Nostalgic, My Dear, For Thee

Now that we’ve launched full speed into the world of digital communication, there seems to be a resurgence of nostalgia for the good old fashioned personal letter. The recent publication of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop’s correspondence, “Words in Air,” inspired a rush of gushing reviews from the New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, the Nation and the New York Review of Books, to name a few of the more well-known publications. There was also a recent release of Samuel Beckett’s early letters, supposedly to be followed my more; last autumn Farrar published the Letters of Ted Hughes; and Susan Sontag’s early notebooks have just been released, to mixed, but breathless reviews.

I wonder why this is. The July/August issue of Poetry Magazine has some of Yvor Winters’ letters to a young poet – a student who showed a lot of promise. The tone is these letters is startling. Winters is straight-forward with his opinions, no mincing words:

“This note is to inform you—unofficially—that you will receive a fellowship in poetry. You will receive your official notification some time after April 1. Meantime you are not supposed to know. Stegner said that you were among the first nine or ten in fiction, but not among the best three.”

The candid tone is refreshing at first, but overbearing after a while. In a second letter addressed to the poet’s father, Winters sounds like a pompous ass, too sure of himself, too much of a product of his time and philosophy for poetry:

“If I may speak frankly and without seeming to boast, I would like to say that I can teach more about the art of writing in verse and about the history of this art than anyone in the country save perhaps Cunningham. But I would like to add that my department is certainly of the half dozen best in the country as regards scholarly achievement and may well be the best of the half dozen in general critical intelligence. It is, in any event, an extremely fine department, and I know its virtues and limitations very thoroughly. This department is one of my principal tools in training my poets: I superintend their use of the department with some care, and they invariably get a great deal from the department, and what they get I utilize in my training. I do not know what you think of departments of English, but the good ones are not random collections of tedious pedants, but are rather carefully selected groups of historical scholars who work in fairly close collaboration with each other. Such a group, in two or three years of instruction, can save a student like Cal (no matter what his genius) fifteen years of labor, simply by giving him a succinct outline of their own work in background materials and in historical outlines. And without these background materials and historical outlines, he will misunderstand at least in some measure, and often in a large measure, almost anything he may read; and if he is a poet, his development may be irremediably retarded. A great poet is a sport of nature, but he is not merely that: he is a thoroughly intelligent man, and intelligence is not easily come by; any man is a fool who does not pick up as much as he can get, wherever he can get it, and as rapidly as possible. The best place to pick up the elements is a good graduate school.”

Winters does go on. It’s a way of writing we almost never see anymore. It’s strange how staged it feels, how formally addressed. It wasn’t all that long ago when we still wrote friends and family and lovers letters by hand. I did it all the way through college; even now, I have a friend who’s locked up that I write back and forth with by hand. But the sending of letters is more or less a dead practice; who wouldn’t rather email?

The method of communication changes, and so the results are different. Winters could write an email like the letter above today, but it would probably receive a quick return email that either slavishly agreed, deconstructed the email point by point or just said fuck off.

Winters’ letter is stagey; it’s a performance. Well, so are our more modern means of communication. In fact, they take the performance aspect of all writing (communication in general, really) to its logical extreme. So if we’re nostalgic for the art of letter writing, it seems we’re nostalgic for an older form of performance art. Why don’t we have the time or patience for this kind of writing – hell, thinking, to judge by Winters’ letter – anymore? I’m not sure. Tomorrow I want to consider the differences between writing by hand, writing on a typewriter and writing on a computer.