Wake Up, Stupid

Tempe, Arizona
1983

Dear Reader:
If you enjoy reading this epistolary novel you might think about writing me a letter. You might even write one. I have made many friends through the mail over the years, most of whom I have never met.
I grew up a passionate letter-writer, partly because of my mother’s teaching. She made me feel dutiful about writing a letter to anyone who had written to me or who had given me something I should be grateful for. Lee Youngdahl’s mother sounds quite like mine — “Why don’t you write a little note to Dee?” she orders her son on Monday 15 October. I find myself writing now five hundred letters a year on my own machine with my own fingers.
Many people love me for my letters, but some of my letters have hurt people and have come back to cause me trouble. In a letter discharging my feeling upon somebody else I relieve myself of my burden by burdening someone else with my relief, and the injured party fights back: sometimes openly; sometimes roundabout, wounding me without revealing himself. Or sometimes he ignores me, our feelings cool, and my letter drifts to the bottom of things, to be covered over with time.
Seldom do the letters we write form themselves without help into a proper story — the only kind of story to tell: a story with a Beginning, a Middle, and an End. This book, Wake Up, Stupid, tells a proper story from beginning to end (via the middle) about a man confronted with a moral decision. Shall he go for the money or shall he stick by his friends? Will it be fame or love? In this book all the letters bearing upon his story are uniquely arranged, as they never are in life, permitting us to follow matters through every twist and turn, answering every question, satisfying all curiosity without our being conscious of the architecture of it.

In the quarter of a century which has passed since the appearance of this book the question has remained with us in the arts and in all life. Our hero’s search for the answer should amuse us: a good book may make us laugh. If you laugh while reading this book you must not worry about yourself, you’re quite okay.
It all looks so terribly easy, as it’s supposed to look. I can tell you, however, that writing this book wasn’t easy. But the idea of writing a book in the form of letters had been in my head since my earliest days. I had loved every page of Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al and J.P. Marquand’s The Late George Apley, and the epistolary stories of William Hazlett Upson featuring Alexander Botts, resourceful salesman for the Earthworm Tractor Company, in the Saturday Evening Post.
In a story made of letters each letter must speak absolutely truly from one person to another. No cheating. It must develop the character of both the writer and the recipient, even as it advances the plot, shapes Beginning, sustains Middle, and produces the climactic End neither one syllable too soon nor too late. The author of the book must never falsify the authors of the letters; he/she must remain invisible, doing everything, supplying everything, all the while unseen, so that the reader may think, “Who needs the author anyway — the story told itself.”
Twenty-four years ago, on the evening of the day this book appeared, it received a tremendous, gratuitous — as far as I know unsolicited — advertisement on television during a broadcast by Huntley and Brinkley, two men who gave the news at once. I never knew if Huntley or Brinkley was the booster, or the grounds of his approval. Of course I was pleased that he enjoyed the book, as many people have enjoyed it ever since, even as the postage rates have risen and we have learned to commit to memory our favorite Zip Codes. Technology keeps threatening us
with the idea that nobody ever really writes a letter any more. Nevertheless our mailperson walks the street, even as recently as this morning, with envelopes for me sometimes so ominous I hesitate to open them, but oftener kind letters from friends or relations making me laugh, which I prefer.
I hope you do, too. Write if you can.
Yours very personally,