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From the The Tenement Series of non-fiction essays by Harry Buschman
© by Harry Buschman
Belles Lettres
My mother's nickname was "Belle." Now, isn't that a fine name for
the third daughter in a five daughter family? Her father was a member of the
D'Oyly Carte opera company which came over here to present Gilbert and Sullivan
to America's unmusical masses. The company had limited success in the states,
which in show business, means it was a disaster. After a short stay, it abandoned
its effort to enlighten their pagan brothers in the new world and sailed back
to England.
My grandfather decided to stay, and with his new bride, raised a family of five
girls, the oldest of whom was less than five years older than the youngest.
My mother's sole inheritance was a love of the English language. I said love,
but it would be more accurate to call it an entanglement. Some people are like
that. She was not a well educated woman. The people of her day were content
with a grammar school diploma, and those who had one were destined for a career
in letters, (usually dictated) regardless of their qualifications.
She fell in love with every word she read regardless of what it meant so long as it was long enough and written in a fine flowing hand. On the sending side, with nothing vital to say, she wrote letters to everyone. I'm sure people to whom she wrote opened them with high expectations and marveled at the penmanship, and then read them with growing annoyance.
She wrote many
letters to the Daily News filled with childish ideas for the betterment of civilization.
Occasionally the Pastor's Sunday homily would inspire her to write to the editor
of a newspaper and suggest to him that sex and violence were not fit subjects
to appear in print. None of her letters were ever acknowledged even though each
of the letters was enclosed with a sprig of mint or lily-of-the-valley.
She loved the sound of words and if 'opulence' was what she meant to say, she
might substitute 'flatulence', if it fit the visual flow of her prose -- the
way a flowing and decorated "f" appeared on paper. My father, on the
other hand, never wrote at all -- and rarely read. His writing was confined
to signing my report card. My mother took up the pen for the two of them and
wrote letters to his friends and relatives which he signed. He signed them blindly,
and so far as I know never read one. By this copout he condemned his own family
and friends to suffer the inarticulate literary onslaught of a woman infatuated
with the sound of words but bereft of thought.
To me they shall always be "Belles lettres" -- that is, literature
that has little or no content, conveys no information, and like Chinese food
is quickly digested and expelled. She wrote letters for the joy of writing to
people, who in turn took little joy in reading them. She dotted her "i's"
with little circles, her g's had double curlicues at the bottom, and her "wyes"
looked like ice patterns traced by an Olympic figure skater. She included a
sprig of sachet in every envelop, and God only knows what people thought of
my father when they got a letter from him.
I often wonder how the word processor and my mother would have gotten along
together. How her fingers would have danced on the keys! She would have spent
long hours with fonts and styles in every conceivable color, underlining and
italics would abound; her belles-lettres would have been as difficult to decipher
as the dead sea scrolls. I'm sure supper would have burned on the stove and
my father would have spent more time than he did at the corner tavern.
©Harry
Buschman 1996
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