Letter writers and their readers

 The English essayist Lytton Strachey said this about Horace Walpole’s letters:

Though from the point of view of style, or personal charm, or individuality of observation, other letter writers may deserve a place at least on an equality with that of Walpole, it is indisputable that the collected series of his letters forms by far the most important single correspondence in the language.

Do you think that's true?

I’m disputing the indisputable, although my hat is in hand to Strachey, who gives an account of why letters are important to some readers, including me.

I agree with Strachey that letters are like pearls. A good one is an admirable thing, but the real value comes when you have a string — the longer the better.

But I think that’s true because we want to know the person behind the letters — what kind of life he or she lived, what he did, what she valued.

I value the letters of Roy Bedichek, a Texas writer of my grandfather’s generation, because I admire the human being who wrote them. And so I’m interested when he tells how to equip a car for roadside camping, how to cook over an open fire and how to make a good sandwich. I care what he thinks about how vermillion flycatchers came in Texas.

The kind of person that interests any one reader varies to a great degree. It is beyond explanation when we talk about why one person falls in love with another. It’s just a matter of individual personalities.

What’s true in love is true in letters: the love of a letter reader for a letter writer is a peculiar thing.

• Source: “Walpole’s Letters” was originally published Aug. 15, 1919 in The Athenaeum. It’s in Lytton Strachey, Biographical Essays; San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, N.D. (A similar version to this paperback was published in 1949.)