Yours Ever (21 page)

In the summer of 1868, the London
Daily Telegraph
ran hundreds of letters that were provoked, in a long associative chain, by the story of a poor Belgian seamstress lured to London with the promise of a waitressing job and tricked into prostitution once she arrived. An early correspondent wondered: did the premium on having a substantial income before marriage keep too many men single for too long, thus creating a demand for prostitutes? For weeks after that, under the rubric “Marriage or Celibacy?” dozens of readers debated the question. The letters came, according to John M. Robson’s study of them, “from a broad range of readers, taking up common points in expository, argumentative, hortative, and interrogative modes, with dashes of humor and lashings of self-interest.” The sometimes pseudonymous contributors—including “Benedick,” “A Simple Country Girl” and “One Who Looks Before He Leaps”—ended up debating emigration, a potential solution to the bachelor’s economic difficulty and its attendant social ill.

To the modern eye, this public discussion appears like a slow-motion computer chat room, with less salacity and better spelling. Today, most letters to the editor arrive electronically and run just a day after the material to which they are responding—or minutes later, if you’re posting online. Their watchdog function endures, and for certain scolding, didactic personalities they are the genre of choice. Some years back a
New York Times
reporter visited one of the paper’s most prolific, if unpaid, contributors. Mr. Louis Jay Herman had succeeded in getting 123 letters, out of the 859 he’d sent, published in the paper. Among his arguments: one “against the need to floss daily.”

Graham Greene was made for the form. Relentlessly corrective, and just as frequently wrong, he wrote letters to the London
Times
and
Spectator
and
Telegraph
for nearly fifty years. Many of them were published not long before his death in a volume titled
Yours Etc
. That peculiar, time-honored sign-off, in which the abbreviation of courtesies seems almost a calculated rudeness, was exactly the note on which to end these communications.

Greene most enjoys setting straight any errors concerning himself: incorrectly reported sales figures, falsely alleged encounters—whatever might proceed from the “wild imagination” of some reporter or profile writer. He has much to say, over the years in bits and pieces, about all that authors put up with. He writes against how the Bank of England treats their earnings; in defiance of obscenity prosecutions and television censorship; in favor of the author’s right to suppress his own early work.

When he protests the supposed ban on productions of
Pygmalion
that Bernard Shaw’s literary executors had countenanced in order to boost the play’s musical adaptation, one feels sure that what’s really exercising Greene is
My Fair Lady’s
being an
American
success, one more loud triumph for a detestable country at its bloated peak of influence. The opportunities that the United States and its enemies provide him! There is the McCarran Act to be derided; Charlie Chaplin to be welcomed home to England; the jet that Britain should be selling to the dictator he likes to call “Dr.” Castro. As late as 1979, he writes that the Soviet Union should grant more exit visas, since it “is highly unlikely that there would be a mass immigration of the proletariat—and that in itself would be a good propaganda point.” A dozen years before, he had already announced that, if forced to live in either the United States or the USSR, he would “certainly choose the Soviet Union.” And why not? He could pal around with friends like Kim Philby, who had already chosen it over Britain.

Letters to the newspaper allowed Greene certain antic indulgences, too. He began unserious feuds; solicited support for a nonexistent Anglo-Texas society; and entered a competition to produce the best parody of Graham Greene. But more often, when he remembered the
Times’s
address, he was in drunken high dudgeon.
Yours Etc
. pieces together what Evelyn Waugh called Greene’s “fatuous and impertinent” protest against the Catholic Church’s refusal to have a priest offer public prayers at the funeral of Colette. Waugh explained (to Nancy Mitford) that the protest derived from Greene’s being “tipsy when he wrote it at luncheon with some frogs,” who got it translated and mailed. Greene himself would remember being “tipsy with rage,” not liquor, but on other occasions he did acknowledge the alcoholic muse that got him to write some of these letters to the editor.

The Church, about which he was always so conflicted, becomes a godsend when it bumps up against other habitual irritants. Take the persecution of Catholics inside the USSR: “I would rather see my church honourably suppressed than corrupted within by such [American] war propagandists as Cardinal Spellman and Bishop Sheehan
[sic].”
But it doesn’t take subjects this mighty to prod Greene toward snit and vendetta. A host of lesser devils will do: modern architecture; a cleanup of prostitutes in the West End; misprints in the
Times;
a change of typography in the
Spectator
. The essential requirement is an opportunity to appear bravely perverse. In 1976, he finds new grounds upon which to oppose a helmet law for motorcyclists: “Here motor-cycle helmets are more and more used in bank robberies, for they are less conspicuous than a stocking mask, especially the latest mode which provide a tinted shield against the sun. Not of course that one wants to make things difficult for bank robbers (we had eight in this region last month), for they may keep away tourists who are a pollution problem.”

The postal service, which conveyed his cracked pots to the papers, was itself a preoccupation. On one occasion Greene proposed that
Spectator
readers clog the system with postage-due letters that recipients would then refuse, thereby bankrupting the whole service, “so that it may be taken over quite cheaply by some efficient business organization—say, Marks and Spencer.” Decades earlier, according to the editor of
Yours Etc.
, Greene had suggested bringing down Neville Chamberlain’s government by mailing packages of pornography that would appear to be coming from its cabinet members.

Here one may be arriving, to swipe a famous Greene title, at the heart of the matter: the slithering, insidious opportunities the mail provides—the way, for pennies, one can dispatch the most disturbing sentiments around the globe, and slip unbidden into a person’s home. Much of Greene’s life and character—all the secrets and seediness and despair that went into “Greeneland,” the territory of his novels—suggests that his letters to the editor were a kind of self-assertion pretending to be the disinterested advice offered by those Victorians in the columns of the
Telegraph
. The conventions of letter-to-the-editor writing allowed him to hide all sorts of private rage in plain sight on a million breakfast tables.

UNLESS ONE SUBSCRIBES
to the more extreme forms of expressionist criticism, hate mail is the only literary genre to be, fundamentally, a psychological symptom. The genre provides satisfaction not only to its practitioners but to many readers as well. These readers—not the original, individual recipients of the mail—derive a sort of pleasure that is also, no doubt, symptomatic: a safe displacement of their own aggressive impulses. They can satisfy themselves with a whole little shelf of anthologized epistolary spleen, which includes hate mail’s more benign cousin, the prank letter. Published collections include:
Dear Sir, Drop Dead!
(1979);
Drop Us a Line … Sucker!
(1995);
Crank Letters
(1986);
Idiot Letters
(1995).

The true hate letter does not artfully crescendo. It flings itself, with sudden, unsubtle surprise, like a rancid cream pie.
Dear Sir, Drop Dead!
shows a number of targets getting it right in the face with the salutation: “Dear Heathen Communist Bitch” goes one greeting to the American atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who inspired correspondents to work harder by her own manifest enjoyment of scorn, even the ad feminam sort: “All you are is nothing but a big old witch with a big ugly fat face and mouth on you.”

Sarcasm (“My dog left home when he heard I had voted for you”) depends, in both the writer and the reader, on an appreciation of distortion. Paranoia has no time for such contrivances. It is terribly urgent, under the gun and ready to assert itself in ALL CAPS,
which even now pack an unsettling punch when they show up in the pixels of angry e-mail—though nothing can be more upsetting than the slithering hate fax, whose paper seems to come, somehow, from the sender himself and not the recipient’s own machine.

Hate mail wants an answer—“I am speaking from experiance
[sic]
. I expect a reply from you”—and it will not be thwarted by a quickly executed “return to sender.” Escalation may take the form of small packages—the dead animal; the soiled garment—or, most spectacularly, the letter bomb. As the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski became the most famous hate-mailer of our time, through both the explosive devices he posted and, toward the end of his slow-motion spree, the lengthy manifesto, a sort of giant letter to the editor that
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
agreed to run in exchange for his pledge to stop the violence at three killed, twenty-three wounded.

Among the more seriously hurt was Yale professor David Gelernter, who lost part of a hand and part of his eyesight. In his book
Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber
, Gelernter reflects upon the irony of his having made Kaczynski’s list: “He picked me out originally, my guess is, with no idea who I was aside from some guy who worked with computers.” Only later, it seems, did Kaczynski discover, from Gelernter’s book
Mirror Worlds
, that his target, a historian of technology, was actually “one of the very few persons in the field who doesn’t
like
computers.”

But Kaczynski, whom the media often treated as a serious if dangerous thinker, was hardly notable for consistency. As Gelernter points out, “He used a typewriter and rode a bus—go figure; but the machines he loved best are the ones that kill people.” Gelernter diminishes his attacker by refusing to use his name; he instead employs the sort of mocking epithets one finds in the salutations of less lethal hate mail than the kind sent by Kaczynski. In Gelernter’s coinages, Kaczynski becomes “Mr. Bucolic Cottage-in-the-Countryside,” “Hut Man,” and “Saint John of Montana.”

Kaczynski’s bomb came in “a book package with a plastic zip cord,” which Gelernter found on a chair in his office beside a stack of mail that had piled up while he was away on vacation with his
family. Since then, the pleasure of opening the mail, even what comes from whittling down a stack of business correspondence, is gone from Gelernter’s life. After the attack, and the receipt of a “truckload of crackpot letters,” he found that “all inbound communication channels are radioactive.” He would “look at the strange message on curling fax paper in the shadows as if it, too, might start hissing and explode.” By 1997, there were thousands of unopened messages in his e-mail queue. Having to type answers with one hand became too embittering a prospect; “the system has all the appeal of a flypaper that has trapped so many creatures it’s disgusting.”

Kaczynski’s own fate was sealed, in part, with a kiss. He left DNA evidence against himself on an envelope and stamp that he had licked.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO
, when Jennifer Hofer set herself up in Los Angeles as an
escritorio publico
, she did so as a kind of performance art. And yet, as she told Zachary Block, a writer from her Ivy League alumni magazine, the Latin American tradition of letter writing for hire “really does provide a service.” Sitting behind a manual typewriter set up on one of the city’s sidewalks, Hofer composes not only business correspondence for immigrants who can’t write English, but also romantic missives for those not confident of their ability to put things with the proper ardor. Like a sympathetic but disinterested Cyrano, Hofer can fill in sentiments the sender can’t fully dictate himself. According to the
Brown Alumni Magazine
, she charges “$3 for a love letter. Illicit love letters—she’s written just two, including one for a woman with a crush on a married man—cost $5.” Hallmark used to advertise its Valentines to those who “care enough to send the very best,” but any printed greeting card
is second best in the realm of authenticity. Hofer, part amanuensis and part author, offers something that by its one-of-a-kind nature comes closer to being the real thing.

Love letters can, in fact, seem so alive that, if one object of affection gets replaced by another, any letters that went to the first should be hunted down and gathered up, for sacrificial destruction or especially safekeeping. When H. L. Mencken got ready to marry Sara Haardt, he asked the silent-film actress Aileen Pringle if he could have back the letters he’d once sent her; he now encloses
her
letters to
him
. Miss Pringle was unhappy about this, but years later would come back into the critic’s life by sending him a letter of condolence upon Sara Mencken’s death.

Amorous e-mail can be deleted even faster than paper can be torn, although it tends to live on, like a potential stalker, somewhere in the hard drives of sender and recipient. In the realm of love, however, e-mail’s most peculiar characteristic is the way it so often becomes not a means to romance but the entirety of any involvement. The e-ffairs into which so many postmodern people stumble are, like the chaste pen-palships of times past, relationships sufficient unto themselves, whereas epistolary romances traditionally sought their own extinction—the moment when physical separation ended, along with each party’s need to write to the other.