The Joys of Being a Woman, and Other Papers

by Winifred Margaretta Kirkland

I have been much talked to of late, and much talked at. I have seen the fanatic spark in eyes that would have been aghast to know its presence there. Once upon a time there was only one church, and excommunication from that was a simple and straightforward matter; it can hardly be an irreligious age when one can feel, in listening to the testimony from the score of temples one’s friends have built, that one is in danger of being excommunicated from all twenty. But better excommunication than that, entering and accepting, I, too, might feel called upon to testify.

I, too, could testify,—I, a mere sunworshiper. I could point out the vaulted sky of my private chapel, most ancient and most orthodox. I could repeat for you the liturgies the wind has made, much the same that it chanted for Moses on Sinai; for are any of your creeds so new, my friends? I could point out to you altar-lights genial and tolerant, the taper-flames of stars. There was once One long ago who went to the mountain for prayer, for there is nothing new about the temple of out-of-doors; but if I, its worshiper, do not carry forth some peace from its great silence, some joy from its godly mirth, then would not even my infinite temple shrink to the size of words, if I should testify?

XI
Letters and Letter-Writers

IT is a popular fallacy that letter-writing is a bygone art. Arguments for this opinion point to the array of picture-cards expressing every sentiment known to experience, and saving, by the neatness and dispatch of their machine-made couplets, all the fumbling effort we used to expend in saying thank you to a hostess, bon voyage to a friend, or even in offering sympathy to one bereaved. The night-message also seems to indicate a sorry substitution for the formality of the post. The truth is that the picture-card, by doing the work of the duty letter, clears the way for the real letter, so spontaneous that it can’t help being written; while the night-message contributes to epistolary art a terseness and vigor that should not be undervalued. While we continue to look back at the voluminous eighteenth century and to regret the decay of letter-writing, we are every one of us every week receiving from a dozen different correspondents letters vibrant with personality, vivid, readable, inviting preservation. Far from not writing letters, people never wrote more letters than they do to-day, nor better ones; if ours are not so long as the letters of the past, they are far livelier. Both in theory and in fact the present time is peculiarly fitted to be epistolary.

If each one of us will examine that packet of letters we are loath to destroy because they have made us see pictures or think thoughts or chuckle with appreciation, we shall pause to ponder how diverse in character are the authors. One missive, guiltless of grammar, is racy with backwoods wisdom; another shows the rapier wit and apt allusiveness of the Hellenist; another is as crisp and keen as the typewriter that clicked it forth; still another peals with freshman skylarking. It is not at first easy to perceive underlying all the variety the essential characteristics which belong alike to all these correspondents and which differentiate that happily constituted being, the born letter-writer; man or woman, young or old, educated or illiterate, certain qualities he must inalienably possess.

The letter-writer is always an observant person. He has the pictorial eye and the pictorial pen. The view framed by his window sash must never grow stale for him, across it the clouds must always roll as if across a painter’s canvas, and its commonplace roof-line must keep always its quaintness and its quirks. Of the groups of people that crowd his day, he must see each as if staged for a play, he must perceive the color of hair and the cut of clothes and the connotation of attitudes as vividly as if he were always seated before a rising curtain. This freshness of vision varies in different people. It is always found in every good letter, but of the writers, some require the stimulus of an unusual scene; while they have not the power to see or to paint the pictures of Dulltown Center, they can portray Tokio or Archangel till it glows on the wall before the reader’s eye; others, more really gifted, see drama everywhere, even if they have never been twenty miles from their own farm and forest. Whether our correspondent is stay-at-home or traveler, he must so combine his gift of observation with his gift of representation that his angle of vision is unique. We have all of us received narratives of travel that were colorless as guide-books and narratives of a village sewing society that were palpitant with portraiture. The true letter-writer makes us feel not only that we have been present at a scene but that we have been present with him.

The genuine epistolary endowment shows qualities in pleasant poise. A letter should be personal, but not over-personal. A self-analyst may cover many pages of notepaper, but we read him only under protest, and drop him promptly into the waste-basket. We enjoy the record of personal observation just so long as it is balanced by detachment. We like to see our friend moving across the scene he describes, but we don’t want to see him bulking large in his own landscape. In a well-penned letter the people written about stand forth as vividly as does the author. It is this power of amused detachment that makes all true letter-writers true humorists as well.

To write letters it is not enough to be observant, objective, humorous: one must have the impulse to express the observation and the fun. This impulse is, of course, the literary will to write, but there is a sharp distinction between the littérateur and the letter-writer. The latter does not merely wish to write, he wishes to write to somebody. He is not lyric, for it is not enough for him to burst into song unheard; he is not a diarist, for it is not enough for him to talk to himself; he is not a genius, for it is not enough for him to talk to a vast, formless creature called the Public. A letter-writer is one who finds life so entertaining that he must talk about it to a friend. Never a self-sufficient person, he is as genial as he is shy; it would therefore no more occur to him to pour himself out upon paper that nobody was to read than to pour himself into print that everybody was to read. He has the literary impulse without the literary ambition. He must be sure of his auditor before his pen will move, and yet when it once begins to gambol, it carries him off and away, after the manner of all pens, until the friendly listener becomes idealized from homely reality into very quintessence of sympathy.

The individual auditor is not only the first requisite for the letter-writer, but the determining influence that gives to letters themselves the qualities which distinguish them from other forms of literature. Letters stand halfway between the formlessness of conversation and the formality of essay or fiction. A letter to a friend has this advantage over a chat with him, that you can choose the impression you wish to make and make it without interference from the interlocutor’s telepathy, or interruption through his rejoinders. Conversation gives and takes, but a letter only gives, and gives exactly what it wishes, no more. In a letter one employs words, weaving them happily to one’s will, but it is a mistake to suppose that conversation is much concerned with words. It is a far more shifting and subtle thing than that, for mere speech is constantly supplemented or corrected or contradicted by the twinkle in our eyes, the tautness or tremor in our voice, the twisting of our lips. The attention of the listener is diverted by watching all these manifestations. While it has all the camaraderie of chat, the letter, in the clarity and singleness of its impression, is distinctly different from talk.

The epistolary form differs as much from the memoir as it does from conversation. The diarist is a self-important person, talking to himself and to the future, and conscious of his effect upon both. If he is great enough, that effect is worth making, and we read his account of himself and his times with the reverence we accord to history. We do not read, however, with the pleasant personal warmth with which we peruse a letter, for we know the diarist is not speaking as comrade to comrade. We know and he knows that he is speaking to posterity.