First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

The state of the art, 1665

“Whither correspondence?” is, for the sort of people who enjoy using words like “whither,” one of the great questions of future literary studies. For several centuries, a central feature of intellectual biography has been the fact that most great writers and thinkers have also been great letter-writers. Waugh, arguably, is at his sustained finest in his correspondence rather than his fiction; Yeats wrote letters at extraordinary length and with eloquent passion throughout his life; Ted Hughes’s posthumously-published letters are the crowning glory of his poetic career; Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin produced a correspondence which, even in the incomplete form in which it survives, raises wit, vitriol, confession, obscenity and pretension-puncturing to the level of art.

A digital age is transforming this beyond recognition, and fast. It’s safe to say that, within a generation or so, we will lack physical records of most writers’ and thinkers’ correspondences. There will be emails, electronic documents, disks, sporadic note-pads and printouts, but a coherent body of letters will only rarely exist; and even when it does it will have little of the authority - the sense of intellectual totality - that you find in past eras.

Still, technological melancholy is a singularly useless emotion; it’s far more interesting to look at what it was that underpinned the writing of these letters than to simply wring our hands over their passing. Amis and Larkin are an interesting case in point: two acutely self-aware writers who frequently questioned, and celebrated, what it was that they gained from letters. Here is Amis writing to Larkin as a young man, in 1950, well before the publication of his first novel:

Also, dear man, I have to thank you for stopping me from being a shit and encouraging me to be funny in the light way and getting me interested in modern po [sic] . . . To-day, you are my ‘inner audience’, my watcher in Spanish, the reader over my shoulder, my often-mentioned Jack, and a good deal more

Amis knew a thing or two about audiences, having recently written a thesis about the previous century’s “reading public.” It was a thesis in which this soonish-to-be-incredibly-popular author outlined what he saw as the most crucial part of any author’s development - their ability, or inability, to find an audience. Any writer, he had argued, writes:

originally for a small circle of intimate friends, keeping before him as he writes their probable response, and afterwards soliciting their opinion.

After this initial stage, the healthy writer then goes on to address “intermediate” and finally “outer” audiences. Without such a progress, he argued, a mature, communicative style would never be developed.

It was a paradigm Amis conformed to closely himself: his hugely successful first novel, Lucky Jim, was shaped, revised and tested in correspondence was Larkin; his faith in writing it was sustained by his friend’s encouragement and feedback; and, perhaps inevitably, its triumph marked his transition to a far larger audience and the dilution of this crucial early friendship.

As well as their most basic element of sustaining an important friendship, then, Amis’s letters let their author know he was not alone as a would-be writer. He could enjoy a companionship of written as well as spoken words: the letters he exchanged made him feel appreciated, validated, corrected, stretched, and informed; they let him express himself, vent his (many, many) frustrations, render his transient concerns permanent, develop his style by entertaining someone whose opinion he valued; and achieve all this in a medium that was intimate and rewarding - in which, unlike the uncertain sphere of “literature,” a response was guaranteed. Is this starting to sound like anything else yet?

The medium I have in mind is blogging, and in particular the kind of blogging discussed in Andrew Sullivan’s rather fine Atlantic essay “Why I Blog,” a conscious updating of Orwell for the 21st century. Discussing his own early blogging days, Sullivan recalls some advice given to him by Slate-founder Michael Kinsley:

I realized that the online form rewarded a colloquial, unfinished tone. In one of my early Kinsley-­guided experiments, he urged me not to think too hard before writing. So I wrote as I’d write an e-mail—with only a mite more circumspection.

It’s a simple observation, but one that leads naturally enough to the “intoxicatingly free” form of which Sullivan is one of the web’s foremost exponents. The blog/letter analogy is, of course, far from perfect (think politics, news, audiences, technology); nevertheless, it’s remarkably useful once you get down to that eternal literary set of questions: why, how, and for whom do you write? Because, far more than it’s a diary or a news digest or a pulpit, blogging is a correspondence: one with a few people, initially, and then more, and then more. So long as its intentions are communicative as well as simply informative, it is a conversation and a validation. A far more promiscous conversation, admittedly, than any letter between friends. But letters, in their day, were the written medium in which one could write aloud, so to speak; in which answers were to be expected, and a sense of self tested and whetted against the ability to communicate this. Today, we write aloud online.

As Sullivan notes, it’s an ancient, rare gift among writers “to let others… pivot you toward relative truth.” If you look at many thoughtful writers today, you’ll find a blog located somewhere in their frame of literary reference very close to where, a century ago, they would have had a correspondence. Something they sit down to for an hour or so each day: a vessel into which they mix the personal and the universal, then pour out freely for consumption and response. It’s a space and an interaction writers need, just as they need an audience and a voice. So let’s be idealistic, and a little impulsive, and end with some Auden to temper our inner Orwells and tell us what, when you get down to it, writing can be all about:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Auden, an inveterate self-reviser who actually excised this stanza from later editions of his poems because he came to consider it dishonest (”We must love one another and die” was, he thought, the only true thing to say), would have made an excellent blogger.