Posting my thoughts on letters 5 separately now that I can, along with letters 6:
LS to BB #5:
I wonder if the #5 letters count as the denouement, the #6 letters as the ending, and the Kind Editor letter as an epilogue? It almost seems that way.
The time-setting “Dusk” sets a bleak tone; it’s not esoteric enough to be humourous, it’s just bold and darkly prosaic.
Notice the avoidance of a retcon here – we still have carrier pigeons, even though in the meantime two more suitable carriers, crows and bats, have been introduced. I wonder, however, if this signifies also the end of Beatrice’s career as baticeer.
Lemony returned Beatrice’s lock of hair, and she returned his ring. I suggest that from here we can extrapolate the reason why Lemony has all the letters he sent to Beatrice rather than those he received – they also returned each other’s letters. (Quite how this works for LS to BB #5 and #6 I don’t know, but it’s a start.) Alternatively: “Ring, hair, letters, photographs—all traces of our love will be scattered then, like an anagram from one of our code lessons.” So that suggests the letters may all have been scattered far and wide; Lemony may have lost the ones he received in a fire, for instance. This also suggests that Beatrice did have Code Class at some point, but presumably at a different point in her schedule.
“Are you certain your co-star is one of us” – in his previous letter, Lemony didn’t seem to have any problems with the co-star, but here he’s suspecting treachery. However… given that earlier reaction, it seems unlikely for the co-star to have been Olaf, especially since the Sebald Code is doubled up with a passage in which Olaf’s wickedness is addressed in no terms of ambiguity. I think the most likely candidate is Bertrand – he was a good man, but given that he’ll eventually marry Beatrice, and probably not too long from now, one can understand if Lemony suddenly becomes distrustful and jealous. Beatrice has been seeing more of her co-star than Lemony for a long time.
Is there any significance to page 189? I don’t think I’ve heard any suggestions, and I’m not about to go grab all the books longer than that and check their one-hundred-and-eighty-ninth pages. It could easily have been picked at random, though – a point sufficiently close to the end of the book to be plausible.
“After reading your book, I understand why you cannot live with me. I hope, after reading the answers below, you understand why I cannot live without you.” What’s interesting is that Lemony doesn’t seem to deny anything. Maybe it’s implicit, or maybe he knows he can’t change her mind.
“Question One: No.” I think this is just meant to form an ironic contrast to the verbose and yielding first page.
Question Two, among others, seems designed to check if Lemony is really who Beatrice thinks she is, which ties in with some of young Beatrice’s letters. However, it could also be a test of his character – is he truly the terrible person the newspaper makes her believe, or is he still the same kind person she loved? Who is the B. mentioned? I’d suggest the context implies it’s a girl, rather than Bertrand. Long-forgotten Bela?
“Question Three: Absolutely not.” Again I think there’s a touch of the irony here, but here’s also where we probably get into the strenuous denials of criminal action.
Question Four suggests that Beatrice was asking him about a poem in a theatrical program – the poem which appears at the end of the book, surely. We know that in the modern day Snicket’s taken to staring at that poem for some considerable time; evidently it contained some significance that Lemony overlooked, or the fact that Lemony didn’t read it is symptomatic of a potential character flaw? I don’t think that it contained any coded message that he missed, as it seems clear that this refers to a time when he and Beatrice once again met up after one of her performances (which perhaps is why Lemony ended up being more than an hour late with his review). I think it contained perhaps a message – not a coded one, but a tacit one about Beatrice’s present concerns, and in failing to read that Lemony failed to properly understand her.
“Question Five: Three children.” I think mostly we’re meant to read this forward towards the Baudelaire orphans – not that there’s a canonical link, but this is what it’s meant to remind us of. Groups of three children abound in the series. Later in the letter, I think, Lemony practically recommends having three children. So really the question could’ve been anything, but I doubt we can pick up anything from it.
Question Six: “What is a brae-man,” “Define the term ‘brae-man,’” etc. Question Seven: “What is a baticeer,” “Define the term ‘baticeer,’” etc. Question Eight just reinforces the above. I see these in the same light as Question Two or Four – either is Lemony the real Lemony, or how closely has Lemony been paying attention to the implicit significance of the play he’s been following? I think the overall explanation linking some of these is the “test of character” idea I expounded above. “Who is Lemony Snicket?”
Question Nine: The most infamous and poignant section of the whole book. I remember once reading a young person’s review of this book, and in response to this passage they had written (I paraphrase), “I wish I loved somebody like Lemony loved Beatrice.” That sort of touching expression shows how well this letter hit the mark – and also how good a writer Handler is. TBL isn’t, unlike most of the series, an especially funny book. But as a very compact book, it’s really doing its best to hit us emotionally. This outpouring of Lemony’s love, and the fact that we know it would go forever unrequited and he would have to live with it for years and years after the woman he loved married someone else, and then later died, turns TBL into a tragedy.
“I will love you with no regard to the actions of our enemies or the jealousies of actors” – the latter, I think, may back up the co-star theory I explained above.
“I will love you with no regard to the outrage of certain parents or the boredom of certain friends.” Suggests that somebody’s parents, presumably Lemony’s or Beatrice’s or they’d be sticking their nose in a bit, weren’t happy with Lemony and Beatrice’s relationship. I wonder why? That Lemony’s ignoring them doesn’t give us any more of a clue as to whose parents they are. I think the cliché would be for it to be Beatrice’s parents, and one can perhaps see the argument – an up-and-coming actress like herself marrying that shut-in, surely she can do better? The boredom of certain friends suggests that Lemony was not viewed as a hot catch among the Beatrice circle; one can perhaps envision Kit being bored, since she already knows plenty about her brother, and perhaps R.’s comment earlier about poorly-trained bats really was aimed at Lemony – which would give another reason for Lemony to distrust the fawning letter apparently from her in the U.A., although I think it would be rather sad.
Then we have quite a few generic high-school terms which root Lemony and Beatrice’s romance in their youth, and which lead up to the amazing revelation that Lemony was a cheerleader for Beatrice’s soccer team, which says it all, really. I think that is a satirical comment by Handler on Lemony’s devoted adoration of Beatrice.
“I will love you if you abandon your baticeering, and I will love you if you retire from the theater to take up some other, less dangerous occupation.” It’s necessary that this be written, since both of these things occur.
“…and I will love you if you betray your father.” Has been taken by some as projecting a certain rift between Beatrice and her father, or between Lemony and same, which would tie in with the outrage of certain parents… however, I think the nuance here is that Lemony
respects Beatrice’s father; the present block of loves regards Lemony’s love for Beatrice
despite certain hypothetical flaws, like lazily dropping her coat on the floor or committing treachery. So I think it would be misplaced to distrust Beatrice’s father.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder is an author Snicket likes, who authored a youngsters’ mystery novel entitled
The Headless Cupid. Among other things, actually, but I remember that one because Handler said somewhere that he liked it.
The theremin – an instrument either Snicket or Handler has been experimenting with, and I forget which. Marmosets – we know from TGG that Lemony was involved in some way with marmosets, and evidently they’re still dear to him. Also confirms that M., or rather Montgomery Montgomery, is known to the pair.
“…the trees fall in the forest without anyone around to hear them” – refers to a philosophical conundrum: “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Lemony dodges that question, though.
Horseradish, manatees and leeches are references to the series; doctors and lakes are a little less oblique. Conceivably the beard links up to the facial hair or lack thereof possessed by the sinister duo, but it could equally well be a more arbitrary and silly simile.
“…and the squinting eye of the reader loves the smudged print of the document, and the tears of sadness love the squinting eye as it misreads what is written.” Could refer to Lemony’s own reading of Beatrice’s book, for instance, although obviously he didn’t permanently misread anything if he knows he misread it. Readers squinting at documents links to BB to LS #3, in which Beatrice describes Klaus doing this (and the handwritten style requires some squinting in itself).
Iceberg and ship – the
Titanic, another tragedy. Children overhearing their parents’ arguments – they weren’t parents, but I keep thinking back to Fiona lying awake listening to Fernald and Widdershins argue.
Taxis and libraries – refer back to the series again, as do the following couple of sentences, most of which are too obvious for me to explain.
Brandy – enjoyed by the Baudelaire father, according to TBB.
The initial sequence: Confirms that Lemony knows Montgomery, Josephine, Charles, Sir, and Nero… although the references to Charles, Sir and Nero may not be “canonical,” but more in-jokes. Also confirms the apparent love of Charles for Sir that some of us read into TPP.
Apples – another reference forward to
The End? Also leads to commentary on how silly these similes are getting.
The most poignant section follows, even though it only highlights exactly what we already know – that, despite everything, time and marriage and children, Lemony will always love Beatrice. If it wasn’t for all the jokes, aSoUE would be an incredibly dark and heartrending series.
“I will love you if you don’t marry me” – comes as a short, unelaborated sentence after several very long run-on sentences. I think it must have cost Lemony a great deal to admit this. That the co-star is mentioned as the first potential marriage partner may back up an identification of him as Bertrand, or may not.
Who is Y.? I’m pretty sure we don’t know any characters with that initial, but the context implies that we probably should know exactly who it is, since it’s placed between the co-star and O. If we can’t identify it as a known character, maybe it’s a literary allusion? Z. through A. are obviously jokes that don’t require characters. I think the reference to R. is more a nod to the fact that R. would necessarily be listed between the initials Z. and A., rather than suggesting anything about R. herself.
Over three pages of Lemony talking about how he loves Beatrice, then we get a fresh page topped with “Question Ten: No.” Obviously a joke question; Question One “writ large,” if you like.
Question Eleven: A callback to the book itself. The question was something along the lines of, “What can one letter change?”, a question invited by several previous letters in TBL.
Question Twelve: The answer to Question Five was “Three children,” and Question Twelve would seem to have been, “How many Snicket siblings are there?” This seems an odd question to ask – rather like the possibility I expressed above, that Beatrice is trying to make sure Lemony is who she thinks he is, and hasn’t been replaced by some villain or other. …Alternatively, it could be making sure that the fans get the message about who is a sibling of whom, since I recall people have been confused before, for some reason.
Question Thirteen: The answer is evidently a coded response, which suggests that the question would also have been a coded one. It could have been something prosaic, or something which seemed prosaic but had a more meaningful resonance in context, and which makes Lemony’s response yet more meaningful. But we can’t tell what it would have been. It suggests more checking of Lemony’s identity, however – making sure he is able to respond as a member of V.F.D. What was Beatrice after?
Also, it occurs to me now that the lock of hair could have been mistaken for a letter G rather than C, but I think fans would have understood. Not that it was necessary, with the card versions.
BB to LS #5:
The heading here mimics the heading of Lemony’s own letters… a heading which was missing on the previous letter, take note.
The Days of Awe are Jewish holidays.
Beatrice is on the floor above Lemony – therefore, she is on the fourteenth floor, matching up to the existence of a Chapter Fourteen, I think. Also notice that her being able to hear Lemony on the creaky floor below her parallels Lemony hearing Beatrice on the creaky floor above him way back in LS to BB #2. TBL is tremendously cleverly-written; there are all kinds of link-ups like that throughout.
“You have a lousy sense of direction” – taken by some as being a comment on the geography of the series itself, which could be true – as I’ve said, Beatrice is a kind of stand-in for the fans. She’d notice these things, if we would.
“Violet told me once that I saved her life, and Klaus claimed that without me he would have died in despair not long after the destruction of Hotel Denoument. Even Sunny said that she could not have survived without me.” I think Handler wrote this very carefully to cover the most broad range of meanings possible so that we couldn’t quite be sure of who young Beatrice was, or would turn out to be. What she writes is just about true; if she hadn’t existed, the Baudelaires might well have given up at the end of
The End with no future left to live for. Oh, and re: the misspelling of Denoument – I’m increasingly confident on a reread that this is merely a mistake introduced in the process of creating the false documents. Notice, for example, that in no other book does Handler place period marks after initials, but every initial in this book has a period mark after it.
“Without Violet’s emergency repairwork, I never would have found my way to the city to search for you. Without Klaus’s notes on mountain climbing, I never would have left the city to search for you again. Without Sunny’s extensive knowledge of making snacks from wildflowers and weeds [etc.]” Again, how do we reconcile these with reality? Quite easily, actually – the parts about Violet could easily refer to events that occur in the series itself, for example, because if Violet hadn’t performed several pieces of emergency repairwork over the series, the Baudelaires would have died and young Beatrice wouldn’t be where she is today. The part about Klaus suggests that she needed his notes on mountain climbing to leave the city – this may back up your theory, Hermes, that the hills are or are related to the mountains. Since it’s been a long journey for her, it may have included some mountains even if the hills are, as I rather fancy is the logical reading, hills. Sunny’s snack knowledge makes a lot more sense, as young Beatrice would’ve needed such knowledge to feed herself on her travels.
“And without the stories all three siblings told me of their troubles—which in some cases differ wildly from your own accounts…” Taken by some as indicating that Lemony is an unreliable narrator. Since unreliable narrators are always exposed, for the simple reason that they need to be in order to establish how much of anything we can take as true, and Lemony is not in this way exposed, and since it seems far more likely to be what this line is referring to anyway, I take it that this line is referring to the following line from
Chapter Fourteen: “The baby had heard about danger, too, mostly from the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind from which the Baudelaires read out loud each evening, although they had not told the infant the whole story. She did not know all of the Baudelaires’ secrets, and indeed there were some she would never know.” Ties in with a specific line in
The End, ties in with the way the Baudelaires were treated by their own parents.
The secretarial school is, as I probably believed before and simply forgot, the same V.F.D. school from the start of the novel. Plenty of evidence here, including the explicit link between the classrooms that Beatrice mentioned in a previous letter, the fact that it isn’t really a secretarial school but evidently has to pretend to be one, Beatrice mentioning studying with these last few volunteers, and the fact that nobody believed Beatrice’s name when she first arrived. And you can see why they wouldn’t. It’s too fantastic. The person who held that name had been dead for, oh, a decade or so by now, and hadn’t been ten years old for some decades before that.
“…and become the “baticeer” I am today.” I think that… I don’t think Beatrice is actually a bat-trainer, because she never mentions any such thing, and expresses revulsion at the fact that Lemony’s cave is inhabited by bats. I think she’s adopting the title as signifying a link between being named Beatrice and being a volunteer, or being a well-read and well-developed individual. And I’m fairly sure she picked up the title from Lemony’s documents and is using it for herself, as we see on her calling card, just as a fan might pick a name or a term from the series and employ it as their username on an online messageboard.
“I owe my life to them, and now that we have been separated, I will not rest until I find them again.” Confirmation – I’m not sure it appears anywhere else – that Beatrice and the Baudelaires have been separated. That is to say, of course they were, obviously, but this puts it in more concrete terms. From here we can read it as a definite event… although she makes it sound quite recent, doesn’t she? Take that how you will. We don’t know.
“…given to me by my last instructor before she had to head to the hills herself, in search of other orphans, and to escape from other enemies.” Helps reinforce the idea of the perpetual, unending story, a theme contained in the last few books of the series… but if we take the following part, “all of us, hopefully, are given one or two useful items before our instructors vanish and leave us all alone in the world,” I wonder if “head to the hills” isn’t a euphemism along the lines of “gone into the great unknown.” Also, when did Beatrice know this instructor? It sounds recent; probably after the “secretarial school” accepted her true identity. Some time passes between each of Beatrice’s letters.
This letter is very climactic. I think that, upon reading it, we get the greatest hope that Lemony will speak to Beatrice. It also makes us consider again why he wouldn’t want to, for which I resort to the same explanations: Too painful for him, and probably, too painful for her. If anyone knows what happened to the Baudelaires, it’s Lemony, but whatever happened to them can’t have been good. Their disappearance and Beatrice’s hope to find them is like the Baudelaires hoping to find their parents. Those instructors have all gone into the great unknown, with only children left to remember them – and Lemony, who survives it all.
LS to BB #6:
As was pointed out a long time ago on these forums, LS to BB #6 is probably based on the following telegram, ripped straight from a Google Image search for “night lettergram”:
toto.lib.unca.edu/findingaids/mss/biltmore_industries/seely_women/hawley/jpegs/hawley019mod.jpgI assume the “independant” typo was introduced in the process of remaking it into an original version. That might seem strange, but the lack of any other explanation for the typo suggests to me the truth of this theory. If you compare the “independant competitive progressive” bar to that on the original telegram, you’ll notice that they’re aligned differently (especially distinct at either end, the letters’ relation to the internal square), proving that the image isn’t a straight copy.
Also, there appears to be something faint printed behind “Late Summer”’ what I can make out appears to say “Telegraph” and “Original” (in all-caps).
“Dear Mrs. Baudelaire” – far more formal than the increasingly emotional headings to Lemony’s previous letters, reflecting the, well, the fact that she is no longer his dear darling.
The first paragraph obviously parallels up to BB to LS #1.
We know from
The End that Beatrice was and probably became pregnant on the island, and that she and Bertrand thought Lemony to be dead at this point; I suggest that it is upon their return to the mainland that Lemony heard details of Beatrice’s pregnancy, and sent this telegram, which itself alerted Beatrice and Bertrand to the fact that Lemony was still alive (although with no signature, they’d have to infer it from the context).
Lemony refers first to a baby girl, and then a baby boy, and then twins; this was taken by some as being a clue referring to, respectively, Violet, Klaus, and then Sunny and Beatrice, who were thus taken to be twins. Quite why Sunny’s twin sister had been separated from the Baudelaire family all her life was never adequately explained, to my recollection, and indeed the theory turned out to be incorrect.
The second paragraph also clearly “anticipates” TSS and Violet’s friendship with Quigley, although they didn’t really spend many happy hours, and people of imagination and integrity couldn’t gather there any more. But it’s the thought that counts.
Was this really was “one last time” Lemony contacted Beatrice? Did they really never speak again? It seems unlikely, although there is always the potential for quibbling about precisely when meetings at the Baudelaire dining table or certain masked balls took place.
What exactly was Lemony’s message? Clearly his warning of impending doom wasn’t that imminent, because it took more than fourteen years for the Baudelaire parents to be murdered. As such, does one have to assume that this refers to an incident we don’t know about? Or is it just the secret itself that is “terrible and dangerous” rather than its implications for someone who knows it? In that sense, it could refer to the sugar bowl or the Great Unknown. Any ideas? Whatever the message is, it begins with the letter A. (It may be that there was no message ever decided upon, and this is simply a means to introduce the hidden letter A.)
BB to LS #6:
As I’ve already mentioned, Beatrice’s calling card mirrors Lemony’s in one distinct way: Lemony’s was red on a white background, and hers is white on a red background. The main “Beatrice Baudelaire” header comes from her own previous letter; referring to the building she’s currently occupying as “The Rhetorical Building” mirrors Lemony’s self-description as “Student of Rhetoric. Is Beatrice really a “Baticeer Extraordinaire,” though? As I mentioned in relation to BB to LS #5, I rather doubt it; I think she just figured out the anagram and adopted it for herself.
The text obviously mirrors that of LS to BB #1, although it takes place literally within the café, probably the same one from all those years ago.
People have noted that the calling card isn’t ripped in half, indicating that LS did come to meet BB; personally I think this is more of a presentational benefit, as printing this book would be even harder if you had to have torn bits of card in it as well, but since I agree that they met then it’s a moot point.
There’s a marked disconnect between this letter and Beatrice’s previous one. Beatrice has never before apologised for wanting to talk to Lemony, nor has she offered to go away and never try to speak to him again; she’s always been entirely unapologetic and completely persistent. She’s explained this very fully in numerous letters, and introduces it in this card as though it’s an entirely new subject. There’s also the fact that Lemony doesn’t have friends any more; every reference to his activities in TBL show that he is entirely alone. (This makes sense, because his friends all seem to be dead, either because they’re historical characters who he’s already admitted are dead or because they die during aSoUE.)
So now we must come to the bone of contention, because I have a controversial theory about BB to LS #6. I think it isn’t to Lemony Snicket at all. I think it’s to a young man of about Beatrice’s age, who she encountered and took a liking to while he was out with his friends in the vicinity of this café. What BB to LS #6 shows is the potential for the unfortunate cycle to repeat once more in some form, in this world where young and well-read people must travel far and wide in search of people they can trust, places that are safe, and knowledge about themselves. Maybe it’ll have a happier conclusion this time. Maybe it’ll all go right. Or maybe the cycle will repeat with exactly the same results as before, but with some names swapped around.
(He doesn’t even need to have the initials LS; the printed tags on each letter are an artificial addition.)