"War & Peace in Sans Serif" by Laura Scalzo

Photo credit: Erik Kvalsvik

​Laura Scalzo is the author of two novels, The Speed of Light in Air, Water, and Glass, praised as “lyrical and insightful,” and American Arcadia, “a gorgeous riff of a New York City novel.” Her shorter work has appeared in various literary magazines including Had, Ellipsis Zine, Reflex Fiction, and the Grace & Gravity Series. She is the Chautauqua Institution Writer-in-Residence for Week Two of the 2023 Season. She lives in Washington, D.C.

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Dorothy Bakkenson (she/her) is an arboreal mammal adapted to the subterranean lifestyle. When she's not wiping dirt from her eyes or relocating spiders from corners too close to her bed, she writes. Come Spring 2023, she will hold both an MA in Literature, Culture, and Technology, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. 

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​Introduction to "War & Peace in Sans Serif"
​by Dorothy Bakkenson

Unlike the protagonist of Laura Scalzo’s “War & Peace in Sans Serif,” I’ve always chosen war. Going so far as to favor the nuclear over choreographed skirmishes, I hold grudges; I burn bridges; I hate. In fact, I’ve gone on record, whenever Russian Literature was discussed in company, to say that I hate Leo Tolstoy and his character, Natasha Rostova, even more. This hatred doesn’t wholly stem from the epic War & Peace itself (the noted favorite book of Laura Scalzo and the inspiration for her story), but from my own scholarly and writerly preoccupations with women.      

It’s been well documented that Tolstoy’s work always passed through a second set of hands, his wife’s, Sophia Tolstaya. I’ve often given into the imagination of her – a woman rearing and raising thirteen children, being handed page after page of her husband’s fiction and philosophy, and keeping it in order, as she did with everything. It has been theorized that Natasha Rostova is partially based on Sophia but reformed into Tolstoy’s ideal feminine. This molding is what caused my contention. What did he rewrite in his own wife? Where is the real of her?

I first read War & Peace when I was just 16, and I still hold visceral memories of my rage over Natasha’s guilt after she “betrayed” Prince Andrei. I could not help but yell at the printed words – Why should she carry that burden? Hadn’t he said that he held her to no promises? She should hate him for his reaction. But of course, a few hundred pages later into the story, it is in part because Natasha is just so genuinely remorseful, good, and dare I write – ideal – that Prince Andrei redeems her as he lays dying, dipping in and out of “delirium:”

“When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change. No, neither death nor anything else can destroy it. It is the very essence of the soul. Yet how many people have hatred in my life? And of them all, I loved and hated none as I did her.” And he vividly pictured to himself Natasha, not as he had done in the past with nothing but her charms which gave him delight, but for the first time picturing to himself her soul. And he understood for the first time all the cruelty of his rejection of her, the cruelty of his rupture with her. 

Perhaps 16 was too young for me to read such a story, because at that time my understanding of literature was insular. Stories were literal and prescriptive, and I felt Leo Tolstoy, and all who had recommended him, thrusting upon me the virtues and vices of Natasha as if they were my own. Natasha – her name like sour medicine I was intended to choke down for my own good – was a reminder that I did not have it in me to be peaceful.  
In an interview with Grace and Gravity, published when “War & Peace in Sans Serif”  first made print in the Grace and Darkness anthology, Scalzo commented that her protagonist, Elise’s name was originally Lise, like Prince Andrei’s first wife. But Scalzo changed it to avoid parallels. Of course I still reached for those on my first read (with the multiple lit degrees I couldn’t help it), but I did not see Lise. Who I saw was Natasha, because in War & Peace it is Natasha who reinspires hope in Prince Andrei’s life. While Elise is not as proper as Natasha within her own context – post-graduate life in Washington, DC – she is a beacon of possibility, which is always tempting to those who feel stuck. 

I’m not originally from the district and choosing this place to live was one of my nuclear war moments. My fear of being stuck propelled me to rent a U-Haul, tow my Jeep, loop a shortlist of Parker Millsap’s most pensive, and chain smoke a few packs of American Spirits as I drove away from Montana in the summer of 2018. I landed in Deanwood, a neighborhood avoided by locals and unknown to most transplants, in just three days. And though I thought I left my last service industry job in downtown Missoula, my first job in DC was waiting tables. 

For eighteen months I worked ten hour shifts on my feet, serving brunches to the clean and sparkly while I smelled of fryer grease and my melting eyeliner deepened my dark circles. The twenty-four of my restaurant’s open hours also introduced me to the grave shift, which had me in league with nearly every bartender, bouncer, and insomniac in this city. So I think it goes to show that my experience of DC is a tad unconventional, in that it is far removed from the fantasy cultivated through primetime soapy FBI serials, catty arguments on CSPAN, and the field trips designed to dazzle eighth graders who love model UN. Instead I’ve always been surrounded by locals, their struggles and their strengths, and I found comfort in their authentic lives.

Elise reads to me as one of these people, because she’s just a girl who needed a job. And with this job of survival comes routine and intimacy with the patrons of her store, namely a newscaster named Dan, who buys a handle of gin at the same time every day. I had to laugh when reading this detail, because the first red flag for Elise about Dan should have been that Tanqueray. But I also sympathize, because I had once been oblivious to such semaphore when meeting incredibly energized men eating dinner alone at 3 AM, who when they looked at me didn’t see a person, but an opportunity for thrill.   

When Scalzo’s story begins Elise is reading War & Peace of all things, and she enjoys it, but not so much that she is saddened by ripping it in half when Dan reveals he never finished reading it himself. And it is this act of irregularity that solidifies his enamor with her – the charms that give him delight. He asks her out and they venture into the world irregular together and during this date there is a revelation that Dan, like Andrei, is flawed and unsatisfied with his life. 

Elise becomes Dan’s thrill, and she is humiliated by this reveal when he takes her to his country club. There she is exposed to those who have more than “survival” occupations. Unguarded and gaudy in her lime green dress adorned with a starfish, she is carelessly flaunted, not by some grand proclamation of Dan’s, but through his uncaring disregard as their irregularity is heightened in the Chevy Chase social scene. He’s made a statement with her, one she hasn’t consented to, and she is dismissed in this same icy regard.
Scalzo’s showing of these events through brief lines on her pages illustrates a muted self-aware feminine that I noticed in her flash fiction piece “All the Girls in France:” 

On Saturdays we had a babysitter while my mom went to the high school football games my dad coached. What a love story, those two. The babysitter invited all the kids in the neighborhood into our cellar to watch the black and white scary movies that came on after cartoons.

When my husband and I were house hunting, he’d check the cellar for me, if he came up looking serious, we’d leave.

This story also has few lines, and the dramas are dreams to the unaware, but the story tremors regardless, breathing with the truth we seek in fiction. It takes a skilled hand to know how to convey minute horror – restraint to accurately depict the exchanges we and our memories face every day, that inform the private being of Me and We. The struggle and triumph of fiction is the power that can be enacted, the release from bondage promised after held breath when we convey to page what we do not or cannot do in “real life.” 

Justice for Dan’s moral failure and quiet cruelty could have been a moment of therapeutic relief for both my teenaged and post-graduate self. Elise’s reaction could’ve rectified my distorted reflections of Natasha and Sophia. Her anger could’ve unleashed the protest of emotional abuses that I’ve held back in my own quivering rib cage – I certainly craved this. Kill him, I thought. Scream at him. Cut him below the knees. Choose WAR. But Scalzo’s Elise doesn’t do that, sure, she bites back a little, displaying some fine auteurial reclamation of the moment when vandalizing a car with typographic panache, but the sun sets on the day and her anger. When she next sees Dan, at their usual hour and place, he surprises her, and me, which concludes the story in a way I never predicted. Dan apologizes, and the simple words of “I’m sorry” reveal Dan’s soul to Elise.

This course of action is an example of what Prince Andrei proselytizes to himself about – embodying divine love, and Scalzo shows that this kind of love is not reserved for the ideal, but rather for the real. Her Elise grants forgiveness, accepting the mundane of Dan. He has no ethereal glow; he’s just a person seeking to numb the existential and hollow. His apology goes to show that there is hope and humility present, and that even the people of DC, who are surrounded by monuments, history, and myths of grandeur, have personal foibles and internal dramas, sometimes of Russian epic proportions.

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To learn more about Laura Scalzo's work, visit her website.