This week, a fellow member of my Rotary group stopped me at the end of the meeting to let me know that she was enjoying these columns. All of you writers out there understand how meaningful this kind of interaction is. After all, writing is a kind of one-way conversation. Writers articulate their thoughts, perhaps even pour their hearts out, and then . . . silence.
This column is starting to sound like a complaint or a plea for responses, but I can assure you it is not. I enjoy writing, and I am pretty sure I would be doing it even if I were alone on a desert island.
Still, sending messages into the void is clearly something that has provoked thought, and, I suspect, even anxiety among some far greater writers than I.
This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me--
So begins a poem by Emily Dickinson, who composed some 1700 poems and managed to publish only a handful of them.
Other writers have made the point less explicitly. Unlike Dickinson, Herman Melville published several books and even enjoyed a fair amount of success early in his career when he was writing adventurous sea novels such as Typee, an autobiographical account of his time on an island inhabited by cannibals. His magnum opus, Moby-Dick, however, did not receive the reception it deserved, and Melville became discouraged. His brilliant short story "Bartleby, The Scrivener," I believe, reflects Melville's feelings about not connecting with an audience. In the story, Bartleby, who has made his living as a kind of writer -- specifically, a copyist for an attorney -- stops writing. When his boss gives him an assignment, he replies simply, "I would prefer not to." In the end, Bartleby winds up in a Dead Letter Office, a place where letters that never reach their recipients are burned. Melville writes:
Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring: --the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity: -- he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Did Melville feel that he himself was writing "letters" that never reached their recipients, at least not in the way he hoped they would? I think he did. In fact, this most brilliant of novelists eventually turned away from fiction and, for decades, published only poetry. (By the way, the word "letters" works nicely as a stand-in for writing in general -- poems, short stories, novels, and more -- because it refers not only to messages sent to an audience, but also to the little characters that make up words. Words, in short, are made up of letters.)
Perhaps it is no coincidence that this theme of failed letters showed up in the writing of one of Melville's contemporaries, yet another underappreciated writer. In 1844, Edgar Allan Poe published "The Purloined Letter," one of his numerous short story masterpieces. The story concerns an unsent letter, which contains compromising information and thus can be used to blackmail a woman with something to hide. Poe's famous detective, C. Auguste Dupin, saves the day by purloining, or stealing, the letter so that it cannot be used for blackmail. In short, the letter is never sent and stands as another example of incomplete communication. There's more to the story, though -- or rather to the story behind the story. Many years earlier, as biographer Kenneth Silverman explains, Poe had written that money he was supposed to receive never reached him because someone had been "purloining letters" at the post office.
In all of these cases, both imaginary and real, someone has crafted a message (or sent money) that for one reason or another either never reaches a recipient or never elicits a satisfactory response. The letters are, in essence, missives into the void, and their authors are left unconnected.
Psychology tells us that connecting with our fellow human beings is an important part of the human experience, and surely it has long felt even more important to those of us who feel drawn to the act of expressing ourselves in words. How must it have felt to Dickinson, Melville, and Poe to feel that they were failing to connect, sending letters that were purloined or dead?
Yet another writer of this era can give us some idea of how such failed communication would have felt. In his poem "I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing," Walt Whitman captures the human craving for connection through a comparison with a solitary tree. The poem concludes with these lines:
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide flat space, Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, I know very well I could not.
Still, Whitman – in spite of some "dark patches," as he put it in one of his poems– was frequently optimistic and offered a positive take on connecting through writing in his magnificent poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Here, he takes the bold approach of writing a kind of "letter" to people he will never know, saying:
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence . . .
For all of its possible failings, writing has one advantage over speech. While it may feel one-sided, it has the benefit of longevity, even permanence. Dickinson, Melville, and Poe may have felt the pain of disconnection in their lives, but their "letters" have managed to reach us, "men and women of . . . ever so many generations hence."
P.S. The title of one of Poe's earliest short stories is "MS. Found in a Bottle." The title says it all: a writer supposedly has composed a message (that is, this story) and sent it into the void --in this case, the sea -- with no assurance that it will reach an audience. Since we are reading the story, we know that it has successfully reached a recipient, perhaps a piece of wish fulfillment for a writer anxious about making a connection. Still, the very notion of a manuscript in a bottle is a kind of troubling metaphor, namely that of writing enclosed in a container. We might say that it is, to use a phrase from one of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poems, "a book sealed." This thought brings me back to that desert island I mentioned earlier. Yes, I think I would be writing on that island, but maybe I also would be stuffing my manuscripts into bottles and hoping -- like Poe, Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman -- that they would reach someone somewhere.
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