To the Letter. Simon Garfield

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      John Cusack and A&H puppets in Being John Malkovich.

      He was born in Arezzo in 1304, but his life as a perpetual traveller accounts for the many letters (almost 500 survive) to so many friends and acquaintances as he moved from near Florence to Pisa to Montpellier to Bologna before settling for an extended stay at Vaucluse in Provence and then Milan. A scholar and poet, Petrarch seemed uncertain as to the lasting value of his best work in his prodigious output, but the modern reader will find much of worth in his essays, biographies and religious treaties, as well as his most famous lyrical poems enflamed by his muse Laura, assured by him of immortality after she died of plague in 1348.

      But certainly we should also remember him for something else: Petrarch’s letters are intriguing and significant documents. Inspired by Cicero, Epicurus and Seneca, he wrote almost every day in personal terms, and his two large collections (one, Epistolae familiares, is a general gathering from his travels, the other, Epistolae Seniles, more specifically concerned with old age) lay good claim to be the first modern letters by the first modern mind at the dawn of our modern European civilisation.

      As if to emphasise the richness of the letters to history, he writes an unfinished biography of his life not in poetry or standard chronological form, but in the shape of a letter ‘To Posterity’. We may regard his opening modesty as a little false (‘Greeting. It is possible that some word of me may have come to you . . .’) and he is downright wrong when he claims such an ‘insignificant and obscure’ name such as his ‘will scarcely penetrate far in either time or space’. History has been kind to him, and to us.

      At the beginning of his first collection he writes to his lifelong friend Ludovico (whom he nicknames Socrates) of how his letters almost didn’t make it even to their first collected publication (in the 1360s), most being eaten by mice or ‘the insatiable bookworm’, and some deliberately destroyed by him on the fire. He writes of being in one of those gloomy moods where he doubted the worth of all his work, but a dreamlike vision of Ludovico (who had previously expressed an affection for his letters) changed his mind. So now he looked back on his work with some satisfaction, and an ability to offer some observations on letter-writing he hadn’t expressed before.

      The first care indeed in writing is to consider to whom the letter is to be sent; then we may judge what to say and how to say it. We address a strong man in one way and a weak one in another. The inexperienced youth and the old man who has fulfilled the duties of life, he who is puffed up with prosperity and he who is stricken with adversity, the scholar distinguished in literature and the man incapable of grasping anything beyond commonplace – each must be treated according to his character or position.

      Writing to Boccaccio in 1365, shortly after his collected letters were evidently being freely copied by numerous scribes, he writes of one overriding wish for his work – that it be legible. Not for him ‘ill-defined though sumptuous penmanship’, nor writing which ‘delights us at a distance but . . . strains and tires the eyes when we look at it intently’. It all comes down to etymology, he writes, for after all ‘the word letter comes from legere, to read’.

      The modern reader may have further hopes: that his letters are not only readable but still worth reading. Many are. They are wide-ranging in content, contradictory, sure of themselves, elitist and erudite, which generally guarantees a good read in any language. He wrote to many friends and also some imaginary ones, such as Cicero and Homer. Subject matter ranges from politics, biography, classical poetry and contemporary literature, but one of the essential things that sets them apart is his writing about travel. Petrarch lays a strong claim to being the world’s first tourist.