Urchin Belles Lettres

By Geo Ong

Belles lettres. You may have heard that term once or twice in your life. Or things like Jimbo Jones is a man of letters. No, that doesn’t mean that Jimbo is a postman or a spelling bee champion. It means, above all, that Jimbo’s writing is worth reading, even if it’s just a letter of complaint to the cable company or something.

Belles lettres translated from French means ‘beautiful writing’ and has come to describe such works of literature as essays, speeches, and correspondence. Diarists like Samuel Pepys and Giacomo Casanova, for example. Essayists like John Berger and Virginia Woolf, to name a few more. Orators like Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King, Jr. These writers can all be considered belletrists.

As of late, I’ve found the correspondence sub-category of the belles lettres category most fascinating. Maybe it’s the voyeuristic aspect of reading someone’s personal letters in an attempt to see into a window of their lives that we find intriguing. For me (in addition to being a big creep), I find beauty in the fact that certain people write beautifully and especially for just one other person. Even if they are the platonic letters between an American writer and an English bookseller that make up 84, Charing Cross Road, much of these published correspondences are, in a word, romantic.

Take the letters between two poets in 1926: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetayeva. In one letter to Marina, Boris writes:

…you are my only legitimate heaven and wife, so very, very legitimate that the force taking possession of the word makes me hear it in a madness that never dwelt in it before. [...] I have, insanely, begun to confuse two words: you and I.

Boris wrote that before he and Marina even met. Plus he was married, but that’s beside the point.

Maybe it is because they are poets. They simply cannot help but write beautifully, even in everyday private correspondence. These letters were never meant to be published, but they were so beautifully written that they deserved to be read. So that got me thinking…

Will someone someday want to publish Urchin correspondence? Naturally, because of the times, they’d be our e-mails to one another. Surely, in years to come, the general public will want to get a glimpse into our humble beginnings. From the inner workings of the blog (‘For the urchins fears, are you guys making your fears funny or serious? like should i talking about my fear of stagnancy or my fear of eggplants?’ —Sarah) to keeping each other informed about important global issues (‘Terrible news! Twinings is moving to Poland!‘ —Margaret).

As to whether our correspondence stacks up to the belle-iness of Boris and Marina, perhaps you, dear reader, can be the judge.