by Richard Farr
My sister and I live five thousand miles apart, but since we both reside in the early twenty-first century it’s easy to stay in touch. Of the many channels available to us we use WhatsApp messages mostly, with a call once a week or so. You might wonder then why we have chosen to revive the old old habit of writing letters to one another. The answer is not far to seek — it’s inefficient.
Fifty-some years ago, growing up in rural England, our parents had a black GPO 700-series telephone that weighed as much as an iron kettle. A settled part of the Christmas ritual was to book a call in advance with the International Operator, gather around at the appointed hour, and spend not a second more than three minutes very expensively exchanging the season’s greetings with our cousins in Ottawa.
Nobody wants to go back to that, but in leaving it behind we lost something. As we have learned from the instant availability of all music, freedom from constraint has costs. We anticipated those special moments of communication, viewed them from various angles, and discussed them in advance. So it is with writing: we used to think about it. Now we drop texts and emails by the bushel, like overloaded September trees. Our devices have made it easy for us to “communicate” almost literally without a thought.
People who write for a living, and therefore need to write with care, often report that their work is frustrating, irksome, paralysingly difficult, and at the same time comforting, exhilarating, and as optional as oxygen. Somerset Maugham: “We do not write because we want to. We write because we have to.” Red Smith: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit sown at the typewriter and open a vein.” George Orwell: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
Orwell is only half correct about my demon. I can’t resist it, but I understand it pretty well. Many aspects of the world and my place in it are puzzling to me; itching for enlightenment, I’m forever attempting to think about them. But I’m bad at thinking: trying to think is a recipe for staring out of the window. The subject could be what’s happening in the Middle East, whether we have free will, or why Chapter Fifteen of the novel I’m working on has become so truculent and unbiddable. In each case, it’s only when I put my head down and write (and write, and delete, and rewrite) that actual thinking occurs. On a good day, careful, intricate writing allows me to approach careful, intricate thinking. Not often. As the historian David McCullough put it, “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”
Good writing can be casual, though, and the written personal letter is a gloriously special form because of the opportunity it offers us — unlike the two years on a novel or the two minutes on an email — to find a line between casualness and care.
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While writing this I’ve enjoyed procrastinating at length in the pages of my long-neglected Oxford Book of Letters, an admittedly Brit-centric overview of how our more famous scribblers performed the dance called correspondence (oh lovely, dying word!) between the 1530s and the 1980s.
The first letter in the book is from Lord Edmund Howard, writing in 1535 to Lady Lisle on the matter of his kidney stones: “So it is this night after midnight I have taken your medicine, for the which I heartily thank you, for it hath done me so much good, and hath caused the stone to break, so that now I void much gravel. But… it made me piss my bed this night, for which my wife has sore beaten me, and saying it is children’s parts to bepiss their bed.” The last letter is from Philip Larkin to Kingsley Amis, a few days before the poet’s death in 1985: “As you gather, I have been in a poor way lately… [T]hey are looking for something, and I bloody well hope they don’t find it.”
In between these dour medical bookends there’s a great deal of historical and literary interest, but above all there are on every page bright little eruptions of wit, precision, intimacy, and personality:
1837 — Robert Southey to Charlotte Brontë, praising her talent but recommending that she think long and hard before choosing the life of a writer: “It is not because I have forgotten that I was once young myself, that I write to you in this strain; but because I remember it. You will neither doubt my sincerity, nor my good will; and however ill what has here been said may accord with your present views and temper, the longer you live the more reasonable it will appear to you.”
1854 — George Eliot, responding to her affronted friend Sara Hennell: “The mode in which you and Cara have interpreted both my words and my silence makes me dread lest in writing more I should only give rise to fresh misconceptions.”
1880 — William Dean Howells to Mark Twain, on being invited to join Twain’s newly-invented Modest Club: “My dear Clemens, The only reason I have for not joining the Modest Club is that I am too modest: that is, I am afraid that I am not modest enough.”
1914 — J.B. Yeats, the poet’s father, to William Butler Yeats: “Nowadays, especially in America (which leads the world) people live so much on the surface that everywhere is an intoxicating levity. Even marriage aims at being a love passage to terminate as soon as the impulse has spent itself.”
1917 — Aldous Huxley to Dora Carrington: “Your nose for the scabrous is unerring.”
1921 — Katherine Mansfield to Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco, who was having an affair with Mansfield’s husband, John Middleton Murray: “I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world. You are very young. Won’t you ask your husband to explain to you the impossibility of such a situation. Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like to scold people, and I simply hate having to teach them manners.”
Apologies if you don’t like lists of quotations, but I’m not quite done yet, because a long evening with my head in the OBL sent me hunting through my files for gems collected elsewhere:
1805 — William Blake to Richard Phillips: “The taste of English amateurs has been too much framed upon pictures imported from Flanders and Holland; consequently our countrymen are easily brow-beat on the subject of painting; and hence it is common to hear a man say: `I am no judge of pictures.’ But O Englishmen! know that every man ought to be a judge of pictures, and every man is so who has not been connoisseured out of his senses.”
1820? — Lord Byron to —-?: “This acquiescence is some thousands of pounds out of my pocket, the very thought of which brings tears to my eyes. I have imbibed such a love for money that I keep some sequins in a drawer to count, and cry over them once a week.”
1855 — Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell: “I hope Lady Lyell & yourself will remember whenever you want a little rest & have time how very glad we shd be to see you here, & I will show you my pigeons! Which is the greatest treat, in my opinion, which can be offered to human beings.”
1929 — J. Robert Oppenheimer to his brother Frank: “[O]ne cannot aim to be pleasing to women, any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one’s living.”
1946 — George Orwell to Celia Kirwan: “You might ask Freddie [Ayer] from me, now that he has a chair in Mental Philosophy, who has the chair in non-mental philosophy.”
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When my best friend died, nothing was harder to bear than realizing that I would not receive another letter from him. That his handwriting would never again grace a page seemed cruel; worse by far was the extinction of a written style as unique as his spoken voice.
Andrew’s envelopes were always addressed to ‘Richard Farr, Esq.’ The letter inside might run to ten or fifteen dense double-sided pages, composed in spurts over a week or more, using several different pens and with running commentary on the relevant delays and interruptions. And it would conclude with a formula we had discovered to our inexpressible delight in a history class — the preferred farewell of Charles Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, to his lover and sovereign James I:
I remaine, Sire, Yr Majesties Humble Slave and Dogge.
In between these ornate brackets, Andrew’s letters were like him: serious and funny; bawdy and eloquent; personal and political; kind, patient, erudite, ironical, sceptical, theatrical, courageous; infinitely thoughtful of other people; an education in the meaning of integrity; an education in the arts of generous friendship. He poured off the pages as if they were trying to contain him but could not.
When he wrote his last letter to me he must have known he was dying, but that letter contained no mention of sickness or suffering. It was the usual quilt of digressions, and digressions from digressions, on everything from his passion for fried bread to the health of his rose plants. He had been reading a biography of Louis XVI, and spent a couple of paragraphs talking about the book’s merits and defects before finishing with a comparative analysis of his own and Louis’ dress sense.
These days, three or four pages to my sister takes me an hour or two to write; even though I’m a writer, the muscles have atrophied. I have to gear up to it, get in the mood, put it off once or twice, and accept that writing will be to some degree, like running, a test of stamina. What to say? How to couch it? What not to bother with? How concerned to be that the prose itself needs editing, or is insufficiently amusing or informative to be worth the reading?
There’s another problem, now: how to deal with the fact that a letter can no longer be long-awaited news, because it has been overtaken in transit by half a dozen faster messages?
When I’ve stopped worrying about all this and I’m done, the sealed envelope may sit on my desk for a day or two because I’ve once again neglected to have the right stamps and it must await my next trip to the Post Office. After that, because of rapidly collapsing postal services on both sides of the Atlantic, it can take a week to arrive, or in one recent instance a month. The explanation is probably that it’s in the modern limbo of a Newark warehouse. I prefer to imagine that the delay has to do with transcontinental steam trains, three-masted sailing ships, and a man with a blue uniform and magnificent side-whiskers whistling cheerfully as he bicycles the last five miles from a red brick sorting house filled with wooden pigeon-holes to almost-still-rural Chiswick.
The important thing, as this fantasy suggests, is the sense of a vanished pre-industrial slowness. Letter-writing has come close to extinction because it is a manual activity, a craft, as quaint and ruminative as knitting and obsolete likewise because of clever machines; defending it without sarcasm, now in 2025, marks you as as a Luddite, a victim of nostalgia, the kind of person it’s natural to suspect of secret antiquarian book-fondling. But should we not examine the metric by which it is more efficient to send dozens of messages a day while our deepest relationships — perhaps the very mental faculties by which we are capable of deep relationships — go untended?
There’s something larger at stake here. To write letters in an attempt to practice a certain kind of mindfulness is to gesture at a whole set of practices and values that might be different from the ones by which we are dominated. So to illustrate the idea that I’m indulging hopelessly naïve fantasies about the future, not the past, permit me to offer a wild prediction, a sort of Parthian shot over my shoulder into the future, about the least-expected fashion of the late twenty-first century.
Circa 2075 I picture this: a world in which a hand-written correspondence once more raises no eyebrows. A world that has rediscovered attentiveness to the slow and technologically backward in general. A world in which people hold doors open, not only wear hats but even doff them, and ride bicycles that completely fail to advertise either the names of their makers or the details of their own technological advancement. Technology so taken for granted indeed that it fades into the background, and overt interest in it seen at last for what it is: gauche, immature, boorish.
Will I live long enough to see this? Probably not — but perhaps more hand-written letters might set the ball rolling? I urge you to give it a try. Hand-write a letter to someone you care about. Order letterhead and buy a Mont Blanc Meiserstück if you must, but beware the impulse this suggests, which is to settle for posing to yourself as someone who writes letters. Scrap computer paper and a gas station ballpoint will do the job. (Take a whole paragraph to apologize for the mess, if you feel like it. The person you are writing to will forgive you.) Try to sound like you sound when you’re talking. Make it a single heartfelt paragraph, or make it as long and eccentric and confessional and ungrammatical as you please. Expect such a real letter to take an hour, or a week.
Whatever you do, don’t write in expectation of a reply. Write only because you can imagine the pleasure on the face of your recipient.
It may seem difficult. It may leave you feeling uncertain, exposed, embarrassed. You may be unsure whether you said the right things, in the right way, and your hand may try to rebel as your arm reaches out to put the envelope in the box. Those are all signs you’re onto a good thing.
Sincerely.
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