COLUMN: Book Nook by Scott McClanahan, #3 (Letters Edition)

Don't just skip over this one. Read it! C'mon people, this is Book Nook.

I tried to come up with a cute way to open up this month’s column like “Let’s get nookin,’” but I failed. So instead I will simply start with this most scintillating of sentences:

I like letters.

Particularly letters from the 17^th-18^th century—the golden period of human correspondence. For instance, if I could only save one period of literature from the trash heap of history, I would pick the 17^th and 18^th century, and in particular--the letter writers.

Perhaps my favorite letter from this period comes from Fanny Burney.

Fanny Burney, Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Penguin Classics)

Burney was a writer celebrated by Dr. Johnson, who wrote novels that heavily influenced a young Jane Austen, before serving as the Queen’s second Keeper of the Robes (a position concerning the queen’s jewelry, and not quite as honorable as the King’s Groom of the Stool—to help with the royal “toilet” and “excretions”).

On March 22, 1812¹, Burney wrote a letter to her sister describing a mastectomy that she underwent in 1810 without anesthesia. For a few months, she had been bothered by a pain in her breast, and after numerous consultations and hesitations, it was decided that the breast should be removed. What follows is one of the most nausea-inducing passages in all English literature. As Burney tells her sister, “Here, my dearest Esther, I must grow brief, for my theme becomes less pleasant.” On the day of the surgery, seven doctors and nurses enter Burney’s bedroom, and she hears the surgeon say in French, “Who will hold this breast for me?” And so the surgery begins.

She writes, “Yet—when the dreadful steel was plunged into my breast—cutting through veins—arteries—flesh—nerves—I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries.” She describes the scalpel being removed and there is the sensation of air rushing in, excruciatingly poking her wound. For a period of time, she thinks the surgery is over, but the surgeon has only grown tired. It begins again: “Oh heaven—I then felt the knife rackling against the breastbone—scraping it!” The whole time, she has the disembodied notion of hearing herself scream.

Burney apologizes to her sister for writing two years after the event, but she has been so traumatized by the experience that she’s been hesitant to re-live it through a letter (as well as her right arm being made temporarily useless from the operation). However, Burney survives the surgery and lives until 1840.

This isn’t the crap that you get in an over-written novel from 1795 or 2025. This is…life.

Madame De Sevigne, Selected Letters (Penguin Classics)

Of course, if there is a Muhammad Ali of 17^th-18^th century letter writers, it’s the French aristocrat, Madame de Sevigne. She was thankfully widowed at 25 and knew everyone at the court of Louis the XIV. Walpole said the best letter writers of this time were women because they wouldn’t worry about risking their reputation by writing about mere “trifles.” And likewise, it is lucky for us that Madame de Sevigne wasn’t born a man, or she would have spent her life writing fashionable plays retelling events from Roman history like Racine or Corneille. Name any mainstream novel today and a hundred years from now its conventions will stink like a corpse.

My favorite Madame de Sevigne letter is one to her daughter from Wed. April 8, 1671. Sevigne has recently been put in charge of her grandchild while her daughter is away in the south of France with her husband. Sevigne reports, “Now for news of your child. I thought she looked pale recently, and I found that the nurse’s breast never seemed too full. I took it into my head that she hadn’t enough milk.”

This was a time in Paris, where it was called the “city without babies,” because most upper-class children were being nursed by women in the country.

In a single paragraph, de Sevigne describes firing the child’s wet nurse and then brags to her daughter about inspecting the various women in the village before selecting a woman who will be perfect for feeding. She believes this is her true talent.

“On Sunday I put the child into the hands of the new nurse. It was a joy to see her take the milk! She had never sucked like that before. Her old nurse hadn’t much milk, but this one has as much as a cow.”

This letter would have been commonplace to them, but it feels like science fiction to us. You can feel the class tensions simmering inside it and see how the women of de Sevigne’s social class will start losing their heads only a century later, and perhaps rightfully so.

Here is another letter by Madame de Sevigne from April 1671. This one is about the king’s cook, Vatel, who is responsible for feeding the Sun King’s hunting party.

“Vatel, the great Vatel… seeing at eight o'clock this morning that the fish had not come, was unable to face the humiliation he saw about to overwhelm him and, in a word, stabbed himself…the fish arrived later when he was dying.”

So this is Madame de Sevigne. Funny and awful, gossipy and tender, nasty and tragic, snobby and sensitive.

But above all, ALIVE.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Selected Letters (Everyman’s Library)

Yet it would be a mistake to think these letters contain only the personal and the domestic. Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s Turkish Embassy Letters contain subject matter as sweeping as any epic novel. In 1717, Montagu followed her husband to Constantinople, where he was an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. At the time, smallpox was killing 400,000 people a year throughout Europe. Montagu had previously survived a bout with smallpox in 1715 (a disease that killed Madame de Sevigne, as well as Montagu’s own brother), and Montagu’s once beautiful face was scarred for life. If you feel like gagging just google “smallpox scars.”

However, once abroad, Montagu begins observing something strange. As she writes, “The small-pox, so fatal, and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless.” Montagu realizes that the Turkish women are inoculating their children by infecting them with a mild case of pox. She states, “They make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together) the old woman comes… and asks what vein you please to have opened.” It’s not long before Montagu decides to have her own son inoculated against smallpox.

And it’s here where Montagu proves her boldest, facing the pushback from her husband and the medical establishment of the time, which sees her as reckless (as well as the high death rates that often accompanied inoculation). She eventually persuades the embassy surgeon to carry out her inoculation wishes on her son. Little Edward is the first known person inoculated from smallpox in England. This is followed by the inoculation of her daughter in 1721. Of course, it would be another 80 years before Edward Jenner would perfect smallpox vaccination by inoculating patients with the far less deadly cowpox.

But why do I find these letters so compelling?

Recently I read the Everyman’s Library Edition of Horace Walpole’s Selected Letters, and I started thinking about this question (as well as discovering I wouldn’t include Walpole in my pantheon of letter writers). I felt bored by Walpole rattling on about the Seven Years War and the Stamp Act. Also, the editor of Walpole’s volume decided to break up his correspondence by subject matter (Walpole and Politics, etc.) so the life never builds. As a member of Parliament, he comments endlessly on political matters, and, beyond that, Walpole is desperately lacking in what the other three possess. “Trifles.” Anecdotes about spouses, children, worries.

However, what all these writers share is this performance for an audience of one. The style is economical and brief, or as Walpole called it, letters that were “wrote flying.” There is the restraint of having 30 minutes to write down an important event, and only two sheets of paper to do it, unlike today, where the cursor blinks on an endless e-mail doc. This creates an almost strange animal energy.

So if you put together enough of these tiny moments of “trifles” into a collection of letters, you suddenly feel the structure of a life: youth and hope, the compromises we all make to achieve adulthood, sickness, and finally the coming of death.

I think it’s impossible to read Burney, de Sevigne, and Montagu without falling in love with them. To be bored by them, to laugh at their eccentricities and prejudices, or to ultimately mourn them when they die. To care about them as we do our friends. To have them time travel to us (still alive) in this most vulnerable and indestructible form of all.

The letter.

1. I know I am cheating here with the date, but Burney is essentially an 18^th-century person