember reading it again, and again, foraging, feeling lustful and hungry, and engaging in magical thinking. How can he be dead? We have plans! There are concerts to see!

  The letter wasn’t one that allowed me to wallow in sadness, because it was so pulsing and real. It was caring without being careful—not a sentence felt calibrated or considered. I don’t think I’ve ever been so playfully and fearlessly addressed. Without knowing it, A. set the romantic standard for years to come.

  Midway through his letter, A. describes a trip he is about to take by truck, “about a 400-mile drive down a dirt road.” A hand-drawn map of Botswana shows the route with a broken line beginning in the capital city of Gaborone and ending in Dobe (“our destination”). Two stops are marked along the way. One is Francistown. The other is Maun. Beside the dot for Maun, there is a sentence: You’re sending letters here. You are sending letters, aren’t you?

  It makes me happy knowing that he wanted me to write. I know I would have. Although I wasn’t sure at the time, I now believe this was a love letter—not the kind that makes you feel prettier, happier, skinnier, but the kind that makes you feel more alive. It’s shockingly life-affirming.

  “Some letters are great. Only a few are indelible.”

  I rarely talk about A. anymore. I feel morbid when I do, as if I’m trying to impress. (“Want to hear the story of my first love?”) Most adults can’t accept this level of gravity in everyday conversation without discomfort. But when I reread his letter, as I sometimes do, it still surprises me; none of the energy has drained away. Some letters are great. Only a few are indelible. This one from a friend who died, this one from someplace else still reminds me: There is no such thing as feeling or living too much.

  Postcard Art

  The postcards that follow were created to mark the launch of The Letter Opener. They are mementoes of characters and scenes in the book, and were made by layering simple ink drawings, gouache, stamps and postmarks. (For the envelopes, I used recycled “dead letters,” purchased at John H. Talman Ltd.’s philatelic store in downtown Toronto.)

  The illustrations are meant to evoke parts of the story in the way a tourist card might use a palm tree to symbolize a Caribbean country—that is, they reduce as much as they reveal.

  I like collage because it appeals to my sense of memory and the way it is always a matter of partial details rather than complete vistas. Every book written is a letter in search of a recipient. Some days, when the winds are just right, a book, like a letter, will travel across oceans and deserts straight to a sympathetic stranger’s door.

  Read on

  Letters, Lost and Found

  Contrary to popular belief, the promise “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” is not the official motto of the U.S. Postal Service, though it is displayed on the post office in New York City. The words are those of Greek historian Herodotus, writing 2,500 years ago. He was describing the Persians who delivered mail by horseback.

  Mail delivery has come a long way since then, but we continue to be frustrated by letters lost, and delighted and fascinated by letters found. Here are some examples:

  • One of the world’s greatest collections of historical letters was discovered in June 2007 in a filing cabinet tucked away in the basement laundry room of a villa in Lausanne, Switzerland. Amassed by private collector Albin Schram, the stash comprised almost 1,000 documents penned by great monarchs, scientists, authors, painters, philosophers and musicians from the fifteenth to the twentieth century in almost every European language. One of the finds, a letter from Napoleon to his future wife, Josephine, later sold at auction in England for the equivalent of US$556,000.

  • Prior to the First World War, knowing how skilled clerks in the U.S. dead-letter office were at finding people, friends and relatives sometimes turned to that office for help. According to the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, one woman who had not heard from her son in 13 years mailed a letter addressed to “Mr. James Gunn, Power-Loom Shuttle Maker, Mass., America.” Using the meagre information provided, the dead-letter clerks tracked down Gunn, who was living in Lowell, Massachusetts. Mrs. Gunn and her son were soon exchanging letters regularly.

  • A Malaysian mail carrier kept 21,000 letters undelivered for up to four years. A 49-year-old post-office worker in South Yorkshire was arrested after 50,000 undelivered letters were discovered. And here in Canada, in May 2006, police charged a former mail carrier in Winnipeg with theft when they found in her home numerous bags of mail and parcels that were to have been delivered between October 2005 and February 2006.

  • In July 2007, a postcard sent from Queensland, Australia, in 1889 showed up at its destination in Aberdeen, Scotland, after spending more than a century lost in the Australian postal system.

  • Some of the oldest letters in existence, those of Pliny the Younger (circa 61 ad to 113 ad) of Ancient Rome, were not discovered until the sixteenth century.

  • New Zealand scholar Constance Mews was reading a fifteenth-century volume intended to teach people how to write well when she discovered that sample letters “from two lovers” matched the story and writing style of famous twelfth-century lovers Abelard and Heloise. Though scholars still debate the authenticity of the letters, Mews published them in 1999 as The Lost Letters of Abelard and Heloise.

  • The Toronto-area Undeliverable Mail Office of Canada Post processes more than five million pieces of mail annually—not counting 55,000 sets of keys (car, house, hotel) and more than 50,000 photos. The office says that it returns items to customers in 92 percent of cases.

  • In October 2007, a rewiring project at Arts and Crafts designer William Morris’s home, Red House in Bexleyheath, South East London, led to the discovery of a letter under the floorboards that had lain undisturbed for 140 years. Dated 1864, the letter was from architect Philip Webb to his friend Morris.

  • British author Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) wrote his earliest novels while working as a postman, occasionally dipping into the lost-letter box for ideas.

  • The U.S. dead-letter office used to handle sums of people’s money, and occasionally jewels, so in the early twentieth century, the office preferred to hire retired clergy, whom they felt could be trusted with valuables. Women were employed there for a different reason. Postal officials believed they had better analytical abilities than men and were there-fore better at deciphering confusing addresses.

  • Major John McCrae’s letter of May 13, 1915, to Dr. Charles Martin, found in the summer of 2002, contained the soldier-poet’s “best and most concise account” of the battle that gave rise to his poem “In Flanders Fields.” The letter was included in a packet of war letters to and from McGill University medical personnel. It was discovered in Yale University’s collection of papers from American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing.

  Further Reading

  Asservate, by Naomi Tereza Salmon

  In 1989, photo-based artist Naomi Tereza Salmon was commissioned to photograph personal relics preserved at Auschwitz in Poland, Buchenwald in Germany and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. As she writes in the introduction, “The things themselves were mostly fragments veiled in silence…All that was certain about these things was that they had once belonged to people and had meant something to those who had found and kept them: as last signs, as traces of memory, as relics, monuments, echoes, lamentations and accusations—as evidence of the crimes.”

  I was given this book by my agent after the publication of my novel and was sobered and moved by the inventory of objects included in the book’s pages. All had been, at one time, personal possessions. All had been confiscated as booty by the murderers. Isolated and meticulously photographed against a white field, each individual comb, toothbrush, rusted razor conjures a specific absence. (Who combed her hair at Auschwitz? Who groomed his beard with that
razor?) As Naiko observes in The Letter Opener, one of the most poignant aspects of inanimate objects is their longevity. They endure, and we do not; they are unspeaking witnesses who can never tell us where they have been and what (horrors) they have seen.

  FOUND magazine

  I am a voyeur. Most writers are. If I saw a letter lying open on the ground, my tendency would be to read it before attempting to return it. I am not necessarily proud of my inquisitiveness, but I also don’t think I’m an exception. We live in an exceedingly voyeuristic culture—a society of “letter openers.” Reality television encourages us to be peeping Toms. The entertainment/biography industry trains us to snoop and pry.

  When I started writing my novel, I had a notion that I wanted to explore North America’s seemingly insatiable fascination with other people’s lives, while showing that voyeurism, in some instances, pushes us to respond. Perhaps it is the “thinking voyeur” in me that finds itself naturally drawn to such morally dubious productions as FOUND magazine. FOUND is a treasure trove of anonymous letters, birthday cards, doodles and notes salvaged from the garbage. Each found item is printed alongside field notes from the person submitting it, explaining the location and circumstances under which the item was discovered. The contents are deeply personal, comical, heartbreaking, epic and mundane. It is a nosy person’s fantasy come true, and infinitely more provocative and stirring than the tabloids.

  The Pigeon, by Patrick Süskind

  Patrick Süskind is best known for his novel Perfume, but I still prefer his follow-up, The Pigeon. This beautifully crafted novella tells the story of Jonathan Noel, a fifty-year-old Parisian bank guard. Traumatized by his childhood experiences during the German occupation of France, Noel is a man so terrified of change and losing control that he has attempted to fashion a life of perfect equilibrium in which every uneventful day resembles every other uneventful day. One morning, a pigeon appears in the corridor outside his one-room flat, and in shattering his predictable routine triggers a profound internal crisis. The true triumph of this book is Süskind’s flair for capturing Noel’s agitated state of mind as he reacts to this outwardly insignificant event and conveying the depth of Noel’s social anxiety as he attempts to restore order. The Pigeon brilliantly accomplishes what I aspired to do in The Letter Opener: it tells the story of a quiet life jeopardized—and eventually enriched—by an unexpected arrival.

  Yo! Yes?, by Chris Raschka

  After having my first child in 2001, I was able to immerse myself in a world of children’s literature. Becoming a parent also taught me a kind of in-the-trenches Zen. One of the optimum states in Zen is beginner’s mind, in which the number of possibilities is endless. Yo! Yes? is one of the Zen-ist and zaniest books on our bookshelf. Two lonely characters, one white and one black, one withdrawn and one outgoing, meet up on a city street. One boy greets the other. (“What’s up?”) The other is wary. (“Not much.”) The first boy perseveres. (“Why?”) The other replies. (“No fun.”) The first one keeps trying. (“Oh?”) The other shrugs. (“No friends.”)

  They continue to talk and eventually become friends. (It could serve as a precursor to the relationship between Naiko and Andrei in my novel.) The entire drama unfolds in just 19 words and compresses the whole gamut of emotion—shyness, fear, curiosity, pleasure. Raschka gives new definition to literary elegance and economy, and I admire him greatly.

  The works of Ryszard Kapúsciński

  I have read a great deal of Ryszard Kapúsciński since his death in January 2007. Kapúsciński began his career as Poland’s first foreign news correspondent and went on to write such classics as Another Day of Life, Shah of Shahs and The Soccer War.

  He travelled all over the world and witnessed countless wars, coups and revolutions, keeping two notebooks with him at all times: one for recording facts necessary to file stories for his news agency job, the other for jotting down experiences that he felt were incommunicable but which eventually developed into the literary reportage for which he became best known. He is a peerless writer whose sometimes harrowing experiences were matched by immense literary talent and even greater compassion. He is a model of internationalism and provides a glimpse of what a global village could look like if we were only less anxious and more gently curious.

  Web Detective

  www.nickbantock.com

  Canadian artist and author Nick Bantock is well-known for having popularized collage and for his Griffin & Sabine books, which tell stories through letters that the reader pulls from envelopes. Click on “Art for Sale,” then “Mail Art” to see examples of his lost-letter works.

  www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04DONADIO.html

  “Literary Letters, Lost in Cyberspace,” by Rachel Donadio of The New York Times, explores the challenge the proliferation of e-mail over letters presents to biographers and cultural historians.

  www.civilization.ca/cpm/chrono/chs1506e.html

  For the rules of letter writing observed during colonial times, visit “A Chronology of Canadian Postal History,” and under the heading “1704,” click on “The Art of Letter Writing.”

  www.theromantic.com/LoveLetters/main.htm

  Read love letters by some of history’s most famous personalities, including Beethoven, Charlotte Brontë, Lord Byron and Voltaire.

  www.civilization.ca/cpm/npmceng.html

  The Canadian Postal Museum’s website features visuals of some of its historic artifacts. Click on “Treasures Gallery” and then “Airmail Letters” to read about missives carried by balloon—the first attempts at airmail—during the Paris siege of 1871.

  http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_plinyltrs2_intro.htm

  The letters of Pliny the Younger (circa 61 ad to ad 113), lawyer, writer and philosopher of Ancient Rome, are some of the oldest in existence. This essay on Pliny, by John B. Firth, is accompanied by links to the text of some of Pliny’s letters.

  To receive updates on author events and new books by Kyo Maclear, sign up today at www.authortracker.ca.

  www.canadianletters.ca/about.html

  The Canadian Letters & Images Project, begun in 2000, is an online archive of the Canadian war experience, with visuals and text of letters dating from the late 1800s.

  www.foundmagazine.com

  Established in June 2001, FOUND magazine is devoted to the “strange, hilarious and heartbreaking stuff that people’ve picked up,” including lost letters.

  http://farm1.static.flickr.com/178/402172497_4079299384.jpg

  Created by M&C Saatchi, Melbourne, this striking ad for the Australia Post says it all.

  Acknowledgments

  I feel extremely fortunate to be surrounded by a community of friends and extended family who fill my life with wisdom and humour on a daily basis. Many thanks to Jude Binder, Brett Burlock, Terence Dick, Mario DiPaolantonio, Brenda Joy Lem, Avi Lewis, Kelly O’Brien, Sarah Rosensweet, Sugie Shimizu, Frank Venezia, Megan Wells and the Maclears of Sussex (especially Andrew, Robin and Ingrid), all of whom kept me company throughout the writing of this book, and many of whom read earlier versions of the manuscript and offered significant insights. This book would truly not have been possible without the presence of four guardian angels: Eliza Beth Burroughs, Naomi Binder Wall, Nancy Friedland and Naomi Klein.

  Several of the events that take place in Romania, while fictionalized, are loosely structured around actual historical events. For help in limning background details, I wish to acknowledge the following books and authors: Out of Romania by Dan Antal, The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution by Andrei Codrescu, The Appointment by Herta Muller, Exit into History and “Obsessed with Words” by Eva Hoffman, The Seamstress by Sara Tuvel Bernstein, The Return by Petru Popescu. Of the other works that have informed this novel, I would especially like to mention the following: Eleanor Cooney’s Death in Slow Motion and Thomas DeBaggio’s Losing My Mind, two powerful chronicles of Alzheimer’s disease; Audrey Kobayashi’s Memories of Our Past: A B
rief History & Walking Tour of Powell Street, a reconstruction of Vancouver’s pre-war Japanese Canadian community; and Stephen Andrews’ Facsimile, a haunting series of portraits drawn from faxed obituary photos.

  Speaking in the Air by John Durham Peters, “Remembering the Dead” by James H. Bruns, “Lost in the Mail” by Jonathan Franzen and Paul Tough’s radio segment “Other People’s Mail” on This American Life provided helpful particulars on mail recovery. Let the Children Come by Robert B. Lantz introduced me to the Christian practice of object lessons. The “Czech author” mentioned on page 245 is based on Milan Kundera, who wrote about the “lost years” of Communism in his book Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts (HarperCollins, 1993: p. 225).

  The image of Rachel throwing valuables into the latrines at Auschwitz-Birkenau on page 286 was inspired by Chavka Raban-Folman’s testimony “The Liaison Agent” in Women in the Holocaust, eds. Jehoshua Eibeshitz and Anna Eilenberg-Eibeshitz.

  For those interested in an inside view of the fall of the Ceausescu regime, I highly recommend Videograms of a Revolution, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s fascinating video essay covering the events of 1989.