At Large and At Small (13 page)

His desk was made of steel, weighed more than a
refrigerator, and bristled with bookshelves and secret drawers and sliding
panels and a niche for a cedar-lined humidor. (He believed that cigar-smoking and mail-reading were natural partners, like oysters and Mus-cadet.) Several books were written on that desk, but its finest hours were devoted to sorting the mail. My father hated Sundays and holidays because there was nothing new to spread on it. Vacations were taxing, the equivalent of forced relocations to places without
food. His homecomings were always followed by daylong orgies of mailopening—feast after famine—at the end of which all the letters were answered; all the bills were paid; the outgoing envelopes were affixed with stamps from a brass dispenser heavy enough to break your toe; the books and manuscripts were neatly stacked; and the empty Jiffy bags were stuffed into an enormous copper wastebasket,
cheering confirmation that the process of postal digestion was complete.

“One of my unfailing minor pleasures may seem dull to more energetic souls: opening the mail,” he once wrote.

Living in an advanced industrial civilization is a kind of near-conquest over the unexpected.… Such efficiency is of course admirable. It does not, however, by its very nature afford scope to that perverse human
trait, still not quite eliminated, which is pleased by the accidental. Thus to many tame citizens like me the morning mail functions as the voice of the unpredictable and keeps alive for a few minutes a day the keen sense of the unplanned and the unplannable.

What unplanned and unplannable windfalls might the day’s yield contain? My brother asked him, when he was in his nineties, what kinds of
mail he liked best. “In my youth,” he replied, “a love letter. In middle age, a job offer. Today, a check.” (That was false cynicism, I think. His favorite letters were from his friends.) Whatever it was, it never came soon enough. Why were deliveries so few and so late (he frequently grumbled), when, had he lived in central London in the late seventeenth century, he could have received his mail
ten or twelve times a day?

We get what we need. In 1680, London had mail service nearly every hour because there were no telephones. If you wished to invite someone to tea in the afternoon, you could send him a letter in the morning and receive his reply before he showed up at your doorstep. Postage was one penny.

If you wished to send a letter to another town, however, delivery was less reliable
and postage was gauged on a scale of staggering complexity. By the mid-1830s,

the postage on a single letter delivered within eight miles of the office where it was posted was… twopence, the lowest rate beyond that limit being fourpence. Beyond fifteen miles it became fivepence; after which it rose a penny at a time, but by irregular augmentation, to one shilling, the charge for three hundred
miles.… There was as a general rule an additional charge of a half-penny on a letter crossing the Scotch border; while letters to or from Ireland had
to bear, in addition, packet rates, and rates for crossing the bridges over the Conway and the Menai.

So wrote Rowland Hill, the greatest postal reformer in history, who in 1837 devised a scheme to reduce and standardize postal rates and to shift
the burden of payment from the addressee to the sender.

Until a few years ago, I had no idea that if you sent a letter out of town—and if you weren’t a nobleman, a member of Parliament, or some other VIP who had been granted the privilege of free postal franking—the postage was paid by the recipient. This dawned on me when I was reading a biography of Charles Lamb, whose employer, the East India
House, allowed clerks to receive letters gratis until 1817: a substantial perk, sort of like being able to receive your friends’ calls on your office’s 800 number. (Lamb, who practiced stringent economies, also wrote much of his personal correspondence on company stationery. His most famous letter to Wordsworth—the one in which he refers to Coleridge as “an Archangel a little damaged”—is inscribed
on a page whose heading reads “Please to state the Weights and Amounts of the following Lots.”)

Sir Walter Scott liked to tell the story of how he had once had to pay “five pounds odd” in order to receive a package from a young New York lady he had never met. It contained an atrocious play called
The Cherokee Lovers
, accompanied by a request to read it, correct it, write a prologue, and secure
a producer. Two weeks later, another large package arrived for which he was charged a
similar amount. “Conceive my horror,” he told his friend Lord Melville, “when out jumped the same identical tragedy of
The Cherokee Lovers
, with a second epistle from the authoress, stating that, as the winds had been boisterous, she feared the vessel entrusted with her former communication might have foundered,
and therefore judged it prudent to forward a duplicate.” Lord Melville doubtless found this tale hilarious, but Rowland Hill would have been appalled. He had grown up poor, and, as Christopher Browne notes in
Getting the Message
, his splendid history of the British postal system, “Hill had never forgotten his mother’s anxiety when a letter with a high postal duty was delivered, nor the time when
she sent him out to sell a bag of clothes to raise 3
s
for a batch of letters.”

Hill was a born Utilitarian who, at the age of twelve, had been so frustrated by the irregularity of the bell at the school where his father was principal that he had instituted a precisely timed campanological schedule. Thirty years later, he published a report called “Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability.”
Why, he argued, should legions of accountants be employed to figure out the byzantine postal charges? Why should Britain’s extortionate postal rates persist when France’s revenues had risen, thanks to higher mail volume, after its rates were lowered? Why should postmen waste precious time waiting for absent addressees to come home and pay up? A national Penny Post was the answer, with postage
paid by the senders, “using a bit of paper… covered at the back with a glutinous wash, which the
bringer might, by the application of a little moisture, attach to the back of the letter.”

After much debate, Parliament passed a postal reform act in 1839. On January 10, 1840, Hill wrote in his diary, “Penny Postage extended to the whole kingdom this day!… I guess that the number despatched to-night
will not be less than 100,000, or more than three times what it was this day twelve-months. If less I shall be disappointed.” On January 11, he wrote, “The number of letters despatched exceeded all expectation. It was 112,000, of which all but 13,000 or 14,000 were prepaid.” On May 6, the Post Office introduced the Penny Black, a gummed rectangle, printed with lampblack in linseed oil, that bore
the profile of Queen Victoria: the first postage stamp. (Some historians—a small, blasphemous minority—confer that honor on a prepaid paper wrapper, inscribed with the date of transit, introduced in 1653 by Jean-Jacques Renouard de Villayer, the proprietor of a private postal service in Paris. But his wrapper wasn’t sticky and it wasn’t canceled, and thus, in my opinion, it bears the same relation
to a stamp as a mud pie to a Sacher torte. In any case, Villayer’s plan failed because practical jokers put mice in his postboxes and the mail got chewed.) The British press, pondering the process of cancellation, fretted about the “untoward disfiguration of the royal person,” but Victoria became an enthusiastic philatelist who waived the royal franking privilege for the pleasure of walking to
the local post office from Balmoral Castle to stock up on stamps and gossip with the postmaster. When Rowland Hill—by that time,
Sir
Rowland
Hill—retired as Post Office Secretary in 1864, a
Punch
cartoon was captioned, “Should Rowland Hill have a statue? Certainly, if Oliver Cromwell should. For one is celebrated for cutting off the head of a bad King, and the other for sticking on the head of
a good Queen.”

The Penny Post, wrote Harriet Martineau, “will do more for the circulation of ideas, for the fostering of domestic affections, for the humanizing of the mass generally, than any other single measure that our national wit can devise.” It was incontrovertible proof, in an age that embraced progress on all fronts (“every mechanical art, every manufacture, every thing that promotes
the convenience of life,” as Macaulay put it in a typical gush of national pride), that the British were the most civilized people on earth. Ancient Syrian runners, Chinese carrier pigeons, Persian post riders, Egyptian papyrus bearers, Greek
hemerodromes
, Hebrew dromedary riders, Roman equestrian relays, medieval monk-messengers, Catalan
troters
, international couriers of the House of Thurn and
Taxis, American mail wagons—what could these all have been leading up to, like an ever-ascending staircase, but the Victorian postal system?

And yet (to raise a subversive question), might it be possible that, whatever the benefit in efficiency, there may have been a literary cost associated with the conversion from payment by addressee to payment by sender? If you knew that your recipient would
have to bear the cost of your letter, wouldn’t courtesy motivate you to write an extra good one? On the other hand, if you paid for it
yourself, wouldn’t you be more likely to feel you could get away with “Having a great time, wish you were here”?

I used to think my father’s attachment to the mail was strange. I now feel exactly the way he did. I live in a five-story loft building and, with or
without binoculars, I cannot see my mailbox, one of thirteen dinky aluminum cells bolted to the lobby wall. The mail usually comes around four in the afternoon (proving that the postal staircase that reached its highest point with Rowland Hill has been descending ever since), which means that at around three,
just in case
, I’m likely to visit the lobby for the first of several reconnaissance trips.
There’s no flag, but over the years my fingers have become so postally sensitive that I can tell if the box is full by giving it the slightest of pats. If there’s a hint of convexity—it’s very subtle, nothing as obvious, let us say, as the bulge of a tuna-fish can that might harbor botulism—I whip out my key with the same eagerness with which my father set forth down his driveway.

There the resemblance
ends. The excitement of the treasure hunt is followed all too quickly by the glum realization that the box contains only four kinds of mail: 1) junk; 2) bills; 3) work; and 4) letters that I will read with enjoyment, place in a folder labeled “To Answer,” and leave there for a geologic interval. The longer they languish, the more I despair of my ability to live up to the escalating challenge
of their response. It is a truism
of epistolary psychology that a Christmas thank-you note written on December 26 can say any old thing, but if you wait until February, you are convinced that nothing less than
Middlemarch
will do.

In the fall of 1998 I finally gave in and signed up for e-mail. I had resisted for a long time. My husband and I were proud of our retrograde status. Not only did we
lack a modem, but we didn’t own a car, a microwave, a Cuisinart, an electric can opener, a CD player, or a cell phone. It’s hard to give up that sort of backward image. I worried that our friends wouldn’t have enough to make fun of. I also worried that learning how to use e-mail would be like learning how to program our VCR, an unsuccessful project that had confirmed what excellent judgment we had
shown in not purchasing a car, etc.

As millions of people had discovered before me, e-mail was fast. Sixteenth-century correspondents used to write “Haste, haste, haste, for lyfe, for lyfe, haste!” on their most urgent letters; my “server,” a word that conjured up a luxurious sycophancy, treated
every
message as if someone’s life depended on it. It got there instantly, caromed in a series of
digital cyberpackets through the nodes of the Internet and restored to its original form by its recipient’s 56,000-bit-per-second modem. (I do not understand a word of what I just wrote, but that is immaterial. Could the average Victorian have diagrammed the mail-coach route from Swansea to Tunbridge Wells?) More important, I
answered
e-mail fast—sometimes within seconds of its arrival. No more
guilt! I used to think I didn’t like writing letters. I now realize that what
I didn’t like was folding the paper, sealing the envelope, looking up the address, licking the stamp, getting in the elevator, crossing the street, and dropping the letter in the postbox.

At first I made plenty of mistakes. I clicked on the wrong icons, my attachments didn’t stick, and, not yet having learned how to
file addresses, I sent an X-rated message to my husband (I thought) at
[email protected]
instead of
[email protected]
. I hope Gerald or Gertrude found it flattering. But the learning curve was as steep as my parents’ driveway, and pretty soon I was batting out fifteen or twenty e-mails in the time it had once taken me to avoid answering a single letter. My box was nearly always full—no waiting, no
binoculars, no convexity checks, no tugging. I began to look forward every morning to the perky green arrow with which AT&T Worldnet beckoned me into my father’s realm of the unplanned and the unplannable. What fresh servings of spam awaited me? Would I be invited to superboost my manhood, regrow my thinning hair, cleanse my intestines with blue-green algae, bulletproof my tires, say no to pain,
work at home in my underwear, share the fortune of a highly placed Nigerian petroleum official, obtain a diploma based on my life experience from a prestigious nonaccredited university, or win a Pentium III 500 MHz computer (presumably in order to receive such messages even faster)? Or would I find a satisfying little clutch of friendly notes whose responses could occupy me until I awoke sufficiently
to tackle something that required intelligence? As Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald, de
scribing the act of letter-writing: “Such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.”

My computer, without visible distension, managed to store a flood tide of mail that in nonvirtual form would have silted up my office to the ceiling. This was admirable. And when I wished to commune
with my friend Charlie, who lives in Taipei, not only could I disregard the thirteen-hour time difference, but I was billed the same amount as if I had dialed his old telephone number on East Twenty-second Street. The German critic Bernhard Siegert has observed that the breakthrough concept behind Rowland Hill’s Penny Post was “to think of all Great Britain as a single city, that is, no longer to
give a moment’s thought to what had been dear to Western discourse on the nature of the letter from the beginning: the idea of distance.” E-mail is a modern Penny Post: the world is a single city with a single postal rate.