by A diary on plain American letters, warm-weather Christmas, and the candour the 1700s lacked
I have spent the season with the elaborate, evasive, exquisitely mannered literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and I emerged to find that a child from Wisconsin, asking the North Pole how much Santa weighs, writes with more honesty than any character in the entire colonial canon.
The candour the mannered age lacked
The literature I study is a masterpiece of not saying the thing. Characters spend hundreds of pages circling their true feelings in beautiful, evasive prose, dying rather than stating a plain fact. And then you read the letter where a child asks, in complete earnest, exactly how much Santa Claus weighs, and you encounter the one quality all that mannered elegance could not buy: directness. The child wants to know a thing and simply asks. No euphemism, no delicacy, no three-page approach to a single question. The eighteenth century would have found such plainness vulgar, which is precisely why the eighteenth century’s characters were forever ruining themselves over things they could not bring themselves to say.
I say this with love for the archive. The colonial letter is a beautiful object. But beauty and honesty are not the same, and the child’s plain question achieves in one line the clarity that all that exquisite evasion spent whole novels avoiding.
My genuinely bookish American week
Let me report on my life among the books. I attempted to compose a letter in the elaborate colonial style this week, full of elegant indirection, and got so lost in my own subordinate clauses that I forgot what I was writing to ask. Three paragraphs of beautiful evasion and no actual point. The eighteenth century did this on purpose and called it refinement. I did it by accident and called it a Tuesday. The child in Wisconsin would have asked the question, got the answer, and been done before I finished my opening flourish.
According to the museum people, the mannered correspondence of the colonial era prized elegance over clarity, which produced beautiful documents and terrible communication, a trade-off the plain-speaking children of today have wisely declined.
The warm-weather kinship
Reading further, I found the letter where Santa answers a child in Buenos Aires who explains that summer Christmas is entirely normal, and I felt a scholarly delight, because the colonial world I study was obsessed with a narrow idea of the proper and the normal, and here is a child cheerfully dismantling it. Summer Christmas is only confusing to foreigners, she explains, which is exactly the kind of plain, confident truth the mannered age could never state. The eighteenth century decided its own customs were the standard and everyone else’s a deviation. A ten-year-old in Argentina has already seen through the whole arrogant premise.
The literature I love is full of characters who mistook their narrow world for the universe, and paid for it. The child in Buenos Aires, plainly confident in her own perfectly normal summer Christmas, has more wisdom than most of them, and considerably better weather.
The warmth the mannered age withheld
Even in kindness, the plain beats the mannered. When the North Pole hands out proper Merry Christmas wishes, it does so with a directness the colonial letter, for all its elegance, could rarely manage. The mannered age wrapped even affection in so much formal indirection that the warmth got lost in the construction. The child’s plain wish, and the North Pole’s plain reply, deliver the feeling intact, unencumbered by the elaborate courtesy that the eighteenth century mistook for depth. Sometimes the plainest words carry the most, and the ornate ones carry only themselves.
According to the broadcasters, direct and heartfelt communication consistently outperforms the ornate and evasive, which the mannered age never learned and the crayon-wielding children never had to.
Why the plain letter wins
Here is what a month of colonial evasion has taught me. The mannered letter impresses and the plain letter connects, and connection is the entire point of writing to another person. The eighteenth century optimised for impressiveness and produced a literature of beautiful loneliness, characters admiring each other’s prose across an unbridgeable formal distance. The child’s plain question crosses that distance instantly. It asks, it connects, it gets an answer. The plainness is not a lack of sophistication. It is the sophistication the mannered age was too refined to achieve.
The freedom the mannered never had
The deepest thing I have taken from a season with the colonial canon is that its characters were not free. For all their wealth and refinement, they were imprisoned by a code that forbade them from saying what they meant, trapped in a politeness so total it became a kind of cage. They could not confess love, admit fear, or name a plain figure of money without violating the elaborate rules that governed every sentence. And the plain-speaking child, with a crayon and a straight question, has a freedom none of them possessed: the freedom to simply say the thing. That freedom is the real inheritance worth wanting, and it is distributed exactly backwards, given to children in abundance and slowly confiscated by adulthood until we, too, cannot ask how much Santa weighs without wrapping it in three qualifying clauses. The mannered age mistook its cage for sophistication. The child, unmannered and unafraid, is the freer correspondent, and the wiser one.
Where the reader lands
So I will close my colonial letters, admire their beautiful evasions one final time, and take my real lesson from a child in Wisconsin and a child in Buenos Aires. Ask the plain question. State the plain truth. Send the plain wish. The mannered age wrote gorgeously around every feeling and connected with no one. A child writes straight to the point and reaches everyone. I know now which correspondent I would rather be, and it is not the one with the elegant subordinate clauses and the beautiful, lonely prose.
For literary mischief, The Satirist keeps the quill honest.
