To The Letter

“We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Letters are magical. The English poet Donne wrote, “More than kisses, letters mingle souls, for thus friends absent speak.” Letters open a window into lives in a manner that would never, in any other circumstance, be discovered in quite the same way. Letters have the power to change lives at the moment they are read and letters have the power to make history for the simple fact that, years later, they become history. I have a box of family letters stored away in a spare room closet and I don’t know what, exactly, will become of those letters when I am gone, but I diligently hang on to them. Whether my own children hold on to letters they have received over the years, I do not know. I hope so. My future grandchildren may not ever receive a postmarked letter in their lives. I weep at this thought.

So many letters lost! So many people, famous names but also our own family members, burn their letters during their own lifetimes or left specific instruction upon death. Burn After Reading. The letters of George Washington, Charles Dickens, and Somerset Maugham, to name just a few, were destroyed this way. We have neither their insights into particular historical events nor knowledge of the personal vagaries that were most certainly contained in these correspondence. Gone.

Other public persons have donated their letters to scholarly archives, often under specific lock-and-key for a certain number of years to allow the passage of time to temper the sentiments contained in these personal missives. Georgia O’Keefe put such a stipulation on her husband Alfred Stieglitz’s letters after his death, which have only recently come into the public domain (Stieglitz died in 1946, O’Keefe in 1986). The non-famous among us have burned their letters as well, out of a sense of discretion no doubt, leaving descendants with little insight into the life and times of their own family members.

But there is hope for the incessantly curious. Many anthologies of letters have been and continue to be published at an acceptable clip. If you can’t make it to a University Library archive in order to spend weeks if not months poring through the personal correspondence of Georgia O’Keefe, Virginia Woolf, E.B. White, or Ernest Hemingway, you can buy the books to add to your very own library. I encourage you to begin with Simon Garfield’s very good To the Letter; A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing.

You can even purchase collections of old letters. Flea markets and online sites like EBay sell old letters by the hundreds. Fleamarketloveletters.com is an online project which archives and preserves old letters and photos that, hence the hashtag, have been found at flea markets. Many of these letters come from the World War II and Vietnam eras, those years now relegated to Ancient History, before Facetime and Snapchat and texting rendered much of letter writing obsolete.

 In the spirit of research, I recently purchased a small collection of WWII era letters on EBay (I’m still not sure as to who, exactly, sells away such personal family memorabilia on EBay, but clearly there is a market for it). My EBay score arrived promptly in a small package, including about 30 letters between Miss Thelma Duers of Glens Falls, New York and Pvt. Richard Jackson, recently enlisted in the U.S. Army and stationed at Fort Myers, Maryland. Both Thelma and Richard had impeccable handwriting. This is a bonus to be sure, as I have spent many, many, many hours in the course of research straining my eyes in attempts to interpret the illegible scrawl or overly-flourished calligraphy of other persons who shall remain nameless at this time (Elinor Wylie and Irita Van Doren: you know who you are….)

The Thelma & Richard letters are the stuff of 1940s’ lovebirds, a couple engaged and then newly married during the tail end of the war (they, of course, did not know that V-J Day would end the war, finally, in August 1945). How did a new bride begin her married life with a husband several hundred miles away, a married life that would exist primarily on paper during the honeymooning years that most couples enjoy? How did a young husband bear the fact that his girl was, truth be told, taking care of herself, something that he so desperately wanted to do himself?  These letters illuminate gender roles in 1940s’ America, ideas about contraception, and the recreation and gossip of small-town America. They also provide a window into the life of a private in the U.S. Army during wartime and describe certain military training exercises. Richard’s particularly poignant description of a U.S.O. rooming house in Washington D.C, at which our soldier arrived very late in the night, looking for an inexpensive and clean place to lay his head after spending the day buying a pair of wedding rings, only to find that the sole accommodation available is a pillow and blanket set atop a ping-pong table. We learn that sleeping atop a ping-pong table is worse than sleeping on concrete. My own husband spent many a night sleeping on the sidewalks of Iraq villages in 2003: soldiers and Marines will gratefully take sleep wherever they can find it.

My collection of the Thelma & Richard letters ends, abruptly, in June of 1943, by which time Richard had been sent to The Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Georgia, he wrote, was “Hotter than ____” 

My Bestest most Darling Wife Forever (I Love You). Here it is Monday nite again, but this Monday nite is a bit unusual. It is about the hottest Monday nite I have ever seen… and the flies are thicker than thick.

They had the second board meeting today and I was lucky enough not to have to go before it. The next two weeks count quite heavily and we have to be “on the ball” more than ever. Just one slip now & it will be a case of being on the outside looking in, & God knows I want to be on the inside looking out. It is now about ten-thirty and it has been a bit of a rugged day. We ran the obstacle course for record this morning. Then this afternoon we had an hour of dirty fighting lessons & after that a period of physical exercises. All of these things aren’t so bad, but it is the dam heat that takes a man out.

How is everything coming along in the new house? Got it pretty well settled or are you breaking your back? Take it easy will you honey? After all, those twins have got to have a strong Mother so you can’t misuse yourself. I’ll write a longer letter tomorrow nite – Till then God Bless You & keep you for me. I Love You all there is – believe me.

                                                            Love & Kisses

                                                            Hugs & Squeezes

                                                            Your husband forever,

                                                            Dick

I Love You Mrs. J!

And that is it. That is the last I know about Richard and Thelma Jackson, she keeping their new home going in Glens Falls and he surviving Infantry School at Ft. Benning. A little digging and I discovered that after Richard completed his service in the Army, the couple began their married life in earnest in Glens Falls, where Richard went on to become a diesel engineer. They later had one child, a boy (the mention of “the twins” during the wartime correspondence was wishful thinking). From her 1935 high school yearbook, the 18-year old Thelma R. Duers looked full of anticipation and optimism for a life ahead. I don’t know all that that life contained, I only know the small snippet that appears in this aged stack of letters. And I know that she lives for me, now, as does Richard. The most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life remains. As a historian and someone who believes in the human condition, that, indeed, is something.