To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  A story is told of Oscar Wilde: he would write a letter at his Chelsea home in Tite Street (or, looking at his handwriting, ‘dash off’ is probably more accurate), and because he was so brilliant and so busy being brilliant, he wouldn’t bother to mail it. Instead, he would attach a stamp and throw the letter out of the window. He would be as certain as he could be that someone passing would see the letter, assume it had been dropped by accident, and put it into the nearest letterbox. If we all did this it wouldn’t really work, but only people like Wilde had the nonchalant faith. How many letters didn’t reach the letterbox and the intended recipient we will never know, but we can be fairly sure that if the method didn’t work well, or if too many were neglected because they landed in manure, Wilde would have stopped doing it. And there are a lot of letters from Tite Street and elsewhere that have survived him to reach handy auction prices. There’s no proper moral to this story, but it does conjure up a rather vivid picture of late-Victorian London: the horse-drawn traffic on the cobbled street below, the bustle, the clatter and the chat, and someone, probably wearing a hat, picking up a letter and doing the right thing, because going to the postbox was what one did as part of life’s daily conversation.*

  There is an intrinsic integrity about letters that is lacking from other forms of written communication. Some of this has to do with the application of hand to paper, or the rolling of the paper through the typewriter, the effort to get things right first time, the perceptive gathering of purpose. But I think it also has something to do with the mode of transmission, the knowledge of what happens to the letter when sealed. We know where to post it, roughly when it will be collected, the fact that it will be dumped from a bag, sorted, delivered to a van, train or similar, and then the same thing the other end in reverse. We have no idea about where email goes when we hit send. We couldn’t track the journey even if we cared to; in the end, it’s just another vanishing. No one in a stinky brown work coat wearily answers the phone at the dead email office. If it doesn’t arrive we just send it again. But it almost always arrives, with no essence of human journey at all. The ethereal carrier is anonymous and odourless, and carries neither postmark nor scuff nor crease. The woman goes into a box and emerges unblemished. The toil has gone, and with it some of the rewards.

  I wanted to write a book about those rewards. It would include a glimpse of some of the great correspondents and correspondences of the past, fold in a little history of mail, consider how we value, collect and archive letters in our lives, and look at how we were once firmly instructed to write such things. And I was keen to encounter those who felt similarly enthused about letters, some of them so much so that they were trying to bring letters back. I was concerned primarily with personal letters rather than business correspondence or official post, though these two may reveal plenty about our lives. The letters in this book are the sort that may quicken the heart, the sort that may often reflect, in Auden’s much loved words, joy from the girl and the boy. I had no ambitions to write a complete history of letter-writing, and I certainly wouldn’t attempt a definitive collection of great letters (the world is too old to accommodate such a thing, and lacks adequate shelving; it would be akin to collecting all the world’s art in one gallery), but I did want to applaud some of the letters that managed to achieve a similarly gargantuan task – the art of capturing a whole world on a single page. To the Letter will begin its travels in Roman Britain, home of the earliest letters we have, with the discovery that the ancient method of opening and closing a letter – greetings and farewells – are those that we still use 2,000 years later. The letter hasn’t really changed much in all that time. But now we may be at risk of letting it change irreversibly.

  Oscar Wilde writes to Mrs Wren in 1888.

  The auction took place on an autumnal Thursday only a few weeks after the close of the Olympics. A few yards from the auction room people queued to check their email at the Apple Store. Nearby, in Bond Street, there was Smythson, the posh stationer and leather goods shop. Its creative consultant Samantha Cameron, wife of the prime minister, had presumably been consulted on the display of a £50 box of Empire notecards with an Indian elephant motif, one of the many items in the shop keeping elegance alive against the touch screen odds.

  But amidst these symbols of the new and the old stood something timeless. Like a good novel, an auction house promises escape, drama and revelation, and the prospect of greater truth. It also promises commerce, of course, the prospect of proud ownership on one hand and profit on the other, an equation as old as the Babylonian market stall. Occasionally a good sale also offers proper history and biographical insight, and perhaps an understanding of life hitherto denied to us. The conjuring sale was one such occasion. How else would these startling people be remembered in an age when conjuring has been largely reduced to Las Vegas and bar mitzvahs? There just isn’t much call for illusionists in the digital age, not only because there are so many other ways to spend an evening, but because the Internet has long laid bare magic’s hidden compartments. Illusionists have been obliged to become postmodernists, the masterful showmen Penn & Teller performing tricks and then instantly revealing how they were done, confident that the gap between knowledge and the ability to apply it in performance will safeguard their profession for a while.

  I learnt from Walker’s letters that the girl in the Radium Girl illusion concealed herself behind a panel before the blades went through, and that the box was deeper than we perceived, but this didn’t make me a magician. I wasn’t particularly interested in how the tricks were done. I was interested in who had done them, and why, and how these people lived their lives. By the date of the auction I had become determined to buy Walker’s letters, and so, on that Thursday afternoon I exchanged my credit card details for a cardboard bidding paddle and sat in the middle of the room as the lots tumbled towards mine.

  First there were books to sell. These didn’t have much to do with magic, or not directly. There was Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge, known to his readers as Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1930, the Black Sun Press, short split to head of upper joint, glassine dust jacket, chipped at spine ends and corners, estimate £4,000 to £6,000 – unsold. There was Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, first edition in book form, 1891, first issue with misprint on p. 208 (‘nd’ rather than ‘and’), darkened, corners bumped, estimate £750 to £1,000, sold for £700.

  When it was time for the magic, one name kept recurring like marked aces. Bayard Grimshaw, who had died in 1994, was a recipient of a great many letters in the sale, and he appeared to be one of magic’s few super-groupies. He was a magic correspondent for World’s Fair, the weekly newspaper for showmen, and he became friends with many of magic’s stars. Perhaps seeing a gap in market, and a gullible public, he also became a performer himself, touting a mind-reading act with his wife Marion. In so doing he achieved an illusionist’s connoisseurship and the trust of the Magic Circle, and amassed a large hoard of oddments and correspondence. Perhaps he thought they would be valuable one day.

  As a keen collector – stamps, tube maps, the usual male detritus – I had been to a few auctions before, but none were as sparsely attended as this. By the time the books had been sold there were about 15 of us left, and I recognised half of them from the preview the previous day. Most of those who had attended for the books portion had drifted away, and although a few others joined us on the phone and online, the prices rarely exceeded their upper estimate, which filled me with hope. And those who were there seemed predominantly interested in the props and physical tricks rather than documents. But just as I began to feel confident that I would get the Walker letters for a steal, or at least something near the lower estimate of £300, a few of the items started going for three or four times their estimate, and a handful went for more than £1,000. One of these was a vast hoard of card tricks, the earliest dating from 1820, an array of ‘forcing decks’, ‘moving pip cards’ and ‘waterfall
shuffle’ packs, the names themselves so alluring that I had to check my urge to buy them on impulse.

  The lot simply titled ‘Mentalists’ was a collection of letters relating to mind-reading, with a detailed account of an act performed by The Great Nixon, and one letter from 1938 suggesting that The Great Nixon was such a phenomenon that he might be worthy of investigation in a laboratory. The Great Nixon was a sham, of course, and only as great as his stooge in the audience. But such was the allure of the performers in this period that I imagined an audience where few were prepared not to believe; they wanted the trick not to be a trick, but to be magic. The world held enough impending horrors in 1938, so why be cynical when you could be amazed? It wasn’t like today, when magic can only be a trick, and the pleasure is not in the illusion but in figuring it out.

  Walker in a straitjacket.

  The auction wore on, through several items featuring Madame Zomah and seven letters mentioning the Piddingtons.* Surely it was only a matter of time before Henry the Horse danced the waltz. But then it was my time, lot 512. The bidding started slowly. No one was interested in the Radium Girl anymore, much less Aquamarine Girl. But then of course it picked up. The bidding was soon at £200. I had promised myself and my wife I wouldn’t go above £400. It went to £260, then to £280. I was so hooked now that I didn’t even lower my hand between bids when a higher counter-bid came in. I just kept on going. I didn’t even know who I was bidding against – an anonymous voice on the phone taken by an auction house staff member. Then the bidding stopped, and I was the last one interested. The gavel came down at £300 to no reaction whatsoever, no gasps, no applause, just another lot sold, and immediately it was on to lot 513. But I had triumphed: I got his letters, and his letters got me.

  When I got them home I read again how to saw a girl in half (a trick box, a very supple assistant, a pair of electronically controlled feet at one end) and also how to make it look as though a cabinet was smaller than it was (black tape, a crafty angle to the audience, an assistant who can really hold her stomach in). But not all knowledge can be written down, and the art of magic, rather than just an explanation of it, cannot be taught but must be learnt, by example and crushing hours of practice. Even a full written explanation, quite apart from breaking the Magician’s Code, would be like showing someone the cockpit of a plane and expecting them to fly. But occasionally the letters would preserve a record of well-honed stage patter:

  Today I’d like to show you one of the most fantastic stunts you are ever likely to see. Behind this curtain we have a very odd looking telephone booth. There is nothing strange about the inside. Open it and show. Except that there are small holes bored thru the top and base. Honey [Miss Honey Duprez] goes inside the cabinet and we thread the ropes thru these holes to the outside. Music whilst you do this. Put mike back on stand. After threading is done take up the mike again. We are going to try a sequence of completely impossible effects. You’ll notice a festive air about this place today . . . It’s the manager’s birthday. He’s just turned 25 . . . he was 52 before he turned it.

  Metal blades and an 18-inch square wooden tube are passed through the centre of the phone booth and, ostensibly, Honey Duprez. ‘Pull out the tube and blades in the reverse order, crashing them to the back. Turn cabinet once to give girl time to collect knots and conceal them. Then with deliberate moves knock off the three catches and pull open box. Girl steps out. Let her come down front and bow. Then take her place and bow off after her.’

  But the tricks were old and almost unperformable now; they belonged in a museum in Vegas. The descriptions reminded me of an old song Clive James wrote with Pete Atkin called ‘The Master of the Revels’, in which a showman has blueprints in his office of ‘the first exploding handshake’ and ‘the charted trajectories of custard pies’. Where is Honey today? Where is that phone booth?

  When it wasn’t mourning the former careers and lost illusions of others, the bulk of Walker’s correspondence was concerned with defending his own. Looking back at the end of a life, he had begun to worry about his reputation, and about how his cabinet tricks would be remembered after he was gone. Walker had heard that a young magician had begun performing a deep cabinet trick that sounded very like the Radium Girl, and that the trick had been supplied by another magician. Walker became convinced, without seeing the act in question, that the patent for his illusion – which he had registered in 1934 – was being infringed.

  This became quite a battle; letters went back and forth for almost a year. ‘I fear,’ wrote John Salisse, secretary of the Magic Circle, ‘that the thing may blow up into a holocaust.’ As the letter trail advanced, so the secrets of the trick emerged. One expert witness claimed Walker’s case was futile, ‘unless you claim that the whole idea of the penetration of a living person originated with you.’ I felt a sadness as I read about the subtleties of the art, and about the great care invested in each illusion. I felt that great magicians shouldn’t be allowed to vanish just like that.

  In the autumn of 1968, Val Walker briefly re-emerged into the spotlight. He attended a magic convention in Weymouth, where he watched a man called Jeff Atkins perform his Radium Girl for the final time. ‘I can never be sure whether it was 1921 or 22 when I built the original in Maskelyne’s workshop under the stage,’ he wrote. ‘PT Selbit watched it in rehearsal and sometime later asked if I minded him using the basic idea for a different effect, which I certainly did not. It was his Sawing Through A Woman that emerged, using the identical cabinet dimensions. I have been both saddened and amused at the plethora of variations on the theme which the public has had to swallow during the intervening 40-odd years. I do not think my version of a penetration has been bettered in this long time.’

  Walker informed the weekly magic magazine Abracadabra that now he had returned to the fold he was already looking forward to the next convention in Scarborough in a year. But he didn’t make it. His letters show a progressive illness: ‘I’m not sure I can attend . . .’, ‘I may not be able to meet you, try as I might.’

  A tricky judgment: The Magic Circle intervenes in 1966.

  A few days before he died, he sent his last letters from a hospital on the south coast. In one of them, at the close, he said he could be ‘reached at the address above’. He didn’t actually write the word ‘at’. Instead, in February 1969, more than two years before what is widely acknowledged to be the first standard email between two computers, he used an old but generally unfamiliar symbol in its place. The symbol was @.

  Chapter Two

  From Vindolanda, Greetings

  You set off on a clear March morning from the Lake District. You take the road north from Penrith, go east at Carlisle towards Brampton, and then head high into the Pennine Hills. The road undulates and the roads are empty, and a driver will wonder whether this isn’t the stretch where car adverts are filmed. You keep going. There’s a B road south, and when you pass a village called Twice Brewed you’re tempted to stop the car to tweet a photo of the signpost. The road twists down to Winshields Farm and a guest house called Vellum Lodge, and then there you are, two coachloads of children ahead of you, at the historic site called Vindolanda, where the evidence of letters begins.

  Here, between AD 85 and 130, a series of five forts made from timber and turf were built to defend the Stanegate, a wide belt of dirt road over the narrow neck of Britain, vital for the transport of men and supplies in the region. Londinium was a week away in the south, and it was perhaps a month to the heart of the empire in Rome. Vindolanda (its name is thought to mean ‘white lawns’) was one garrison among many: some 50,000 men were stationed around these ramparts, the unofficial northern frontier until Hadrian’s Wall started going up about a mile above it in AD 122. The forts were a vital communication centre too, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when, in the autumn of 1972, the archaeologist Robin Birley cut a trench to drain off excess water from the south-west
corner of the Vindolanda excavation site and unearthed the first evidence of a Roman treasure trove.

  What was more surprising was how well some things had survived. About 2.3 metres into the soil, Birley struck a leather sandal that was in such good condition it was possible to read the maker’s name. He discovered other fragments of leather and textiles, and there were realistic dreams of further finds. Here was a moment that would, for decades to come, inspire young people to become archaeologists, a Tutankhamun moment 50 years on. But then the northern rains swept in, and Birley got another taste of the terrible challenges the Romans had faced in this remote valley. He was forced to close up the site for the winter.

  Birley had digging in his blood. His father was Eric Birley, who, in 1929, had bought the Chesterholm estate on which the Vindolanda forts continued to stand and had made some of the key discoveries that had shaped the way we view the Romans’ early defence of northern Britain. But although his work had occasionally revealed a few coins and chips of pottery, there wasn’t much in the way of personal or domestic possessions that would enable us, some 2,000 years later, to bring the ancient world to life.

  His son’s excavation resumed in March 1973. There was more leather footwear, a gold earring, a bronze brooch, keys, hammers, rope, purses, tools for stripping hide, oyster shells, and bones from oxen, pigs and ducks. These things in the soil were found enmeshed within bracken, heather and straw, and further preserved by what appeared to be excreta. The Romans may have regarded all these objects as rubbish, and there were signs of attempted incineration. But of course their rubbish isn’t our rubbish. The waterlogged conditions of the soil, the matted foliage that enveloped it, and the man-made barriers from repeated building on the site provided ideal conditions for preservation.