Love, actually written down
The love letter is dying.
Okay, okay, I’ll back off and try not to be such an alarmist.
The love letter as we once knew it is dying.
Once upon a time — so the conventional wisdom goes — love letters were penned by heartsick, ink-stained wretches who would enclose their deepest thoughts on parchment paper inside bottles or wax-sealed envelopes, leaving the fate of the letters themselves up to the whims of waves or over-burdened letter carriers. Romances were stoked carefully from a distance, heated by imagination, absence, and longing.
All too often these days, the florid language of courtship gets condensed to 160 characters so it can fit into a text message. The written proof of love and desire gets digitized and deleted. There may always be room under your bed for your shoebox of high-school love letters, but your hard drive only has so much space.
So, how nice it is to see a book that celebrates the love letter as the wholly imperfect and idiosyncratic art form that it is.
Four Letter Word: Invented Correspondence From the Edge of Modern Romance is a great little book of completely fictional love letters from some of today’s leading writers. There are sad letters, funny letters, silly letters, creepy letters, and inspiring letters. There are letters to lovers, parents, old friends, non-acquaintances, cross-species crushes, and Santa.
Yes, Santa.
And while some of the letters drip with silliness (take the Bigfoot-to-Santa letter as the most obvious example; author Graham Roumieu mimics as best he can the stilted caveman-speak of Bigfoot: “Ten year now, no phone call, no letter, no hello-visit-down-the-chimney leave Bigfoot only to wonder what going on in Santa head”) and others are just kind of weird and sad (Neil Gaiman’s stalkerish letter from a street-performing statue to his unsuspecting crush springs to mind), there are a few that legitimately moved me to tears with their beauty and sincerity.
A. L. Kennedy’s sober, aching letter about, but not necessarily to, a lost love was the first piece in the anthology to crack my cynical shell (that’s right, there’s a closet romantic inside me that I let out every now and again, but don’t tell anyone). Kennedy’s words are dark but not without hope. They come from a place where the pain bubbles up thick and can’t be soothed, and where the sad little empty rooms we move between once we find ourselves alone are never completely empty because they are filled to the corners with the grit of regret. A place where the movement of the world is automatic and unchanged, and sweeps us along with it, perhaps so we can convince ourselves that we are moving on, making progress, healing.
Kennedy writes:
I have this which you won’t read. Whatever form of words I find, it will make no difference — there’s nothing more you’ll let me say to you. I work in invisible ink, unsay myself in rooms I don’t want and don’t know and I keep on the road to stay ahead of so much silence, to be beside you in this one way, travelling as I know you’re travelling, running.
This idea of loss as integral to the expression of love pops up several other times in the book. There are letters to dead mothers, dead fathers, lovers lost in the flood waters of Katrina, lovers who’ve never even met, and impossible crushes. There is pain here.
But oh so much joy, too, as fleeting and as fickle as it may be. And the best part is it’s all written down for posterity.
Other authors in the collection include Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audrey Niffenegger, Jeanette Winterson, Douglas Coupland, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and more.
Published on The Shelf Life, the book blog by writers for The Commercial Appeal, on May 17, 2008