Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Marcel’s Letters
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://carolyn-porter.com/
CITY: White Bear Lake
STATE: MN
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.porterfolioinc.com/ * http://carolyn-porter.com/about/about-carolyn/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; husband’s name Aaron.
EDUCATION:University of Wisconsin, Stout, B.F.A., 1991; also studied at Middlesex University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author; graphic designer.
MEMBER:New York Type Director’s Club, AIGA-Minnesota, AWP, Minnesota TypeTuesday, Twin Cities Creatives Group.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Carolyn Porter is a graphic designer and the author of Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate. “In 2014, Carolyn released her first typeface, P22 Marcel Script,” stated the contributor of a biographical blurb to the Carolyn Porter Website, “which is based on the handwritten letters of Marcel Heuzé.” The book is partly the story of Porter’s work on the font itself, and partly the story of Heuzé, who wrote the letters when separated from his family during World War II. “Porter came across Heuze’s legacy while searching for font design inspiration in the small town of Stillwater,” in Minnesota, explained the author of an article in Print. This “captivating memoir,” said Booklist reviewer Bridget Thoreson, “describes her journey to find answers, noting how her fascination with Marcel proved infectious as she faces obstacle after obstacle.”
In Marcel’s Letters Porter tells the story of how her work on the font, based on the calligraphy in the letters she discovered in a second-hand store in Minnesota, led her into a search for the man who wrote them to his loving family. “She learned,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “that Marcel had been one of thousands of French citizens obliged to participate in a Vichy government forced-labor program that sent them to work in German factories.” “Marcel was part of the Service du travail obligatoire (compulsory work service), or STO, an often forgotten group in history,” stated Maggie Soucheray Sonnek in White Bear Lake Magazine. “Germans needed laborers to replace men who had been transferred to the fronts to fight, so they demanded workers from the countries they occupied.” “Simultaneously, she continues to work on what would become the acclaimed P22 Marcel font,” declared Julie Summers in Reviewer’s Bookwatch, “immortalizing the man and his letters that waited almost seventy years to be reunited with his family.”
Porter was able to find certain terms that gave her clues about Marcel’s situation during the war and the affection he had for his distant family. “Unable to speak French, the graphic designer nevertheless realised that ‘they had been written with love’ and had them translated. She learned of Heuzé’s daily life at the factory and his desperate desire to be reunited with his family,” explained Henry Samuel in the London Telegraph. “After a year’s research with a help of a genealogist, she tracked the family down. ‘The day they told me that Marcel had lived to return home to his family, I started bawling as I thought it was so unlikely,’ she said.” “She presented them with a stash of his missing letters, at which point son Marcel, sixty-three, ‘almost fell off my perch,'” wrote a contributor to the Daily Mail. “24-year-old Tiffanie Raux, Heuzé’s great grandaughter, said: ‘When we realised it was true, it was like a magnificent film. It gave my grandmother so much joy but also sadness that her parents were not there to see them.'”
Critics enjoyed Porter’s recounting of the story of the search for Marcel and his family. “Marcel’s story is a story of hope and tenacity. The German factory in which he worked was under constant threat of bombing, and the living conditions in the labor camp were dire,” stated Megan Suckut in the Growler. “Yet, the expressions of love Marcel penned to his wife and daughters transcended the danger of his circumstances. In correspondence dated April 1944, he writes, ‘I leave you for today while always keeping the hope that I will see you again soon.'” “It’s a pleasure to read Porter’s romantic dive into the depths of the lost art of letter writing and contained worlds,” concluded Erin Lewenauer in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “The soul, Porter seems to say, isn’t seen through the eyes or the hands — no, it’s in the handwriting.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2017, Bridget Thoreson, review of Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate, p. 12.
Daily Mail, October 12, 2012, “Love Letters from Nazi Labour Camp Delivered to Frenchman’s Family 70 Years on, Thanks to U.S. Collector’s Detective Work.”
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2017, review of Marcel’s Letters.
Print, summer, 2017, “A Type Tale,” p. 14.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, October, 2017, Julie Summers, review of Marcel’s Letters.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), June 16, 2017, Erin Lewenauer, review of Marcel’s Letters.
Telegraph (London, England), October 11, 2012, Henry Samuel, “Wartime Letters of French Father in Nazi Labour Camp Resurface.”
White Bear Lake Magazine, June, 2017, Maggie Soucheray Sonnek, “In Search of Marcel.”
ONLINE
Carolyn Porter Website, http://carolyn-porter.com (April 18, 2018), author profile.
Growler, https://growlermag.com/ (June 21, 2017), Megan Suckut, “Finding Marcel: The Letters That Brought a WWII Love Story to Life for a Minnesota Font Designer.”
Graphic designer. Creative thinker. Art director. Typography lover. Daily dog walker. Detail freak.
Designer of the typeface P22 Marcel Script and author of the forthcoming book, “Marcel’s Letters.”
Carolyn obtained a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Wisconsin-Stout. She also studied a semester at Middlesex University in London. After receiving her degree in 1991, Carolyn returned to London, where she lived and worked for nearly a year.
After returning to the states, Carolyn focused on providing high-quality graphic design, writing, and brand strategy services to clients in the financial, medical, environmental and business-service industries. Work samples can be viewed at porterfolioinc.com. In addition to writing for clients, Carolyn has written guest articles for Marketing Mentor, a company that provides practical strategies and inspiring ideas for solopreneurs and owners of small design firms.
In 2014, Carolyn released her first typeface, P22 Marcel Script, which is based on the handwritten letters of Marcel Heuzé, a Frenchman conscripted to work in a German labor camp during the depths of World War II.
Carolyn is a member of the New York Type Director’s Club, AIGA-Minnesota (the professional association for designers), AWP, the Minnesota TypeTuesday group and the Twin Cities Creatives Group.
Carolyn lives with her husband, Aaron, in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.
Marcel's Letters: A Font and the Search
for One Man's Fate
Bridget Thoreson
Booklist.
113.18 (May 15, 2017): p12.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Marcel's Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man's Fate. By Carolyn Porter. June 2017.352p. illus.
Skyhorse, $24.99 (9781510719330); e-book (9781510719347). 940.54.
Although Porter found the letters, perhaps they also found her. So she is told more than once by those who
hear her improbable tale of a chance discovery that would consume more than a decade of her life. Porter, a
graphic designer, was drawn to the handwritten letters in an antique store for their beautiful script, without
understanding a word of the French writing. After years of arduous work designing a font based on those
letters, in a fit of curiosity she had one of them translated. That first letter, sent from Berlin during WWII,
contained a father's tender words to his young daughters, along with perplexing references to clothes that
needed mending and his inability to buy a comb. It started Porter on a quest to find out what happened to its
author, a man named Marcel. Porter's captivating memoir describes her journey to find answers, noting how
her fascination with Marcel proved infectious as she faces obstacle after obstacle and enlists the help of
experts to discover the fate that awaited him. She learns about a program that brought millions of workers to
Germany to feed the war machine, the wretched conditions they faced, and how difficult it was to survive.
As impressive as her detective work is, it is Marcel and his letters-real, honest, heartfelt, and brave-that are
undoubtedly the star of this marvelous book.--Bridget Thoreson
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Thoreson, Bridget. "Marcel's Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man's Fate." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p.
12. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496084711/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f19fbd7c. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496084711
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521932653743 2/4
Porter, Carolyn: MARCEL'S LETTERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Porter, Carolyn MARCEL'S LETTERS Skyhorse Publishing (Adult Nonfiction) $24.99 6, 6 ISBN: 978-1-
5107-1933-0
A graphic designer and self-described "typography geek" tells the story behind the creation of her awardwinning
font, P22 Marcel.On an antiquing trip in the early 2000s, Porter acquired a series of "scratchy, old,
ink-on-paper" letters written in a beautiful, unique script she wanted to use as the basis for a font design.
The letters, written in French, were penned by a man named Marcel and had been posted from Berlin to
Marcel's family in France during World War II. But surface information about the letter writer was not
enough for Porter, who would spend the next decade carefully crafting the font she would name in Marcel's
honor. The more she studied the letter shapes, the more she puzzled over the context in which Marcel wrote
his letters, which he always ended with a deep paternal tenderness and signed with an eye-catching flourish.
She began her search online, which yielded tantalizing clues. She learned that Marcel had been one of
thousands of French citizens obliged to participate in a Vichy government forced-labor program that sent
them to work in German factories. This information only made Porter more desirous to know whether the
man she had come to think of as "my Marcel" had survived. Enlisting the aid of translators and a
genealogist, the author eventually discovered that Marcel had reunited with his wife and children. More
importantly, Marcel had been able to put his time as a forced worker behind him and live a happy life. The
book is most interesting for the details it offers about the process Porter used to transform script into font
and the search she undertook to piece together Marcel's life story. While it is clear that the author felt a
genuine connection to Marcel, consideration of why he became so personally important to her is lacking.
The result is a story that obscures the reader's relationship with the narrator. A flawed but intriguing memoir
from a diligent researcher.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Porter, Carolyn: MARCEL'S LETTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668581/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e318c8e4.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487668581
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521932653743 3/4
Marcel's Letters Carolyn Porter
Julie Summers
Reviewer's Bookwatch.
(Oct. 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Marcel's Letters
Carolyn Porter
Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018
www.skyhorsepublishing.com
9781510719330, $24.99, HC, 352pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: Seeking inspiration for a new font design in an antique store in small-town Stillwater, Minnesota,
graphic designer Carolyn Porter stumbled across a bundle of letters and was immediately drawn to their
beautifully expressive pen-and-ink handwriting. She could not read the letters (they were written in French)
but she noticed all of them had been signed by a man named Marcel and mailed from Berlin to his family in
France during the middle of World War II.
As Carolyn grappled with designing the font, she decided to have one of Marcel's letters translated. Reading
it opened a portal to a different time, and what began as mere curiosity quickly became an obsession with
finding out why the letter writer, Marcel Heuze, had been in Berlin, how his letters came to be on sale in a
store halfway around the world, and, most importantly, whether he ever returned to his beloved wife and
daughters after the war.
"Marcel's Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man's Fate" by Carolyn Porter (herself a graphic designer,
typography geek, and founder of the graphic design company Porterfolio) is the incredible story of
Carolyn's increasingly desperate search to uncover the mystery of one man's fate during WWII, seeking
answers across Germany, France, and the United States.
Simultaneously, she continues to work on what would become the acclaimed P22 Marcel font,
immortalizing the man and his letters that waited almost seventy years to be reunited with his family.
Critique: An absolutely engaging and inherently fascinating read from first page to last, "Marcel's Letters: A
Font and the Search for One Man's Fate" is an extraordinary story--one that will linger in the mind and
memory long after the book it finished and set back upon the shelf. While unreservedly recommended,
especially for community and academic library collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that
"Marcel's Letters" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $14.74).
Julie Summers
Reviewer
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Summers, Julie. "Marcel's Letters Carolyn Porter." Reviewer's Bookwatch, Oct. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514884387/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2e6e4b9d.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A514884387
A type tale
Print. 71.2 (Summer 2017): p14.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 F+W Media, Inc.
http://www.printmag.com/
Full Text:
YOU PROBABLY KNOW P22 TYPE FOUNDRY, home to the award-winning typeface Marcel, with companion fonts and more than 1,300 glyphs. But did you know that Marcel was a real person?
Designer Carolyn Porter has captured an incredible true historical love story in her new book Marcel's Letters. Marcel Heuze was a French soldier pulled apart from his family during WWII as part of the Vichy government's Service du Travail Obligatoire (obligatory work service in Germany). He was forced to spend his time working in a squalid Berlin factory--often a target for bombings--and regularly wrote letters to his wife and daughters.
Porter came across Heuze's legacy while searching for font design inspiration in the small town of Stillwater, MN. She discovered a bundle of handwritten notes in an antique shop, and after being intrigued by his lettering and having one of the missives translated from its original French, realized that she had "opened a portal to a different time"--a portal that spanned three countries and one man's love for his family.
Marcel's Letters follows Porter as she searches for Heuze's fate and works on refining the typeface that would become P22 Marcel Script, simultaneously "immortalizing the man and his letters that waited years to be reunited with his family"--and creating a rare typographic tale that intrigues and inspires.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A type tale." Print, Summer 2017, p. 14. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A503310350/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6cd1365a. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A503310350
Finding Marcel: The letters that brought a WWII love story to life for a Minnesota font designer
June 21, 2017 by Megan Suckut
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The letters of Marcel Heuzé, a French civilian imprisoned at a German labor camp during WWII, inspired a font and a new book by Carolyn Porter // Images courtesy of Carolyn Porter
The letters of Marcel Heuzé, a French civilian imprisoned at a German labor camp during WWII, inspired a font and a new book by Carolyn Porter // Images courtesy of Carolyn Porter
Carolyn Porter, a graphic designer based in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, found a stack of beautifully hand-scripted French letters in a Stillwater antique store. She bought a few thinking they would make an ideal base for designing a new font. It was only after her curiosity led her to translate one of them that she realized the gravity of the letters in her possession.
Carolyn could tell that the letters were dated between 1943 and 1944, and, despite not knowing French, that they were sent from someone in Berlin named Marcel Heuzé to someone in a French village called Berchères-la-Maingot. Through translating one letter, she found that Marcel was a French civilian deported to Germany as part of the collaborationist Vichy government’s STO initiative (Service du Travail Obligatoire, or obligatory work service.) These letters that Carolyn stumbled upon were ones he penned at a German labor camp and mailed to his wife and daughters in France.
Carolyn Porter, author of "Marcel's Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man's Fate" // Photo courtesy of Carolyn Porter
Carolyn Porter, author of “Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate” // Photo courtesy of Carolyn Porter
In the midst of designing a font based on Marcel’s handwriting, Carolyn found herself with nagging questions: Did Marcel survive to be reunited with his wife and daughters? And how did his letters end up in an antique store halfway around the world? In mid-2011, she partnered with two French translators and a genealogy researcher in a search for answers that consumed most of the following year.
“When I started researching this, it was a very selfish search,” Carolyn says. “I wanted to find out about this guy whose letters ended up in Stillwater. It ended up becoming so much more than that, so much bigger than me, and I wanted to make his life known.”
Carolyn didn’t know what she would discover about the man behind the distinctive handwriting, much less that she would write a book about him. Once she delved deeper into his story—and the greater history of France in World War II—she realized Marcel and the story of French forced-laborers building German tanks had fallen through the cracks of history.
Marcel’s story is a story of hope and tenacity. The German factory in which he worked was under constant threat of bombing, and the living conditions in the labor camp were dire. Yet, the expressions of love Marcel penned to his wife and daughters transcended the danger of his circumstances. In correspondence dated April 1944, he writes, “I leave you for today while always keeping the hope that I will see you again soon.” Throughout the months of research that led to her writing her debut book, “Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate,” Carolyn felt the desperate hope that Marcel’s family must have felt as they read his letters.
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“Marcel’s Letters” is also a tribute to the power of curiosity. In writing the book, Carolyn shares the curiosity that led her from translating one letter to finding out what happened to Marcel and why his letters ended up in Minnesota. In the book, she recounts her experience creating the font, P22 Marcel Script, parallel to her findings about Marcel’s life and letters. “I’m nobody special,” she says. “I’m not a World War II historian. I’m a graphic designer who wanted to design a font, who ended up finding these letters in Stillwater.”
Carolyn spent her free evenings and weekends researching his story and designing the font, which was finished in late 2013. Soon after, P22 Type Foundry, a font distributor specializing in fonts based on art, history, and design, wanted Marcel Script to be part of its curated collection. The font, Carolyn’s first, has won multiple awards, including the prestigious Type Directors Club’s Certificate of Typographic Excellence.
Carolyn hopes Marcel’s story will remind her readers to keep their eyes open and follow their curiosity. “There’s no reason for people to not be curious about the world,” she says. “This is only my case. I was curious to find out about what the letters said, so I decided to have one translated. This entire thing is nothing initially more than curiosity.”
Wartime letters of French father in Nazi labour camp resurface
The children of a Frenchman who wrote to them from his Nazi labour camp have received his warm letters almost 70 years late, thanks to the detective work of an American letter collector.
Wartime letters of French father in Nazi labour camp resurface
Marcel Heuzé, born after the war, said: 'I almost fell off my perch'
Henry Samuel
By Henry Samuel, Paris
4:16PM BST 11 Oct 2012
Marcel Heuzé, a toolmaker and turner, was one of hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and women France’s collaborationist Vichy regime requisitioned and deported to Germany in 1942 to help the Nazi war effort in its Compulsory Work Service.
Between 1942 and 1944, Heuzé sent dozens of letters to his wife and three daughters from Marienfelde, southwest Berlin, where he worked at the Daimler-Benz factory to produce tanks, aero-engines and armoured vehicles.
Missing them terribly, he would start his messages off with “mes petites chéries” (my little darlings), “mon petit loup” (my little wolf) or “mon petit trésor” (my little treasure).
Many, however, never made it to his loved ones back in France, apparently confiscated by the German censors.
But by an amazing stroke of fate, they resurfaced at an antiques dealer in the northern American town of Stillwater, Minnesota. Intrigued by the French terms of affection, customer Carolyn Porter bought the batch.
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Unable to speak French, the graphic designer nevertheless realised that “they had been written with love” and had them translated.
She learned of Heuzé’s daily life at the factory and his desperate desire to be reunited with his family.
“Time seems to go so slowly without you and without my girls,” he wrote. “All the letters I receive tell me that I’m awaited with impatience and it makes me sad,” he wrote in another.
“There is a lot of talk of us leaving but it’s always the same, nothing official. And in the end, we are still waiting,” he wrote in a third.
He said he was “very proud” of his wife fending for the family alone and tending to their land.
He asked after the girls, telling one “not to suck her thumb” or pick the fruit “until it’s ripe”.
“I started reading a lovely book but it made me giddy as it speaks only of eating and beautiful women, all the things that are not allowed here,” he told his wife.
But he became increasingly frustrated as he realised that many of his letters never made it to the rural village near Chartres where she and their daughters lived during the war.
“I must have letters that are late or lost,” he wrote.
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Mrs Porter, 43, said: “Once I had the first letter translated, the story started unfolding and I had to read the rest. It was so beautiful and heartbreaking.”
“When I had finished, I just wanted to know whether he had lived, whether this man returned to the wife and daughters he loved so much. I knew it was unlikely given the horrible things he described, but I was hoping, hoping for a happy ending.”
After a year’s research with a help of a genealogist, she tracked the family down.
“The day they told me that Marcel had lived to return home to his family, I started bawling as I thought it was so unlikely,” she said.
She arrives in Paris in two weeks with another batch of letters she managed to track down in California that the children have not yet seen.
Back in France, Denise, one of Heuzé’s daughters, recently received a letter in basic French. Denise contacted her brother, Marcel, 63, born after the war, who said: “I almost fell off my perch.”
He said he believed the letters were censored by the Germans as one was “stamped with a swastika”, and were taken back to the US and sold by a serviceman after the war.
Tiffanie Raux, 24, Heuzé’s great granddaughter, said she first through the letters were a hoax when she opened them at her grandmother Denise’s home.
“Then when we realised it was true, it was like a magnificent film. It gave my grandmother so much joy but also sadness that her parents were not there to see them.” The first letter was directly addressed to the three daughters in turn, asking “touching things about the cat and what they had seen at the cinema”. “Others were more on the horrors of war, the waiting, the fear of dying.” As for the letters to his wife, she said: “He uses words of love that I’d die for someone to say to me in this day and age”.
She said the family couldn’t thank Carolyn enough for her “altruistic” gesture. “It’s very American. I’m not sure people in France would have gone to all that trouble,” she said.
She said she had very fond memories of her great grandparents. “They had a wonderful life, they were joyful, strong personalities and truly in love — the dream couple really.”
Mrs Porter will fly to France later this month to learn more about the family. She will not meet Heuzé or his wife, as both died 20 and seven years ago respectively.
However, the children are still alive and unlike the letters, her request to meet them has not gone unanswered.
REVIEW: 'Marcel's Letters,' by Carolyn Porter
NONFICTION: A White Bear Lake graphic designer seeks the story behind a trove of letters from a Stillwater antique store.
By Erin Lewenauer Special to the Star Tribune
June 16, 2017 — 10:30am
A selection of letters written during World War II from "Marcel's Letters."
Skyhorse Press
A selection of letters written during World War II from "Marcel's Letters."
My penmanship is not good. Friends laugh. Strangers squint. My family asks, “Is there something wrong with your hand?” I thought of this while reading White Bear Lake resident Carolyn Porter’s careful, descriptive and methodical memoir, “Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate.”
Set in the Twin Cities, Texas and Europe, Porter’s book explores the aftermath of a visit to a now closed antique shop in Stillwater in 2011, where she purchased a package of letters written by a Frenchman named Marcel Heuze. Twelve of the letters, written during World War II, appear in the manuscript alongside historic photos.
Porter, a graphic designer, was first attracted by the penmanship — she had been seeking a font to develop for the computer — but she found herself pulled toward Marcel’s dynamic words. She had the letters translated from French and began a self-imposed race to discover whether this big-hearted man, who signed his letters “Your Papa who thinks about you all the time,” had survived the war.
She discovered that he was a Frenchman who had been imprisoned in the German labor camp of Daimler making tanks. Marcel’s pain and optimism thrive in these letters, which were addressed to his wife, Simone, and three daughters, Denise, Suzanne and Lily.
Porter’s research is admirable but not always compelling; she spent countless hours scouring archives and teaming up with a genealogist, determined to discover this man’s fate. Did he survive? She needed to know but also couldn’t bear to know.
The passionate search takes its toll on her life and work: “I was angry at Aaron for not helping with the search; at Marcel’s family for not cherishing his letters; at my clients for consuming time and energy; at every person who had not returned an e-mail or letter,” she writes. “Most of all, I raged at myself for not finding him — and for allowing the search to devour time, money, energy, sleep.”
Marcel’s Letters by Carolyn Porter
Marcel’s Letters by Carolyn Porter
Porter’s story feels very reconstructed, which it was. She did not write the book as she was developing Marcel’s font, which went on to be honored by the P22 Type Foundry in New York in 2013 and win awards. Her writing often feels distant and meticulously edited, unlike Marcel’s emotional letters.
Yet her play-by-play depiction of how obsession can move unexpectedly into one’s life will hold a reader close. And her journey to embrace her lifelong passion is entirely honest: no green pasture, but an unpolished pile of rocks that need sorting.
It’s a pleasure to read Porter’s romantic dive into the depths of the lost art of letter writing and contained worlds. Porter and Marcel both ask their readers to slow down, look closer and let passion persist, even if one is alone on a soulful search. The soul, Porter seems to say, isn’t seen through the eyes or the hands — no, it’s in the handwriting.
Erin Lewenauer holds degrees from Vassar College and the University of Pittsburgh. She writes for Publisher’s Weekly, Rain Taxi and other publications and lives in Milwaukee.
Marcel's Letters
By: Carolyn Porter.
Publisher: Skyhorse Press, 344 pages, $24.99.
Love letters from Nazi labour camp delivered to Frenchman’s family 70 years on, thanks to U.S. collector’s detective work
By Daily Mail Reporter
Published: 00:41 EDT, 12 October 2012 | Updated: 15:00 EDT, 12 October 2012
The family of a Frenchman, sent to work at a German World War Two labour camp, have finally received his homesick letters, 70 years after he wrote them.
Marcel Heuzé fell foul of the Nazi regime, becoming one of hundreds of thousands of French men and women deported to Germany during World War Two as part of its Compulsory Work Service.
From 1942 to 1944, Heuzé worked at the Daimler-Benz factory producing tanks, aero-engines and armoured vehicles.
Snail mail: Marcel Heuze wrote this letter 70 years ago when he was in a labour camp during the war. His family has only just received it
Snail mail: Marcel Heuze wrote this letter 70 years ago when he was in a labour camp during the war. His family has only just received it
During that time the homesick father and husband penned dozens of letters to his loved ones.
But those heartfelt notes were apparently confiscated by the German censors, the Telegraph reported, never making it home to France.
Only now, 70 years on, are his family finally discovering what it was he wanted to tell them.
The letters came to light when Carolyn Porter came across them at an antiques fair in Stillwater, Minnesota.
The homesick father and husband penned dozens of letters to his loved ones during his time in the Nazi labour camp
The homesick father and husband penned dozens of letters during his time in the Nazi labour camp
Ms Porter was mesmerised in by Heuzé's affectionate prose, addressing his wife and children as 'mes petites chéries' (my little darlings), 'mon petit loup' (my little wolf) or 'mon petit trésor' (my little treasure).
So intregued was she that she bought the batch of letters, having them translated and learning of Heuzé's desperate plight as he sought to be reconnected with his family.
'Time seems to go so slowly without you and without my girls,' he wrote. 'All the letters I receive tell me that I’m awaited with impatience and it makes me sad.'
A portrait of Marcel Heuzé
Marcel Heuzé with his wife Rene who he married on 31 December 1932
Marcel Heuzé pictured alone (left) and with his wife Rene who he married on 31 December 1932 (right)
He continued in another: 'There is a lot of talk of us leaving but it’s always the same, nothing official. And in the end, we are still waiting.'
Heuzé wrote about how 'very proud' he was of his wife, adding personal notes to his girls, asking one 'not to suck her thumb'.
As time went on Heuzé appeared to realise his letters weren't making it home. 'I must have letters that are late or lost,' he wrote.
Ms Porter was so touched by the serviceman's 'letters of love' that she embarked on a project of her own, seeking out his long lost family.
'Once I had the first letter translated, the story started unfolding and I had to read the rest,' she told the newspaper. 'It was so beautiful and heartbreaking.
'When I had finished, I just wanted to know whether he had lived, whether this man returned to the wife and daughters he loved so much.
'I knew it was unlikely given the horrible things he described, but I was hoping, hoping for a happy ending.'
And a happy ending she got.
Working with a genealogist, Ms Porter miraculously managed to track down Heuzé's relatives.
She presented them with a stash of his missing letters, at which point son Marcel, 63, 'almost fell off my perch'.
24-year-old Tiffanie Raux, Heuzé's great grandaughter, said: 'When we realised it was true, it was like a magnificent film. It gave my grandmother so much joy but also sadness that her parents were not there to see them.'
Heuzé had returned to the family following the war, his surviving offspring told Ms Porter. He died 20 years ago, his wife seven.
BY Maggie Soucheray Sonnek
From the June 2017 White Bear Lake Magazine issue
In Search of Marcel
Decades-old postcards send local graphic designer on an odyssey of words.
Photo by:
Joel Schnell
A collection of letters and handwriting samples Carolyn Porter has collected over the years. It was Marcel’s handwriting that first attracted her to his letters.
Carolyn Porter could never have predicted that a brief stop in a Stillwater antique shop would thrust her down a decade-long journey full of heart-pounding twists and turns, plunge her back in time, and end up changing her life forever.
Something about a stack of old yellowed postcards swirled with cascading letters written in French caught her attention. A graphic designer, she’d always been infatuated with calligraphy and the shapes of letters. She paid the apathetic teenager behind the counter and walked out with what was, unbeknownst to both of them, a treasure.
“For years I had wanted to capture the essence of century-old handwriting in a font,” Porter says. “I knew when I was standing in that store that those letters would be the basis of my new project.”
Porter spent her nights and weekends deconstructing the upper- and lower-case letters and numbers, as a creative respite from designing medical brochures.
Although she didn’t read or speak French, she could tell the letters were formed with care. Picking out bits and pieces, she grasped a few details: Paris, cinema, 1300 km. These vague facts caught her attention and, nearly a decade after first laying eyes on the postcards at the Stillwater antique store, she had one translated.
“I just assumed the postcards were a man writing to a woman,” she notes. But the first three words changed that. They were addressed to “My little darlings”—who turned out to be the writer’s three daughters.
His words were filled with tenderness and love. “As for Lily,” he writes, “I’m glad that she’s no longer sucking her thumb. I recommend that she doesn’t pick the blossoms from the cherry tree or the pear trees. She should wait until the fruit is ripe.” He signed his note “Your dad who thinks about you all the time, Papa.”
Because the first postcard didn’t include many details about this man or why he was separated from his family, Porter opted to get the second letter translated, too.
“Today marks the 14th month of my imprisonment,” reads the first line of the letter.
With that, Porter became obsessed with finding answers. Working with an archivist and genealogy researcher, she slowly put together pieces of the puzzle.
She learned the mystery man’s name was Marcel Heuzé, an ordinary French civilian living in a farming village southwest of Paris. He was sent to Germany to work as a forced laborer in World War II.
Marcel was part of the Service du travail obligatoire (compulsory work service), or STO, an often forgotten group in history. Germans needed laborers to replace men who had been transferred to the fronts to fight, so they demanded workers from the countries they occupied.
“As soon as we leave the table we are hungry again,” Marcel wrote to his wife in one of the letters. “What we eat doesn’t stick to our ribs.”
“At first, I just wanted to learn if Marcel survived and made it home—back to his daughters and wife,” Porter says. But the more she learned, the more unlikely that became. “Americans were bombing the factory where he worked. What would the Allies want to bomb more than a German factory?”
Porter did learn Marcel’s fate—and made some surprising connections in France. But we’ll let you read about that in her upcoming book: Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate.
Both her book and the font, called Marcel, are getting rave reviews. Since its release, P22 Marcel Script has won five awards, including the certificate for typographic excellence from the New York Type Director’s Club—kind of like a rookie baseball player hitting a homerun his first time up to bat.
“I felt this huge responsibility to make the font beautiful. These letters weren’t just proof of love, they were proof of life,” Porter says. “I wanted the font to be worthy of those words of love. To be worthy of the high stakes—that every letter might have been his last.”
Porter has made an effort to be more emotionally expressive now, after learning the high stakes that Marcel had to go through to make sure his wife and daughters knew he loved them.
“The day I bought those letters, I couldn’t conceive what it would become,” she says. “I had no idea what I was buying or how it would change my life.”
Hear Carolyn Porter share Marcel’s story:
June 22, 7 p.m.
Subtext Books, St. Paul
June 26, 6 p.m.
A presentation at the White Bear Lake public library in conjunction with the White Bear Lake Area Historical Society.
July 14, 10-11:30 a.m.
Book signing at the WBL Farmers Market/Lake Country Booksellers
Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate will be available in hardcover and eBook format when it is released in June. Pre-sales are underway online at Amazon and at barnesandnoble.com, as well as Lake Country Booksellers when it is released. For more information, visit the website here.