At Large and At Small (14 page)

Alas, our Penny Post, like Hill’s, comes at a price. If the transfer of postal charges from sender to recipient was the first great demotivator in the art of letter-writing,
e-mail was the second. “It now seems a good bet,” Adam Gopnik has written, “that in two hundred years people will be reading someone’s collected e-mail the way we read Edmund Wilson’s diaries or Pepys’s letters.” That may be true—but will what they read be any good? E-mails are brief. (One doesn’t blather; an overlong message might induce carpal tunnel syndrome in the recipient from excessive pressure
on the down arrow.) They are also—at least the ones I receive—frequently
devoid of capitalization, minimally punctuated, and creatively spelled. E-mail’s greatest strength—speed—is also its Achilles’ heel. In effect, it’s always December 26. You are not expected to write
Middlemarch
, and therefore you don’t.

In a letter to his friend William Unwin, written on August 6, 1780, William Cowper noted
that “a Letter may be written upon any thing or Nothing.” This observation is supported by the index of
The Faber Book of Letters, 1578–1939
. Let us examine the first few entries from the
d
section:

damnation, 87

dances and entertainments, 33, 48, 59, 97, 111, 275

death, letters written before, 9, 76, 84, 95, 122, 132, 135, 146,

175, 195, 199, 213, 218, 219, 235, 237, 238, 259, 279

death,
of children, 31, 41, 100, 153

dentistry, 220

depressive illness, 81, 87

Dictionary of the English Language
, Johnson’s, 61

Diggers, 22

dolphins, methods of cooking, 37

I have never received an e-mail on any of these topics. Instead, I am informed that Your browser is not Y2K-compliant. Your son left his Pokémon turtle under our sofa. Your essay is 23 lines too long.

Important pieces of news,
but, as Lytton Strachey (one of the all-time great letter writers) pointed out, “No good letter was ever written to convey information, or to please its recipient: it may achieve both these results incidentally;
but its fundamental purpose is to express the personality of its writer.”
But wait!
you pipe up.
Someone just e-mailed me a joke!
So she did, but wasn’t the personality of the sender slightly
muffled by the fact that she forwarded it from an e-mail
she
received and sent it to thirty-seven additional addressees?

I also take a dim, or perhaps a buffaloed, view of electronic slang. Perhaps I should view it as a linguistic milestone, as historic as the evolution of Cockney rhyming slang in the 1840s. But will the future generations who pry open our hard drives be stirred by the eloquence
of the e-acronyms recommended by a Web site on “netiquette”?

Or by the “emoticons,” otherwise
known as “smileys”—punctional images, read sideways—that “help readers interpret the e-mail writer’s attitude and tone”?

“We are of a different race from the Greeks, to whom beauty was everything,” boasted a character in an 1855 novel by Elizabeth Gaskell. “Our glory and our beauty arise out of our inward strength, which makes us victorious over material resistance.” We have achieved a similar victory of efficiency over beauty. The posthorn, a handsome brass instrument that once announced the arrival of
mail coaches and made a cameo appearance in the sixth movement of Mozart’s
Posthorn Serenade
, has been supplanted by an irritating voice that chirps, “You’ve got mail!” I wouldn’t give up e-mail if you paid me, but I’d feel a pang of regret if the epistolary novels of the future were to revolve around such messages as

Subject: R U Kidding?

From:
Clarissa Harlowe <
[email protected]
>

To:
Robert
Lovelace <
[email protected]
>

hi bob, TAH. if u think im gonna run off w/ u, :-F. do u

really think im that kind of girl?? if your looking 4 a

trollop, CLICK HERE NOW:
http://www.hotpix.com
. TTFN.

I own a letter written by Robert Falcon Scott, the polar explorer, to G. T. Temple, Esq., who helped procure the footgear for Scott’s first Antarctic expedition. The date is February 26,
1901. The envelope and octavo stationery have black borders because Queen Victoria had died the previous month. The paper is yellowed, the handwriting is messy, and the stamp bears the Queen’s profile—and the denomination one penny. I bought the letter many years ago because, unlike a Cuisinart, which would have cost about the same, it was something I believed I could not live without. I could
never feel that way about an e-mail.

I also own my father’s old copper wastebasket, which now holds my own empty Jiffy bags. Several times a day I use his heavy brass stamp dispenser; it is tarnished and dinged, but still capable of unspooling its contents with a singular smoothness. And my file cabinets hold hundreds of his letters, the earliest written in his sixties in small, crabbed handwriting,
the last in his nineties, after he lost much of his sight, penned with a Magic Marker in huge capital letters. I hope my children will find them someday, as Hart Crane once found his grandmother’s love letters in the attic,

pressed so long

Into a corner of the roof

That they are brown and soft,

And liable to melt as snow.

rom time to time, after we decided to move from New York City to western Massachusetts, my mind came to rest on the dispiriting example of James Montgomery Whitmore, my great-great-grandfather. Whitmore was a Mormon convert who traveled by covered wagon from Waxahachie, Texas, to Salt Lake City
in 1857. Five years later, believing he had received a divine call to serve as a missionary along the Utah-Arizona border, he sold his mercantile business, hauled his family down to Pipe Spring, bought livestock, planted grapevines, and started spreading the word. In 1866, a band of Paiute Indians stole a flock of sheep from his pasture, and when Whitmore and a companion followed their tracks
onto the open plain, they were ambushed and shot. A posse of ninety men found their bodies twelve days later, buried under the snow.

Though the chances of ambush in western Massachusetts were slim, I did not feel my family history augured well. My great-great-grandfather should have stayed in
Waxahachie; maybe we should stay in New York. But every time I walked past my husband’s desk, I saw a
yellow Post-it on his bulletin board on which he had copied a quotation from Elaine May: “The only safe thing is to take a chance.”

I’d lived in Manhattan for twenty-five years, George for twenty-one. We liked Mets games and New York accents. We liked Juilliard students who played Boccherini in subway stations and Sikh taxi drivers who wore turbans. We liked to walk from our loft in SoHo to Goody’s,
our favorite restaurant in Chinatown, and slurp Shanghai soup dumplings from large porcelain spoons. We liked our building, a turn-of-the-century box factory whose upper floors, when I moved there in 1978, were still served by a freight elevator that bore a hand-lettered sign:
WE KNOW YOU ARE OLD AND FORGETFUL, BUT PLEASE RETURN THIS ELEVATOR TO THE GLUING DEPARTMENT
.

In spite of all that, as
we reached middle age we found ourselves inclining tropistically toward open spaces. It was impossible to describe our nature-cravings without sounding like Wordsworth, only more blubbery, so George and I avoided the subject around our friends, most of whom would have become seriously ill had they moved more than five blocks from the nearest bagel shop. We had both spent our early childhoods in New
England, imprinted at tender ages by the smell of mown grass, the pea-green color of the air before a summer cloudburst, the taste of butter-and-sugar corn—the methods of
whose eating my family had divided into two categories, Rotary (round and round) and Typewriter (left to right). (George and I added a third, Dot Matrix, for those who favor a back-and-forth approach.) We wanted those things
again. Besides, our younger child was fond of projectiles—balls, slingshots, airplanes, rockets, arrows, torpedoes—and we were tired of shouting “
Not at the wedding pictures!
” Henry needed a yard.

We couldn’t afford a weekend country house, and might not have wanted one anyway: too much like having a wife and a mistress. Serial monogamy seemed preferable. About ten years ago, we started talking
about a second, rural phase. Since we were both writers, we could live anywhere we could plug in our modems. Cautiously, easing into the water by slow degrees, we visited college towns (bookstores, foreign films, possible teaching jobs) in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine. Some had houses priced beyond our means; some were too far from George’s parents, who live in Boston. We settled
on the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, named for the Puritan frontiersmen of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, large numbers of whom, like my great-great-grandfather, were massacred by Indians who thought they should have stayed home.

When Sir Walter Elliot, the self-absorbed baronet in
Persuasion
, becomes “distressed for money,” he decides to move out of his ancestral manor
in Somersetshire. It is suggested that he might be able to stay put if he prac
ticed certain economies, but he cannot imagine such a fall. “What! Every comfort of life knocked off! Journeys, London, servants, horses, table,—contractions and restrictions every where. To live no longer with the decencies of a private gentleman! No, he would sooner quit Kellynch-hall at once, than remain in it on
such disgraceful terms.”

Sir Walter is defined by his home.
The Baronetage
, the only book he ever reads, opens of its own accord to the page headed “
ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH-HALL
.” When he becomes
ELLIOT OF A-RENTED-HOUSE-IN-BATH
, will he still be himself? (Yes, says Jane Austen. He’s just as obnoxious as ever.) It makes Sir Walter uneasy to think of a tenant living in
his
bedchamber, taking walks
through
his
grounds. “I am not fond,” he observes, “of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable.”

We felt that way, too. Afraid to burn our bridges, we decided to rent out our loft, furnished, so we could creep back if we started missing soup dumplings too severely. We owned no shrubberies, but I wasn’t sure that I wished strangers to approach the corner of the living room where we
had exchanged our wedding vows, the bathtub that had soothed my first labor pains, the bed in which we had exchanged a thousand embraces and a thousand confidences. Would they appreciate “Nudes for Nudes,” a series of four pencil sketches by George’s mother that we had mounted on the shower wall? (I have always believed that it is unsporting for fully clothed people to look at pictures of naked
ones. The placement of this work was designed to even things up.) Would they be properly
impressed by the dining-room lamp, a large black contraption that had formerly graced the Erie Lackawanna railway station in Hoboken, New Jersey, and was still equipped with an anti-moth-immolation grille?

Sir Walter forbids anyone to mention that he is letting his house: “It was only on the supposition of
his being spontaneously solicited by some most unexceptionable applicant, on his own terms, and as a great favor, that he would let it at all.” We had no such qualms. We engaged a real estate agent who dressed in black and had an Italian first name and a last name that was half French and half Spanish. (It was hyphenated. Paolo was far too upscale to have only one name.) He walked around the loft.
I’m not sure he appreciated “Nudes for Nudes.” I saw him eyeing the aquamarine felt-tip-pen stain on the chair near the front door, the grungy sofa, the ancient gas stove. “It will be just right,” he said in his expensive Italian-French-Spanish accent, “for a very special person.”