The Lives in Letters: An Interview with Shaun Usher and Simon Garfield

When was the last time you sat down with paper, postage stamp and envelope and scrawled out your mind and heart across the page? When was the last time you got a letter from a friend? Did you just email them instead? There’s a lot of hype about things dying because of the internet – and it might well be just hype – but the death of letter writing is different. It really is on the way out: it’s a slow, beautiful, curious art form disappearing from the landscape of human communication.

People might not write letters anymore, but they still want to read them. Judging by the success of Shaun Usher’s blog-turned-book Letters of Note and Simon Garfield’s To the Letter, there’s still an interest in the sort of thing a letter contains. The letter’s unique quality is its personality: the insight it gives into the workings of someone’s mind, whether it’s the Queen, or Elvis, or Jack the Ripper. It’s not just famous people who write excellent letters though – the most striking examples in Simon’s book are those between signalman Chris Barker and Bessie, who conducted a romance entirely through this form during the Second World War. And it’s this correspondence, alongside a choice selection of missives from Shaun’s book, which will provide the content of their Letters Live event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 9 August. A group of actors and writers will read these letters live on stage, inhabiting the material to bring the uniqueness of each to life.

The event has worked well in recent months, with a sell-out night at Hay Festival, where Benedict Cumberbatch held the audience in rapt silence as he read the part of Chris writing to Bessie during the war. The main tent was full – around 1,700 people - and, Simon says, “That terrible cliché of being able to hear a pin drop was absolutely true – it was extraordinary.” The line-up of speakers for the event in Edinburgh is yet to be announced, but Simon’s advice is to get your ticket now, before the big names are announced and the tickets are gone.

So what makes letters so special, and what is it exactly that digital communication can’t do? It comes down to two things, says Simon, “One is that we write in a different way when we write digitally. By email or text it tends to be shorter, more instant, and less emotional than a letter. There’s that feeling that we don’t express ourselves as we once did in the written form.” And the second? “We don’t leave behind the same historical record. We’re not going to discover love emails in the attic. We lose so much of the element of human communication that comes from putting pen to paper – not necessarily just handwriting, but the whole physical process of sending and receiving a letter. So we do lose quite a lot – we lose that feeling of getting something through the post that has been consciously arranged, that’s been sent as a gift and received as a gift.”

The correspondence between Chris and Bessie has been so well received that Simon is now working on a book devoted entirely to the letters. It seems that romance by letter has lasting and universal appeal – Shaun conducted his own long-distance relationship in this fashion. The woman who would become his wife moved to Spain for a year almost as soon as they started dating. “We kept in touch and fell in love through letters, and it was at that point that I kind of, you know, fell for the whole concept of letter writing.”

Five years later, working as a copywriter in a job that he hated, he set about researching famous letters for a client of his, a stationery retailer. “I went to the local library and got out a whole load of dusty old books full of letters by people like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens and I was hooked, immediately. Three days later I had the website up and running. A year after that I quit my job and started doing it full time.”

Now, as a ‘curator of correspondence,’ Shaun is deeply aware of the loss to biographers and historians as the circulation of letters declines. Their lasting appeal, he says is “as self-contained stories, they’re the most accessible and most exciting way to learn about history. It’s far more preferable to read the letters of people who were involved in events than to open a history book and read about them there. Letters let you learn about people in a way you wouldn’t normally learn about them. So there’s a letter from Iggy Pop to a troubled fan and it just shows a side to him that you wouldn’t see anywhere else.

“And we’re losing all of that to email and texting and Twitter, where everything looks the same and it’s bland and boring. We’re losing out because of it, and it’s a huge shame.” So did he make a conscious decision to write love letters, to keep the form going? “It was 12 years ago, so we weren’t really using emails much, and it was just far more enjoyable to write letters. When you send an email you immediately expect a response straight away. With a letter you can take a week to gather your thoughts and you get a far better correspondence through it. It was never something we discussed, we just started writing. They were terrible letters, though, I’d never publish them. Really awful, with terrible hand drawn pictures, but they were endearing and I think if we’d have kept in touch through email I’m not sure if our relationship would have survived.”

Will the letter die out completely? It depends – Simon notes that the Canadian postal service is considering stopping personal deliveries altogether, returning to a situation similar to that of the 19^th century. Both Shaun and Simon imagine the letter will become increasingly niche, like vinyl, but that the loss to the historical record will only be realised once it’s too late. Shaun finds the thought of biographers basing their stories on people’s Twitter feeds horrifying – “can you imagine how bland and depressing that would be?”

All this talk of the fading letter could make things a bit gloomy, but both Simon and Shaun are keen to keep the tone celebratory. Indeed, Usher owes his success to the internet – first with the Letters of Note blog, with an audience that grew almost entirely through Twitter, then the book that was crowdfunded through Unbound, the Kickstarter for printed words. They’re both on Twitter and my phone handily told me I could WhatsApp Simon if he didn’t pick up. He did, so I wasn’t forced to conduct the interview by emoji. The point is that they’re not anti-digital, just pro-letter. The event will conjure the personal, engaging world of the letter – and to escape the uniform world of digital communication, we encourage you to write a letter to a friend, invite them to Letters Live and see how written correspondence can be deeply rewarding.