WHEN READERS WRITE IN
Paul Johnson on
the guidance he gets from correspondents
WRITERS need readers, not just for a livelihood but as a kind of radar echo- system, to help guide them. I remember the cartoonist Vicky saying he had decided to move from the Daily Mirror to the Evening Standard, for much less money, simply because he didn't get enough re- sponse to his cartoons in the Mirror. 'It was like', he said, 'dropping a pebble into a bottomless well. There was never any splash.' That sound, however faint, is necessary to prove one is not speaking into a void. Wordsworth was so pleased to get his first reader's letter, from the young Thomas de Quincey, that he invited him to stay. I am often amazed, and humbled, by the time a busy man like Charles Dickens devoted to writing long replies to unknown correspondents.
Like most writers, I need these letters but find them troubling. Except on emo- tional issues they tend to be friendly, because if readers object to what you say they write to the editor; if they like it, they write to you. I get an average of about 100 a week, many prompted by books and articles printed abroad. My foreign pub- lishers send them to me in batches from time to time. But a lot come in hot response to articles I write in the Daily Mail, especially if I touch on the subject of public or private morals. When I say that letters act like a radar system, I must add quickly that the guidance supplied is often confusing. Emphatic responses tend to cancel each other out.
Recently I commented on the fact that one in four births in Britain was now illegitimate, pointing out that the success of Western societies owed a good deal to the institutions of the monogamous family, strongly protected by law and public opin- ion. I also noted that illegitimacy — as the royal family is even now being reminded still carried a slur which often led to bitter- ness, and that the spread of one-parent fami- lies was linked to the rise in crime. The response has been formidable, many let- ters coming from those with some personal experience of the problem. I read them carefully and I am not sure I am any the wiser (or even better informed). A lady who signed herself Tracey wrote: 'My mother is illegitimate and has never seen her father, but has led a fulfilled and happy life. She has felt no stigma whatsoever and was brought up knowing "it is not where you come from but how you live your life which is more important".' My comments were 'rubbish'. Another lady, herself ille- gitimate and now 29, wrote to say she had `never been so angry in my life. . . . I do not feel inferior and I have never felt persecuted. I have always been treated like, any other human being. . . . I have always felt wanted.' On the other hand, a lady in Lancashire wrote: 'My husband was ille- gitimate and the stigma stayed with him all his life, especially when filling in official forms and even when applying for work, when a birth certificate was asked foi to be looked at by all and sundry. However, the thing that upset me most was when I was filling in the probate form. One qtestion asked: Was the deceased illegitimate? So the stigma was intended to follow him beyond the grave. I may add that my conscience allowed me to say no.'
Another lady wrote: 'I am a 21-year-old single mother with a 13-month-old baby called Samantha. . . . Her father is a millionaire who had every intention of supporting Samantha both financially and 'I can't see any loot at the end of the Tunnel.' lovingly. We have a good relationship both as friends and lovers but we have no intention of getting married in the future.
. . Overall Samantha is a very contented, happy and loving child who has no reason to be unhappy.' Perhaps not, but listen to this from another reader, also called Tracey: 'I am a 14-year-old girl and have no father as my mother never married. My mother never thought about me wanting a father, all she and others thought about was themselves. I honestly will never for- give my mother for her selfishness. I see and know real families, I see them going on holidays, and shopping. I see my mother going out with one man after the other, which I hate, and when I'm old enough am going to leave. . . . I was reading your page and my mother took the paper off me. She was mad that what I had been saying for a long time was written by you.'
There was a good deal of such contradic- tion, and some irrelevance too, most peo- ple believing that one moral issue tapers off imperceptibly into another. One angry offspring, male this time, claimed that 'my own mother had a toy-boy five years younger than me, her own son', a situa- tion, he added mysteriously, which led to a "family's" loss in excess of £100,000'. A Cornish lady insisted: 'I have long believed that if purpose-built hostels, with matrons in charge to supervise the comings and goings of male visitors, were provided for unmarried mothers instead of council flats and houses, then perhaps girls would be a little more careful about getting pregnant.' Yet another lady, a former Miss United Kingdom, now 53, believes that much of the problem stems from 'the lax dress of today'. There is 'too much cleavage, too much leg and definitely too much bottom'.
'When I was a model', she says, was taught to model clothes and not my figure: She is launching a national campaign for higher dress standards and wrote to me: 'I managed to verbally attack a mini-skirted presenter on the Derek James show recent- ly — that gave me immense pleasure!' She plans, she says, to become 'the next Mary Whitehouse'.
In my experience, this kind of response is about average on a moral issue. It is rare to get the letters running all one side or the other. Even when I attacked the Beatles in the 1960s and 600 letters poured in, no more than two-thirds were against me — I had over 200 in support. The only time I can recall being completely in the dog- house was when I suggested, prematurely, that Cecil Parkinson be brought back into the Government. Every single letter was hostile. But as a rule there are rival choruses out there. Mr Pickwick, it will be recalled, advised that if there were two mobs it was best to 'shout with the larger'. But what readers' letters teach is that public opinion is not merely divided but multifaceted, surprising and often weird. The writer has to make up his own mind and take the consequences.
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