The Lost Art of Writing Letters"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“The Lost Art of Writing Letters”

September 17, 2023

 

“The gentle arts of conversation and letter writing have largely

given way, nowadays, to the intrusive urgency of the telephone.”

                                                                                                                Dorothy Lobrano Guth (1928-2016)

                                                                                                                Editor, Letters of E.B. White, 1976

 

Ms. Guth wrote the introduction to her godfather’s book of letters almost fifty years ago. Since, phones never leave our side. E-mails, text messages, social media, Snap-Chat, and Twitter (or whatever it is now called) have proliferated, like inebriated rabbits. Technology has increased by magnitudes the frequency and ways in which we communicate, allowing us to stay in touch with people in a way unimaginable to our parents and grandparents. In sending my essays by e-mail, I am in regular contact with childhood and school friends, unseen for decades. I hear from people I worked with at Merrill Lynch almost sixty years ago. There is much good in this, but…

 

While social media and myriad forms of communication provide benefits undreamed of a few decades ago, they have downsides. In our new, technologically efficient communication, grammar, spelling, syntax, and their progeny, thoughtfulness and the well-constructed sentence have receded in favor of succinctness and speed. Less concern for the recipient is given than when pen was put to paper. E-mails and text messages are responsive, not contemplative. 

 

Does an e-mail in your inbox spark the same excitement as a handwritten letter in your mailbox? As much as anyone, I am guilty of this omission. Most of my handwritten letters are ones of sympathy, or birthday cards to my wife, children and grandchildren. Yet I vividly recall the anticipation and receipt of a letter when at school – not the scolding or admonishing one from my mother, or the indulgent one from my grandmother, but the neat, identifiable one from a girl I knew or had recently met.  Mail call, when in the Army, was the highlight of the day. Now, when I descend to the mailbox, I expect and receive solicitations, advertisements, catalogues and bills. Ever so rarely there is a real letter, which I save.

 

Letters provide insights into the way people think and behave. An anthropologist, studying American social life, would have a treasure trove in private letters, especially those written with no expectation of being published. In the decision to publish the letters between my parents during World War II in Dear Mary, I wrote: “In the end, I decided their value as a window on a special time in our history seemed worth whatever embarrassment might accrue to those no longer alive.” But any study of American life through letters would end when their decline began in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1990s. 

 

Old letters are treasures and should be preserved. Every now and then one comes across a gem, such as that written by my mother’s youngest brother who, at age 24, had recently been given command of LST 601. Preparatory to the August 15, 1944 invasion of southern France, Prime Minister Churchill was there to wish the men well. My uncle wrote to his parents on August 13: “What a thrilling day was yesterday…I led the men in ‘three cheers for Churchill.’ Smiling and waving, he passed within fifty feet. He was in his blue playsuit looking just as much like little Sydney Williams as he could.”

 

Enough said; let’s write more letters!