.
From the published volume of letters A Private Spy (2022) it’s clear that John le Carré was good at keeping up with his correspondence. In his case, it’s not obvious that he was writing for posterity; he often kept no copies. ( See the Review on this site 1 November 2022)/ He may have been following a habit established in many childhoods of the past where in addition to dutiful Thank You letters there might be absent parents to whom regular and often anxious letters would be addressed.
Le Carré, who was never
less than very busy, often replied to complete strangers and not just by
sending best wishes and the autograph which might be hoped for. But this was
not eccentricity; there was a time when anyone could, for the price of a
postage stamp, write to anyone - even a famous writer - and reasonably hope for
some kind of reply. The Collected Letters of some authors are numbered in
thousands - ten thousand and counting in the case of Henry James.
*
In 1963 John Dancy, the
Master of Marlborough College, published The Public Schools and the Future. I
read it and wrote to tell him that as far as this sixteen-year-old grammar
school boy was concerned, they had no future. I got a nice reply inviting me
and three or four school friends to stay at Marlborough for a week and, in
exchange, accept a return visit to our school from some of his boys,
accommodation to be provided in our homes. Talk to my own Headmaster and deal done.
As a result, one unfortunate Marlborough boy had to pass a week without a bath,
hot water, and with use only of an outside toilet.
This positive
reinforcement to a letter-writing habit was not the first I had received. As a
youthful stamp collector I wrote to The Postmaster, The Maldive Islands
(perfectly adequate address) asking for information about that country but, of
course, hoping for a reply franked with collectible local stamps. The Maldives were not then a tourist destination and
mail was scarce. I got the stamps on the outside and inside the large envelope
a locally-printed booklet giving me more information than the Britannica
could supply. I still remember one detail: the Maldivian government had
recently welcomed its newest and most youthful cabinet minister; he was
sixteen.
Just turned seventeen,
and thanks to a Your Holiday This Summer address provided in The
Daily Mail, I travelled (train, boat, train) to the Swedish province of
Dalarna for a post-A level summer job in the Hotel Siljansborg – now demolished
– where Ingmar Bergman had sometimes retreated to write screenplays. I didn’t
know that and didn’t make a connection to the wild strawberries I ate on walks by Lake Siljan. I was just curious that they were called smultron
but regular strawberries jordgubbar.
With a track record of
epistolary success I found it easy enough to take on the task, allotted to university
club secretaries, of writing to prospective visiting speakers and passing on
resolutions carried to those they were carried against. And so it has continued
for most of my life.
In the examples given, I profiled
myself in some minimal way: grammar school boy, stamp collector, club secretary.
The pitch I made to Miss Arpi for a job
in her hotel did also include a brief To Whom It May Concern reference
from my school, which I reckoned necessary. But, realistically, none of the letters’
recipients could have sought further credentials and would not have attempted
it. Where might they look? Who’s Who? The telephone directory? Readers had to take on trust that you were
who you said you were and that you were writing for a reason. That had to be
enough and, if satisfied, you replied. Fröken Arpi employed me because I wrote
to her and asked for work. She didn’t even see a photograph.
*
A world like that no
longer exists.
Some of the 1960s club
secretary correspondence is now housed among the
John Johnson collections of the Bodleian Library. But when in the 1970s I
deposited the first batch of this and other hard copy material, unsorted in
boxes and carrier bags, it never occurred to me that one day in 2023 I would sit
at a computer screen and scroll through forty-seven open access pages which
inventory the contents of twenty-one organised boxes. I’m not even sure it’s an outcome I would
have wanted; it seems rather indiscreet. I had imagined an archive gathering the
dust of discretion and awaiting its chance discoverer.
To state the obvious, teenagers
no longer pen letters; they write emails and so does almost everyone. And email
recipients can easily check credentials before replying and many do: Who are you (or, perhaps, Who do you think you
are?). Are you on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, academia.edu, ResearchGate, Tinder? Quite
aside from the contents of an online Profile, those locations have their own
status rankings as do obsessively informative university directories.
What do you look like? Do
you have a dog? Are you transphobic? Do you have a doctorate? Are you on
editorial boards? The answers to a myriad of possible questions are there on
the internet and create the human algorithm which determines whether a reply is
sent. The original email could be a literary masterpiece (grant that hypothesis
…) but that is nothing compared to a shiny CV polished only yesterday.
In the search for
credentials, email recipients may forget one thing. They often leave a trace
and the email sender will be aware that you have read the CV and, indeed, very
shortly after receiving the email to which you do (or don’t) reply. You can’t
have been that busy. Seems like you were sitting at your desk anxiously waiting
for the World to contact you, then disappointed to find that it is only a
namesake of that famous person who has written.
Such eager profiling could
be a sensible attempt to avoid wasting time on a time-waster. But in both
literary and academic contexts it may just be an index of status anxiety. Those
are contexts where too many people are chasing not enough (insecure, poorly
paid) jobs. In that kind of world, you reply to an email from someone of higher
status or who might help your career, but don’t reply to someone who clearly
can’t, for whatever reason, and who can’t be quantified under “public
engagement”. No one puts on their CV, “replied to eighty-seven unsolicited
emails from the great unwashed”.
John le Carré found
enough time to engage with the public as individuals, sometimes over a couple
of handwritten pages. He also went on the open-to-all, non-virtual stage. I listened
to him shortly before his death in a packed Royal Festival Hall where he spoke
for an hour, standing erect; what he said had substance and style. And, in the
end, what matters is substance and style, not the template-driven Profile, which like most people I now feel obliged to offer..
.
