I’ve just published Idle Thoughts, a humble collection of 40 letters. They were written and addressed to the readers of the Idler, the magazine I edit, over the last few years.
While assembling it, I reflected on the lost art of letter-writing. Letters were for millennia – and till very recently, when they were ruthlessly attacked by the overlords of Silicon Valley – at the beating heart of artistic and commercial production.
Letters are a wonderfully elastic literary form. They can be chatty or formal. They can be any length. And they can include gossip, moaning, expressions of love, poetry, travel tales, confessions, anecdotes, philosophical reflection, advice, moral admonishment, jokes, drawings, diagrams, financial advice…
The letters in my book are open – intended for a wide audience. They’re newsletters, but written as if to a single person.
It’s a tradition that goes back a long way. The Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote in letter form. Then there were Seneca’s Letters on Morals to Lucilius. These letters, written around 65 AD, are high-quality literary productions, as you’d expect from a philosophical man who was trained in rhetoric. They’re addressed to a young friend and are appropriately avuncular in tone. They contain nuggets of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, all intended to make Lucilius happy and free of anxiety.
In Roman times, there was a lot to be anxious about: as well as the fear of poverty and disease, Seneca says people were quite worried about the savage punishments doled out by the state – ‘jail, the cross, the rack, the hook, the stake driven up through the middle of a person and coming out through the mouth, the limbs torn apart by chariots driven in different directions’.
Seneca’s letters were intended to be read by many: ‘The work that I am doing is for posterity,’ he wrote.
And so it seems for many letters. My own bookshelves groan with collections. Letters I have loved include Sylvia Plath’s, Maynard Keynes’s, Dr Johnson’s, William Godwin’s, Keats’s… Jane Austen’s are hilarious. Bernard Shaw was a great letter-writer, as were members of the Bloomsbury Group.
As for personal letters, my friends and I wrote letters to one another non-stop in our teens and twenties. When we were 16, a new girlfriend and I wrote to each other every day for a week when I was away. Sadly I’ve lost them all.
Modes of address and of signing off have changed over the centuries. In the ancient world, you started your letter with your name and the name of the addressee followed by a hello. If I were writing to the editor of this magazine, I would write, ‘From Town Mouse, to Harold, greetings.’ And then I would sign off with the simple word ‘Farewell’.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, you would always start a letter with ‘Dear’ or My dear’. Sign-offs included ‘I am, sir, your well-wisher and humble servant’; ‘Yours with sincere and perfect affection’; ‘I am sir yours etc’; and ‘Yours truly’. I was taught to sign off formal letters addressed to someone anonymous with ‘Yours faithfully’ and letters to a named person with ‘Yours sincerely’.
Sign-offs given by a 19th-century instruction manual in letter-writing include ‘Your loving daughter’, ‘Yours very respectfully’ and ‘Your obliged and affectionate friend’. These elaborate courtesies, officially called ‘the complimentary close’, should, I think, be brought back.
Emails, by contrast, are often brusque to the point of rudeness. They might start with the informal ‘Hi’ and end with something like ‘All the best’ or, if you’re lucky, ‘With kind regards’. Some oldies may deplore the fashion of adding an ‘x’, even when the addressee is not held in high affection. And what about the habit of starting an email with simply the addressee’s name? Brutal.
We’re still fascinated by brilliant letters, as is proved by Shaun Usher’s popular book Letters of Note, and his event series of the same name. He tirelessly brings amusing epistles to the public’s attention, and gets celebs to read them out loud on festival stages.
Another example is Love, Nina – a collection of Nina Stibbe’s letters home, written in 1982, chronicling her life as nanny to the eccentric literary patron Mary-Kay Wilmers, and were a big hit.
I worry about the future of collections of letters by writers, simply because everyday correspondence takes place via electronic means. Will they exist? Who will edit them? Will they be titled The Emails of Zadie Smith, The Collected WhatsApps of Salman Rushdie and The Texts of Kazuo Ishiguro? Sad days.
Tom Hodgkinson’s Idle Thoughts: Letters on Good Living is out now
The Oldie September 2024
