Edinburgh International Book Festival: Letters Live

It’s the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s opening night, and Shaun Usher and Simon Garfield are delivering either a  rallying cry or a eulogy. In their slightly bumbling introductory remarks, the night’s MCs ask us if we, our society, can afford to give up written-stamped-posted letters in favour of texts, tweets, emails and the rest. An audience member with impressively lifelike cherry earrings shakes her head ostentatiously. The 500-odd others in the Baillie Gifford Main Theatre appear largely in agreement.  At the very least, there’s still a choir to preach to.

Of course, aside from any rallying or eulogising, the pair are also selling. Usher curates the popular Letters of Note blog, which is simple and self explanatory, pulling together correspondence from persons renowned and obscure, covering subjects grave and whimsical. The blog has spawned a best-of book, published last year and favourably reviewed by this magazine. Garfield, the elder literary statesman of the pair, has written his own epistolary tribute, To the Letter: A Curious History of Correspondence, also published last year, also published by Canongate. Usher and Garfield have been dispatched on the festival circuit as a double act.

Letters Live curates performers as well as correspondence. Garfield and Usher make the various introductions, then have a collection of writers, actors and comedians – of which Edinburgh in August can boast more than just about anywhere – deliver the letters’ contents. It was in this capacity that Benedict Cumberbatch caused a stir at the Hay Festival earlier this year. Though the line-up this time round can’t boast the same celebrity clout, the cast is more than capable. Actors Lisa Dwan and Patrick Kennedy are handy reading WWII love letters from Garfield’s book. John Lloyd – of Blackadder and QI repute – apes an indignant Kurt Vonnegut taking down a book-burning school board head. If Lloyd’s American accent is a bit needless and naff, he atones with a magnificently delivered wartime piece from the hand of Sir Archibald Kerr, British Ambassador to Moscow, to Lord Reginald Pembroke at the Foreign Office. Its concise blend of smut and xenophobia is a window to a very different time.

This sort of nostalgia serves as Garfield and Usher’s primary currency. So perhaps Letters Live is a eulogy. And, somewhat ironically, in waxing nostalgic, perhaps the pair are only embalming and interring the form they adore. They’re doubtless more optimistic, hoping that theirs and others’ efforts might spur an epistolary renaissance. Time will tell, though the current trajectory seems mostly bleak. Even if their efforts prove in vain, Letters Live at least impresses upon its audience that we’d do well to remember and pay homage to this precious medium. [Angus Sutherland]