Letters in Books

I’ve had the first edition collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s letters for six months or so, and I’m still reading them. I’m in no hurry. I read a couple of letters, maybe three, and then put the book aside. A few days later or a couple of weeks later or a month later, I’ll read a few more, and then put the book aside again.

Collected letters are not like novels or nonfiction books. You don’t just — or at least I don’t just — read them straight through. I take my time, read them with a little space in between, as if I were receiving the letters through the mail.

They’re the only letters I do receive, either through the mail or in book form. I already told you about the letter I got a couple of weeks ago from the reporter and columnist Randall Beach. Randy handwrote it in ink on two sides of personal stationery and mailed it to me in an envelope on which he also handwrote my address. It was a nice letter, charming and personal and . . . rare. I never receive letters like that anymore. I never receive letters, period.

Even most emails I receive are less than 40 words long, and many are only 20 words long or just 10 words long or just one word long. I guess people feel they don’t have anything much to say, and maybe they don’t. Or maybe they think I’m just too boring to write to — too boring, too old, too . . . incidental.

I pretty much live in a letter vacuum. Life goes on around me, and I sit and watch it like a sphinx. If I were to die tomorrow, hardly anyone would notice. Certainly, no one would write me a letter of condolence.

I’ve already written my obituary, to save other people the trouble when the time actually comes to tell the world that I am gone at last. People wouldn’t know enough about me to make a decent summary and farewell on their own. So I’ve put it together myself. That way, I got all the good stuff in.

Vonnegut’s letters, by the way, aren’t the only collected letters on my bookshelves. I also have letters by Kafka, Hemingway, James Joyce, E.B. White, Chekhov, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, the correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, and the “Wind in the Willows” letters that the British author of that work, Kenneth Grahame, wrote to his young son, and which I wrote about a couple of essays ago.

Of course, not everyone likes to write — letters or anything — and that includes famous writers. In a letter Vonnegut wrote to his publisher in December 1975, he referred to a recent chat he had with his friend and fellow writer E.L. Doctorow about something the writer Renata Adler had said.

“Ed Doctorow told me,” wrote Vonnegut, “Renata Adler’s definition of a writer at supper yesterday. She says a writer is somebody who hates to write. That sure includes me,” added Vonnegut in his letter. “And, as Max Wilkinson once said, ‘I never knew a blacksmith who was in love with his anvil.’ “

Vonnegut then added, “Hi ho.”

To which I add my own, Hi ho. And a twiddley dum, too.

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