"Even more than a personal possession, a writer's script, with its smears, crossings out, second thoughts, and marginal notes, seems to take the viewer directly into his or her mind. The poet Philip Larkin once said, 'All literary manuscripts have two kinds of value: what might be called the magical value and the meaningful value. The magical value is the older and more universal: this is the paper he wrote on, these are the words as he wrote them, emerging for the first time in this particular miraculous combination. The meaningful value is of much more recent origin, and is the degree to which a manuscript helps to enlarge our knowledge and understanding of a writer's life and work.' In the words of the poet and former NEA chairman Dana Gioia, 'Reading is never more intimate than with script. The hand of the poet reaches out to greet the reader.' When you see the manuscript of a work that's important to you, it's difficult not to be very aware of that hand holding the pen and forming the letters--and to feel a bit closer to the mind behind it all.
"Now that most writers no longer labor over holograph manuscripts, there will come a time when this kind of magic will be gone. Little that's new will be added to the vast store of manuscripts that have come down to us over the centuries. The shape of the letterforms, the cross-outs, the substitutions, the puzzling illegibilities, the changes of mind and slips of the pen, the color of the ink and the type of paper, the egotistical capital I's and the randy loops on the g's--gone, all of it. Someday the job applications and charge-card receipts of the famous may be all that's preserved in manuscript collections.
"And then there's the rather stunning idea that if you can't write cursive, you have a lot of trouble reading it, too. Will my mother's diaries look like Sanskrit to her great-grand-children? Will it be only a small group of specialists who can make sense of the original handwritten manuscripts of Jim Harrison and Wendell Berry, the heartbreaking letters home from soldiers in the American Civil War, or artifacts like this Christmas note Walt Whitman sent to his publisher in 1879?
"Shakespeare reportedly wrote a sequel to Love's Labors Lost, entitled Love's Labors Won--what if, in 2108, it turns up in a dustbin somewhere in Warwickshire? Will there be any¬one around who can decipher it? Who will be the last person to send a handwritten postcard? Who will read it?
"In an eloquent lament in the Oregonian (January 13, 2008) for the decline of the handwritten letter, Jim Carmin suggests: 'Perhaps our many creative writing programs should emphasize that one of the important facets of being a writer is to express one's thoughts in the writing of letters, and to remind authors that for history to have a more complete and accurate understanding of their work, the millennia-old tradition of letter writing is a good way to do it . . . Just as there is a "slow food" movement, to counteract fast food and fast life, perhaps we should begin a slow writing movement, to regain the appreciation of writing letters as an important meditative and historically significant activity, especially to literary studies.' "
"My own advice is: if you get a letter in the mail, save it! Posterity will thank you."--Marilyn Dahl