Marcel's Letters

by Carolyn Porter

  “There is an issue with letterspacing. The o isn’t balanced on the left and right,” John observed.

  “The vertical strokes on the F and L look too thick,” Akira added.

  The judges offered additional opinions about proportion, shape, balance. As the designer’s ten minutes drew to a close, Roger handed the prints back to the designer. “It’s a start,” he said. With that remark, he dismissed both the design and the designer.

  The judges pointed out problems with weight, balance, and scale on the second designer’s font. Spectators chimed in with observations and opinions. The judges did not seem to know what to make of the third design; the experimental, geometric letterforms left them unimpressed.

  As the fourth designer handed the judges her specimen sheet, she explained her uppercase serif font had been inspired by ninety-six-year-old letterforms inscribed on a building in Seattle.

  “The spine of the S is too heavy,” John said immediately and unequivocally after initial small talk concluded. In addition to thinning the spine, he suggested she shift the spine upward. “And the tail on the Q obviously needs more work,” he added. “The proportions don’t all conform. The M and N appear too wide …”

  Roger pointed out problems with the G and H before asking whether she had researched other high-waistline typefaces from the era.

  Akira made observations about the top-heaviness of the A and K. The judges pointed out problematic serifs, issues with the lobes on the B and the crossbar on the E, problems with the shape of the U and Z. They discussed the style of the W before asking the designer final questions about her process.

  As each minute ticked by, my heart rate increased, my mouth got drier. When Roger called my name, I quietly said, “that’s me,” and began working my way through the crowd.

  “My name is Carolyn and I have an affection for script fonts.” The rasp of my voice was unsurprising since my tongue felt too dry to move. “This is my first TypeCon and my first font.” I reached forward and handed the judges pages set with the lyrics of “La Marseillaise.” The anthem’s title was large at the top. Columns of lyrics sat below the title: French on the left, English on the right.

  “The font is based on a letter written in French.” That was the extent of what I intended to say about Marcel; this was not the time or place to talk about his letters. For these ten minutes, I wanted to absorb their expert feedback. I handed over additional pages with the Glyph Map, which was a multi-page grid showing the five hundred individual glyphs that made up the font. I hoped I was giving them an appropriate sample; I had only learned about Type Crit a week earlier and had to guess at what they might want to see.

  The crowd jostled to look over the judges’ shoulders. As I waited for the critique to begin, it felt impossible to breathe. Yet, I also sensed something inexplicably comforting.

  “This is lovely,” Akira said as a hint of a smile crossed his face.

  “Thank you,” I said quietly.

  “Have you studied calligraphy?”

  “Not since I was a teenager.” I should have disclosed I had a Letterform class in college, but in my nervousness, I had tried to answer his question literally. “I tried to pay close attention to the thicks and thins of the original handwriting.”

  “This was an ambitious undertaking,” Roger said as he leafed through the pages.

  “I didn’t know what I was getting into,” I confessed. Now that preliminary niceties were over, I braced myself for their excoriating truth.

  “I’m seeing a nice array of alternate swashes,” John said. “And you’ve done a good job of capturing the feathering you’d see when ink bleeds into paper.” John talked about techniques other designers used to capture an ink-on-paper look with a digital font.

  “How long have you been working on this?” Akira asked.

  “A long time,” I sheepishly replied. I did not want to disclose it had been ten years. The judges waited for an answer, so I complied. “Years. Evenings and weekends.”

  “And your intent is to license this?” John asked.

  I nodded. John passed his copy to the spectator behind him, and gestured for it to be passed around the room. He had not done that with any of the previous specimen sheets.

  “It’s beautiful,” Roger said.

  I was sure the bloodletting was now going to begin in earnest.

  “You might want to look at the dieresis on the ä, it’s a bit too close to the top of the letter,” Akira commented. He asked about the placement of other accents. I explained I tried to follow placement on the original letters; that was true for the acute and the circumflex, anyway. For other diacritics, I researched and made a best guess.

  John noted the crossbar on the T seemed too mechanical. He suggested I study how it might slope up or down a bit more. And Akira suggested I refine the curve of the apostrophe. “You might make it less hook-like,” he suggested.

  One judge asked if I worked much with steel-nibbed pens. Not since the Schaeffer pens I received for my thirteenth birthday, I almost confessed. As he talked about the aesthetic qualities of steel-pen writing, I scolded myself for not determining specifically what kind of pen Marcel had written with. It seemed like such an elementary thing to have overlooked.

  I prepared for comments pointing out fundamental flaws in proportion or scale, weight or shape. I anticipated they might suggest a typography class, or propose a different avocation. But Roger concluded the session with the observation that their suggestions were minor tweaks. “This is close to being ready, congrats.”

  I blinked a couple of times, unsure I heard correctly. Was I being dismissed? I gathered my sample pages, slid them into my bag, and thanked the judges for the review. Without the benefit of having witnessed previous Type Crits, I did not understand “beautiful,” “nice,” and “congrats” were words rarely tossed around.

  Later that afternoon, after everyone returned to the main conference ballroom, a woman stopped to speak to me. “You have got to be thrilled,” she whispered. “I’ve been going to Type Crit for years and I can’t recall a single time when all three judges liked a font as much as they liked yours.” I could not help but smile. “You could feel the energy in the entire room change as soon as you handed them the pages,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like that happen before.”

  “Thank you,” I stammered.

  What I did not tell her was that I had felt the energy in the room change, too.

  It felt as though Marcel had been right there with me.

  On Monday evening, back at home, while Aaron cooked dinner, I cleared off the front of the refrigerator before opening the clear plastic box I had purchased at the museum.

  “What’s that?”

  “French vocabulary words,” I said as I snapped apart the small magnetic tiles. Eau. Water. Temps. Time. Jardin. Garden. Grenouille. Frog. In addition to a couple hundred nouns—café, amour, derrière, lumière—magnets existed for pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions.

  I froze as soon as I saw a magnet imprinted with the word “font.” What an odd word to be in the collection. I flipped through the miniature dictionary that came with the set. I let out a long sigh, then walked out of the kitchen.

  “Dinner will be ready in a couple minutes,” Aaron called as I headed to my office.

  I typed “font” into the translation website I had used for the myriad letters and emails I had sent to Marcel’s family. I let out another long sigh, then tried a different translation service, hoping to see a different answer.

  “Font is ‘police’ in French,” I said after shuffling back to the kitchen.

  I had assumed no one in the family expressed interest in the font because they did not know much about typography. “They might not have any idea what I’m talking about,” I explained to Aaron. Considering Marcel’s imprisonment, I could not imagine a worse word—especially since I talked about my police project with such enthusiasm.

  “What’s French for ‘fuck’?” I muttered
.

  I sent emails to Natacha and Tiffanie apologizing for any confusion. I hoped we might laugh about it someday, though at the moment, I just felt like throwing up.

  In the week that followed, legal issues raised at TypeCon gnawed at me, so I reached out to a lawyer I occasionally hired for client work and outlined my questions:

  Did I need the family’s permission to complete and sell the font?

  Did I need their approval to name the font after Marcel?

  Could I share the letters’ contents?

  The lawyer said he needed time to research French copyright and privacy law. Weeks later, when he called to report there were no issues with the font, I wanted to do cartwheels. He said I did not need anyone’s permission to finish, license, or secure copyright on the files, and confirmed I could name the font whatever I wanted as long there was no other font using that name.

  “The original letters? Those are a different story,” he cautioned. And with that, my cartwheel seemed to collapse mid-whirl. Since the letters were, in whole or in part, written to Denise and Eliane, according to French privacy law, it was their right to keep the contents private during their lifetime. He warned I could not publicly show images of, or disclose the contents, without their explicit written permission.

  It did not matter I bought the letters, he said. Physical custody did not count.

  “Do I need permission from the son Marcel?”

  “Since he wasn’t alive when the letters were written, the letters weren’t to him, so the same rights don’t extend to him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  White Bear Lake, Minnesota

  Late August 2012

  Apologies filled Tom’s email. His busy summer schedule meant he would be unable to translate the letters after all. Fury surged. A precious month of time completely lost!

  After anger subsided, a bewildering loss remained. It seemed impossible to believe I would find someone else who would translate Marcel’s words with the same thoughtful care. I sent emails to the translators I contacted the previous July, followed by frantic emails to Kathy, Dixie, and any friend or graphic design colleague who might have a connection to anyone who spoke French. I hoped to find someone trustworthy and affordable. I was willing to work with anyone available.

  Within a day, a neighbor’s mother—a retired high school French teacher—offered to help. Hope soared when she promised to look at one letter that evening. But the next day she apologized and confessed she had trouble deciphering Marcel’s handwriting. She puzzled together words and phrases, but did not feel confident she could translate an entire letter. I thanked her for the attempt, and tried to mask my disappointment.

  Before long, Dixie sent an email noting a friend’s mother spoke French. The elderly woman wanted to help, so I emailed a scan of one letter and crossed my fingers. But the next day, when I was told she, too, had trouble reading Marcel’s writing, hope plummeted. After recusing herself from the project, the elderly woman suggested I call a friend of hers who had been born and raised in Paris, and for decades had taught high school French in St. Paul. Without disclosing that one high school French teacher had already passed, I thanked her for the referral and promised to call her friend, Louise.

  “Letters like that don’t exist. Do you understand?” The wonder in Louise’s voice made my heart swell. She absorbed the situation with exhilarating speed, and barraged me with questions: “Where did you get the letters?” “Why did you buy them?” “Do you speak any French?”

  Two aspects of the story confounded Louise: the font—which did not surprise me—and STO. Louise confessed she had never before heard that ordinary French civilians had been forced to work in Germany.

  “What happened to your head?” Louise blurted as she processed the various pieces and parts. She burst into laughter, assuring me her question had not come out as intended. I chuckled along. I understood where her question came from. At times during the previous year, I had wondered the same thing.

  After a moment of silence—the only silence during our spirited hour-long conversation—Louise’s voice fell flat. “So many men, so many French men, disappeared, you know. One day they were gone and they were never heard from again.” She repeated her amazement that these letters existed, and asked me again: “Do you understand?”

  Louise wanted to begin immediately. We discussed a fee, and I promised to email her a scan as soon as our call ended. Timing was my biggest concern. It had taken Tom weeks to translate each letter, so it seemed doubtful an eighty-six-year-old woman would be able to translate twelve letters in the six weeks before the open house.

  The letter I emailed to Louise had the earliest date of them all: January 17, 1943. It had been written less than a week after Marcel arrived in Berlin.

  Some words appeared as thick puddles of navy ink; others were hair-thin scratches. It was as if Marcel’s pen intermittently clogged, and I imagined him violently shaking it to make it work. Lines and funny, fish-shaped pencil loops ran along the bottom of the first page and continued on the top of the second. On the last page, Marcel abandoned the pen and finished in pencil, the dust of the sixty-nine-year-old graphite no more than a whisper across the page. I presumed the last page included a section to his girls, since Marcel’s handwriting suddenly became large and tidy, just like the very first letter. The thought of it made me smile.

  I did not expect to hear from Louise for days, but I quickly learned not to underestimate the amazing woman who had just entered my life. Within hours, Louise emailed the translated text, along with a note begging me to email the next letter as soon as I possibly could.

  Letter Six

  Marienfelde, Germany

  January 17, 1943

  My little wolf,

  As I wrote to you, I spent a weird kind of Feast Day. Just think, Saturday, around 8 o’clock, I saw the friends of Auntie. And it happened in a strange way, we had barely found each other when two barracks were completely roasted, including my own; so that’s why now I don’t have a darn thing, I mean absolutely nothing, not even a handkerchief to blow my nose with. So the first package you can send me is the suitcase with my things. Can you imagine, all my food gobbled up all at once. I’m going to make you a little list of what I need. Some stationery, some ink, envelopes, some soap, some shaving soap, a razor, a shaving brush, also two bath towels, two dish towels, two washcloths, one undershorts, socks, six handkerchiefs, two undershirts, some basic medicine, sewing kit, a kit for clothes and shoes, and a little bit of food. Outside of that, don’t worry, my health is good.

  Saturday afternoon, I went to Berlin for grocery shopping; the city isn’t bad, but it’s a big change from Paris. There’s music in the streets, and food, and everything in the shops, lemons, oranges, candy, chocolate; the only thing is you have to have coupons to have all that. Fortunately I have good buddies; while I’m waiting for new clothes, we’re managing together. Well, that’s past. Let’s think of you all. Are you thinking of killing the pig soon, and how is it going in Berchères? I really would like to hear from you. I’m beginning to worry.

  Yesterday, we got a down payment of 21 marks. We have to get used to the money. Especially don’t forget to send me some tobacco, because I got my tobacco yesterday but it went with the rest. Put also a place setting and a plate. When you get a letter, don’t worry if it doesn’t have an ending, because sometimes it’s the Post Office that decides, since it closes at 7. Until tomorrow for the news. In the meantime, I send you lots of kisses. Your big guy, Marcel

  Today, January 18, we are at the dining hall. Don’t worry, I’m going to send you one or two cards because some letters might not get through. Last night, at the same time, it started again; it promises to be jolly. I hope to go to the Post Office in a little while. I’ll send you a card for your Feast Day, and also one for Lily. For me, I’ll remember St. Marcel Day of 1943; let’s hope my birthday will be better. I’m ending my letter by sending you all kinds of kisses. Your big guy who thinks of you. M
arcel

  Mes chères petites,

  Daddy is in good health. I had put some chocolate aside for you, but the fire ate everything. I hope to get more. And is my little Lily a good girl? I think that Suzanne and Denise are good girls too and that they think of their Daddy who thinks so much about his dear little girls. Be good girls with Mommy and grandma and kiss them for me. Your Daddy who kisses the three of you.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  White Bear Lake, Minnesota

  Late August 2012

  I picked up the phone and heard the sound of Louise’s laughter. “Only one pair of underwear?” I laughed along, allowing chuckles to mask the intoxication of reading more of Marcel’s words. It felt as if a friend I never expected to hear from again was telling me about his day. The image in my mind was so clear I did not need to close my eyes to picture Marcel strolling through Berlin, gazing into shop windows. In my image, though, Marcel walked on the sidewalk with his head held high. In reality, Marcel might have been forced to walk in the street’s gutter. If he had to follow the same rules as French prisoners of war, he would not have been allowed to “sully the sidewalk.”

  The letters’ lines and fish-shaped loops made sense once I had Louise’s translation. The lines underscored the items he requested, though it was a mystery whether he, a censor, or someone else had made the pencil marks. French workers had been ordered to bring specific items with them: a complete set of work clothes, an overcoat, underwear, good footwear, sheets. They had been forewarned that opportunities to acquire clothes or shoes in Germany would be limited, so perhaps Marcel figured it would be easier to request replacements from home than to find the items in Berlin.

  I asked Louise whether she had trouble reading Marcel’s writing. “None,” she assured me. She had been raised reading that style of handwriting.