Check out 'Yours Forever: People and Their Letters'

By Rebecca Hyde

Rowan Public Library

Thomas Mallon’s “Yours Ever: People and Their Letters” is not an anthology but a love letter to the art and craft of letter writing.

It is a very personal and judgmental survey. Mallon describes it as “a kind of long cover letter to the cornucopia of titles” in the bibliography, from which the reader can choose the selected or collected letters of so-and-so.

The book is loosely organized around the circumstances of life motivating the letters: absence, friendship, advice, complaint, love, spirit, confession, war and prison.

Sorting the collections was like herding cats. And letter writing itself is changing. What is a blog? “Half diary, half letter-to-the-world,” says Mallon. If a reader is inspired to dip in or consume one of the titles mentioned, Mallon will have no regrets for the years spent on the project.

The correspondence is sometimes an introduction to a family and their times: “The most important letter Jessica Mitford ever wrote was a forgery, addressed to herself (‘Darling Decca’) at the age of nineteen on February 3, 1937.” This forged invitation to a European tour from an imaginary girlfriend and her well-positioned family was intended to be Jessica’s ticket to war-torn Spain and elopement with her second cousin. The couple transmitted news of the Spanish war for a press bureau. Mitford continued to write letters during her life as a muckraker and Communist Party member. A second marriage was long and happy. Before her death in 1996, friends had already died off, and Mitford realized that “she missed the arrival of their letters more than the people themselves.”

Examining Wilfred Owen’s World War I correspondence, Mallon remarks that Owen was never a natural soldier, rather a boy drawn to botany, evangelical religion and Keats. An older poet, Siegfried Sassoon, offered some “military-sounding” literary advice: “Sweat your guts out writing poetry,” and don’t publish too early. Owen was killed a week before the Armistice. The power of the letters, Mallon concludes, makes one almost forget that Owen’s poetry made his reputation.

Will Mallon’s book motivate us to write letters? Perhaps, if we start with a “thank-you”? See “Just a Note to Say...” by Florence Isaacs.