Vivian Gornick: On Writing Letters
How to resist cultural decline without giving in to pessimism.
Welcome to “Words of Wisdom”, a series that zooms in on a passage of writing — an essay, a chapter, a speech — from a great thinker on a specific idea.
Today, Vivian Gornick: essayist, critic, and one of the great re-readers, whose writing always feels generous. Reading her on the topic of favourite books, the death of an almost-friend, or what feminism means to her, you feel seen and gifted with the attention of someone whose interest in life is enlivening. Gornick’s writing voice is itself an art-form that, as The New Yorker put it, “does not just tell the story, it is the story”. Here, we’ll look at an essay from her collection Approaching Eye Level.
When was the last time you sat down and wrote a letter? Not a note, or a reminder, or a memo to a colleague scrawled on a post-it note (even that sounds archaic in a world of instant messaging and wristwatches that send emails). I’m talking about placing a sheet of paper on a desk and a pen in your hand to write out the thoughts and feelings you thought and felt that day; to tell someone you love not just that you love them but why; to share a story that, sure, could be summarised in a brief text, but here on the page reshapes bald facts anyone could recount into a lively tale only you could tell.
All right, how about doing any of that but typing it into an email instead of writing it out? I’ll bet a few more of you can raise your hands now. Me too; as much as I romanticise ink-stains and the texture of paper, I’m much more likely to write a letter if I can type it — the same way I write my essays — and send it with the click of a paper airplane icon. The whole thing is quicker and less frustrating than finding an envelope to seal the pages in, licking a stamp to stick on the corner, and going out to find a postbox so that my friend can finally read these words in two days to a week.
It wasn’t always this way. In her essay “On Letter Writing”, Vivian Gornick tells us the story of her mother’s epistolic relationship with a married co-worker. It began in 1920, when her mother worked for a New York bakery. There she met a bookkeeper who was, “like herself, a European immigrant who read books and listened to music”:
“Mr Levinson (an unhappily married man who lived in the Bronx) saw in my mother (a soulful young woman who lived on the Lower East Side) a kindred spirit. When they parted at the end of the working day his need for her conversation had often not run its course and he fell into the habit of writing to her late at night.”
Mr Levinson’s letters “were remarkably varied in mood and content”:
“Whatever the subject, whatever the mood, when Mr Levinson sat down at midnight to write to My Dear Friend he wrote at length and at leisure. If he’d been to the theatre he described the play, the acting, the crowd on Fourteenth Street; if a child was sick he confided the atmosphere in the room, the look of the patient, how the doctor had conducted himself; if he was continuing an earlier conversation he included nuance and digression freely and fully.”
More remarkable than the honesty and literary broadness with which he wrote these letters is the fact that Mr Levinson often ended them,
“by telling my mother he was now going down to the corner to mail this letter so that she would read it at eight in the morning before they met an hour later at work. This last — that she’d read it in the morning — he predicted with an assurance he was entitled to: there were then five mail deliveries a day in New York.”
Perhaps that’s why people don’t write letters anymore. Maybe it’s about the ease and immediacy with which a phone call can be made, while a letter might now take days to arrive, if it arrives at all.1 The expediency of the phone won out over the effort of the pen. So, the easy answer to Gornick’s question about why letter-writing fell out of favour is “the telephone did it”, just as video apparently killed the radio star or the internet destroyed our ability to concentrate.
Is it that easy? Gornick certainly won’t allow herself to be complacent, and the critical self-insight she reveals here is a model for deep thought. Just as she begins to tell herself that “in my youth I was great letter writer and would have continued to be one if it wasn’t for...” she swerves, turning the finger of blame on herself:
“Nonsense, I answered myself. You can’t blame technology for this. The question to ask is, why didn’t letter writing put up more of a fight? What is it in us that allowed the telephone such an easy takeover? Look to your own part in it. Ask yourself why you don’t write letters any more. Something deeper at work, I think, than ‘the telephone did it’.”
This is an intellectual judo move, one that in my experience (when I remember to do it; I fall short more often than I succeed) yields greater insight and opportunity for growth than the standard, outward looking model. Gornick shifts from the passive — we were corrupted by modernity — into the active — I allowed this to happen.
Gornick spends her essay digging into “the buried history” of the idea that “the telephone did it”. By sifting through the cultural sediment, she uncovers a phrase beneath our tendency to shift the blame: “The world I find myself in.” It comes to her when she tells herself that opting for a phone call “nine times out of ten” over writing a letter is simply what everyone does: it’s “the habitual response of the world I find myself in, that which does not require an active will”.
“The world I find myself in. Now there’s a phrase to linger over. A phrase that furrows the brow; resonates unpleasantly in the head; even presses on the heart. What does it mean to find yourself in the world, rather than that you struggle to take your place in the world?”
Here, Gornick strikes bedrock in her excavation of meaning beneath our preference for the phone (or the terse instant message tapped quickly, composed of “text speech”, and sent immediately) over the slower, more deliberate letter. It’s a matter of ease over effort, of the lure of passivity over the delayed gratification of a more active approach. She’s candid about this in her own life:
“Today, letter writing is a chore. I will not linger over what I write. In my letters I do not elaborate unnecessarily; I do not associate widely; I do not describe at length or at leisure. And still, it will take me hours to write a letter properly. I must, after all, compose it. I cannot scribble down a set of notes. I must write full sentences in full paragraphs. I must make the paragraphs agree with one another, speak to one another, cohere as a piece of writing.”
Gornick goes on to lament, “It’s a decision now to write a letter whereas when I was a girl it was a way of life.” This, I’ve come to believe, is what we’re really yearning for — that the world would make it easy to do the challenging things that reward us in the future (letter writing, eating healthy, exercise). We wish the world would bring the good choices to us, and hide some of the bad ones from view, so that we don’t have to make the decision. We wish living well was simply our “way of life”.
This is precisely what Gornick discovered when she visited Tel Aviv, in the hope of finding “a bit of Paris in the Middle East” in its famous café culture. But when she got there, nobody seemed to go out to the cafés. When she met with a disgruntled Israeli journalist, he pointed his bitter blame at the television. “A few years ago,” he told her, “they would all have been out in the cafés, now they’re home watching Dallas.”
“I asked him if he still went to the cafés. ‘No,’ he replied moodily. ‘What is the use? No one goes any more.’ Where, then, did he and his friends gather to talk? ‘People don’t talk any more,’ he said. What do you mean, people don’t talk any more? I continued. He lived among the most urgent talkers in the world, how could he say people didn’t talk anymore? ‘For God’s sake,’ he cried. ‘The world has changed. I find myself in a world I don’t recognise. What can I do about it? Nothing, I can do nothing; people don’t talk any more.’ I understood then; he didn’t talk any more.”
With the cafés no longer bringing people together, the journalist had given up. As Gornick considers the letters she no longer writes, she briefly resents the changed world with the kind of bitterness expressed by the journalist. “Resentment flared into anger; anger sank into depression; depression gave way to lethargy.” This is what we must resist — the apathy that invites us to slide so easily into it.
recently wrote a compelling broadside against grievance culture, against complaining instead of acting. Here’s his advice to those lamenting the decline of the humanities:“Maybe the culture is in free fall. The only way to stop that is to have more people read George Eliot and talk about her work. If you hate AI slop, share real art. If you hate the decline of humanistic education, read in public. Keep the difficult balance between lamenting the change and being the change you want to see.”
Gornick tells us about the advice of Edmund Wilson in a letter to a friend: “We have to take life — society and human relations — more or less as we find them. The only thing that we can really make is our work. And deliberate work of the mind, imagination, and hand [...] in the long run remakes the world.” Gornick is writing for herself as much as for us; she takes on the challenge of this advice, realising that not doing work is also “world-making”:
“Every time the urge to write a letter dies stillborn in me I am making the world I rail against.”
The question, in the end, is not what kind of world you find yourself in — it’s what kind of world you choose to build.
Surely email has solved the delivery problem? Yes, but I’m not convinced that’s done a lot to change the situation regarding sending others what I’m calling “letters”. I think the fact that emails deliver instantly makes us more prone to sending brief, unconsidered notes rather than thorough, considered letters. Of course, this is intuited from anecdote and personal experience; I don’t have the hard data on what kind of things people generally send as emails.