A Man of Steel, Not Letters : Our Dependence on the Telephone Makes the Modern Biographer’s Task More Difficult

A free-lance writer named Jim Beaver is writing a biography of George Reeves, and he has discovered a disadvantage of the electronic age that I hadn’t thought of.

You say why is anyone doing a biography of George Reeves? You never heard of George Reeves?

Of course you have.

Reeves is listed in Ephraim Katz’s “Film Encyclopedia” as follows: “George Reeves, b. George Besselo, Apr. 6, 1914, Woodstock, Iowa, d. 1959, a suicide. A supporting player and minor lead in Hollywood films of the ‘40s, he gained stardom on TV in the ‘50s as the incarnation of the cartoon-character Superman.”

He played in such movies as “Gone With the Wind” (as Brent Tarleton), “From Here to Eternity” and “Westward Ho the Wagons.”

What makes it so difficult to gather material about Reeves’ life, Beaver says, is that Reeves had a telephone.

“And he used it a good deal. I have researched this book since 1978, and I have uncovered one letter from Reeves. One.”

And that one letter contains little of substance; it merely refers to a previous telephone conversation.

Beaver laments: “I have discovered that it is easier to write a primary-source biography of Beethoven or da Vinci than one of someone born in this century.

“Sure, there are many people still alive who knew your 20th-Century subject, and in the case of very famous subjects, there is probably a wealth of material already written about him or her.

“But what makes Beethoven an easier subject than Gorge Reeves is that Beethoven never had a telephone. When Ludwig wanted to reach out and touch someone, he wrote a letter, even if only to send it across town. And letters, for some wonderful reason, tend to get saved.”

I have previously considered here the death, by telephone, of the love letter; but I had not thought of that handy instrument’s effect in swallowing up a subject’s entire lifetime of thoughts, sentiments, revelations and proposals.

What businessman writes a letter today, except those letters that are meant as broadsides, and are printed and addressed by computer?

Can you imagine that the whiz kids of Wall Street who illegally used inside information to make a killing wrote letters to one another and to their tipsters?

How many critical communications between the President and his adjutants in his far-flung Administration are handwritten, or even typed? The telephone is easier, quicker and more transient.

What would we know of Lincoln if he had telephoned instead of writing those terse, incisive, explicit notes he wrote to his generals during the Civil War?

His compassion is revealed in a telegram to General Hurlbut on Dec. 17, 1863: “I understand you have under sentence of death, a tall old man, by the name of Henry F. Luckett. I personally knew him, and did not think him a bad man. Please do not let him be executed unless upon further order from me, and in the meantime send me a transcript of the record.”

(A telegram, even though it is transmitted electronically, must be written down to be read, and so it has the permanence of a letter.)

If Lincoln had been able to pick up a telephone and tell Hurlbut to spare Luckett, we might not know of this gesture (though, of course, he might have had to sign an executive order).

Perhaps the most famous of Lincoln’s letters is the one he wrote to Lydia Bixby to console her on the death of five sons in the war.

“Dear Madam . . . I just feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming.”

What speech he ever made was more revealing of U.S. Grant’s character than the telegram he sent to Lincoln after the ghastly battles of the Wilderness and the Spotsylvania Court House: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”

There, in essence, was the general Lincoln wanted: tough, aggressive, unrelenting.

Today most of our connections are made by telephone--stones thrown into the sea.

But even professional writers, though they reveal themselves in their work, may be far more candid and open in their private correspondence. In public, every writer works behind a screen.

My biographer, if anyone is idle enough to assume that role, will have to scan that box of letters I wrote home during World War II if he wants to know what I was really like: selfish, self-pitying, smug, sardonic, sullen, sentimental--to name but a few of my qualities, and without even using up the S’s.

E. B. White left us many charming essays, but it is in his letters that we see true glimpses of the man. He writes a friend about his craft: “I’m glad to report that even now, at this late date, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me--more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears.”

I have an idea that White hated the telephone, and I doubt that he ever used a computer.

Maybe Beaver should write a biography of him .