ENGL 4310

Again going back to what we talked about on Tuesday, I keep thinking of what Sarah said about how when we write a letter, we don't typically make a draft of it first, and then later refine it or correct any mistakes before sending it out into the world. Although we don't write letters much anymore, I know that when I write an email to someone, I often push the send button without altering it in any way. And all I would have to do is push the "delete" button. It wasn't even that easy in Porter and O'Connor's day. Porter was also such a prolific letter writer and set aside time in the day for the very purpose of writing so I doubt that she often agonized over the way a sentence sounded or the structure of the letter.

I think part of the reason I'm interested in this is because the letters represent a kind of rawness. Since they were likely created in a short amount of time and in the heat of the moment, they may refelct their creator the way a revised story cannot. I've found several examples of this. In a letter to Glenway Wescott (p. 169), Porter makes a typo when she attempts to write "phony" and it comes out instead as "P6H6o6N6Y." She goes on to say that it was a mistake caused from pressing the space bar rather than just correcting the mistake. I love that. It may sound ridiculous, but little things like this make these letters come alive for me. In another letter to Josephine, Porter writes "Your splendid letter came about an hour ago, and I am so zipped up by it I run to answer" (31). So it seems that Porter anxiously creates a response and, from the sound of it, probably put it in the mailbox as quickly as possible, with minimal revisions; it represents her authentic voice rather than her revised voice. In one letter, Porter seems to recognize this authentic nature of the letter by beginning a letter to Barbara Wescott, "your letter was like you" (165). Now, I'm not sure if "like you" means the structure of the letter in some way represented her friend or if the words themselves were so authentic and raw that she would've known it was Barbara who wrote them. I like to think it's the latter.