The Intimacy of Letter Writing

I became obsessed (maybe that's a little strong--enchanted may be a better word) with letter-writing in my American Literature survey course at BYU. In my Norton anthology were letters written between John and Abigail Adams. I don't recall as to whether we read the letters for our class or not, but I read them. I was intrigued by the way John and Abigail corresponded and about all the sorts of topics they wrote about: women's rights, power, revolution. The tone was bold, outright, but then many times there was a sort of tenderness to them. Some would find it unusual to call them love letters, but I see them that way, and I wouldn't be surprised if John and Abigail did as well.

Then in grad school during my 19th Century British Literature Comedy class, I was again drawn into letters. This time, though, the letters were fictional. As we read Pride and Prejudice and Vanity Fair I noticed the pattern of how both Austen and Thackeray use letters in their texts to highlight important moments and to illustrate the intimacy between certain characters.

Recently a friend posted a letter she discovered written by John Steinbeck in response to his son Thom on her blog. I love Steinbeck's candid advice about love to his son. I particularly love his last bit: "And don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens -- The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away." Truth.

Naturally, after reading my friend's post, I sought the source, so I googled and found a site of a collection of letters! There are hundreds of letters on this site. Some are sweet. Some are funny. Some are very inappropriate. I found this one today: "Sweetheart Come." When you look at the letters they are all but scribbles covering sheets of paper. This was written by a German woman who was suffering from dementia. She wrote her letters with text so condensed that many of the lines overlap and the text is virtually illegible; however, a few phrases have been deciphered: "Sweetheart come," and "come, come, come." How beautifully desperate and tragic.

I have always liked letter-writing. Maybe it's due to the fact that I feel more adept writing my thoughts than expressing them verbally, or maybe it's just that I really like getting mail. But few things seem to have the intimacy of a letter.