Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>>From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
>>It's my pleasure today to introduce author, Thomas Mallon.
He has written 14 books and he has both an international
and national audience but I'm happy to say he is a local writer.
He lives in Washington and I was told just before I came up here
that he is working on a novel about Watergate.
His previous novels include Henry and Clara, Two Moons,
and Dewey Defeats Truman among others.
They have been renowned especially those with historical settings
for the detail, and the research, and the nuance
with which they depict times removed from the present.
Thomas has also punched his bureaucratic ticket in Washington.
He worked for the NEH and served as the deputy chairman of the NEH
and he is the recently appointed director
of the Creative Writing Program at George Washington University.
He occasionally dabbles in journalism and some
of you remember a recent New Yorker article
in which he had the temerity
to question the reflexive respect that's paid to an obscure novel know
as TO Kill a Mockingbird.
He called it "moral Ritalin" I think, a phrase that I rather like.
His most recent book is Yours Ever: People and Their Letters.
And so here to tell you about it is Thomas Mallon.
[ Applause ]
>>Thomas Mallon: Good afternoon.
Thank you for coming.
It's nice to be here again.
I remember being here the first time back in 2001,
with my fiction hat on I think that year.
This time I've got nonfiction hat on.
I'm going to talk a little bit about this book about letters
that I've written called Yours Ever.
When I was out doing the things one does promoting a book,
one radio interviewer asked me a really good question about how --
if there was a fire in your house and, you know, you could go in
and you save one thing, what would save,
the photographs or the letters?
And it's kind of an impossible question but I remember saying,
I was thinking particularly about my parents, both of them are gone now.
And I thought the letters because I would remember what they looked
but the letters are so evocative
of their personalities, their handwriting.
They both had kind of sad, long, protracted, declines
and it's visible in the way they would write letters.
And, you know, the ones that they sent me when I was a freshman
in college I still have them with the six cents stamp
with Franklin Roosevelt on it and they're evocative of the whole time.
And so I wanted to write this book about a genre
that there's no getting around it is dying out.
Letters are becoming a kind of specialty genre.
We reserve them now for special occasions like sympathy letters.
Most of us still think it's kind of tacky to send a sympathy e-mail,
you know, or a sympathy text I think would be rock bottom
in terms of the human spirit.
But the everydayness of letters which is
to a great extent being replaced by e-mail and so forth
which we're not really saving despite our ability to archive it.
We're not really holding onto it all that much.
This is something that we're losing something we need
to really I think cope with.
And I tried to make this book, which explores some
of the great letter writing of all time.
It's not an anthology.
As one person said, its anthology told in the anthologist own words.
There is a lot of quotation from letters but it's a kind
of running commentary on collections of letters that intrigue me,
excited me, that I liked, that annoyed me.
It's very whimsical.
It doesn't try to be encyclopedic and inclusive.
It tries to suggest the whole terrain that's out there
without actually being absolutely comprehensive.
I started this book in 1994.
It was 13 years overdue at the publisher
by the time I handed it in.
When I started writing it a stamp cost 29 cents.
I did not have an e-mail account.
No one had any idea what texting is or what Twittering might be.
I still have half an idea of it.
Somebody recently told me that emailing is for old people.
Somebody who lives her entire life texting now and I generally bring
up the rear where technology is concerned.
I'm not a guide to the future.
So I thought maybe I could have some usefulness as a guide to the past.
But when I started writing the book, I really didn't know that we were
on the verge of this enormous sea change.
And the book was always intended to be companion volume to a book
about diaries that I had written 25 years ago.
Same kind of approach, opinionated, old fashion, whimsical,
what interested me, what I hoped might interest readers.
And I thought I wanted to suggest the same kind of landscape
about letter writing without being kind of a scold.
I mean the book is unquestionably or implicitly nostalgic.
I mean I do think we're on the verge of losing something
with the disappearance of the letter as an everyday form of activity.
But, you know, I didn't want to be hectoring
and I'm entering my kind of, you know, Andy Rooney years anyway.
I doubt miss this.
Whenever -- I mean I didn't want to do that.
I eventually embraced all of the technology.
I e-mail, I text, I do not Twitter.
>>Thomas Mallon: But, you know, I'm with it.
Although I still think that the --
to me the absolute perfect thing was the fax.
To me it was the sweet spot.
It had a very brief life, the fax but it combined the best
of both worlds; it was fast, efficient.
Jessica Mitford, the great English writer who got used to faxing
at the very end of her life when she was in her 80s,
she adapted all these letter conventions to the fax.
She would fax her sister back and write yours of 9:54 p.m., received.
And you had something to hold onto.
And it just seemed to me my preferred stopping point.
But the fax had really a very brief life.
I think it was in the saddle as a mode of communication
for probably five years before everybody turned to e-mail.
This book is organized around the motives people have
for writing letters.
Why they actually write them.
The chief reason has always been absence
and the letter is a bridge over distances.
You couldn't travel to somebody you were separated
from so there's a chapter about such things.
Friendship, the way in which there are certain friendships
that really exist not on paper alongside
in person, but exist only on paper.
One of them, my favorite ones is the friendship between George Sand,
the French kind of bestselling writer of the 19th century,
and Flaubert, the artistic agonizer squeezing out the [
indiscernible], torturing himself over every word.
And George Sand says, oh, you know, my proofs of novel came today.
I usually don't bother with them.
I don't bother reading them.
And, you know, Flaubert is neurotic about everything.
I think and yet she understood his neuroses and she
to him was this kind of earth mother figure.
I think if they saw one another in person all the time,
they would've driven one another absolutely crazy
and yet it worked on paper.
It was the right medium for that.
And it think you may have experienced
that in your own letter writing.
I'm sure that you e-mail with certain people
and much prefer e-mailing with them than being
on the telephone with them.
And I think we -- relationships adapt
to whatever medium we carry them out in.
There's a chapter on advice, letters particularly --
letters from parents to children who frequently been full of advice.
There's a whole collection of Scott Fitzgerald's letters
to his daughter Scotty when she was a young woman and Vassar.
And his advice is very particular.
But one day when he's in a more generalizing mood,
he says to herself, just do everything completely differently
from what your mother and I did and you should be all right.
>>Thomas Mallon: There's a chapter on complaint.
Sometimes letters used for serious reformist complaint.
Florence Nightingale when she arrives in the Crimea
and is horrified by the hospital conditions sends back these
scathing, vivid letters to the war office in England that lead
to a complete revolution in the way medicine is practiced
on the battlefield.
And the fact that she could sustain these complaints day after day
and letter after letter had an enormous effect on the world.
That chapter includes that it's outer stream, hate mail
and goes all the way up to the Unabomber.
Needless to say, there are love letters in the book.
The correspondence between George Bernard Shaw
and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the actress, a chased correspondence
but they had a kind of flirtation without any physicality to it.
They refer to themselves as *** lions at one point.
And eventually when she's down on her luck financially,
she wants to sell his letters to make some money.
He resists and tries to explain to her that there's a difference
between physical property, the ownership of the actual paper letter
and intellectual property, his words.
You can't quote them without violating copyright.
She never can grasp this distinction no matter how many times he explains
it to her and she finally with hurt feelings says Dear Joey,
which she called him for unusual reasons,
my letters are worth two cents, yours 50 quid so bother to answer.
And she gave up on the idea.
The worst set of love letters of all time, the love letters
between the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Sickening.
Sickening.
I mean yes we all say things in love that we don't say in other context.
We, yes, we talk baby talk even on paper sometimes.
But to listen to the man who was supposed to be King of England go on
and in this infantile manner letter after letter,
after letter is kind of sick making.
And they always sign themselves "we" because it blended Wallace,
Wallace Simpson and Edward the Eighth and they --
each time they put it down, they act as if it's the quaint age
of all time and are amazed by it.
There's confessions.
A whole chapter devoted to people who write letters to say things
that they can't say or won't say to their nearest and dearest in person.
Lady Melbourne who was on of Byron's acquaintances.
She was the mother-in-law to his onetime mistress, Caroline Lamb,
the woman who famously said that Byron was mad,
bad and dangerous to know.
Her mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne remained his confidant
after the affair and when he disastrously married Annabella
Milbanke, he wrote to Lady Melbourne, I got a wife and a cold
on the same day but have got rid of the last pretty speedily.
And other chapters on prison and war.
I think the greatest war letters of all time are the ones
that Wilfred Owen, the poet, sent home from the front.
Owen, nobody's idea of a soldier, although he became quite a good one
but was the most kind of delicate, sensitive personality,
the last boy you would imagine being sent to the front.
There is no more vivid documentary of the First World War
than the letters that Owen sent home to his mother.
One of the things that he was in charge
of as a company officer was taking care of the mail and making sure
that it got distributed to the soldiers
when it arrived at the front.
And one of this duties was when that soldier
to whom the letter was addressed was dead, to get the letter returned.
And he writes to his mother late in the war when he,
this very sensitive fellow has become hardened to everything.
He says I now don't even take the cigarette out of my mouth
when I write deceased over the envelope.
>>Thomas Mallon: It's a shattering picture
of what war is actually like day-to-day.
And I thought I would say since we're in Washington, there are a lot
of presidents' letters in this book.
They come and go in all different kinds of chapters.
Thomas Jefferson's letters to his children and grandchildren,
not letters that would have made them rush
to open the envelopes every time they saw one.
My for all of his genius, he could be difficult.
He really tries to run their lives impart wisdom.
There's not exactly a light touch to the Jefferson letters
but they're fascinating for their intellectual content.
Lincoln, for all that we know about Lincoln,
we only have about 400 of Lincoln's letters.
They're masterly but they're very different from the Lincoln
that we know of as a man.
They're very short.
The greatest storyteller ever to occupy the White House.
Lincoln always had time for an illustrative story,
the way Ronald Reagan always like to stop the action.
And let me -- it reminds me of a story.
Lincoln in his letters has no time for storytelling.
They're short, they're urgent
and Lincoln made during the civil war an immediate adaptation
to the telegram.
He communicated with him battlefield generals by telegram
and was often extremely terse and extremely pointed with them.
He gets a letter from General McClellan who's so slow
and never getting anything done
and he just asks him would you mind telling me what it is
that your horses have done to become so fatigued
because you never seem to move out of camp.
Franklin Roosevelt, a master
of the short affectionate note does not write long letters
but writes these cards that were --
I mean Winston Churchill said meeting Franklin Roosevelt it was
like your first glass of champagne
and that's what Roosevelt's notes were like, short, pick-me-ups,
often encouraging, very light, a kind of tonic.
Teddy Roosevelt, an advice giver, wrote many, many --
he's the champion of presidential letter writers,
wrote 150,000 of them and wrote many of them to his children
that were full of advice about how to live the strenuous life.
They're often very tender, full of nicknames, silliness, nonsense,
and they're always written on the fly
because he's always doing something very strenuous.
And Roosevelt to one of his children writes my favorite postscript
of all time.
After writing this very affectionate letter to his child,
"P.S. I have just killed a bear."
If I were ask you to wind up here.
If I were to ask you what president you thought was the champion love
letter writer of all time in the White House, who would answer?
Or let me put the question differently,
who would you say would be least likely with the possible exception
of Richard Nixon because that's the kind of gimme, like,
take Nixon off the table.
And he wrote actually very charming letters
to Pat Nixon when he courted her.
But who might be just about the least likely?
[ Shouts from audience ]
>>Thomas Mallon: Taft, I'm that's, you know,
I can't think of a better answer than that.
Maybe just on physical grounds but my answer would've been at least
when I was writing this, Woodrow Wilson, so pinched, so professorial,
you know, with the severe little glasses looking like he just come
from the Princeton Lecture Hall, the most scholarly of our presidents.
Well, in fact, Wilson arrived at the White House married
to his first wife, Ellen who died of Bright's disease in 1914,
the second year that he was there.
He went into a tremendous depression afterwards, which his relatives
and friends tried to bring him out of by introducing him
to a woman named Edith Galt who was a very plump, lively widow.
She was married to the man who ran Galt's Jewelry Store,
which was in Washington for nearly 200 years.
And they introduced the two
of them hoping it would divert Wilson from his troubles.
Well, they got more than they bargained for.
This famously professorial figure was mad
for her from the first moment.
They met and they begin sending letters across town.
She only lives blocks away but they begin sending letters sometimes two,
three times a day to each other.
And though I would read you just a couple of paragraphs.
This is the way the book kind of carries this combination
of commentary and quotation.
Edith Galt was a less cerebral companion
than Ellen, his first wife had been.
In one decollate portrait, this juicy corporeal presence looks
like Madame X as seen through the eyes of Botero.
And it not hard to imagine how Wilson
who once said he was carrying a volcano inside felt ready to blow.
"If I ever again have to with you for an hour and half",
he writes her on June 5th, "with only two stolen glances
to express my all but irresistible desire to take you in my arms
and smother you with kisses, I am sure I shall crack an artery."
Two weeks later while Edith has tea at the White House with Helen Bones,
his niece who was one of the people who fixed him up with Edith,
Wilson hides behind some lace curtains in the Green Room.
Taft could not have done that.
He would not have fit behind them.
And he writes to her afterwards that he quote, "Feasted his eyes
on the loveliest person in the world with oh, so such a longing to go
to her and take her in my arms and cover her with kisses."
He more than once talks about his competing personalities,
"The boy that is in me who has found a perfect playmate.
The lover in me who has found love
like his own and the man of affairs."
And in a summer of war fevers, this is 1915, he turns Edith's love
for him into her patriotic duty.
"I am absolutely dependent on intimate love for the right
and free, and most effective use of my powers.
Consider what it costs my work to do without it."
I would say that is a unique of epistolary blackmail.
You have to do this for your country.
The White House usher in those days had the very strange name
of Ike Hoover.
It almost sounds as if it was an Republican plant
in the Wilson White House with these names
of future Republican presidents.
And Lincoln -- Wilson would send him down to the old post office,
what's down on Pennsylvania Avenue,
where I used to work when I was at the NEH.
He would send him down in the evening to see if the 9:30 mail
from New York had come in when Edith was traveling and to see
if it had brought anything from her.
He eventually suffered from writer's cramp because he was writing
so many handwritten letters and began
to type his love letters on a Hammond portable.
But these letters, I think, they give a glimpse of a president
that we could not get any other way.
And I'll just end with one letter that he writes to her
on a Saturday night in August of 1915
where he provides an unforgettable glimpse of his presidential self.
"I got back to the house before the band concert on the south lawn was
over and heard I fancied the greater part of the program
as I sat writing at my desk.
At the end when they played the Star Spangled Banner,
I stood up all alone", in his office.
"I stood up all alone here by my table at attention
and had unutterable thoughts about my custody of the traditions
and the present honor of that banner.
I could hardly hold the tears back and then the loneliness."
And I don't think this is a glimpse you would get
of Woodrow Wilson in any other way.
I don't think you would get in any other form but a letter
and I don't think you would get it in any other --
to any other recipient other
than this woman he was completely mad for and unguarded with.
Once they married, which they did, in the White House,
the letter stopped which is the usual kind of ironic thing
about any collection of love letters that ends a successful courtship,
there's no need for them anymore.
The two are together and so they cease writing letters
but together they must have been thinking of those letters on the day
in 1918 when the two of them together cut the ribbon
and inaugurated the first airmail service
of the United States Post Office,
a boon to lovers everywhere for many decades.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>>Thomas Mallon: If there's time for a question
or two I'd be happy to take one.
There are microphones there.
Two fast questions the pavilion man tells me.
Anybody? This gentleman.
>>Have you seen any of Obama's love letters?
>>No, I haven't but I would not pass up the opportunity.
You know one of the things that is interesting
and I think a little bit sad now is we have a President
in the White House who is a very graceful writer.
He is a book writer man
who can write his own books when he wants to.
But I don't think we will know him from --
we won't know his presidency from the letters he writes,
the personal letters and so forth.
Since Richard Nixon, there's been what commentators like to call a
"chilling effect" on presidential correspondence,
just as we will never have tapes made again in the Oval Office.
Presidents, I think, are much more reserved about putting things
on paper than they used to be.
When Hillary Clinton was the First Lady, she said quite seriously
that she would like to be keeping a diary of her time in the White House
but she knew that eventually it would wind being subpoenaed
for something so she didn't.
And I think we are the poorer for that.
I mean it'll be -- we'll know the President through some
of his writings but not through the kind
of personal writings that Wilson had.
And this last one, yes.
>>Thank you.
I was just wondering whether you have any point of view
about all the letters that were destroyed by families and --
like I think of Jane Austen's letters that were --
a lot of them burned by her sister.
How do you account for the letters that survive
and what do you think separates these different circumstances?
>>Thomas Mallon: Well, it's, you know,
it's a very interesting question.
It's very difficult for somebody who wants to get rid of a group
of letters because they are going to recall some sad,
painful, private situation.
It's very difficult to say to that person, no, you have an obligation
to literary history, you have an obligation to biographers
who may be coming after you.
I mean many writers have done this.
Dickens famously had his bonfire on Gads Hill when he got,
you know, rid of many things.
I do thinks it's mostly a question for the archivist
at the Library of Congress.
The most urgent question at the moment is how are we going
to save those letters and communications and by
that I really mean, e-mail from writers, famous people, so forth
and make them available to scholars and writers
and just ordinary readers the way we've had letters available
to us for so long.
That is still so much influx now and it's not really a settled question.
So I think that's a real challenge for the librarians
when they're not putting on the festival to contend with.
Okay. Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>>This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us a LOC.gov.