What is love without a letter?
Pop scientist Carl Sagan and other human zoologists have lately been reminding us of how closely we are related to our cousins the animals, complete to courtship and mating rituals and the methodology employed in, er, bringing love to fruition.
But there is an important difference between the species that far transcends even religious notions of the human ”soul”:
Animals can`t write love letters, and there is no more enduring and endearing achievement of human life and civilization than that.
According to Chicago-born Duke University English professor Cathy Davidson, one of the nation`s foremost authorities on the subject, love letters are as old as history and language itself. Sappho of Greek legend and several of the Roman emperors wrote terrific love letters. Napoleon and Henry VIII were magnificent practitioners of the art, though the latter`s letters were often received with great trepidation.
Passion is fleeting, even that ennobled by the purplest prose, and with Henry, parting was not always such sweet sorrow, as ladies of his troth were sometimes compelled to leave behind their heads.
The telephone, and later the computer, have more or less wiped out letter writing as a social attainment, but love letters have handily survived the advent of the high-tech age, and even now are flourishing
If love letters have survived as a form of expression, their quality has much diminished. According to Davidson, the general decline of genteel discourse and civility in modern times and the advent of high-tech shorthand have combined to produce a terser form of pitched woo. She said that the computerized love letter services write their messages-for-hire in something approximating computerese. Technology has also given rise to such discourtesy as the ”Dear John” letter left recorded on the rejected swain`s telephone answering machine.
”But writers will always be the bastion,” she said, noting, for example, that a contemporary love letter by author John Cheever (recipient and his or her gender unknown) bears good comparison with the elegant love prose of yore. It says in part:
”You seemed to lift from my shoulders an aloneness that I was happy to lose … I wanted only that you be there; that if I woke in the night and asked for you I would hear your voice.”
Some of this adversity to love-letter-writing, Davidson notes, is attributable to the invention of Hallmark greeting cards, whose vast inventory of pre-manufactured sentiment provides the perfect bon mot for every emotional occasion. But developments in electronics have played a role as well.
”We now have what you might call the `love fax,` ” said Davidson, author of a just published compendium of great love letters called ”The Book of Love” (Pocket Books, $22).
”There are also companies now that specialize in computerized love letters for specific occasions,” she said. ”With one, Love Letters, Inc., you might choose letter No. 32, which begins, `I saw you across a crowded room.` It`s for someone you`ve seen but haven`t met yet. They`ll personalize it in beautiful calligraphy and deliver it wrapped in a lovely ribbon.
”Another company will transmit a love letter for you to your beloved`s computer E-Mail.”
Both these firms, she added, perhaps unnecessarily, ”are in L.A.”
Sing in exaltation
It promises to be a growth industry, and why not? Whether beautifully scripted on fragrantly scented paper, or flashing on your computer terminal`s green screen, love letters are what elevate the state of being in love from simple lust and physical satisfaction to something exalted. They serve to perfect that state, define it and, in a sense, complete it. And, like love itself, they transform both author and addressee into special beings.
”The love letter is the surrogate for the missing self,” said Davidson. ”We can call it literal sex. As with all other varieties, technique is essential. A love letter can`t just mean but also has to be. In a very real sense, every lover is a poet and every poet a lover.”
Chimpanzees and other of nature`s vast treasury of creatures are, to be sure, able to duplicate the feats of Madonna and her friends in her new picture book ”Sex”-as one frisky little pup amply demonstrates in one of Madonna`s more poignant tableaux. But no chimp (not to speak of rock star)
could ever have penned the following lines:
”Farewell for to-night (sic), my dearest-my soul`s bride! Oh, my heart is thirsty for your kisses; they are the dew which should restore its freshness every night, when the hot sunshiny day has parched it. Kiss me in your dreams; and perhaps my heart will feel it.”
These were written by Nathaniel Hawthorne to his wife, Sophia. All who watched the PBS series ”The Civil War” must know by heart the words writ by Union officer Sullivan Ballou to his Sarah on the eve of battle:
”If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I loved you, nor that when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name . . . O, Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.”
Soldiers have perforce been indefatigable love letter writers because of their frequent and long absences from home-and separation from one`s beloved is a requisite condition for love letter writing.
Love letters lost?
In fact, the absence of love letters during prolonged separations can bank the embers of ardor quite quickly. As Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to his Josephine from the Italian front in 1796:
”I don`t love you, not at all; on the contrary, I detest you- You`re a naughty, gawky, foolish Cinderella. You never write me; you don`t love your husband; you know what pleasure your letters give him, and yet you haven`t written him six lines, dashed off casually!”
Yet he ended this missive with: ”I hope before long to crush you in my arms and cover you with a million kisses burning as though beneath the equator.”
Napoleon`s embers took a lot of banking.
Natural talents
Davidson`s book concentrates on smitten and besotted writers, because, being professionals, they wrote the best love letters.
”When painters fall in love, they produce paintings,” she said.
”Writers write. I think some of them fell in love just so they could write letters.”
Love letters have allowed many authors a freedom of expression they could not find in the strict disciplines of novel or poetry writing. Macho Ernest Hemingway, whose tight, minimalist prose was often painfully abrupt, was far more rhapsodic when he turned letter-writing swain, as in this 1944 wartime letter to his fourth wife, Mary:
”I am just happy and purring like an old jungle beast because I love you and you love me. I hope you were quite serous (sic) Pickle because I am as committed as an armoured column in a narrow defile . . . I am committed horse, foot, and guns . . . in favour of you sitting up straight in bed lovelier than any figure head on the finest, tallest ship that ever drew on canvas or heeled over to a wind; and in favour (sic) of kindness, permanence, loveing (sic)
each other and fine loveing (sic) nights, and days, in bed. Pickle I love you very much and am your partner, friend, and true love.”
Even crusty, curmudgeonly H.L. Mencken turned quite something else when writing to his wife, Sara:
”Friend Sary, I miss you like hell … If you were at hand I should probably risk your yells by trying to neck you. I have been practicing on a fat woman. When we meet you will see some technique. So beware again! Ich kuss die Hand!”
Best and worst
Wow. Davidson`s examples of perhaps the finest love letters ever written curiously enough stemmed from two same-sex romances:
Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf:
”I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia.”
Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas:
”Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses.”
Some of the worst love letters ever penned also came from writers, Davidson noted. Dostoyevsky`s love letters were as drearily despondent and anguished as his novels:
”Disaster isn`t really a reason for despair . . . Remember, too, Anya, that there are misfortunes that carry their own punishment.”
Like Dostoyevsky`s, Jazz Age romantic F. Scott Fitzgerald`s love letters invariably contained complaints about money. When his wife, Zelda, wrote him one of her impassioned, full-of-self-destruction love letters, he`d steal the lines for use in his novels.
The most truly worst love letters ever written, though, stemmed from the
”Romance of the Century” between England`s Edward VIII and American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson, later the Duchess of Windsor.
Edward (familiarly called David) to Wallis in 1936:
”Your eanum dawg and your David thank for the Buick ride and say we are missing you terribly and holding you very tight indeed. We will phone when we land and will be awaiting your call after the opera. More and more always sweetheart.”
Yecchh.
Bravo, bravo!
Davidson stresses that love letters are a form of performance as prepared and perfected as any actor`s. They are also of necessity fantasies, elevating even ordinary movie and popcorn romances from last-row hand-holding and smooches to something ideal and beatific. They compensate for physical deficiencies, as in overnosed Cyrano de Bergerac`s lyrical paeans to Roxanne, and serve as a substitute for physical love rendered impossible by distance or, in the legendary case of Pierre Abelard and Heloise (he was emasculated by thugs sent by her guardian), structural lack.
Anais Nin and Henry Miller suffered no structural lacks. When they were finished with their sweaty romps, they`d hurry home to write about what had happened. Miller wrote:
”You invite me to go ahead, be myself, venture anything. I adore you for that … You will forgive me, I hope-the blood on your face kept reminding me of the garden scene in L`Age d`Or and I was growing frantic and hysterical.” Love letters, alas, not only have a dark side, but a downside.
”They speak of deceit, betrayal, abandonment-all of the horrible things people do to each other when they`re in love,” Davidson said.
Most painful of these, of course, is the Dear John/Dear Jane letter, to which a tearful chapter of Davidson`s book is devoted.
Agnes von Kurowsky (who inspired the nurse in ”A Farewell to Arms”) to Hemingway:
”I am writing this late at night after a long think by myself, & I am afraid it is going to hurt you, but, I`m sure it won`t harm you permanently.” Hah.
Wrote Chicago`s Nelson Algren to Simone de Beauvoir:
”One can still have the same feelings for someone and still not allow them to rule and disturb one`s life.”
Double hah.
About the author
Davidson, who has been happily married for so long she is reluctant to divulge the number of her next anniversary, grew up on Chicago`s North Side and in Mount Prospect and got her degrees at Elmhurst College, the State University of New York and the University of Chicago, where she met her husband.
Their courtship, interestingly, did not include love letters.
”It was sort of a hippie thing,” she said. ”We were married 10 days after we met and any love letters probably wouldn`t have been delivered in time.”
But that, of course, was in the days before the love fax. –
