Book Review: New In Print

Yours Ever: People and Their Letters

by Thomas Mallon
Pantheon, 352 pp., $26.95

Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves

edited by Jason Bitner
St. Martin's Griffin, 224 pp., $22.99

On topics of interest alone – first diaries in A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries, now letters in Yours Ever: People and Their Letters – one might accuse the essayist and novelist Thomas Mallon of voyeurism, or at least of a fetish for being the uninvited guest. His is the outsider's voice elbowing into the private thoughts and intimate correspondence of others, but with commentary so insightful and language so finely wrought that I suspect any one of the letter writers within would be delighted to make his acquaintance by post.

After a brief introduction contextualizing the book within our current "post-private age," Mallon dives into a scopious accounting of letters from history's knowns (gimmes such as Rilke, the Charing Cross Road correspondents, and Heloise and Abelard); lesser-knowns like the five lavishly talented Mitford sisters, who read like something out of a Wes Anderson movie (with a significant detour into Leni Riefenstahl territory); and the never-knowns – correspondents from pioneer and Reconstruction days.

Despite the easy-to-eulogize subject matter, Mallon never strays into the sentimental. In fact, he can be quite bracing; of F. Scott Fitzgerald's cautioning letters to his daughter, he says they "read less like advice from a father to a daughter than loud slaps to the face of a drunk one is walking to keep awake." Mallon makes perfectly clear his own favorites, mounting a defense of the dyspeptic British poet Philip Larkin, for one, while energetically dispatching spoilsports Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Agee, and Ayn Rand (of whom he writes her "self-delight ... borders on the autoerotic"). He clearly prefers those who like to have a laugh, and he brings a sense of play to his own writing, as when he describes the novelist George Sand as a "pants-wearing sorceress who once devoured Chopin like a truffle and whose long amatory life was a kind of intermissionless opera both grand and bouffe."

Mallon is a careful reader, not just of letters' content, but their form, noting the syntactical nuance – the "stark paragraphing" – of lines written by the British poet and soldier Wilfred Owen to his mother in 1916:

"I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last four days.

I have suffered seventh hell.

I have not been at the front.

I have been in front of it."

In six absorbing pages, Mallon looses Owen's brief life (he would die two weeks before the 1918 Armistice) from artifact to immediate narrative, vividly limning his life alongside others as disparate as statesmen and schoolteachers, the circumspect W.H. Auden and Beats bad boy William S. Burroughs. This is a scenic-byways kind of book: pit-stopping in unexpected places, challenging assumptions on more well-trod ground, and, above all, reveling in the precision and musicality of language. It is, quite simply, the kind of book that makes you want to be a better reader.

The mixtape – another dead art form – was never about self-betterment. The gifting of a labor-intensive audio cassette mix was meant to convey two crucial details: 1) I am smart/edgy/mysterious/playfully ironic/culturally expansive/one Nine Inch Nails song away from slitting my wrists (circle one ... or, hell, all of them), and 2) I am into you.

The website Cassette From My Ex smartly recognized that all mixes wear their hearts on their sleeves, their intentions in the painstakingly selected playlists and packaging. The new anthology Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves culls some of the site's best stories behind the tapes to create a loving, sometimes shuddering monument to that particular age (teens and early 20s) when life's experiences were all new; emotions, hair-trigger and ragged, ruled the day; and there was enough disposable time to devote obsessive hours to picking over songs to pitch woo to.

Oh, but how quickly the woo fell to woe. The inevitable heartbreaks are detailed here by contributors such as Starlee Kine (This American Life), Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time), the Magnetic Fields' Claudia Gonson, and Austin radical folk rocker Gretchen Phillips. Even more fascinating, though, are the reproduced labels and liner notes: the bubble script, the cover collage art, the hard-won inside jokes and abstruse titles meant only for Me and You. The age of the cassette is still so near – as is the memory of one's own adventures in heart-sleeve mixmaking – that too much of Cassettes From My Ex in one sitting gives one a grimy, peeping feeling. But then one remembers Mallon's post-private age: What's Mine and Yours is the World Wide's now.