My Baby just wrote me a letter.

Continuing a theme: on letter writing: I’ve written and mailed two handwritten cards in the last few days, and I’ve been a magnet, recently, for books about letters. One is a book that came out a couple of years ago, Other People’s Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant to See, edited by Bill Shapiro. The other was Ben Greenman’s forthcoming collection of short stories, What He’s Poised to Do.

Bill Shapiro’s book appeared before me, in perfect condition, at a tag sale. I’m not sure it had ever been read. It had almost certainly been given as a romantic gift to someone (the book lacked an inscription, so I can’t prove that; but experience as a bookseller tells me the odds are good). The book looked unread. Clearly the owner had decided, “All right: enough’s enough, I don’t need this anymore.” And the book was banished to the church tag sale donation pile, along with old children’s books, dogeared and chewed up, and bad cookbooks, bought with good intentions but never used.

I bought it because its appearance was, I felt, a Sign. A few days previous to this, an old friend of mine -- someone with whom I engaged in extensive written correspondence for years and years (we now communicate, sporadically, via email) sent me a copy of Ben Greenman’s forthcoming collection of short stories. My friend clearly thought, “Hm, stories about letters. Who would want to read this? Oh: Eva.” I’m not sure what this says about me, but I’ll take it. The book was sent, received, and read pretty much in the same little windows of time in which I acquired and read the Bill Shapiro book, and it’s been an interesting little experiment, continuing what seems to be an ongoing concern of mine: what it means to write letters to anyone these days.

I don’t have any hard and fast proclamations on the subject but one thing is clear to me: people can say all they want that letter writing is dead, but it clearly is not.

Shapiro’s book is fascinating in that voyeuristic way you’d expect. It’s fun to leaf through -- some of the letters are just beautiful to behold, some of them are really works of comic genius, and some of them are gut-wrenchingly sad; you remember every stage of your own roller-coaster ride through romantic life as you go through the book -- but it’s not a book I lingered over.

Greenman’s book, on the other hand, is more of a challenge. The book isn’t a collection of letters; it’s a book wherein letters are central characters in their own right. The fourteen stories in What He’s Poised to Do are set in different places and different times. Each story starts with its title and a postmark serving as a dateline (“Seventeen Different Ways to Get a Load of That,” Lunar City, 1989; “Against Samantha,” New York City, 1928), which is a nice touch.

I’m afraid that, the older I get, the less good I am with fiction. I read it less and less, and I have a harder time just enjoying it. So I balked, a little, but I found Greenman’s collection houses really delicately good pieces. This will not surprise Greenman’s fans. He is a nimble and clever writer. His essays are always a pleasure to read; I now would actually like to go take a look at the novel he recently published, Please Step Back.

In What He’s Poised to Do, there were several stories that left me uninterested, unintrigued, completely, in what the characters had to say. But then, others crawled into my head and wouldn’t leave. Greenman’s collection is noteworthy. To elaborate on that much would, I feel, crush the stories -- they’re kind of like butterflies that way -- but the last story in the book, “Her Hand,” really struck me particularly. I read it once and immediately read it again, though it was hardly heartwarming. It’s a four page long quiet sigh of resignation.

The personally-directed written word -- letter, postcard, email -- written to be read by one person and one person only, is alive and well. Even if reading it doesn’t always make you happy. I’m going to go listen to the Bay City Rollers’ “Rock and Roll Love Letter,” followed by the Box Top’s “The Letter,” and see if I can cheer myself up.

Nicholas Rombes, again. But it's relevant, I promise.

I learned recently about an interesting little plot regarding literature (or, at least, literary writing) and getting real mail, which is, as you can tell, kind of a thing with me. (Previously in this forum I've talked about letter writing and how no one does it anymore. Only, and happily, to be proven wrong by a reader of this very website.) It seems that Nicholas Rombes, who wrote the Cultural Dictionary of Punk I wrote about here a few months ago, is writing a novel called Nightmare Trails at Knifepoint, and he plans to publish and distribute it via the U.S. Postal Service. In other words, it's a serial that will reach its readers via snail mail. He's publicizing his work via the web, and signing up subscribers that way, but the readers will receive their chapters in the mail, along with their bills and L.L. Bean catalogues and flyers about political candidates. (I don't know about you but that's mostly what's in our mailbox.)

I think Rombes is a little crazy to do this, but you know what? Good for him. It's a weird little experiment but I can't think of any good reason why he shouldn't do it. I wonder how many subscribers he'll get. I bet some people will sign up simply for the pleasure of receiving mail that isn't a bill or something sent at bulk rate. I'm tempted, myself.

Loose Ends, Now Tied

In previous essays here at the New Haven Review, I've written about the death of letter writing and about my misty memories of flyers around downtown that proclaimed "New Haven is the Paris of the 80s." I wondered who it was that put up those flyers, and thanked them for their efforts, and expected nothing to follow. Yesterday I got quite shock when I received in the mail -- via the U.S. Postal Service -- an actual, real, hand-addressed letter from a man who tells me that he did it. He's the "New Haven is the Paris of the 80s" guy. Somehow he found my entry here from months ago, and he wrote me a letter to thank me for it.

Made my day. Hell: made my week.

The mystery is solved, my friends. I'm not going to reveal his identity, but I want you all to know, all is well, and the world is now, in my view, a slightly better place than it was twenty-four hours ago.

I Had Post

I was reading somewhere (was it in the New Haven Independent? cannot for the life of me remember) that the U.S. Postal Service is suffering financial woes and considering dropping Saturday mail delivery as a cost-cutting measure. Some tiny percentage of the local populace is up in arms about this. I would be one of them, but I frankly don't see that losing Saturday mail delivery would really be the end of the world. Slightly inconvenient, yes; but on the other hand, it would reinforce the idea of a weekend for most people, which might be a good thing, in a small way. I found myself lamenting my own letter-writing habits, or lack thereof in recent years. Ask anyone who knew me from, say, 1983 to 2000 and they will tell you that I wrote more letters than anyone in their right mind would ever wright. Anyone with a life would not have written so many letters. But I wrote letters. Boy howdy did I write letters. Long letters, handwritten, often with fountain pens; long letters, single-spaced, on a typewriter (and later on a computer). I typed on postcards, I typed on onion skin to friends overseas, I typed on anything I could wrap around the cartridge thingy on my typewriter (which I still own). I remember writing a letter on a barf bag, once, when I was on an airplane, though I have no recollection now of to whom I was writing.

And I saved all the letters I received back. I have boxes of these things, and while I can imagine throwing out some memorabilia from my life I cannot imagine throwing out those letters.

So I'm an incurable romantic on the subject of written correspondence. But at the same time -- when was the last time I wrote a letter? Well, actually (and I write this a little sheepishly, because it takes away from my argument a little), it was in the last ten days; I wrote a letter to a woman in Vermont. I had fun picking out a card that had an illustration on it I knew she'd like, and when I filled up all the space in the card I got out some loose notepaper and continued on that. And I am confident that she was happy to unlock her PO box and find that handwritten letter waiting for her.

We're all made so happy by real letters and postcards. We were twenty years ago, when they were pretty much normal; now we're made even more so because they're so unusual. So how come we're all so lazy and can't be bothered to write real letters? If a diehard like me is too lazy to write a letter, what hope is there for anyone else?

I am reminded of a phenomenon from my bookseller days when I would mail books to customers; I always made a point of including a handwritten note with the book, just to acknowledge the customer, to be friendly. I was always surprised by how happy this made people -- who knew that a little three sentence note could make someone so happy? One shop I worked at mailed catalogues periodically, and I was in the habit of writing out all the addresses on the envelopes, and people even commented to us on the handwritten mailing addresses. It was something we'd done because we were too cheap or too disorganized to set up for computer-printed mailing labels, but it turned out to be a piece of really good marketing.

I could try to make a vow to start writing one letter a week to someone from now on, but let's not fool ourselves: I wouldn't be able to keep that vow. Still, I feel bad that I'm not the letter writer I once was.