HomeKeywordsLetter

Letter


Although the word "letter" may seem ambiguous in its meaning and therefore difficult to study, in the context of That Summer in Paris, the vast majority of its uses seem to apply to the form of communication rather than characters in the alphabet, as shown in this word tree made in Many Eyes:



  4730e79e-3962-11e2-bf3f-000255111976.pngblog_this_caption.jpg


 

Because of this, within the context of the book it seems safe to assume any patterns picked up through the use of the word "letter" will refer to the form of communication and not the character.

One thing that is instantly clear from this word tree is the prominence of the words "Ernest" and "Paris", indicating that much of Callaghan's correspondence with regards to Hemingway and Paris is conducted by sending letters, at least until he travels to Paris himself. The historical implication of this is that, although telephone lines were established around much of America at the time, international calls were presumably still problematic, forcing expatriots such as Hemingway to communicate with America by writing letters.

This chart, made in Google Ngrams, helps to back this up, showing a clear decline in usage of the phrases "wrote a letter" and "received a letter", and an increase for "telephone call":
 

letter-ngrams-e1354111874202.png


This suggests that in 1929 (when the book is set), although the use of telephones is on the rise, sending letters remains the more widespread form of communication, and interestingly enough in 1929 the results imply that sending letters is undergoing something of a resurgence.

chart-1-e1354113414704.png

 

This graph also shows the distribution of the words "letter" and "letters" throughout the book. As we can see, the bulk of it is placed at the beginning up until Callaghan travels to Paris, upon which the use of the word effectively stops, other than a brief section where Callaghan mentions a letter he could have sent Fitzgerald (but doesn't actually send) and one he does send to explain this:

"As soon as I got up next day I wrote a letter to Scott. In the letter I asked him to forgive us for walking in on him unannounced—we shouldn’t have done it. It would have been much more sensible to have written him and informed him where we were in Paris, but Max Perkins had assured me that such a letter was unnecessary." (Callaghan, 1963)

Other than this minor blip, there is almost no mention of letters until the final section (after Callaghan leaves Paris) where the use of the word soars. In these final sections, the story about the boxing match is published and Callaghan, Hemingway and Fitzgerald proceed to send multiple letters to one another in order to set the story straight.

 

Works Cited:


References:

Callaghan, Morley. 1963. That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/bio/callaghan-thatsum.html.