When fan mail mattered.
Ours is an age in which human interactions often take place through emails and text messages, but I remain attached to the tried-and-true technique of putting pen to paper—or, at least, fingers to keyboard, and keyboard to computer, and computer to printer.
Yes, the messages we transmit over the internet or by phone presumably exist forever in our recipients’ devices, but no one scans ancient emails with wistfulness. On the other hand, many of us old enough to write and receive letters have taken out a letter from a departed or seldom-heard-from correspondent and experienced a jolt of sadness or some similar Proustian emotion.
Web- and phone-based communications are too instantaneous. When an answer is proffered quickly (and therefore too hastily), we are denied the pleasure of waiting—sometimes eagerly, sometimes desperately—for an answer to wend its way through the inscrutable U.S. mail system.
This is especially true in the matter of fan mail, which, I confess, I have been an intermittent sender of since the early 1990s. No newfangled technology can replicate the thrill of placing a fan letter in the mailbox or the anticipation of waiting weeks—or forever—for a reply.
At the inexplicable age of nine, I wrote a fan letter to the horror novelist Stephen King—whose books I enjoyed in theory but never actually read in full because, despite my best efforts, I was not a fan of the genre. Nonetheless, I wrote a missive to King, and lo and behold, I received a reply in the form of a pre-printed card explaining that he no longer had the time to answer the volumes of fan mail he received.
This was not exactly a personal answer, but I remember being thrilled that the card included King’s (pre-printed) signature. Sometimes I wonder whether King still has the occasion to make use of that pre-printed card or if it has gone the way of the transcripts that were once offered to viewers at the end of Meet the Press. Remember those? “For a printed transcript of Meet the Press, send one dollar and a stamped, self-addressed envelope to…”
A few years later, by then convinced that I wanted to become a newspaper cartoonist, I enjoyed a more fruitful correspondence with Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau. I sent him some samples of my cartoons, and he replied—on beautifully embossed ecru stationary—with great encouragement and reassuring specificity: There was no chance I was reading a form letter, even a slightly rewritten one, since Trudeau talked about my cartoons in detail. Sometimes I wonder whether the intensely left-wing Trudeau remembers my name and, if he happens upon my column in the American Conservative, asks himself, “What on earth happened to my protégé?” To which I might reply: “Well, Garry, I became a conservative as soon as I was old enough to think rationally about the issues…”
In the spring of 1999, by then in a position to take advantage of the internet in furtherance of my fan mail habit, I wrote an email to Little, Brown asking whether the publisher still forwarded letters to J.D. Salinger. To my surprise, the publicist answered—and, to my greater surprise, she said that they did! I would like to take this opportunity to thank the unknown publicist for humoring my 16-year-old self that the author of The Catcher in the Rye would read and conceivably answer my letter. (It never happened.)
My last big effort in fan mail came in the mid-2000s, when, in the nascent years of my own writing career, my letters became more thoughtful. I wrote a long letter to Ray Bradbury, a man far worthier of my admiration than some of my earlier objects of hero worship. I told Bradbury that I was working on a book on Orson Welles, and, as I once described in this publication, he answered with unusual interest. He had worked with Welles, and he said he still thought that Citizen Kane was the greatest of all movies. He signed off in such a way that suggested that he had taken note of my literary dreams and did not consider it out of the question that they might be fulfilled: “I wish you all the best in the months and years ahead, Ray Bradbury.”
Equally satisfying was a letter I received from William F. Buckley Jr., who, I suspect, answered me because the question I posed him was so specific: I had read that he once participated in a documentary about the Sistine Chapel for which Malcolm Muggeridge, Grace Kelly, and Charlton Heston were also interviewed.
I asked him whatever became of this project, and he answered, on National Review stationary, forthrightly: “Alas, the documentary was never released—it just wasn’t good enough.” His was the only letter I ever received that ended with the phrase “Yours cordially.” Happily, Buckley’s uncommon politeness to me was vindicated when, several years after his death in 2008, I began contributing to National Review.
Far less gratifying was my correspondence with the filmmaker Robert Mulligan, director of To Kill a Mockingbird, Summer of ’42, The Man in the Moon, and other classic films. After getting ahold of his home address through someone who had worked with him decades earlier, I sent several letters in which I insisted on his greatness and on my unique capacity to explicate his greatness.
In short, I wanted to interview him for an article or maybe a book. He twice answered me, and because the letters came on ecru stationery—shades of Garry Trudeau—and he signed his name with a blue fountain pen, I allowed myself to be momentarily hopeful before reading what he had to say. Alas, Mulligan did not want to talk about his career—period, end of story, full stop. He spent two whole letters explaining why. Perhaps because there are fewer and fewer public figures worthy of my fandom each year, I no longer write much fan mail.
That leaves me with fewer letters to send in general—except, that is, at Christmas. After all, who doesn’t prefer receiving a Christmas card rather than a Christmas email?
The post Yours Cordially appeared first on The American Conservative.
