The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters

A renowned cultural observer and critic focuses on the intersection of art and experience in an intellectual memoir that describes coming of age in Berkeley, California, in the 1960s, the events that shaped her life, and the influences of film, theater, art, and literature on her life and work. 12,500 first printing. Tour.

The Conversion

This is not to say that I am entirely reformed. I am still one of the stubbornest people I know. My first response to any suggestion or criticism or recommendation is generally to say no; only later does it occur to me that it might have been a good idea. Change is always difficult for me, and resistance is at the core of my personality.

I resisted e-mail for at least two or three years. Many of my Berkeley friends are academics, so they got it automatically as part of their jobs and then annoyingly sang its praises. "It replaces long-distance phone calls!" "You can dig up old recipes from libraries across the Midwest!" "It allows you to communicate instantaneously with colleagues from South Africa!" None of these seemed like things I particularly wanted to do. Moreover, I had strong if somewhat irrational reasons for resisting. I did not want my computer talking on the phone to anyone else's computer, because who knew what could happen once you opened up those lines? I wasn't just worried about viruses, though those were indeed a concern; but how could you be sure that someone wouldn't sneak through the e-mail door and thereby penetrate your hard disk, stealing or at any rate messing up your closely held documents? I preferred to keep my computer chaste and self-contained, aloof from all potential communicants.

And then, I didn't see the point of getting those unreadable little messages that seemed to go on forever, with little or no punctuation. To judge by the e-mail I had read in newspapers and magazines (the kind that was always reproduced to show how fun and liberating this new mode of communication was), these emissions were somewhere below the level of the worst unsolicited manuscripts I receive in the course of editing a literary magazine. Why should I want to read more of the stuff, especially on a barely legible computer screen? What was the good of a technological form that erased the boundary between intimate friends and total strangers, reducing everyone to a digital printout? Where was handwriting in all this? Where was personal style?

I should interrupt my screed to say that I am not a complete antitechnologist. I watch more television than just about anyone I know, and believe that Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue are among the substantial artistic achievements of late-twentieth-century America. I use the latest (well, the second-latest) desktop publishing equipment to put out my magazine, and rely on a rather complex database software to organize its subscriber list. I adore the fax machine and have long considered it the single greatest invention since the telephone--the fax machine, after all, respects and transmits handwriting, just as the telephone conveys the nuances of the individual voice. I am not, that is, a hermit. I constantly employ and enjoy electronic transmissions of many sorts, and I do not feel that they in any way sap my capacity to be an Emersonian individual. On the contrary, they enhance it: without all my little machines, I could not make a living as a self-employed, self-designated arbiter of cultural taste. In Emerson's time you had to inherit a comfortable income if you wished to subsist as a man of letters; in our day technology can substitute for and even generate the freeing effects of wealth.

But for some reason this dashing perspective, this resolutely cheerful optimism about mechanical progress, did not make a dent in my fear of e-mail. From the viewpoint of one who has now crossed the great divide, I can see that my phobia stemmed in part from a category error. That is, I thought that "e-mail" and "the Internet" were identical: I believed that in order to communicate with my friends and colleagues I would have to place myself squarely in front of all the oncoming lanes of traffic in the Information Superhighway. Worse: I was persuaded that those snippets of generic e-mail clipped from the bulletin boards of the Internet represented what my own friends would sound like if I had to talk to them by computer. I wrongly supposed that the machine controlled its own content, that the medium (as we used to say, pace McLuhan, in the Sixties) would be the message.

Why I should have believed Marshall McLuhan in this respect when I had long since discarded his views on television is a question that perhaps requires a cultural psychotherapist to answer. (I don't know that there is such a thing as a cultural psychotherapist, but since I have recently learned of something called "ecopsychology"--which is designed to help us bond with Mother Earth--I assume there are no limits.) For some reason, fear makes us believe in false prophets, the more apocalyptic the better. Clinging to the printed pages of my old-fashioned literary quarterly and my beloved cloth- and paperbound books, I thought that e-mail spelled the end of reading as I knew it. After all, you couldn't do it in the bathtub.

I still wouldn't want to read a novel or even a ten-page story on e-mail, and faced with that little message screen, I probably couldn't compose an essay worth printing. But for daily correspondence, electronic mail has become my essential instrument. Like all tools, it is more than just a simple replacement of the previous technology--it acts on you as well as you on it, and it acts in ways you can't always predict. In effect, e-mail has restored the personal letter to my life.

If you are like me, you went through a phase when personal letters occupied a central place in your existence. You were probably in your late teens or early twenties. Possibly you were living away from home for the first time, or perhaps you had just embarked on your first long-term (and long-distance) love affair, or maybe you were traveling alone through Europe, or all of the above. The mail became your lifeline, and you honored it accordingly. You poured everything into your letters--the engaging details of daily existence, the special sights, the serious emotions, the witty observations--to such an extent that even journal-keeping, by comparison, seemed onerous and redundant. You tailored each letter to the personality of the recipient, delightedly imagining the eventual response to the in-jokes of a shared history. You received as good as you gave, and each day's mail delivery marked an emotional high or low point. And then, at some stage, you grew out of all this, and household bills, business letters, magazines, and fundraising pleas came to fill your mailbox.

Just as personal letters define a phase in an individual's life, so do they also define a period in Western history. I didn't realize this until I read P. N. Furbank's review of the Oxford Book of Letters, wherein he remarks "how deprived the ancient world was, not having discovered the secret of personal letters--long, spontaneous, chatty letters, as funny as they can be made but not always just funny, and coming nice and often--the sort of letters you might have got if you had known Henry James or Bernard Shaw or Philip Larkin. You would have been expected to answer them, and that would have been marvelous too, at least for oneself. It would be like enjoying a second life." Exactly. And, as Furbank goes on to say, "The ancients knew nothing of this. With what leaden spirits one would have received a letter from Cicero! One may hazard that this best kind of letter-writing began in the eighteenth century and really came into its own in the nineteenth." Not coincidentally, this was just when the postal system was reaching a pinnacle of service, in terms of frequency and reliability.

For one of the keys to the pleasure of letters lies in that half-buried little phrase, "and coming nice and often." In London, where P. N. Furbank lives, mail is still delivered twice a day, and a letter posted first class will reach its destination anywhere in the United Kingdom by the next day. It is still possible to keep up a satisfying personal correspondence under such circumstances. For the rest of the world, however, mail is generally too slow to gratify the needs of the moment. You might choose to rely on the stamp and envelope on special occasions, or for particularly delicate communications, or if (like a young person in her teens or twenties) you live on a very limited budget; but when you have something important to say, you're much more likely to pick up the telephone.

The crisis in my attitude toward e-mail occurred when I realized that I would no longer be able to afford the telephone. I was about to leave America for four months, and to indulge in long-distance calling from England would be ruinously expensive. Nor could I tolerate waiting the two weeks it would take for the round-trip communication by post. It was e-mail or nothing.

One problem with e-mail, though, is that it takes two actively willing participants. Anyone in the modern world can receive a postal letter, but only those with an e-mail hookup can receive e-mail. So I had to get my near and dear to join up at the same time I did. Among those I had to persuade was a writer in New York, a friend of over twenty years' standing on whom I normally lavish at least one long-distance phone call a day.

It always stops the conversation dead when I tell people, as I occasionally do, that I talk to Arthur every day on the phone. If my husband is present, he may get looks that imply, "What's the story here?" Or sometimes I get looks that say, "Aren't you a little old to have a 'best friend'?" But the truth is, I'm not: I need to have someone there at the other end of the phone line who can sympathetically but analytically respond to all the little exuberances and travails of my daily life. And so, apparently, does Arthur--either that or he's just humoring me. It's not easy to explain our connection. Some people might say that the pleasure lies in vicariously experiencing an alternate life (the straight California woman who writes for marginal literary publications versus the gay New York man who work...