Epistolary Practices

Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications

William Merrill Decker

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807866634
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Letters have long been read as primary sources for biography and
history, but their performative, fictive, and textual dimensions
have only recently attracted serious notice. In this book, William Merrill Decker examines the place of the personal letter in American popular and literary culture from the colonial to the
postmodern period.
After offering an overview of the genre, Decker explores epistolary practices that coincide with American experiences of
space, settlement, separation, and reunion. He discusses letters
written by such well-known and well-educated persons as John
Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John
Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Clemens, Henry James, and Alice James, but also letters by persons who, except in their correspondence, were not writers at all: indentured servants, New England factory workers, slaves, soldiers, and Western pioneers. Individual chapters explore the letter writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Henry Adams--three of America's most ambitious, accomplished, and theoretically astute letter writers. Finally, Decker considers the ongoing transformation of letter writing in the electronic age.

Chapter 1: Burn This Letter

Autograph Missive and Published Text

GENERIC DEFINITIONS

“I really did not mean when you asked me for a letter to write a homily” (LRWE 7:352). So Ralph Waldo Emerson apologizes to H. G. O. Blake toward the close of a letter that he fears may exceed the more concise response that Blake probably expects. Perhaps Emerson genuinely felt that his reply, for which he had apologized in the first place because it was belated, had become a rather long-winded metaphysical harangue. The communication was nevertheless sent: such apologies, in Emerson’s letters and in those of many others, are largely a matter of form. Henry Adams likewise adverts to the tendency of letter writing to overrun foreseen bounds. “At length I expect to conclude this species of autobiography which is becoming a volume,” he observes toward the end of a rambling dispatch to his British friend C. M. Gaskell (LHA 2:55). He does not really regret the long diarylike entries or the delay in getting the matter closed and posted. What there is of apology is muted by the perception—evident throughout Adams’s epistolarium—that letters ever require apology as the self-indulgent discourse of the first person, but that they will always in any case be written and sent. “They are books rather than letters,” Adams prefaces a bundle of letters to Elizabeth Cameron during his visit to Samoa, “and they are written only on the chance that they may give you half an hour’s amusement. If they bore you, burn them.” Although he was correct in perceiving that what he sent was the substance of books, they were not, as he well knew, books but letters, subject to the perils and ephemeral life span that attends letters but not books. “They are for you,” he goes on to remark, “and not meant to be preserved” (LHA 3:328).

A homily, a species of autobiography, books—so Emerson and Adams characterize what as letter writers they have produced: letters of a sort, apologies for letters, but not letters in the strict sense. What, strictly speaking, did these writers call a letter? Both suggest that the real thing would not burden, disappoint, or bore the recipient, whereas a homily or book likely would. A letter is what they feel obliged to fear (or pretend to fear) they have not written, but the ideal for them is less a matter of form than of effective content: writing that can please or otherwise fulfill the recipient’s expectations. In the context of the epistolary exchange, a true letter is communication that figures successfully in an interpersonal relationship. Where there is doubt concerning the relationship, or of the rapport mediated by letter sheet, there is particular occasion for apology. But such occasion is endemic to the epistolary task, in which to apologize in anticipation of a letter’s failure is to plead the terms of its success. Given the spatial and temporal separations that such colloquy must negotiate, it can hardly surprise us that letter writers affect not to meet what they project as the addressee’s expectations. “You know it is customary for the first page to be occupied with apologies,” Emily Dickinson observes to Abiah Root (LED 1:65). Letter writers apologize—for letters too long, letters too short, late letters, letters that are not letters.

Apologies aside, the communications that Emerson, Dickinson, and Adams deprecate but still send are letters, produced under common epistolary conditions, dependent on the same ink, letter sheet, and mails and generated by the same social, psychological, and economic needs as the outpourings of writers whose letters are less apologetic, less sophisticated, less likely to have survived on their literary merits alone.¹ “They are for you, and not meant to be preserved,” writes Adams, conscious that they almost certainly will be preserved, but also aware of the privacy and disposability of what he has produced. The literarily self-conscious letter writers examined at length in this study participate as correspondents in an activity that is popularly practiced, and although they are aware of the possibility of literary excellence in letters and may be well-read in the published works of such canonized practitioners as Madame de Sévigné and Horace Walpole, they write their letters, much as nonliterary authors write theirs, to transact one or another kind of interpersonal business. Even when they generate texts that mimic homilies, diaries, novels, or poems, even when they provide the substance of books, as correspondents they write within a framework that serves the ends of short-term private communication and that does not necessarily favor, much less guarantee, the preservation of what is written or its ultimate possession by an anonymous readership. However much the letters of an Emerson, Dickinson, or Adams transcend, singly and as assembled lifeworks, the productions of less accomplished letter writers, their works amply reflect the protocol, conversationality, license, and hazard commonly found in this form.

An inquiry into a genre must specify the characteristics of that genre; although the foregoing paragraphs suggest some features of the familiar letter, a working definition of the objects and practices to be examined is in order. Most criticism directed to letters in English has concerned the eighteenth-century British practitioners, yet the epistolary works of the Augustan writers, which aspired to literary canonization even in their own time, have been marked off as literature in ways that the letters of American writers have not. There are advantages to approaching epistolary texts as a category of writing irrespective of the literary quality of specific instances; my definition will therefore conserve something of the conception of letters as a marginal literary form. In The Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter, Bruce Redford ponders the “critical neglect” that has been the genre’s fate even after a period of concerted attention to many other forms of autobiographical nonfiction prose. “The explanation,” Redford writes, “has much to do with the vexed issue of generic placement: how can we do more than talk impressionistically about the letter until we can fix a category for it and then formulate appropriate aesthetic criteria?”² To place the letter generically and to assume a perspective from which to theorize its variant aesthetic aims involves, as Redford suggests, avoiding the merely impressionistic response elicited by particular examples and resisting habits of reading that focus on a writer’s life and personality. But the task also involves viewing the letter as a cultural as well as a specifically literary form.

To this task I would apply a fundamentally materialist conception of genre, one that embraces literary and nonliterary writing, text and artifact, autograph manuscript and printed page—a conception that repudiates traditional genre hierarchies. “Genres,” Fredric Jameson writes, “are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural object.”³ Emphasizing the conventions that govern rhetorical relations, and contextualizing those conventions within the dynamics of a society’s system of exchange, such a definition is valuable because it posits the genre-object as the vehicle of a genre-practice; it encourages us to recognize that a genre-practice assimilates to a contemporary culture while preserving certain structures and themes historically associated with the genre. A materialist view of genre encourages us to account for the generally confidential life a letter leads as a private autograph text as well as the transformations it undergoes in becoming a document published in a collection intended for what is usually a posthumous readership. To account for the letter’s multiple rhetorical lives compels a consideration of whether, in passing from the autograph state to the print transcription, the letter undergoes a genre change, or whether the contracts by which letter exchanges go forward and those by which letters are appropriated for publication are so interdependent as to mark different phases of one generic practice.

Jameson’s definition requires two modifications before we apply it to the study of letters. First, within the context of the epistolary exchange, the contractual parties are correspondents who alternate in the readerly and writerly roles, and for whom reading and writing are inextricable activities. Second, with respect to volumes of published letters, editors normally figure as intermediary if not preemptive presences in the relationship between writers and nonepistolary readerships; to them fall the tasks of appropriating letters to the institution that is the letter volume and of redefining, from time to time, the contract between the letter volume and its public. Equally applicable to texts that are literarily self-conscious and those that are not (granted, the distinction is often far from self-evident), a materialist conception of genre resists confining the criticism of letters to a single aesthetic. In addition, it encourages recognition of the varied conventions that occur within letter writing as a cross-cultural practice. Whereas even the most naïve letter writing embodies ancient notions as to the agency of inscribed utterance, it more immediately reflects expectations that arise within a particular culture at a particular time. To the degree that such expectations lend themselves to revision, they may foster idiosyncratic utterances peculiar to specific epistolary relationships.

As the forms the familiar letter can take and the uses to which it can be put are so numerous, it is well to propose a minimal definition. By familiar letter, then, I wish to designate texts that at some point in their histories are meant to pass in accordance with some postal arrangement from an addresser to an addressee, and that in some way inscribe the process by which an author personally addresses a specific readership.⁴ Addresser and addressee need not be singular; particularly among family correspondences, letters are written in collaboration to addressees who often collaborate as readers. Postal arrangements may include everything from a government postal service to the conveyance of a letter by someone happening to travel in the direction of the addressee. Letters that are meant to pass from a writer to a designated recipient do not always arrive and sometimes are not posted, and they are notoriously subject to becoming lost in transit. Yet even letters that are never mailed or that exist only in the roughest drafts usually bear in their rhetorical structure a clear epistolary intent. The process of addressing a specific readership enters the letter text in a number of ways, most obviously in certain stock gestures: dating, salutation, and complimentary close. It enters more profoundly, however, in a number of genre-reflexive themes found in correspondences at every level of literariness. The most prominent are those of separation, loneliness, and apprehension that death will intervene before the parties can reunite—a fear that letter sheet, mail, and language are inadequate to the task of maintaining relations.

Such themes commonly arise in meditations on the time and space that divide correspondents, in the anxiety expressed over the state of those whose absence prompts the letter’s composition, and in the anguish registered over delayed replies. To be sure, not all personal correspondence concerns itself with these themes; letters exchanged within a locality between persons who have access to one another are not apt to reflect upon spatiotemporal division, and examples may be found of letter writers for whom distance from friends and relatives excites little evident anxiety.⁵ Nevertheless, the occasion of letter writing as represented by many correspondents before the twentieth century is one in which the temporary (but always potentially permanent) loss of the addressee figures prominently. Moreover, the apprehension of that loss commonly generates a nostalgic or otherworldly fantasy of future reunion in which parties are compensated for the pain of endured separation. As we will see, the epistolary construction of utopian scenes that restore the full presence of the lost or absent friend is one of the most pervasive and interesting motifs in pre-twentieth-century letter writing. These themes inform the many occasions of correspondence, yet they arise with particular force in letters of condolence—those messages that address the void a death has produced in a family or among a circle of friends. Recurrently I will discuss condolence letters as expressions that most fully articulate the common epistolary themes of loss, separation, and reunion “in this world or the next,” that foreground the awareness of mortality that constitutes a dimension of much routine letter writing.

By defining letters as texts that pass from an addresser to an addressee and that in some way inscribe the process by which an author addresses a specific readership, I would exclude the letters of epistolary fiction. Such fiction, as Janet Altman, Linda Kauffman, and others have shown, develops possibilities for narrative inherent in the letter exchange, especially those exchanges in which letters serve as a medium of erotic relationships.⁶ Fictive and authentic letters are in some respects inseparable; both validate the importance of individual daily experience, and, as Altman and English Showalter Jr. suggest, affirm the broadly realist aesthetic that emerges throughout the eighteenth century and is associated with the rise of the novel.⁷ Writers of epistolary fiction (many of whom are themselves prolific correspondents) draw on the experience of writing authentic letters, while literate correspondents practice within a frame of reference that includes epistolary fiction. But fictional letters and the stories they tell are created under circumstances that differ markedly from the reciprocal exchanges that produce authentic letters. The present of authentic letter writing is a condition missing from the composition of epistolary fiction, which requires a synchronic structure in which the open-ended process of ongoing correspondences is imaged but not engaged. A long-time correspondence may indeed generate its own synchronic structures—paradigmatic responses to recurrent situations, anticipations of how the corresponding partner will reply, or how a reply may resonate within the shared experience of epistolary composition. Emerson, Dickinson, and Adams all have letters that they write again and again throughout their lives, and that assert a power to predetermine experience. However, authentic correspondences, unlike their fictional counterparts, can only provisionally forecast closure.⁸

In addition to epistolary novels, the present study also excludes a variety of texts that proceed in the more or less elaborate fiction—generally reflected in the title—that they are letters, but that do not engage a genuinely epistolary process. Examples range from conduct books such as Lydia Sigourney’s Letters to Young Ladies (1837)—which share with epistolary fiction a common ancestor in the letter-writer (or letter-writing manual) with its model letters and moral precepting, pioneered by Samuel Richardson’s Familiar Letters on Important Occasions (1741)—to instructional tracts like John Young’s The Letters of Agricola on the Principles of Vegetation and Tillage (1822), a text that addresses farming practices appropriate to Nova Scotia.⁹ Another major genre of such writing is the philosophical letters of travel, real and imagined. Examples include J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer (1782), John La Farge’s An Artist’s Letters from Japan (1899), William Dean Howells’s Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), and, more recently, Alphonso Lingis’s Abuses (1994)—all developments of a genre framed by Montesquieu’s Lettres Persans (1721). An additional category of writing not covered by this study that does engage something of a genuine epistolary process is the public letter published in a newspaper or as a pamphlet. Examples range from John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1767) to David Walker’s Appeal (1829) and Sarah Moore Grimke’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Women (1838). Writing of this kind often grows out of, leads to, and overlaps with private correspondence, and the public letter is adept at mimicking the confidential tone of the private exchange. Yet the conventions and expectations that distinguish the private from the public occasion remain firm.¹⁰

In describing letters as texts that at some point in their history are meant to pass from an addresser to an addressee, I anticipate a further qualification of what the letter can be as a cultural object. Letters have histories, even those (by far the vast majority) that duly arrive at their destination to be read and, sooner or later, abandoned, discarded, or destroyed. What the addressee does with a letter received constitutes a crisis in a letter’s existence. Always more than its text, the holograph is an artifact of potential fetish value; the meaning of a letter within the economy of a correspondence emerges not only in the textual response that it draws but in the physical disposal of the holograph. To preserve or destroy a personally inscribed manuscript determines what the letter, beyond the initial cycle of exchange, may become as a cultural object. As it is preserved in a private or public archive the letter undergoes transformation: for the addressee it becomes an aging object that speaks to an evolving sense of the interpersonal past; to readers outside the epistolary exchange it becomes a document to be read for its various levels of biographical, historical, and literary interest. Although later readers may peruse autograph manuscripts in research libraries or on microfilm, they commonly encounter the texts of letters in books that have been constructed from archival materials. Presented to a book readership in the context of other letters that, in the unity of their compilation, are supposed to represent the totality of an author’s epistolary output or of a specific correspondence, the transcribed and annotated text of a letter is by no means the cultural object that began life as an autograph document addressed to a specific reader.

Apprehension that such objects may come under the scrutiny of unauthorized readers is registered by writers at all levels of sophistication: “I bege you not to let this scrabling be seen,” writes Sarah Hodgdon, a sixteen-year-old mill worker, to her mother in 1830.¹¹ The more literary or prominent the letter writer, the more cognizant the writer is apt to be of the potential interception or preservation of a holograph and its subsequent transformation into published text.¹² The letter writer’s plea that the recipient burn the letter after it has been read is commonplace in printed volumes of letters; nothing so drives home the ironic relationship that readers of published letters bear to these texts...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Epistolary Practices Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations and Note on Quotations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Burn This Letter
• Chapter 2: I Have Taken This Opportunity of Writing You a Few Lines
• Chapter 3: I Cannot Write This Letter
• Chapter 4: A Letter Always Seemed to Me Like Immortality
• Chapter 5: I Write Now d’Outre Tombe
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index