I already knew I missed writing and receiving real-letters-on-paper, but I was just reminded how much I miss them. I was looking through old photo albums for pictures of commedian/activist Dick Gregory. (He’ll be in NYC tonight and tomorrow night at Caroline’s on Broadway, a comedy club. I knew him back in the 70s and did a fast-for-world-hunger with him in Atlanta thirty years ago. I thought he’d like to have some of the pictures.)
But in addition to photographs in those much-traveled albums, I found a letter dated March 8, 1977. I’d saved it because it came from a real writer’s writer, Sloan Wilson, author of A Summer Place and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. I’d written him a fan letter and was so thrilled that he wrote back, I saved the letter all these years. The stationery, 5 x 9, was engraved with his name and an address in Ticonderoga, New York. (“All the best writers live in New York,” I thought, back in Kansas City and aspiring to write books, too). The letter was typed and had one error, which he’d corrected with a pen.
Mr. Wilson passed away a few years ago. I read the obituary in The New York Times. But I have his letter, and it is such a grand example of this nearly lost art that I’ve decided to share it with you in its entirety. I don’t know why, maybe so you’ll write a letter. Maybe so I’ll write a letter. Maybe so we’ll at least print and save the brilliant emails, although frankly if I got an email from a perfect stranger with family new, et al, I’d wonder why this person was telling me extra stuff I don’t need to know. Maybe I want to share it because letters, and engraved stationery and fountain pens, like cloth napkins and Sunday strolls and calling non-intimate Mr. and Ms., were lovely. I’m glad I was around for them.
SLOAN WILSON
po box
street address
town
____
phone
March 8, 1977
Dear Victoria Mucie; (*that was my maiden name)
Thank you so much for your letter about my books. It is certainly an honor to be a favorit of so literate a letter writer!
I hope you emerge from your on-the-verge times. Editors and publishers appear to be changing their customs even more than other people, and the changes rarely are of value to writers.
We had our first real spring day here after a long winter. I have a stroy to finish and a book to start and a mountain of mail and a daughter who must be chauffeured from her school to the dentist, but my wife and I took a walk this noon anyway and waved at friends and glared at enemies the way people in a small town do.
Read Previous Post