Dear editor.(THE STRAGGLER)

Is there any genre of literary endeavor lower--less significant, less regarded, more ephemeral--than the Letter to the Editor? Or any better illustration of the truth, first noted by one of the Roman authors, that writing is neither an art nor a science, but a disease? A person would indeed have to be suffering from some sort of malady to be so hungry for distinction as to give over half an hour to compose a letter, on a topic of public interest, addressed to a stranger, in the faint hope that it might see print, squinched into some newspaper between the thundering unsigned editorials and the dry ruminations of public intellectuals, or in the shadowy ad-fringed ditch between some magazine's contents page and the warm-up features.

This low and self-indulgent art form boasts few masterpieces, and even those have the miniature character of heads carved on cherry-stones. A personal favorite of mine is the one sent to the London Times in February 1959, signed jointly by Earl Russell, a.k.a. Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and gadfly, and Lord Russell of Liverpool, a jurist who had helped prosecute the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg. After the latter's book The Scourge of the Swastika became a bestseller, people started getting the two aristocratic Russells mixed up, leading to the joint letter, whose text read, in its entirety: "In order to discourage confusions which have been constantly occurring, we beg herewith to state that neither of us is the other." There you have a perfect letter to the editor: memorable, socially useful, and brief.

I was attracted to the letters columns of my family's morning newspaper from an early age. That paper was Hugh Cudlipp's Daily Mirror, the greatest success in postwar British tabloid journalism. The letters column was a folksy affair purportedly managed by a pair of elderly gentlemen called the Old Codgers, who in practice were of course a single person, that person being whichever Mirror staff member could be found nothing better to do. That was so in Fleet Street at any rate. Staff at the separately printed northern edition of the Mirror used to just make up the letters, a fact sufficiently well-known to worker bees of the British press to cause much mirth when Hugh Cudlipp dropped in on the Mirror's Manchester office one day to congratulate John Flint, the night news editor, on the fine natural sense of humor displayed by the paper's northern readers.

At any rate, I quickly got attached to the Old Codgers. They practiced a prewar style of courtesy, referring to male readers as "Sir" and females as "Ma'am." They had a nice line in odd believe-it-or-not facts, and patient answers to colorfully silly questions from readers. In my preteen arrogance I even submitted a letter to them--something about the speed of light, I think it was--but the letters editor did not see fit to publish it. That particular incarnation of the Old Codgers was probably the legendary reporter Brian McConnell, who some years later took a bullet in the chest for Princess Anne when a lunatic attempted to kidnap her. (He recovered, and was ...