Every month Annejet van der Zijl saves an almost lost story from oblivion. In the ninth story, lost loved ones briefly come back to life through their handwriting or the sound of their voices.
It is a question I am often asked at lectures: is there still a future for biography now that there are hardly any exchanges of letters left to use? In my case, the question is obvious, because letters played a crucial role in the creation of most of my books. My book about Annie MG Schmidt, for example, I would never have dared to start if her son hadn’t pushed an old supermarket bag full of yellowed, scribbled sheets and envelopes into my hands at the right moment.
Also for my other books I have moved heaven and earth to find letters from the main characters or their loved ones. Because no matter how informative newspaper reports, interviews, eyewitness accounts and archive documents can be, you only really get the feeling that you get to know someone when you see the handwriting and, as it were, hear his or her voice.
Scribble
I saw the enormous power of letters once again illustrated by one in the International New York Times published article about recovered written messages from victims of the so-called White Terror that gripped Taiwan from 1947 to 1987.
Among the tens of thousands of people who were then detained and executed without protest, was Chang Yi-lung’s grandfather. In 2008, she decided to inquire in the national archives about the man her mother had never known, because he had already been put to death when she was yet to be born. How much he had thought of his unborn child in his last moments was evidenced by the scribble Chang found in the thick stack of documents made available to her by the archives. “Being at this moment and realizing that I will never see you, that I won’t be able to hug you or kiss you once—that breaks my heart,” her grandfather wrote to her mother. “My grief is endless.”
Eve execution
To her surprise, Chang found among the documents not only this heartbreaking farewell note from her grandfather, but also letters from 176 others, none of which were ever delivered to the loved ones for whom they were intended. For example, on the eve of his execution, sometime in 1954, the espionage suspect Liu Yao-ting wrote to his young wife:
My Yueh-hsia, you must listen to what I say now. Although we are separated, our hearts remain connected. I so hope that you will overcome all trials, that you will be brave and not too sad, and that you will not lose your health because of me. Yueh-hsia, I’m so sorry. I should take care of you and the kids. That’s what I hoped for the future. But I can not. Yueh-hsia, I hope you can forgive me.
These messages had taken more than sixty years to arrive. The ink had faded, but the feel hadn’t. Effortlessly they broke through the barriers of death and time. “I kept crying because I finally got to read something from my dad,” one of the recipients told me The New York Times. “I had never seen his handwriting. I had no idea what he was like as a human being. But his letters made him alive. Without it I could only imagine him in my imagination, now I suddenly saw him in front of me.’
Answering machine
So it’s a good question: what should a biographer do in the future, now that letters are hardly being written? Yet I never worry. For I believe that the descendants of thirty-eight-year-old Brian Sweeney, a former United States Air Force pilot who was unlucky enough to find himself aboard United Airlines Flight 175 on the morning of September 11, 2001, will be listening to his final message for decades to come, recorded on his wife’s answering machine:
Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on a plane that’s been hijacked. If this doesn’t end well, and it looks like it is, then I want you to know that I love you very much. I want you to do good things and have a good time. The same goes for my parents and everyone else, and I really adore you and I’ll see you when I get there. Bye babe – I hope I’ll call you.
Four minutes later – 9:03 am – the plane crashed between the 77th and 85th floors of the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.
The letter as we know it may die out, but emails will be preserved, messages will be recorded, old Twitter and Facebook accounts will remain accessible in some way.
People will continue to communicate and the need to keep the highlights of that communication, so biographies can always be written.
2023-05-27 01:00:54
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