The Letter
Last week I took a jab at all the media companies soliciting donations from readers or those still on their mailing list. (The hands-out queries come every day, a marked increase from previous years; does that mean the GOP will get thwacked in next year’s midterm elections? I’ll leave that to the Beltway “experts” who never, ever stop writing, and posting on social media, about politics, even though such “thought experiments” have a one-week expiration date.)
A note from David Samuels, one of my favorite journalists, who co-founded the bimonthly County Highway with Walter Kirn—just one fella’s opinion, but the broadsheet would benefit from increasing frequency to 12 times annually—and it was jarring since Samuels, who has a funny bone, mustered an overly serious tone, and it took me aback. I won’t take advantage of CH’s various offers; as a subscriber from the first issue, I’ve done my part, and also have bills to pay.
After an obligatory season’s greetings and wish for “a wonderful new year,” Samuels, I’m reluctant to report, gets on a high horse that should’ve bucked him back to sensibility.
He writes: “Having grown up sending handwritten missives from summer camp to distant aunts and uncles, to far-away friends, and to the men they married, my mother and aunts understood letters as the only medium fit for serious communication. Even Xeroxed letters had weight; no doubt they would be handed down to posterity, bound together with lengths of silk ribbon. Including even a minor fib in the historical record would be to leave behind incontrovertible proof that you were a liar. Pleasantries, gossip, sly insinuations—that was the stuff of idle chatter at a cousin’s wedding. Letters were for serious matters, like births, funerals, breaking an arm or leg, buying a new house, starting a new business, driving cross-country in a camper, marriages, divorces, and other affairs of the heart.”
That’s one paragraph bursting with hokum, perhaps written with the County Highway oft-mentioned ethos in mind, that of curling up near a wood stove in a remote cabin and brushing up on John Steinbeck or Thomas Wolfe, and then settling in with a mug of coffee and the latest CH.
My mother, too, wrote letters almost every day, some weighty, but most filled with jokes, slang and “white lies” or euphemisms to mask any hint of mischief her five boys were up to. She saved all of her correspondence—much of it in my basement now, and they’re part of family history, although I’m not sure how long these crumbling artifacts will last.
Like my brothers, I was also an enthusiastic letter-writer—partly out of boredom, partly as an exercise in how to write—and they were jocular and gossipy but also included more weighty opinions on what I was reading, albums added to the collection, and seeking recommendations for the same. In 12th grade, colleges were a prime topic, as well as SATs, and grade-point averages. I never broke an arm as a kid, so that was out, but I enjoyed a close friend’s detailed description deflowering a 10th grader . “It’s all about the sex,” he said of the paramour, which struck me as kind of mean, or more likely braggadocio. At college, as a freshman, classmates and I would wait for the mail delivery in the afternoon (eagerly, but no one admitted to that) and, taking a break from loads of homework, would respond that same night.
I still have letters from colleagues across the country and in town, in the pre-internet and email age. I’ve tossed a lot of those, but saved the most interesting.
The picture above is of a letter my grandmother sent to my mother, then pregnant with her first child, with a few words of advice, mainly not to let doctors (“big shots”) push her around. She wrote: “You must remember your whole system undergoes a complete change, and consequently discomfort comes with it. So, don’t worry, but be optimistic as I was many years ago.” She then violated the Samuels Rule, and wrote about a blackout in the Bronx, which she “got a big kick out of.” One thing I found strange is that she opened with a formal “Dear Daughter,” but then signed off, “Love, Mommy.” And of course sent love from my grandfather and Uncle Pete, who was living with them at the time.
Letters were letters: some funny, some serious, sometimes a lot of both. It was a habit of literate people, or reasonably literate, and rarely had the gravity of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams exchanging correspondence after they ceased to be rivals. And my collection isn’t bound together by lengths of silk ribbon.
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: Henry Wallace was U.S. Vice President; sales of new cars are banned to save steel; Thailand declares war on the U.S. and U.K.; the Voice of America begins broadcasting; John Ford wins Best Director Oscar; Walt Disney’s Bambi is released; the St. Louis Cardinals win the World Series; Casablanca premiers at NYC’s Hollywood Theater; Carole King is born and Grant Wood dies; coffee rationing begins in U.S.; Thomas Mann moves to California; How Green Was My Valley wins Best Picture at the Oscars; Ellery Queen’s Calamity Town, Rex Stout’s Black Orchids and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology are published; no Literature Nobel Prize is awarded; Sarah Vaughan’s discovered at Harlem’s Apollo; and Gene Autry’s “Deep In the Heart of Texas” is a big country hit.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023