Issue 6 2010 - TLS - Victoria University

Last writes
by Anson Cameron
In this age where we tweet, text, email and blog,
communicating more but saying less, Anson
Cameron laments the loss of the letter.
I HAVE a letter from my father, written after he was
diagnosed with terminal cancer, that begins:
My Dear A.J.
The age of letter writing is of course gone but I have
always been better able to express myself in writing,
especially where emotions are involved. I wanted to
write to you at this time to say a few things while I
have reasonable clarity of mind...
Five pages later the letter ends:
My uttermost blessings and wishes for your lifetime
health and happiness and that of Sarah, Asta and
Freya.
Love Graeme. (Dad)
P.S. NO reply of course!
In my reply (of course) on a page headed
SENTIMENTALITY, I offered my own fond
memories and love. Then on another page titled
BUSINESS I offered to help him end his merciless
decline with a bottle of scotch and a conversation and
some carbon monoxide and a view of the Strathbogie
Ranges.
He then wrote me another letter, which began:
My heart bled and my eyes welled when I read your
wonderful, gallant offer to stand by my side at the
edge of eternity.
There was nothing wonderful or gallant about it; it
was one possible next step in a friendship. But this
was the opening sentence of a letter in which he took
two pages to knock me back.
No father and son were better friends, I think, but if
we hadn’t said these things in letters they would have
remained unsaid. For we are not European or Middle
Eastern men. We are Anglo-Celts and we have no
easy recourse to emotion. We cannot weep or wail
in each other’s presence. We cannot hug or make
spoken declarations of love. We had two powerful
communications. We could shake hands while
looking into each other’s eyes and therein see and
swap a story. Or we could write letters.
But Graeme (Dad) was right; the age of letter
writing is gone. And I reveal these extracts from his
letters only to give an idea of the profundity, love
and honesty hand-written correspondence so easily
contains. A letter seems to me a magical vessel, one of
the few that can hold all that is in a person’s heart.
There is the expectation that your letter will be read
and re-read by its recipient at leisure, in isolation.
It will be studied, its every nuance and mood
explored. It is, after all, a considered, composed
communication.
Would I have said the things I said to my father in an
email Could I have said them in the 140 characters
of a Tweet Could we have had this conversation on
Facebook
Computers and phones are rightly regarded as
porous devices and anything we say on them must
be understood to be said in a semi-public domain.
What chance true honesty if you suspect you might
be pouring your heart into the Town Crier’s ear
What chance a declaration of love And what fool
would offer assistance to a friend to end their curdled
mortality over the internet People writing computerto-computer
know what they are saying is potentially
public and are wary of revealing too much.
Historians have routinely mined the letters of the
famous dead to flesh out their humanity. The letters
were not always an accurate guide to the man, of
course. Famous people are at least as duplicitous as
the hoi polloi and many (especially writers) had an
eye to posterity when writing their letters and were
therefore writing for history, enhancing their legend.
Even this was no bad thing for the historian. If
one was painstaking over one’s letters because one
expected them to be kept, then good, the writer
was in effect penning for us the outline of an
autobiography. At their best a collection of letters
could give a picture of a private life, and an X-ray of
an inner life.
CHARLES Darwin was a shy, non-combative, tense
and often ill man who lived a double life. He sat on
his theory of natural selection for seven years before
he wrote to botanist Joseph Hooker in 1844. “I am
almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I
started with) that species are not (it is like confessing
a murder) immutable”.
His class and family hated the “fierce and licentious”
radical hooligans who would tear down the social
order without God to stop them, he worried. And
he didn’t want trouble with the church, his scientific
friends . . . or his wife, who was deeply religious.
It was a full 20 years after its inception that Darwin
finally bared his theory. Luckily we have his
notebooks and 14,000 letters to and from him in
which he made and broke friendships, equivocated,
courted supporters and extracted knowledge from
others.
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