When the nine-year-old Susan Knell wrote to Leonard Bernstein in March 1962 from her family home in Ossining, New York, she had very little — if any — concept of ‘the archive’. Nor were posterity or history-making remotely in her mind. The second child of highly educated Jewish parents, she had been studying the piano because ‘it was something that kids were expected to [do]’.Footnote ² Exactly how the letter came about she does not recall. Most likely, one of her parents encouraged her to write to him: ‘They were very impressed by […] famous people who were accomplished’, she reflected. ‘And we were Jewish. And so I think there was that connection with Bernstein.’ Armed with a sheet of lined paper, torn from the pad in such a way that one of the five pre-punched holes was left ripped, she penned her missive. The careful formatting reflected her awareness of ‘good etiquette’, but was also at odds with the childish scrawl, an incongruity suggestive of children’s tendency to do things ‘correctly’, up to a point. Once posted, the letter was sooner or later forgotten by Susan — and likewise was the photograph reportedly sent by return, which she has no memory of ever receiving.Footnote ³

The letter’s story, however, did not end there. Having escaped what might have seemed its most likely fate — the wastepaper basket — it eventually wound its way to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. It now resides in File 10, Box 409, of the Leonard Bernstein Collection, where it keeps company with thousands upon thousands of letters sent to Bernstein across the course of his celebrated career from people unknown to him, otherwise known as ‘fans’.Footnote ⁴ These letters are at once diverse in genre and highly generic in content and phrasing. They include everything from perfunctory telegrams thanking Bernstein for a wonderful performance to multi-page confessionals describing the maestro’s impact on the correspondent’s life; from polite appeals for help with term papers to suggestions for new compositions or television shows; from formal audition enquiries to autograph requests; from effusive love letters to what we would now term ‘hate mail’. The diversity is exemplary of the kinds of mailings that contemporary literary and artistic celebrities tended to lump under the dubious category ‘fan mail’.Footnote ⁵ The correspondents, in as far as they can be known, appear as diverse as the letters. They range from children who had barely learnt to write through to aged adults on their deathbeds. Some proclaim a high level of formal education and musical proficiency; others are self-taught; others still make their comparative lack of education known explicitly or through copious grammatical and spelling mistakes. Women outnumber men, although by a small enough margin that any attempt to stereotype fan-mail writing — or indeed fandom — as effeminate would hold no water.Footnote ⁶ While we can hazard a guess that the majority were white, a handful of photographs and the occasional life story confirm at least some diversity in ethnic background.

Despite being preserved in such an illustrious institutional repository, Bernstein’s fan mail is in many ways atypical of the sorts of material that have traditionally populated archives, and of the historical methods and accounts that they have inspired. If, as Jacques Derrida argues in his now classic critique of late twentieth-century academia’s ‘archive fever’, the archive denotes a place where ‘official documents are filed’ by those with ‘publicly recognized authority’, then this collection falls short on every front.Footnote ⁷ The classification ‘fan mail’ immediately betrays a lack of authority: it suggests a kind of writing that is less serious and of less historic value and interest than ‘correspondence’.Footnote ⁸ That this is in part a product of the letters’ authorship is proved by the archival sorting that reportedly occurred before the collection was bequeathed to the library. The archive’s online Finding Aid notes that ‘some letters from prominent individuals were moved from the “fan mail” collection to “correspondence”’ — as if fan mail from a person of note becomes something more than a mere ‘fan letter’.Footnote ⁹ What’s more, fan letters were usually conceived of as private messages to Bernstein. Consequently, they are hardly exemplary of the ‘official documents’ that line the shelves of the Derridean archive: they are for the most part far too personal, far less bureaucratic; they draw attention to lives being lived rather than societies being shaped. Nor does the fan mail have a straightforward relationship to the more ‘official’ content of the Bernstein Collection in which it is hosted. In as much as it has been kept as part of this collection, its interest ostensibly lies in the recipient rather than the author; the obscurity that shrouds most of the writers adds to this impression. Yet one doesn’t have to read many letters to realize that they tell us very little about Bernstein, and rather more about the authors’ self-fashioning.

Finally, it is unclear in what sense these letters fulfil that further condition of the archive: that a document be of sufficient importance to merit keeping. If Susan’s story is typical, it seems that even the authors did not attach particular significance to their correspondence.Footnote ¹⁰ (So much for the stereotypes of fans as obsessional and excessively emotionally invested.) Susan’s initial reaction to an enquiry about her letter was to assume it was spam: ‘I see the e-mail, and I think it’s some kind of junk response. And then I opened it, and […] I recognized my childhood handwriting immediately. I was like, “Oh my gosh […] I can’t even believe this is real!”’Footnote ¹¹ Doubtless few if any ‘great men’ would recall the details of every committee meeting ever attended, but the institutional contexts from which their scraps of paper emanate easily justify scholarly readings of even the most tedious and mundane of discussions as history-making. Fan mail can make no such claims to greatness.

What, then, might we do with these letters that seem closer to what Walter Benjamin described as the ‘detritus of modern life’ than to the stuff of the traditional archive? It is not just their unconventional relationship to the archive grandly construed that invites a different approach. Where Susan’s story diverges from the majority is that she subsequently took part in an oral history interview. If the memories shared contextualize her letter, they also draw attention to the interpretative challenges created by the absence of such information, which is the norm. Read in isolation, her letter appears to tell the story of an aspirational young pianist seeking and making a connection with an idol. Her oral history interview, on the other hand, revealed that her devotion to the piano was not as strong as perhaps implied, and that the autograph dispatched either never arrived or failed to arouse memorable interest. Without such additional information, we run the risk of finding meanings in these documents that they did not hold for their originators.

Writing about letters where the authors are unknown also raises a host of litigious and ethical challenges: assuming that most of the letters are still in copyright, to what extent should we disguise authors’ identities or paraphrase their voices? To display everything in plain sight is, of course, to run the risk of violating a person’s right to privacy (and to create problems for potential publishers, who will not want a lawsuit). If the legal position seems unequivocal, the ethical one is more complex. On the one hand, there are shifts in generational sensitivities to navigate: as literary scholars Maryanne Dever, Sally Newman, and Ann Vickery note in their work on ‘intimate archives’, while social media has brought private lives into the public eye in new ways, ‘earlier generations […] were rather more reticent when it came to exposing the intimacies that shaped their existence’.Footnote ¹² On the other hand, as Carole McGranahan has argued in a recent critique of pseudonyms, to assign anonymity is also to deny recognition.Footnote ¹³ Or, we might add, it withholds the possibility of validation that some draw from being part of a research project — or, less grandly, from their life being of interest to another. Moreover, if naming letter-writers is to make them vulnerable, this vulnerability might encourage the researcher to read more generously and write more sensitively. For to name is to acknowledge that it is real people and their lives — rather than abstract historical evidence — being brought into the academic arena.

Faced with these challenges, we might draw inspiration from recent scholarly attempts to recover voices that have been marginalized or entirely excluded from history. Sujit Sivasundaram, for instance, has shown how adopting different perspectives can enable alternative interpretations of traditional sources. In a compelling re-reading of a western ethnography of Pacific islander culture from the islanders’ perspective, he suggests that it documents not the scientific ignorance of the islanders, but rather ‘Europeans’ inability to contextualize islanders’ ways of knowing’.Footnote ¹⁴ Meanwhile, Saidiya Hartmann has shown the value in questioning our own scholarly investments in her ‘Venus in Two Acts’, in which she critically analyses her desire to imagine moments of resistance, empowerment, and autonomy in the lives of slaves whose chronic mistreatment ultimately led to their deaths.Footnote ¹⁵ Such pioneering scholarship takes the archives’ silences as an invitation to look elsewhere for traces of the past, to interrogate our biases, to write history more creatively.

Where the fan mail is concerned, perhaps the limits on traditional historical writing necessarily imposed by writers’ obscurity might be counterbalanced by leaning into, rather than denying, the fuzzy boundary between history and fiction. For where the facts do not obviously lead anywhere — we know Mrs Margaret Loftus wrote from Wisconsin on 18 August 1963, but who was she? — we cannot look to the archive straightforwardly as a factual repository of the past. Instead, we must think capaciously around the letters and their unknown writers, be open to both the obvious and the unlikely readings, and ask how the stakes of our academic arguments might appear different if we try to reposition ourselves as the letter-writers.

I want to end by offering an all-too-brief, but I hope suggestive, reading of excerpts from another fan letter, sent by a 13-year-old:

One reading of this letter might dismiss the writer as a precocious teenager — an archetypal middlebrow snob in the making.Footnote ¹⁷ From her talk of ‘great masters’ to her description of popular music as ‘junk’, it is clear that she has imbibed the kinds of highbrow judgements commonly passed by music educators, including on occasion Bernstein.Footnote ¹⁸ Meanwhile, her emphasis on ‘great feelings and emotions’ lays her open to charges of uncritical listening disparaged by ‘true’ highbrows such as Adorno. With its implicit moral judgements, such a reading would sit comfortably alongside contemporary commitments to challenging mid-century canons.

But it might also fail to account for the meanings that Judith found in classical music. We might get closer to these by trying to reposition ourselves as if in her shoes. We could begin by sketching some biographical details. Cross-reading her letter against the 1950s census records confirms that she was writing as a young teenager. While she does not name her school, or give any insights into her parents’ educational background, the census also reveals that she started life in an area where the majority of residents had not entered into higher education. Like many of the fans who wrote around this time, she knew Bernstein from his Young People’s Concerts, which she had viewed on television religiously for the past year. Perhaps more revealing, however, are the vulnerabilities betrayed by her letter. First, she makes no secret of the fact that her classical music interests have invited ridicule at school. Although it is hard to judge whether her tone is defensive or defiant, it is clear that she feels her pursuit of classical music is ostracizing her from her peers. No less revealing is the request that closes her letter: ‘write me and tell me if you agree’. In writing to Bernstein, she is ultimately seeking validation — to have her musical preferences affirmed.

Crucially, this youthful vulnerability also throws a different light on the letter’s opening paragraph. Rather than a precocious music history essay that feels strangely out of place in a fan letter, it is better understood as an attempt to reach out to Bernstein in his own language, the language in which his viewers were learning to articulate their musical preferences. Reading her letter from this perspective is not to deny her complicity in the blatant assimilation of values central to the classical music world; it is instead to acknowledge that having these musical tastes as a teenager set her against the status quo. In this sense, for Judith, as for many other young Bernstein fans, classical music functioned rather like a teen subculture: it was a niche in which she sought to negotiate her sense of identity, as she refashioned an adult cultural mainstream as a site of resistance against her peers.

To what extent classical music continued to be an important source of identity for Judith, or whether she would grow into something more akin to a middlebrow snob, we cannot know. But in offering a glimpse of a moment when Tchaikovsky and Beethoven were the vehicles of rebellion for this teenager, this letter offers one example of how archives of the everyday can offer new lenses on the past. Recovering these forgotten perspectives requires us to broaden our methodological apparatus and to think beyond the stories that fit easily into established narratives. In some instances, additional sources — census records and oral histories are just two examples — might provide a catalyst. Where these are not available or have little to add, acknowledging the personal vulnerabilities exposed wittingly or otherwise in these intimate pieces of correspondence might help to attune our sensibilities to those of the letter-writers.

Bernstein’s fan mail is a treasure trove of acts of alternative meaning-making. Its ephemeral qualities should not blind us to the historical insights that it promises, which are broader than traditional sources and methods, and the critiques thereof, allow.