I’m not nosey, I’m a historian

I’m surrounded by letters: stacks of personal correspondence. These particular letters are from 1911 and 1912, the years that Carl Van Doren and Irita Bradford met and were engaged to be married. A visual description might help, as this isn’t something you come across every day: the envelopes are tiny, perhaps 3 inch by 4 inch packets. Most of Carl’s letters to his beloved are addressed, simply, to Miss Irita Bradford, Tallahassee, Florida. In 1911 there’s no need for an address or even a zip code (which did not yet exist). A red wax seal, still attached, secured the envelope during its original journey from Urbana, Illinois to Tallahassee. The envelopes, and the leafs of paper inside, are yellowed with age and are stiff to unfold, but the writing is as legible (or, in many cases, as illegible) as the day they were sent. These letters are personal, between young lovers counting the days until their wedding day. 

Woman my own Dearest: When this reaches you I suppose you will be wanting me very badly (xxx, restless and nervous because you are tired and all alone. I wish I was there to hold you very close in my arms and whisper in your ear a hundred times how much I love you and would like to love you…I love you with my whole power, dearest.  Do you know that it is barely two months now till I shall have you all for my woman? Three days more in June, 62 in July and August, and then…

I’m not nosey, I’m a historian. And reading personal correspondence is the most fascinating part of history detective work. Do you know how many people burned their letters, either during their own lifetimes or under strict instruction after their deaths? The short answer is: alot (I’m not a mathematician and so that estimate is the best that I can do at this moment), especially when those people were public figures, as Carl and Irita Van Doren would become (he, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, she the longtime editor of the New York Herald Tribune Review of Books). Charles Dickens famously burned the bulk of correspondence between himself and his wife Catherine; George Washington instructed his wife Martha to burn their correspondence after his death.Burn after reading has, for many, been the order of the day. At the same time, volume upon volume of personal correspondence between persons of some degree of fame continue to be published in hefty tomes (a 700-page volume of letters between Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz weighs about ten pounds, I can personally confirm). For a biographer on the trail of history, letters that have survived fire, water, carelessness, forgetfulness, and yes: time, are treasured gems.