Re: New Book: Telegram

Date: January 16, 2004

"Telegram! : Modern History as Told Through More than
400 Witty, Poignant, and Revealing Telegrams
Hardcover: 207 pages
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc.; (November 11, 2003)
ISBN: 0805071016
$18.00 Bookstore - $12.60 Online

Rosenkrantz sends a fascinating 'TELEGRAM!'
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

The most fragile and haunting pieces of paper I own are two telegrams sent to my grandmother in 1919. Both are from the War Department. The first says that her son Edwin is missing in action on the battlefields of France. The second, sent a month later, says he was killed.

Linda Rosenkrantz' Telegram culls together some 400 historic wires. Bob Minzesheimerwas especially fond of the ones having to do with money.

Edwin was 19. My father was 7, and used to say that he could remember the day that the messenger boy from Western Union made his mother cry.
Excerpt from 'Telegram!'

Before the opening of his play Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw telegraphed Winston Churchill:

AM RESERVING TWO TICKETS FOR YOU FOR MY PREMIERE. COME AND BRING A FRIEND IF YOU HAVE ANY.

To which Churchill replied:

IMPOSSIBLE TO BE PRESENT FOR THE FIRST PERFORMANCE. WILL ATTEND THE SECOND IF THERE IS ONE.

I thought of that story reading TELEGRAM!, a fascinating array of telegrams collected by Linda Rosenkrantz. Not all of it lives up to its subtitle, Modern History as Told Through More Than 400 Witty, Poignant, and Revealing Telegrams, but a surprising part of it does.

TELEGRAM! is an excellent companion to Tom Standage's 1998 history of the telegraph, The Victorian Internet. Standage makes the case that the telegraph triggered the greatest revolution in communications since the invention of the printing press and draws parallels with the development of the Internet.

Rosenkrantz's collection personalizes the technology. It draws heavily on telegrams sent by the famous, such as President Lincoln and Elvis Presley, since those are most likely to be preserved in archives and books.

Rosenkrantz argues convincingly that "a fairly complete history of the Civil War could be told through the telegraphic correspondence of its leaders." Lincoln was the first commander in chief who could communicate instantaneously with his generals on the battlefield. I wonder if any president since has been as direct and eloquent in what he told them.

But my favorite parts of the book deal with more mundane affairs, especially the great writers pleading with friends, agents and editors to send them money.

From F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1928: "MY INCOME TAX CHECK IS DUE IN NEW YORK TOMORROW MONDAY CAN YOU POSSIBLY DEPOSIT THREE HUNDRED FIFTY DOLLARS TO KEEP ME OUT OF JAIL STOP."

Eight years later, Fitzgerald telegraphed his editor, Maxwell Perkins, asking, "WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU CANT PAY TYPIST OR BUY MEDICINES OR CIGARETTS STOP."

Others sent money. Presley wired his parents in 1954: "HI BABIES, HERE'S THE MONEY TO PAY THE BILLS. DON'T TELL NO ONE HOW MUCH I SENT."

In 1928, Ernest Hemingway, a foreign correspondent for William Randolph Hearst's International News Service, was asked for a complete accounting of his expenses. Hemingway replied: "SUGGEST YOU UPSTICK BOOKS ASSWARDS."

As for Hearst, Rosenkrantz notes that historians doubt the existence of his most quoted telegram, reportedly sent to artist Frederic Remington in Cuba on the eve of the Spanish-American War: "PLEASE REMAIN. YOU FURNISH THE PICTURES, AND I'LL FURNISH THE WAR."

But the book includes a telegram the newspaper mogul sent his editors, urging them to promote an obscure young preacher named Billy Graham: "PUFF GRAHAM."

In an era when people paid for telegrams by the word, some of the most memorable are the shortest. (E-mail, in contrast, doesn't encourage concise writing.)

Victor Hugo wrote a very long novel, Les Misérables, but when he asked his publisher about how sales were going, his telegram simply read: "?"

The publisher replied: "!"

When author Ian Fleming asked Noel Coward to play the role of Dr. No in the James Bond film, Coward replied: "DR NO? NO! NO! NO!"

The book is sprinkled with anecdotes. Andrew Carnegie and Joseph Heller once worked as tele- gram messengers. Sinead O'Connor and Nathan Lane delivered singing telegrams.

The telephone replaced the telegraph. These days, e-mail is the preferred means of communications. But does anyone save the best of those messages?

©2004 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc."