An epistle
EPISTOLARY, adj. This word, which means “having to do with letters/correspondence,” is totally straightforward, coming right from Latin epistolarius meaning the same thing. Latin epistola also gave us the English word “epistle,” which is a fancy way to say “letter,” and I guess people mostly use “epistle” to talk about Paul’s letters in the New Testament, but as a Jew it is my right not to know anything about that.
Anyway, the adjective “epistolary” is mostly encountered in front of the noun “novel.” More on that in a minute.
Portrait of a woman, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, 1787. Yeah, technically I already put this image in a previous newsletter, but if using a Labille-Guiard painting twice is wrong, I don’t wanna be right. Also, can you imagine doing all your email and text messages and professional documents with a quill? You can’t copy-and-paste shit. How did anyone write anything?
In a startling turn of events, this week I actually picked up some books in French, opened them, and viewed their printed contents with my eyes, so today’s newsletter has a Capital-R Romance section, something I have not done since… April? Let’s not discuss it.
I am always relieved to discover that I can still read in French—I am aware, rationally, that barring a terrible accident, a language in its entirety is unlikely to just slip out of my brain, but since when do my fears have to be rational? Besides, I’m pretty sure fear is the only reason I even learned this language—you put in some time one semester, and then if you stop, you forget everything and all that time is wasted. That’s how the sunk cost fallacy tricked me into dedicating years of my life to the study of French literature.
This is not to say I have not been speaking French, but most of those conversations are my friend calling me up to say “If I wanted to send a text message in English that said [some phrase], how would I spell that?” and then we have an extraordinarily confusing exchange where we spell things to each other over the phone in both the French alphabet and the English alphabet simultaneously, so neither of us can ever tell if we are talking about e or i, which is the single most labor-intensive way to write anything, even harder than using a quill, and yes I am including all the times when my novel outlines said things like “they solve the problem somehow” for the later scenes. Anyway, you can see how this French-i-or-English-e experience does not inspire a lot of confidence in my own fluency in any language.
Being in charge of, or partly responsible for, someone else’s correspondence is a tough job. This week I reread the prefaces to five eighteenth-century French epistolary novels for fun, and also in preparation for maybe drafting an epistolary piece of fiction of my own (in English, because my masochism only goes so far). Obviously the GOAT Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos was on my list, but I also looked at the prefaces to Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, Sénac de Meilhan’s L’Émigré (fun fact literally the only thing I remember about the content of this novel is that there’s some antisemitism, but right there in the title it says it’s about an aristo who runs from the Revolution, so what did we expect), Montesquiou’s Les Lettres persanes, and Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne. If you’re asking “why these five novels,” it’s because they were the ones within easy reach. My research is so thorough and exhaustive, I know. Probably I should already have thrown L’Émigré in the garbage, but I worry someone else might pick it up and read it.
Anyway, here is a list of things you might say in the preface to an epistolary novel:
Is this a novel or some letters? We’ll never know.
If it is a novel, though, that’s an accident.
I definitely didn’t write this.
I am just the translator.
I am just the editor.
I am just the person who organized these letters by date.
I am just the person who selected the most important letters from the vast collection given to me by an anonymous donor, a collection which contains way more than what is printed here, but I am not publishing any of that stuff, even though it definitely exists.
I am just the person who corrected all the spelling mistakes.
I am just the person who did not correct all the spelling mistakes, because I wanted you to know how definitely real these letters are.
If you find any fault with the writing style, it’s not my fault because of how these are real letters, and I did not write them.
If you find any fault with the contents of the letters, it’s not my fault because of how these are real letters, and this stuff really happened, and sometimes people do bad things.
If you find any fault with me, the innocent translator/editor/organizer, for publishing these letters riddled with spelling mistakes and clunky style and describing obscene and malicious behavior, you should know that I only did it to educate you, so you would know better.
So, really, it’s your fault for reading this in the first place.
Love to get defensive and criticize my readers before we’ve even started! I think it’s gonna go over really well when I try to pull this trick in 2020.
In small-r romance, this week I read:
Midnight (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Beverly Jenkins. I wrote about this romance set in Boston’s free Black community right before the Revolutionary War in last week’s newsletter, and this week I finished it. Faith Kingston is so opinionated and determined, and I really liked her as a heroine. She and the hero have great banter, and it’s always such a pleasure to get to know a historical moment and community through one of these novels. Also, a brag: I got to hear Ms. Bev speak at a virtual event on Friday night, and she was wonderful. I’m really happy that worked out because I had intended to go to an event of hers in Boston in March, and I was sad to miss it. If you ever have the chance to go to an event of hers, I recommend it. Content warnings: emotional abuse, violence, discussions of slavery, sex.
Boyfriend Material (m/m, both cis and gay, contemporary) by Alexis Hall. Most of the time when we say “rom-com,” we mean “a light contemporary romance that will have some charming, quirky characters” and there is no guarantee of laughing out loud. Not so here. This book is really fucking funny. Also, I’m never going to recover from this burn:
“Book that literally everyone else has read but you haven’t.”
“All of them.”
He drew back. “You’re not getting kissed for that. It’s a total cop-out.”
“No seriously. All of them, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, anything Dickens ever wrote, All Quiet on the Western Front, that one about the time-traveller’s wife, Harry Potter…”
“You really do own your illiteracy, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I’m thinking about moving to America and running for public office.”
There are so many other jokes I loved, but I’m not posting any of those because they’re better in context. Content warnings: emotional abuse/neglect, main character has trust issues from a previous partner selling sexual details to tabloids, homophobia, sex.
In things are neither romance nor Romance, I read Wow, No Thank You, another collection of essays by Samantha Irby, hilarious and occasionally heartbreaking. I got it (and her other books, one of which I quoted a lot last week) from the library, but I think I might need to buy this one and possibly all of them. I don’t buy a lot of print books because we are already maxed out on bookshelf space, but some stuff you just wanna own in tangible, physical form. I can absolutely see myself rereading these books, or shoving them into my friends’ hands. Anyway, since I don’t yet have a print book or know all of you in person, and we can’t come close to each other anyway, consider this newsletter my version of shoving a Samantha Irby book into your hands. You’ll love it, I promise.
I also read many good things on the internet this week. Here is a list.
The Perfect Art Heist in Bloomberg. I have no idea why I like stories about heists so much, and particularly art heists. I would say it’s because I like to imagine stealing paintings, but this one isn’t about that.
“The Gay Marriages of a Nineteenth-Century Prison Ship” by Jim Downs in The New Yorker. There is no better advertisement for this article than its title.
Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true. By Nikole Hannah-Jones, part of The 1619 Project in The New York Times. I’m working my way through the essays in The 1619 Project and this one struck me because one, it’s an incredibly powerful piece of writing, and two, Hannah-Jones points out a number of slavery-related euphemisms, like “servants for life” in last week’s newsletter. Hannah-Jones notes that the Founding Fathers didn’t mention slavery or slaves in the Constitution; instead they wrote “property.” And I also highlighted the phrase “forced-labor camps, which we like to call plantations.” Imagine how different the US would feel if people had to say “I had my wedding at a historic forced-labor camp.”
In the Grand Canyon, the US Postal Service still delivers mail by mule by Hannah Ostroff for Smithsonian Insider. This is an old article but it’s a cool piece of Americana and also, a nice thing about mules is that they don’t burst into flames.
Insane after coronavirus? by Patricia Lockwood. Everything else might be terrible, but at least we have this Patricia Lockwood essay:
‘The love of my life is now my enemy,’ I thought to myself, crawling out of the bedroom on hands and knees to take one million mg of Vitamin C, because what the hell else was I supposed to do – apply leeches? What kind of man would fake a cough while his wife was in the next room perishing? Hadn’t he discouraged me from going to the hospital? At the beginning of lockdown, had he not thrown away the empty detergent bottle I set aside for use as an Apocalypse Bidet, telling me I was being a lunatic? Look at him, I thought to myself evilly: fit as a fiddle and playing video games all day – though later, of course, it turned out that he was also delirious and had been playing the same twenty minutes of Skyrim over and over without ever progressing. When he checked later he saw he had saved 130 games, and that all of the characters he had so painstakingly created had ripped abs, leather outfits and huge cat heads. In between these feline exertions, he lay on the couch trying to summon the energy to make a will, so that I would have access to all of our financial information when he died.
GOD I LOVE PATRICIA LOCKWOOD SO MUCH.
I wish you all a good week!
Please accept, readers, the assurance of my profound respect,
Felicia Davin
