By Nina Sankovitch (Simon & Schuster, 192 pages, $28.99)
Reviewed by Jules L. Wagman
If there’s anything author Nina Sankovitch (Tolstoy and the Purple Chair) likes better than writing a letter, it’s reading a letter. Especially, other people’s mail.
Though her obsession with letters began when she was in ponytails, it really took off when she and her husband bought a townhouse in New York City and found, in a backyard shed, a trunk full of 100-year-old letters, abandoned by a former owner early in the 20th century.
The letters were mostly from James B. Seligman to his mother, Addie, most of them written between 1908 and 1912, when he was a student at Princeton University: “Woodrow Wilson lectures to us in Jurisprudence—It is a treat to listen to him speak.”
James had a quirky sense of humor: “Chapel was great. I never laughed so much in my life.” Answering “ponderous interrogations” by his mother: “My diet consists principally of food. My health is fine.”
Ms. Sankovitch moves on to Heloise and Abelard, 12th century star-crossed lovers. They secretly married and she had a baby who was raised by her sister. Heloise ended up in a nunnery, Abelard in a monastery. Their letters raise eyebrows—and Ms. Sankovitch’s ponytail.
Abelard wrote: “[I]f love could devise something new we welcomed it.” Heloise wrote: “Pleasures which we shared…too sweet—they can never displease me, and can scarcely be banished from my thoughts.”
Love letters are a large part of the book and Ms. Sankovitch believes that the writers are more willing to bare their souls in solitary outpourings to their beloveds: “[A] single message to a special recipient, Nonforwardable.”
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) wooed 18-year-old Yalie Joyce Maynard with letters after reading “An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back in Life,” in The New York Times. Their relationship ended less than a year later when Salinger told her to move out.
It would have remained hidden, but Maynard wrote a tell-all memoir in 1998. Salinger had multiple affairs by mail that eventually took him to California, to England. “Maynard thought she had been one of a kind, but she was wrong.”
Richard Wright corresponded with social activist and author Dorothea Canfield Fisher after his novel, Native Son, was published in 1940. He told her, “Few whites know or suspect the enormity, depth and meaning on the Negro problem in America…”
Ms. Sankovitch especially likes the letters in “The Stanleys of Alderley,” written between Maria Josepha Lady Stanley and her daughter –in-law Henrietta Maria Lady Stanley, between 1851 and 1865. “[T]he matters of most vital importance to the family were the marrying off of daughters and the managing of sons.”
Daughter Blanche was taken with David, Earl of Airlie. Her mother wrote to her father who was in London, “He never leaves her side for a moment, & she seems very well pleased, & they are now, between 12 & 1, sitting on the lawn with a book each, but I can see by the reflection in the window that he is not reading.”
Signed, Sealed, Delivered is a froth of a book, opening doors and lifting curtains on lives. both humdrum and chaotic. But always interesting and frequently revealing.
Jules L. Wagman has been writing book reviews since 1966.
© 2014 Jules L. Wagman
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