Ta Ta Lovy Dovy!

T.T.L.V. and # # #

Taylor writes T.T.L.V. and leaves several kisses at the 
bottom of his letter to Fanny in August 1889.

Maybe you noticed on that last blog introducing Taylor and Fanny, the "T.T.L.V." written at the bottom of Taylor's photograph.  Nobody really knew what that stood for.  We could figure out the "T.H." (Taylor Holt" and the "F.H.K." (Fanny Huckstep Kyle), but who or what was T.T.L.V.?  

I know I've already said that these were mush love letters, but, really...you have no idea. They are REALLY MUSHY LOVE LETTERS.  Some are a single page, front and back, with nothing but mushy love.  It's sweet.  And a little ooky.  This is the Victorian era, after all - a time of "Mother Hubbard Dresses" - high necks, shapeless bags, basically - and the necessity of having a chaperone.  Taylor and Fanny met at a church social.  They were in Leadville, Colorado, which - at the time - had a lot of saloons, a fancy theater, and could be quite a rough place. But, they courted properly. Don't get me wrong, when I say "mushy," I don't mean x-rated or anything, just a lot of wanting to see each other, talk to each other and, hold and kiss each other.  

Letter from Taylor to "My own Dearie" (Fanny Kyle), dated 17 August 1889.

I don't know who coined the phrase (**update! see last paragraph) that goes along with the initials, T.T.L.V., but they both write it - often more than once - on each and every letter they send.  It's actually Taylor that is the most romantic of the two.  He is the one who is the author of the letter above, written from Leadville on August 17, 1889.  Fanny had left Leadville just over two months prior, on June 12, so they're at the very beginning of their 11-month separation from each other.  This particular letter isn't long - just one page, front and back - which isn't surprising since he didn't start writing until 10:00 at night, after a long day of working at the smelter, and then doing some shopping, which kept him in town later than usual. 

In response to a "blue" letter he had received from Fanny, he wrote, "I have such an unutterable longing to be with you so that I can kiss away every trace of sorrow and gloom." That's what the # marks are.  Kisses.  In one letter, he inserts #s all through the letter, randomly in the middle of a sentence, above a sentence, EVERYWHERE. He is pretty much constantly trying to reassure Fanny that he does indeed love her, which she just can't seem to believe.  In every letter. Without fail.  

That T.T.L.V., though - I'd see it on a letter as I was transcribing it, and I would dutifully include it in the transcription, but it wasn't until I got to a letter from Taylor, dated 29 June 1889, that I found out what it meant! T.T.L.V. is actually either a badly translated hodge-podge of French and Spanish OR maybe a badly translated Latin phrase meaning, roughly, "I will love you all my life." Mush.  Complete and utter MUSH. And it's wonderful.  They were adorable. Or at least Taylor was; Fanny is a little bit more complicated and needy - she seems very worried that Taylor will realize his mistake and break off the engagement, and it shows up in a lot of the letters (can you tell that will be a future blog?). But she  uses T.T.L.V. and mushy lines in her letters as well - just interpsersed with a lot of low-self-confidence.

This letter from Taylor has Taїmeraї Touta La Vida written across the entire second page of the letter.

Anyhow, they both sometimes wrote out T.T.L.V., and it stands for "Taїmeraї Touta La Vida."  Which, if you put it into Google Translate comes up with nothing for the first word (though possibly Maori) and the rest as Haitian Creole for "all his life."  If you change things up just a bit, like adding an apostrophe and taking the diacritic signs off the i's in Taїmeraї, you are left with T'aimerais or "would love you." That leaves the rest a hodge-podge: Touta is probably misspelled French, Toute, meaning all and La Vida is Spanish for life.  Now, maybe some foreign language specialist or linguistic expert will tell me that they didn't get it wrong - after all, language evolves and maybe they were right.  

How do I know I've got it right, you ask?  Good question: Because Taylor translated it for me in one of his letters. It was definitely a secret code between the two of them. The best translation, though, might come from his mother, Aurelia "Lelia" Grimes Holt. In his letters, he refers to her as "the Aged P" (I guess that will be another blog post, eh?) and in this one, from September 1889, she was apparently reading over his shoulder as he wrote and was trying to guess what T.T.L.V stood for, guessing, "ta ta lovy dovy" (even though that would be T.T.L.D). I love that woman! She sounds delightful.  I think that's a good place to stop.  Ta Ta, Lovy Dovy!

**Well, I have to update this post because I've just been transcribing a letter written by Fanny on 23 September 1889, in which she asks Taylor, "Who wrote 'T.T.L.V.' in the corner or Mr. Purnells* note. Does he know about that? What did you tell him for? I thought that was our particular secret. You never told anybody about my writing that in your notebook before you told me you loved me, did you?"  So - now I know that it came from Fanny and she secretly wrote it in his notebook early in their courtship.  Sigh. 

* Mr. Purnell is Elisha Littleton Purnell, the soon-to-be-husband of Taylor's aunt, Nira Grimes. It was supposedly Elisha (whom Taylor calls "Purnie") that introduced Fanny to Taylor.