A kind of odd thing happened on a recent evening in
mid-March. I was in the Washington, D.C., area and, unlike the New
York Times, the Washington
Post comes with Parade, that dinky, mostly junky magazine
some newspapers circulate on Sundays. I leafed through Parade as
I was watching some TV before dinner that night. The main subject that
week was letter-writing and the main article was “Letters That Changed Our
World” by Liz Welch. It made me think of
a conversation I’ve had with some friends and relatives recently.
In her article, which Welch sub-heads “The missives that
move us, shake us and, sometimes, alter the course of history,” the author
refers to a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt
which prompted the president to launch the Manhattan Project to build an atomic
bomb. She also writes about another letter
to President Roosevelt, one written by Fidel Castro when he was 14 years old, “requesting
$10 and Groucho Marx’s advice to Woody Allen.”
An illustration accompanying the article shows a note 23-year-old writer
Eudora Welty, who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, sent to the New Yorker proclaiming, “How I would
like to work for you!” Welch also refers
to a book, Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence
Deserving a Wider Audience (Chronicle Books, 2014), which is an anthology of
letters that reveal surprising aspects of historical events and figures. All this is what made me recall my
discussions.
I used to do research
for scholars from universities outside New York, finding references and
documents for them. I used to do
a lot of digging up of old letters sent
from one historically important figure to another—Tennessee Williams’s
and Elia Kazan’s letters were among the largest collections of
correspondence through which I had to pore. It’s made me think: What’s
going to happen to collected letters for the generations of famous (not to
mention the not-so-famous) people to come? (I touched on this question in
my ROT post “Books in Print,” 14 July 2010.) First of all, most of
their correspondence will be electronic—e-mails and tweets and texts—which may
or may not even be saved, much less printed out on paper for filing in
traditional archives. (While letter-writing
has declined, the average e-mail account sends or receives about 100 e-mails daily,
according to one study. Eighteen- to
29-year-old Americans send as much as 100 texts a day.) E-mail is basically ephemeral; I know it can
be saved, and offices and agencies are required to keep significant messages,
but electronic communications are just evanescent. What’s more, they can’t easily be passed
along later to repositories like libraries. As writer John Coleman
expressed it, “Email is ‘permanent’ in its own way; our electronic messages are
easy to keep and search in huge volumes. But they aren’t tangible and enduring in the
same way those old notes are.”
Second, even those old electronic letters and notes that are
kept—on disks or hard drives somewhere—will eventually be impossible to access
and read as the technology changes (which, in the computer world, can happen in
a matter of a few years). I already have old disks that I can’t read now,
like old Betamax videotapes no one can play anymore unless you dig up an old
machine. (That’s not even counting the e-mails and other files I’ve plain
lost from technical mishaps, like when I fried my hard drive years ago or when
my last machine got a virus and I had to wipe the drive before transferring everything
left to a new one. I also changed e-mail providers a few years ago and
lost all the old stash before I realized I could have transferred it.)
Since nearly no one writes letters much anymore—the postal
service estimates that in 1987 the average household received a personal letter
every two weeks, whereas by 2010 the average had dropped to once every seven
weeks—there’s nothing to keep. Author Jessica Kleiman admitted in Forbes magazine, after finding a cache
of old letters and notes, “Had those been sent to me via email or text, I
definitely would not still have them.” I’m not casting aspersions on
the quality of on-line correspondence in contrast to paper letters. (I’m not really a Luddite: I use e-mail all
the time and I compose on a word processor; I even maintain a blog. This isn’t about disparaging the existence of
electronic media, which has many benefits.)
I’m also not lamenting the loss of the art of writing letters which
declined long before computers arrived on the scene. I’m just contemplating the durability of electronic
writing versus the paper kind, how it’ll last and be accessible in the future.
Libraries keep old
books and periodicals we can get to when we want them. There are archival collections that contain
the letters and papers of the Tennessee Williamses, Max Lerners, Jo Mielziners, Cheryl Crawfords, Brooks
Atkinsons, S. N. Behrmans, and
Elia Kazans (to name just a few with whose papers I’ve worked) and scholars,
writers, and historians consult their holdings all the time. Who keeps electronic publications? Where would I go in the future to work with
the e-mails or e-publications of a current figure I want to write about? Nancy Reagan kept her husband’s letters (and
my mom and dad kept each others’); who’s keeping Barack Obama’s private
e-mails? One of the projects on which I
worked was The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams (New Directions, 2000 and 2004). The two published volumes cover correspondence
from 1920 to 1957. Would an editor or a biographer
80 years from now be able to find e-mails, tweets, blog comments, and so on
from today? Someone saved Williams’s
early letters (he was nine in 1920; his grandfather apparently kept some
of his letters) and they’re amazingly
revealing to look back at! My parents
(and, apparently, my own grandfather, too) kept some of my old letters from high
school, college, and the army, but if I ever become famous, would any of my
friends and colleagues have retained old e-mails for a researcher to look
at?
Even if they’re not
erased, old e-mails or word-processor files will be stored on some obsolete
hard drive somewhere, maybe irretrievable even if someone could find it. Technology obsolesces while paper and ink
always remains accessible. Even if letters
are stashed somewhere, someone can find them and read them. We frequently hear reports of centuries-old
documents that have been discovered hidden away. Back in 2003, members of the First
Presbyterian Church in Manhattan who were cleaning out some rooms in the
basement of the church stumbled on two sermons exhorting the congregation to
support the American Revolution. The
historic sermons were written in 1776 and survived tucked away in the pages of
a ledger, easily legible again after 227 years.
If the Rev. John Rodgers, the church's pastor during the late
colonial period, had written his sermons on a computer, it’s doubtful they’d
have survived 25 years, much less 225! Will
200-year-old e-mails be available for anyone to reread in 2215? I wonder.
Some of Williams’s correspondence
(and all of Kazan’s)—including postcards, telegrams, and random notes—are in
the various archival collections of his correspondents’ papers in libraries and
document repositories scattered around the country from New York City to Los
Angeles and Cambridge to Key West. Would
e-mails ever end up in those kinds of places where they could be retrieved by
writers of the future? Many e-mail
systems don’t even save messages older than a week or so. They’re just erased, gone, sent out into the
ether. What will happen to the next
Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, or Ronald Reagan (whose letters are published in
I Love You, Ronnie: The Letters of Ronald
Reagan to Nancy Reagan; Random House, 2000)? Those letters are often fascinating and
revealing. If newspapers are the first
drafts of history, then letters may be the notes for that draft.
That kind of thing may not be available for future writers and scholars.
They’ll either be lost altogether or deposited somewhere in a pile of old
storage media that no one can read even if someone found them. I mean,
you find an old letter, telegram, or postcard, it doesn’t take any special technology
to access it. (In addition to the old letters of mine to my parents and
my grandfather I’ve found, I also recently came across a collection of letters from
my father to my mother while they were apart for a month when my dad was
abroad before my mother joined him. My dad also collected and bound the letters he
and my mom exchanged during World War II.
And I can just read them! Who’s keeping the electronic love messages of
today’s courting couples, the latter-day Reagans and my folks?)
The same would be true of Tennessee Williams’s journals, selections
of which (as well as those of artist David Wojnarowicz) have been published
and, like the letters, reveal a great deal about his development as a
playwright and how he formed many of this principles and concepts. (I drew on one entry in Williams’s journals, later
released as Notebooks; Yale University
Press, 2006, for my essay “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic
Theater,” republished on ROT on 9 May
2012. Wojnarowicz’s journals were
published as The Waterfront Journals;
Grove Press, 1996.) I have paper
journals that go back to my high school days, including travel diaries from
trips to places like the Soviet Union (1965) and China (1980) that I can still
read and reminisce over (or use for a blog post, as I did with my travelogue of
Istanbul on 24 June 2010). My friend Kirk Woodward has kept journals for
most of his sentient life and has generously let me publish parts of them—or
he’s written articles based on selected entries, in some cases along with old
letters—on ROT (see, for example, “Kirk Woodward’s King Lear Journal,” 4
June 2010, or “A Year in Korea,”
18 January 2011, among others). Today
those would also be kept on computer. Whether they’re word-processor
files or an on-line blog like this one, they’re subject to disappearing into
the ozone one way or another. All those
accounts of early experiences, travels, and ideas would be lost to us—and I
can’t be the only one who finds those looks back tremendously fascinating and
telling—when all there is is electronic media, as ephemeral and technically
precarious as they are, like those old floppies I have that I can’t read anymore!
Of course, it’s not
just e-mails and computer journals that are perishable. Websites in general are also, despite the myth
that nothing ever disappears from the ’Net.
I can’t say that anything I post on ROT is worthy of saving, but
let’s imagine that it is. In 50 years,
will anyone be able to find copies of my old posts? I’ve published a few articles in on-line
periodicals which don’t have paper editions.
Will my articles and anyone else’s in those cyber journals still be
available for someone doing research in 10 or 20 years? (Believe it or not, a few of my essays have
been cited by later writers—and one on-line essay was even republished, albeit
in a bowdlerized version and without my knowledge, as I described in “The
Case of the Purloined Paper,” 5 February 2010.) At least one of my
contributions has already disappeared from an on-line journal’s site because the
publication changed format. Even the
more prominent Internet writing, in e-journals like Huffington Post, Slate, or Politico: will anyone be
able to research old articles on those sites in half a century like I can with
old newspapers, Time magazines, or books? It doesn’t seem as though any of those
outlets, whose content includes significant writing and opinions that should
bear on future accounts of our time, will be available for study and research. (I’ve done many research projects, like “The Lost Première
of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale,” 20 March 2010, or “The Washington Square Players: Art for Art’s Sake,” 21 and 24 June 2012,
which required digging out old reviews.
I quote reviews in my current ROT
play reports, and I include the Internet press in my survey. Will a future researcher be able to find the
old on-line reviews for a reconstruction of, say, Charles Mee’s Big Love, which I saw a few weeks ago,
or Beth Henley’s Laugh, a world
première on which I reported earlier this month? It’s problematical at best.)
Kirk wrote me, when I broached the inclination to write this
rumination, “When I put together my ‘autobiography’ [Kirk’s written an
extensive memoir], based on letters and journals, I found that the amount of
material for the most recent couple of decades was miniscule compared to that
for the previous years.” (Kirk estimates
that less than a quarter of the memoir covers almost 45% of his life—since the
mid-’80s, when home computers became common—“illustrating the point about fewer
written sources.”) My interpretation of
this remark is that the recent record is lacking because it had all been
inscribed electronically and has evaporated. He also
once sent me a copy of a wonderful memoir his grandfather wrote covering his
life as a frontier lawyer for the first 60 years of the 20th century. (Kirk wrote “A Lawyer and a Life” for ROT
on 11 November 2010 based on that memoir.) Today that chronicle would be written on a
computer and, unless the author printed a copy on paper, it would exist only as
electronic blips on some disk somewhere.
The same is true of the diary of Kirk’s late wife, Pat, which recounted
her obsession with the Beatles in 1964—and which Kirk shared with us on ROT on 8 January 2013. He could do that because it was on paper and
he could access it. I donated my copy of
the reminiscence of Kirk’s grandfather to the local history division of the New
York Public Library (“Obiter Dicta:
Some Experiences During Sixty Years Practice in Kentucky Courts” by Ernest Woodward,
call no.: ITY 01-10556) so that someone interested in that bit of
Americana can find it. What would happen
to a latter-day counterpart? (In 2005, I
wrote an impromptu memoir of my 2½ years as an army intel officer in Berlin,
but I wrote it on my computer. Will it
still be around in a readable form in 20 or 30 years?)
This is a particularly topical subject at the moment because
of the issue of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Though most of the coverage of the Clinton
brouhaha focuses on the “gotcha” aspect, the desire to use the e-mails to find
blame someone can pin on her for, say, Benghazi or some other things her
adversaries can tar her with, in fact, one of the stated reasons for archiving
official e-mails and electronic communications, just like the paper kind, is
for the historical record. Now and then, you hear someone mention that point
in passing in a report of this story. That, of course, is exactly the
same thing as digging through Tennessee Williams’s or Elia Kazan’s letters and
notes—historical (in that case, literary/artistic) research.
The issue with Clinton’s potentially missing correspondence,
of course, is that it was either deliberately or carelessly discarded/not
saved. That can happen with paper mail as well. What I’m considering is less conscious—the
loss of the whole record of someone’s thoughts, ideas, ruminations, expressions
simply because the format, that is, electronic blips on a storage medium, is
innately ephemeral and obsolescent. (As I said, writing on paper never goes
out of date—it can be deciphered as long as it exists—barring, of course,
everyone forgetting how to read the language, which can happen but takes
centuries, not decades.)
There is, of course, another technical vulnerability that
effects e-mails and other electronically-generated documents, whether on line
or on a word processor: hacking. Any
computer system can be hacked sooner or later.
We mostly know hacking from the leaked documents that have made the news,
such as the recent Sony incident and the thefts by U.S. Army
Private Bradley Manning (now known as Chelsea), posted on WikiLeaks,
and NSA consultant Edward Snowden, but hacking can result in the alteration of
electronic records as well, of course.
There are frequent stories of some student who’s hacked a school’s
computer system and changed grades, and the same thing can happen to electronic
memos and letters. Paper documents can,
of course, be forged or altered, too—the embarrassment at CBS in 2004 when Dan
Rather took at face value some memos purporting to show that George W. Bush had
gotten special treatment during his Air National Guard service is a prime
example. The memos turned out to have
been latter-day forgeries and the exposure discredited not only the 60 Minutes Wednesday report but Rather’s
entire career. But that’s not easy to
accomplish or get away with. Electronic
forgery or alteration is much harder to detect and can screw up someone’s
research with false information or the deletion of important facts. E-mails are far more susceptible to this kind
of manipulation than paper letters, but I’m focusing here more on the loss of
access to a letter-writer’s entire correspondence—or a large chunk of it—due
not so much to nefarious acts but the innate realities of electronic writing.
(There’s a sidelight to the issue of e-mail hacking. To protect against it and maintain security
and privacy, some e-mail users employ passwords. That may safeguard the e-mail but it’d be a
bane for a subsequent researcher if the password remains secret after the
writer’s death. You can’t really lock
someone out of a paper letter unless you secure the file in a vault.)
Unfortunately, I
don’t know the solution to this impending problem. We can hope that e-mails and other electronic
documents will be preserved—and safeguarded—somehow, that some kind of archival
system will be devised so that researchers, scholars, and students can retrieve
them in the future, and that there will always be some way to read those old
e-documents. But I don’t see any
movement to assure that any of that wishful thinking will see realization. The government may have a system of
preserving and archiving official documents created by computers, and perhaps
some corporations do, too, for their own uses.
(Among my research projects, not a few have required work on the
collected files and papers of such organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation;
the New York Shakespeare Festival; New Directions Publishing Corporation; the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center; the
Gotham Book Mart; and Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, Inc.) Right now, however,
it’s just haphazard whether someone saves and stores ordinary old electronic
writing, the kind that you and I create—or the next generation’s Tennessee
Williams or Elia Kazan—or not. It’s just
dumb luck that they can be located and then accessed again decades hence. Like Kirk when he was trying to find
resources for his autobiography, the next generation of researchers and writers
may find the record from the last few decades into the coming ones
lacking. Will we ever see the collected
letters of the great 21st-century writers, artists, business leaders, military
commanders, politicians? I fear we
won’t—or that the output will be so meager it will amount to a few slim volumes of
spotty correspondence. On the New
York Times blog Opinionator, for example,
author Mason Currey wrote:
In recent years, a
number of journalists and critics have lamented the death of the literary
letter. The publication of Saul Bellow’s
letters in 2010 [Saul Bellow: Letters; Viking] and William Styron’s last
year [Selected Letters of William Styron; Random House, 2012] were
accompanied by waves of speculation about how many more such collections we can
expect. There was also no small amount
of hand-wringing about how “The Collected Emails of Dave Eggers” (or whomever)
will never cast quite the same spell.
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