Dan's Papers - June 26, 2009

Two of my favorite books are The World's Great Letters and 84, Charing Cross Road. The World's Great Letters, selected and edited by M. Lincoln Schuster, is over 500 pages long and was published in 1940. It includes letters by and to famous painters, poets, philosophers, statesmen, and authors. Helen Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road, on the other hand, is a short, scintillating compilation of letters between Hanff, a saucy New York City writer, and Frank Doel, a seriously reserved London bookseller. Their 20-year correspondence began in 1949 when Hanff went in search of obscure classics and English literature titles she could not find in New York. Seeing an advertisement from Marks & Co., an antiquarian bookstore in London, Hanff sent them a detailed list of book requests. She was promptly received two of the listed books, chosen for her by Doel. Over the years, the letters between Hanff and Doel foster an epistolary friendship built upon their shared love of good books - good in content, paper quality, and binding. Their letters include discussions of the sermons of John Donne and the Imaginary Conversations of Walter Savage Landor, as well as Hanff's horrified response to receiving an abridged version of Pepys's Diary. Towards the end of their correspondence, the letters have homely additions: a Yorkshire pudding recipe; notes about family and friends. This little book, filled with imaginative sympathy and literary insight, is enchanting.

Historical letters are a wonderful entry into a different time and place and, in an age of ephemeral emails, remind us of what is being lost as letter writing dwindles into insignificance. But all is not yet lost. The epistolary novel is alive and well.

From 1793 to 1795, Jane Austen tried her hand at writing an epistolary novella. The result was Lady Susan, a study of an adult woman of great intelligence and force of character; it is a neatly plotted, ambitious, and sophisticated early work, unlike any of Austen's other books. Although abandoned by Austen, Lady Susan is the source of the forthcoming novel Lady Vernon and Her Daughter by Jane Rubino and Caitlen Rubino-Bradway (slated for publication in October, 2009). Prior to Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson, an inveterate letter writer, authored three epistolary novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740); Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748); and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753). Richardson adopted the epistolary form because he believed this device gave him the freedom to speak directly to the reader, while allowing for the slow development of characters and their relationships.

A recent epistolary novel has a whimsical title: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It was co-authored by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, an aunt and niece. Though this is a work of fiction, it resonates with 84, Charing Cross Road in tone and feel, and both have a post-World War II setting. The story of Guernsey revolves around the German Occupation of the British Channel Island during the war and is told through an exchange of letters between the islanders and Juliet Ashton, a writer living in London. The correspondence begins in 1946 when a member of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society writes to Juliet because he has acquired a book by Charles Lamb with her name inscribed on its flyleaf. Through the lively letters that ensue, we learn that Guernsey is filled with eccentrics whose reading is wildly eclectic. There is, for example, a valet who reads only one book over and over again - The Letters of Seneca: Translated from Latin in One Volume, with Appendix; a farmer who thinks the world of Wordsworth and chides The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935 for omitting the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen; and a woman who, when she's not reading one of the Brontë sisters, sells her vegetables and homemade "elixirs" at the farmers market. The Society originated as a ruse, a defense against the Germans who were going to arrest some islanders for breaking curfew. It then became a forum where the power of books nourished the islanders through some of their darkest hours. But this is not a dark book. It is a marvelous paean to the power of the written word. Reading it you feel there should be a Literary Society whose motto is "good books, good friends, good letters."

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrrows, 279 pages, Dial Press Trade Paperback, 2009, $14. 84, Charing Cross Road by Helen Hanff, 112 pages, Penguin, 1990, $13.