The Written Word
for March 21, 2001

Once upon a time people wrote letters to one another. And in olden times they were delivered by messengers so, since only the well-to-do could read and write or afford a messenger, writing letters was for the few. There exist, of course, many wonderful collections of correspondence of yesteryear.

In the 19^th century. Post offices developed and at first it was the recipient who paid for the service. Since the letter would have been sealed with wax I suppose some pretty good guessing would take place before the postman was paid his couple of pennies. The sealing of envelopes was still around when I was a child. I remember going to my grandfather’s office and watching him melt the red wax onto the back of the letter then put his seal upon it.
One of the great by-products of the letter was the letter to the editor something that became its own branch of literature especially after they had passed muster by the editor of the New York or London Times, the Telegraph or the Manchester Guardian as it then was. Many of these letters have been published. Much wisdom and wit is to be found there.

When I started broadcasting, I started getting letters – perhaps a half dozen or so a week. I would set aside some time each week, usually Thursday with a brown bag lunch, to answer my mail. There was no urgency.

Then came the fax machine in the mid eighties. Interesting thing, the fax. The technology was an old one. They used to "wire-photo" photographs during the war – that’s how you would see the scenes of war on the front page of the newspaper. Evidently no one thought of wire-photoing words though it may have been a matter of cost. In any event the fax came, first with its funny paper and uncertain transmission, progressing to where a fax copy is indistinguishable from the original. My mail increased to perhaps 25 letters a week – still well within my capacity to deal with. Then came the email.

The email started slowly because of habit I suppose. It wasn’t until the late nineties that it really caught on. Now I still get half a dozen letters a week by "snail mail", perhaps the same number of faxes and up to 100 email a day!

With the advent of email has come a sense of urgency only partly explained by the volume, which if unattended, gets out of hand. Somehow one gets the sense that if the reply isn’t prompt, a penalty will be paid.

It’s incredible how long some of these "letters" are and what they sometimes demand. I will often get several pages of opinion which I am expected, as soon as convenient, to respond to in kind. My opinion will be sought on matters I couldn’t possibly know anything about. I am often given a very long story and told that I must do something about this desperate situation my correspondent finds himself or herself.

I receive some email by invitation of course – as, for example, when I ask for feedback to my show. And I also get nice compliments and some brickbats. But I also get volume!

I have had to make some rules. I have had a form letter devised for use where I want to the writer to know that I’ve seen the email but just can’t – or won’t – deal with it. I quite often just read and leave unanswered mail from regular correspondents. For safety reasons I won’t open attachments and I studiously ignore email when I am one of several c/cs.

But it does get overwhelming. And it has brought a new dimension to correspondence which I relate, in closing, by this anecdote.

A few years ago when I was writing my book, Canada: Is Anyone Listening? I got very angry at my editor because he was trying to make me say things I didn’t intend saying or stop me saying things because he didn’t agree with me. One Friday I received my manuscript for the umpteenth time with substantial (as opposed to syntactical) changes and I got so angry that I fired off an ill-tempered email to my publisher, Anna Porter. It being about 9:00PM - thus midnight in Toronto – I didn’t expect a reply and was astonished to get, a few moments later, a brusque reply saying that she couldn’t attend to the matter now but would on Monday.

"To hell with you", I thought, so I fired back an even angrier email demanding that if she was working at that time she could damn well deal with my problem. In a few minutes I got a reply in the same terms.

Then it occurred to me – she had a program that enabled an automatic response. I had never heard of such a thing so I fired back another email saying "Perfect! Now, after I get the same program, we can continue to insult one another at night by letting our computers do it for us!"

God only knows where we’re headed but wherever it is, writing letters will never be the same again!