'the grand object of every morning's impatience'
some thoughts on letter writing and communicative intimacy
A couple of weeks ago I found my dad and his cousin poring over a box of old letters, exchanged by their respective parents in the thirties and forties. The letters were yellowing, thin pages covered with spidery handwriting and signed at the bottom. Some remained in long unsealed envelopes, others were pressed in a book, crease-marks flattened and behind plastic. They smelt faintly musty, like a library. They were so overwhelmingly tactile; you wanted to hold them. They produced the same feeling as stuffed animals in a museum, long extinct.
Nobody writes letters anymore, yet for hundreds of years, letter writing formed the primary method of human communication over distance, time and space. My grandparents’ generation, and those stretching back before them, relied on letters which tracked across continents, which initially could take weeks to arrive before becoming as quick as a very slow email. Until very recently, address books lived permanently in top drawers and pockets. But as with so many facts of life, in the span of my lifetime things have changed, for better and for worse. The simplicity of a letter has been replaced by an ocean of methods of communication, all enclosed in a glass and silicon rectangle half the size of an envelope.
I’ve run through more messenger platforms in the last ten years than my parents have used in their lifetimes – text, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, BBM, Discord, Slack, Snapchat, and a whole host of social media platform tie-ins. Plus dating apps, though I’ve been mercifully saved them. Whilst letter writing involved a relatively clear etiquette (which peaked in the Renaissance era, determining everything from signature size to form of address), each social media platform of the 2010s and 20s has required its own particular code of conduct. Whether to react to messages or respond, how long you could leave someone on read, the turn of phrases commonly used, and the likely recipient — whether you were likely to be talking with friends or colleagues or strangers. In messages, form and content merge together in strange ways, with BitMojis, GIFs, and heart reactions providing breaks between messages, or serving as messages themselves. I don’t know anyone who uses iMessage’s Invisible Ink or Screen features, but they do exist. And not that long ago it was popular to suggest – whether elatedly or despairingly – that the next generation of people would communicate solely through emoji. Looking back at my messages, distinct eras are detectable – an era of preteen txt tlk (brb gtg ly lol xox), of no caps sentences in poetic cadence, of the awkward ‘getting to know you’ first impressions of university. I never communicated in emoji, but I definitely used a lot of sparkly pink hearts.
Communicative modes change through space as well as time. Perhaps the strangest is the ability to switch from message to call, or to FaceTime. To move from textual to oral communication, to immediately see the face and reactions of your recipient of your words. Given the ease with which we switch between messaging and video calls, it’s hard to imagine a time when such a thing was impossible. To have a conversation, rather than simply a correspondence.
Letters always had the potential to take multimedia forms – past letter writers would enclose scents, pictures, or locks of hair in their correspondence. In the Renaissance, ornate signatures and seals were used to signify status, a bit like public figures paying for Twitter Blue. Even text talk isn’t a wholly modern phenomenon; the first recorded instance of ‘omg’ to stand for ‘oh my god’ supposedly comes from a 1917 letter. Looking through old letters can feel like an insight into a vanished world, but it can also remind us that the past isn’t that much of a foreign country, after all. During my Masters, my palaeography class transcribed a letter from an irate father to his recalcitrant daughter, ordering her to return home from a lengthy stay in London with friends. Sure, he invoked the wrath of God, but he also used a good old fashioned bit of parental guilt tripping – your mother and I are getting older, we need you to care for us, wouldn’t it be unfortunate if one of us got sick and died while you were away, etc etc etc. I’ve heard that one before. But if the contents remain remarkably human, the expression of those contents has certainly changed.
The self you fashion in a letter is permanent, in a way, at least for as long as it takes to receive a reply and send out your next correspondence. In the eighteenth century, the emergence of the epistolary novel saw a whole genre of literature taking the form of exchanged letters, whilst some of Jane Austen’s finest dramas are fuelled or sustained by letter writing – think the Bennet family, for whom ‘the arrival of letters was the grand object of every morning's impatience’. Mr Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth after his failed first proposal is as much a part of the romance as the lovers themselves. By contrast, the self you shape in a text or post can be rewritten, erased, unsent, amended in seconds, passed off as a joke. It is, at least in my view, resoundingly unlovely and lacks art or thought. It fails to cohere. It stops and starts, defies pinning down. On Slack, it is courteous and businesslike, on Snapchat it sends nudes under the table. Communicative personas can collide with humorous or disastrous results, like Succession’s Roman Roy accidentally sexting his father. And who among us hasn’t conducted three simultaneous discussions with the same person, save on different platforms? When Instagram introduced Threads, its alternative to a flailing Twitter, few dedicated Tweeters jumped ship enthusiastically, citing an incompatibility between their Instagram and Twitter personas. Communicative spheres multiply and require different personas and forms of etiquette; we no longer stand at the window or door waiting for a letter, but worry if a friend or lover doesn’t reply within a certain set of minutes, or if we see them active online whilst leaving us unread.
As the letter dies off, what dies with it? Lockdown saw an unprecedented increase in letter writers and pen pals, for obvious reasons, and I was one of them. I don’t know what I wrote about in my letters, as they’re likely languishing beneath the childhood beds of various friends, but I can take a guess. Cherished anecdotes about a lost existence of shared independence, pseudo-poetic wonderings on the state of the world, remarks on the weather loaded with ham fisted pathetic fallacy. I remember the discomfort of seeing a friends name pop up on my phone as I was in the middle of writing to them, a kind of cognitive dissonance as two realities collided. The sense that maybe this was redundant, given as we were FaceTiming near every day, and texting far more frequently.
I do know that I was reading Normal People at the time, and that the emails between Marianne and Connell particularly struck me as false. It was the same sense of dissonance I felt writing my own letters – people don’t really talk like this, at least not anymore. Not only don’t, can’t. Our brains don’t work at the same pace. An email is simply not a letter. Rooney’s emails are self conscious but not entirely self aware, a performance of intimacy where both the writer and the reader are in the audience but neither gets the full story. Like my letters, they are painfully literary in their attempts at intimacy. I think perhaps that is the point Sally Rooney is making throughout Normal People – of the failures of communication inherently involved in self-performance. A letter is both a performance and a communication, it reveals without telling, withholds whilst proclaiming its openness, an exterior predicated on interior, it says open me and most often requires a response.
I didn’t have a lockdown lover to write to (though I was temporarily enamoured with a beautiful dark haired man who smiled and winked at me twice on my daily walks, and who I unfortunately never saw again, despite best efforts) but my letters belied a craving for intimacy that even I couldn’t detect. One friend thought I had a crush on them, after receiving a letter. I think, in hindsight, and without my own letters with me, I was writing for myself rather than to communicate with my friends, treating the letters as a diary I could tear apart from myself and foist upon the world. I suppose this made my words more honest, added an extra layer beyond the purely communicative, the intimate. I thought about each word I wrote, I valued them and could not erase them, unlike the snappy six word texts I sent in my daily life, the meaning of which could be easily changed with a follow up ‘lol’. It’s hard to imagine an epistolary novel told through texts.
Again, what do we lose with the letter? What do we lose, when communicating no longer requires time, thought, effort, and perhaps, intimacy? The internet has recently seen a host of discourse about dating app conversations; men behaving badly, or just awkwardly, women demanding princess treatment from strangers, general rudeness and uncomfortable incompatibility screen-shotted and posted online as discourse fodder. Is ice cream and a walk an adequate first date? Should a woman always expect to be picked up? Is an awkward pick up line cringe, or creepy? Above all, should we really be sharing private conversations in a public forum at all? I think these questions have arisen in part because of the lack of a clear code for communicating online. I don’t mean some kind of charter, or a signed and dated contract, or even the un-codified etiquette that governed the form of historical letters. More a loosely informal understanding that one’s words are a part of oneself, torn away willing or unwillingly and trusted with a specific, usually individual recipient.
A letter makes clear that peculiar kind of intimacy. It’s an intimacy you struggle to extract from the warzone of social media, from the exposed blank tundra of email. It’s even hard to get it from a diary, which will always stare blankly back at you, reflect your self without comment or response. But a letter, no matter how artfully or formally constructed, can bear a soul.
Looking back at old letters, whether your own, a relatives, or a historical figures, you will see a trace of a person’s existence printed on the page. A self that lives on in words received and kept, rather than in the pixels and posts and screenshots of the present day. The loss of letter writing will change the historical archive, as historians have to trawl through online and messenger app archives, battling issues of access and erasure, rather than sifting boxes of physical documents. It might also change the face of human connection forever.