YOU ARE INVITED TO MY YALE PRESENTATION ABOUT LETTERS TO MEN OF LETTERS April 29, 2019
 |
Although friends came to Yale from California and Orvieto for my talk, many who wanted to be there could not, so I promised them and myself that I would write a written version that would allow them to feel as if they had been there. Most Yale Fellows presentations are in the evening, but I was asked to participate in a bit of an experiment by giving my talk over lunch. Although it was recorded by a well-intentioned student videographer, that recording contains some funny flaws that make it clear that the person behind the camera should not quit her day job. Despite the clattering of dishware and odd lightning and sound issues, I am very glad to have that video recording. But as a technodunce who prefers to rely on the written word, I’m going to record a written version of it here.
As attendees trickled in to what ended up being a full house, I had playing in the background Fats Wallers’ inimitable catchy version of “I’m gonna sit right down and write myself a letter, and make believe it came from you.” After thanking everyone for coming and especially our Head of College, Mary Lui, for inviting me to speak, I asked, “Do you recognize that song? The singer? Do you know the words?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZZRAU3DeOo
For the rest of this summary, I will try to transcribe the presentation. Here goes.
When I told my husband about my idea to have this Fats Waller tune in the background, he said, “Diane, that’s a great song, but it has nothing to do with your book. You’re not writing to yourself and making believe it came from somebody else. You’re writing to a bunch of mostly dead guys who happen to be writers, and are NOT likely to answer any time soon.”
Anyway—(Show cool publicity banner that has the head of all of my authors displayed in a clever design) As you can see, my book is called Letters to Men of Letters. This talk will have four parts.
1. Part I deals with The Magic of Letters—what makes them special
2. In Part II, I will discuss what the book is about and why I wrote it
3. In Part III, I will be reading a few short excerpts from my letters to Balzac, Sartre, and Andre Aciman, who happens to be alive, and with whom I have exchanged actual, real live letters.
4.In Part IV, I will talk about the last chapter,#20–Postscripts to Myself, My Book is Never Over. Lastly, I will move on to discuss the next step for Letters to Men of Letters, which is now only in the form of an e-book.
I should preface my comments by telling you the story about how a total technodunce like me ever came to write an e-book. I originally had a traditional publisher who gave me a September 2016 deadline, which I met successfully only to learn that the company was going out of business. That left me with an orphan book! Now what?
I’m lucky to have a son, Noah, who knows something about the writing business, having published 16 books of his own. He tried a few other publishers on my behalf, but then he had a different idea. Noah is affiliated with Versopolis, The EU-sponsored Review of Books, Poetry, and Culture. Versopolis asked to publish several of my individual letters in a series on a regular basis. They originally contracted for 8 letters, then 12, then 15 of the 20 letters in the book. Then they had the idea to publish the entire collection as a free bonus book to help expand the readership of Versopolis’ online web journal. So that’s the backstory of how this e-book came about.
And now, back to The Magic of Letters.
One advantage of being an old dinosaur is that I remember the excitement of running to the mailbox and receiving an actual letter.
I want to start by asking you a few questions:
When is the last time you wrote not an email, but a heartfelt letter?
When did you last receive one?
Have you ever wanted to write a letter to an author who has been important to you?
Have you ever reread a letter you wrote a long time ago, and been surprised by what you saw? “That letter is definitely in my handwriting, but who IS that person?“ When I look at my old letters, I don’t always like what I see, but to quote myself, “Letters bear witness to how one can have lived multiple lives within a lifetime. Letters hold a truth of their own. Maybe letters remind us that we are all a puzzle that may never actually reconnect to become whole. Some pieces will have gone missing. Others may have worn away here or there, and no longer seem to fit.”
(Show slide): “We readers are marked forever by great authors—they are never really dead. We carry them around with us. I write them letters.”
(Show slide): Here is the cover of the book. I am very pleased with how it turned out.
Now comes the part of the talk where I try to tell you what the book is about, why I wrote it, and what it feels like to have written it.
This book features letters, both real and imaginary, that I have written to literary figures with whom I have an intense relationship. Although always passionate about these authors, I was shy about approaching them, and to do so would, in several cases, have required time travel, as most of them are no longer with us.
Because I teach French literature, many of the writers are French. Each letter is part memoir, part intellectual coming-of-age, part reaction to having read, loved, studied, and taught the work of these timeless writers. Libraries are full of essays and literary studies about these authors, but a letter is more personal and intimate. These letters reflect my own relationship with the authors—what they have taught me about myself, but also what they can offer the reader.
It’s been tricky to try to explain even to close friends what this book is about. A college friend who is an artist in many media wrote to say she had finally framed and hung examples of her best work on the walls of her home—a type of self-juried retrospective. In congratulating her, it occurred to me that in writing this book of letters in which I am assembling lifetime of thoughts and experiences with literature, I am doing something similar. As I write these letters to the authors who have marked me throughout my intellectual life, I am working at figuring out what they have been saying to me and perhaps to others—a kind of taking stock of where I’ve been, where I am, and where I might be going next.
I think that one reason why I wrote Letters to Men of Letters was as a way of “catching up with myself.” As a child I was often complimented for being “ahead of myself,” which can be a mixed blessing.
Now, with respect to what it feels like to have written this book—
Firstly, writing Letters to Men of Letters has made me aware of the confluence of events, of synchronicity and inter-connectedness: I have found many examples of how my life is “in sync“ with that of my authors.
With respect to what I like about the book:
It shows how much I have learned from my students and writing tutees. Writing Letters to Men of Lettershas reinforced my connectedness with my writing partners. I have two. One, Jacqueline Raoul-Duval, age 89, is an established writer in France, and I have been her translator. The other, Erika Bizzarri at age 90, lives in Italy.
Another feeling about having written Letters to Men of Letters is the pleasure I have felt at introducing my favorite authors to those who did not know about them before. Ralph is an example. We were in the same schools since kindergarten, but had not been in touch for 55 years. We recently reconnected. Although unfamiliar with most of my authors, Ralph read my book, and then he was inspired to go to the library! I was surprised and touched that what I wrote is having an effect on my classmate. His advice to me about how to approach today’s presentation was “Just think of your talk as introducing your author friends to your other friends.”
Another outcome of writing the book has been my pleasure at learning more about these author friends whom I thought I already knew well. But new technology allowed me to feel in the same room with some of them via film clips.
A further benefit for me in writing Letters to Men of Letters is that I got to show who I was and who I am. A longtime family friend who doesn’t usually read books like mine recently said, “Diane—I read your book and it sounds just like you.“ I had been worried about what anyone not familiar with my particular Men of Letters would make of my letters to them. And now thanks to Ralph McClurg and Anne Vallombroso, I am finding out. This has been an unexpected gift.
From critic Roland Barthes, I was reminded of the important role that photos can play in one’s life— how they helped me divest and move from my home of 36 years. And how his use of a photo helped comfort him after the death of his mother.
Now I would like to read a few excerpts to give you an idea of the flavor of these letters.
(Show slide with table of contents page)
A really neat feature of the e-book is that there is no need to read from beginning to end. You can just point and click and skip around among the Letters.
The first excerpt I will read is from my letter to Honoré de Balzac, whom I am comfortable addressing by his last name.
Dear Balzac,
I’m picturing the literally pocket-sized powder-blue paperback of your Père Goriot—the expurgated version, probably intended for impressionable high schoolers like myself, from which anything deemed too sexy had mysteriously vanished. Even without the juicy parts, I was transfixed by it. That was back in Middletown, New York in 1964—a long way from Paris. By the way, when we read Voltaire’s “Candide,” there was no cleaned-up version available. In order to comply with the school board’s idea of decency and not get fired, our enterprising French teacher, Madame Van Eseltine, had to tell us which passages to skip: “Students, whatever you do, do NOT, I repeat, do NOT read the following pages...” You can imagine how well that worked!
I go on to tell Balzac,
My literary love affairs have followed a pattern: There’s that first, blown-away naïve contact with a book and then, years later, I revisit it and begin to feel that I understand better what I’m loving.
When I finally got to Paris in 1966, I saw Rodin’s looming statue of you every day, and walked by the places you wrote about and inhabited. That was during my Junior Year Abroad (a rite of passage that probably would have perplexed you, since young ladies of your class and generation tended to have to fulfill their ambitions closer to home).
Next, I allude to Flaubert’s great letters from his Grand Tour with his buddies, and to the syphilis they returned with.
But back to you, Balzac, who didn’t have to go far to indulge in some non-health promoting habits—not that you had a choice. Writers driven by deadlines and passion do what they have to do to keep going. Me? One drop of caffeine, and I don’t sleep; a few sips of wine, and I’m practically comatose. Some of us are not cut out for 19th-century Paris society, even though we love to imagine it and read your accounts of it.
Thanks to you, dear Balzac, I wrote a prose poem inspired by your novel, Père Goriot. I called it “Upstairs, Downstairs, Now What?” In Père Goriot, as Father Goriot’s fortunes fell, he was forced to move to higher and higher floors of his boarding house. But I wrote my poem while luxuriating in bed on the top floor of my home, which was the very best part of the house. Go figure!
The next excerpt I will read is from my letter to Jean-Paul Sartre.
“Dear Jean-Paul,
There have been many Jean-Pauls in my life, but you’re the only one in whose bedroom I have slept. You’re probably wondering what I am talking about, so I will explain.”
I tell him that during my Junior Year in France I lived in the apartment at 1 Rue Le Goff where young Sartre grew up. I go on to tell him about the many years I spent trying to teach Yalies about the positive aspects of existentialism as we read his play, “No Exit.“ Of course they didn’t always agree about the positive part, but I gave it the old college try. It went something like this—(I’ll give you a few of Madame Charney’s explanations followed by the horrified student reactions.)
Here goes—
In Sartre’s view, there is no God. (Oh, no!—the upset begins!).
But this allows you to be free. (Hmm...but there must be some strings attached).
All that counts is what you do. You alone define yourself by your actions. (Oh, dear! You mean I can’t blame my parents?)
Sartre thinks that the bastard is the freest of all. (Are you kidding? How could that be? My parents give me a lot of freedom. They even let me make my own decision about whether to come to Yale or Harvard!)
In this absurd world where there is no afterlife, you and only you are responsible for the actions that will define you. (But this is making us nervous. That’s not what they taught us in Sunday School!)
To their virgin ears, it was a lot to swallow. But this is what can happe when you come to college.
The last excerpt I’d like to read is from Andre Aciman.
Not only is he one of my two still living Men of Letters, but we have exchanged real life letters since 2012. I used to have to explain who Aciman was and why I fell for him. A Proust scholar and brilliant essayist, he had me from the first line of his essay on “Lavender.” But ever since the film based on his novel, Call Me By Your Name, that won so many major international awards, everyone now seems to know HIS name.
What I wrote him could just as well have gone in the first part of my talk that was on the theme of “the magic of letters.” Or in part that was about “what it feels like to have written this book.” But I’m going to put it here near the end.
Dear Andre,
To write my letters for this book has at times felt uplifting, but often disorienting because, like you and Marcel Proust of whom you are such an adept reader, I have felt transported to various iterations of my younger self. I started to write “older self,” but to write letters like this can make the distinction between young and old quite irrelevant. I may be nearing 72, but in a flash, I can be that 16-year-old Verlaine-reciting future lover of Camus walking the streets of exotic Montreal. You’ve told me that even though you were exiled from Egypt and have lived in many other places, you now have the comfort of belonging to New York. Do I belong to New Haven where I’ve lived since 1976, but that has always felt like a transitory place? Do I belong to France that has been my intellectual home for as long as I can remember? Or do I belong to my adopted country of Italy, which has felt like a rebirth? The best I can answer is “all of the above.”
What’s quite wonderful is that unlike most of my Men of Letters, Aciman writes me back. If you want to see what he says, read the book! BTW, some people feel guilty about reading other people’s mail. I invite everyone to read mine!
And now for the “What next?” part of this talk. I want to tell you a bit about my Chapter #20—"Postscripts to Myself: My Book is Never Over.” I especially like it because it gives me permission to keep thinking and writing. It may sound a bit morbid, but I once wrote,
It’s fall, and death is in the air. But then again, it always was. From Day One. Life is what we do to keep ourselves from noticing.
Perhaps what I should have said is “To write is what we do to keep ourselves from noticing”?
Even after 40 years, New Haven does not quite feel like home. But as a lover of words, I like the sound of residing quite permanently in a new haven. I was raised in a place called Middletown. Is that why I’m so attracted to the idea of the liminal zone? After all, what is a letter, if not the attempt to bridge a gap between a certain “here” and elsewhere—a way of encapsulating and holding in one’s hand something that has been in both places? A way of marking and capturing lost time? Maybe the letter has always been my madeleine.
What I’ve given you is just a taste of my 20 Letters to Men of Letters. And now for the “What next?” This is an ebook and it’s the only way you can read it now. However, my goal is to have a print version that I can hold in my hand. This brings me to my last story.
Since my book is never over (which is the title of my last chapter), I want to tell you about a new friend, Mirella Daniell, who is an artist and fellow Francophile. We met in Rome through a mutual friend, Shirley, who was dear to both of us.
This led to the idea to add Mirella‘s portraits to the print copy of the book, and she loved that prospect. I think she’s very talented. Let me show you some examples of her work (Show Proust and Sartre)
Here’s a photo that shows why Mirella and I feel like soulmates. Just take a look. (Slide of me and Mirella dressed in nearly identical colors and outfits) What are the chances that Mirella and I would end up wearing nearly identically colored outfits to her exhibit at the French Bookstore in Rome? As this photo demonstrates, the answer is 100%.
And by the way, there’s another passion we share:
(Show slide of her portrait of Camus)
Mirella’s portrait of Albert Camus will have pride of place in Letters
to Men of Letters and in our home.
I would like to end my presentation by thanking our Head of College, Mary Liu, for inviting me back to my Yale college home to talk to you about Letters to Men of Letters, and by thanking all of you for coming to hear me today.
Diane Joy Charney
New Haven, CT
dianejoycharney@gmail.com
Comments
Post a Comment