Video killed the radio star, sang the Buggles in 1979 — assuming the synth-pop Buggles actually sang. In the same year, Mark Amory was putting the finishing touches to a collection of Evelyn Waugh’s letters. He noted in his introduction that letters were an antique curiosity; no one writes them anymore, he wrote.
That grave prognosis was a tad premature. Diana Athill’s recent epistlatory memoir, Instead of a Letter, suggests that men of letters still live up to their name. Then again, Athill is 93.
The telephone gave letter-writing a nagging cold, which email has turned into pneumonia. The letter’s admirers have leapt to help. The Guardian reports that Dave Eggers has joined American magazine the Rumpus for an initiative in which a team of well-known writers will pen letters to selected readers, who will be encouraged to reply. Another American author, Mary Robinette Kowal, has begun a similar programme on her website, as has UK publisher Scott Pack. All three ventures share the view that an email is no replacement for a letter. And indeed it isn’t. Even short letters are playful, but emails are invariably colourless. Subtle figures of speech and irony are stripped out so that an email can be written and read in a few moments.
It might be argued that the subtleties of language are the victims of the perceived need to communicate instantly — a perception that the workers of the world are increasingly united against: there are campaigns afoot to respond en masse to emails only twice a day. In fact, the speed of communication is irrelevant. A long letter takes time to compose, but postcards are designed to be knocked off in seconds. I recently came across the hundreds of postcards my father sent me when he was working abroad. Each is just a few lines, but each is memorable. A particular favourite showed a Chinese junk under sail in Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong. He wrote on the back to my six-year-old self: ‘You are the expert. Is this is, or is this not a pirate ship?’ By contrast, emails relating the trials and tribulations of his retirement, though witty, do not quite have the same effect.
This is about permanence: there is nothing permanent about an email, even if it will be stored forever on a server. Jonathan Franzen, who spoke earlier this week of the permanence of books against the transience of eBooks, is a man whose letters (and emails) probably will be published, assuming he’s written enough of them. He corresponded with the late David Foster Wallace, but they don’t appear to have written many letters. They also, according to Franzen, avoided email. Instead, they spoke over the telephone. It is ironic that this era of hyper-connectivity may leave us with an incomplete record of how people lived.
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