Men, it would seem, are all alike. “The officer who will bring you this letter reminds me for the fourth time that he must leave. How he is pressing. He is abandoning no doubt some other unfortunate woman in this country.” The chance to scatter animadversions like this is an incidental pleasure available in the midst of misery. Mariana admits to a certain enjoyment of romantic martyrdom (“I find myself rather attached to the unhappiness caused by you alone”), enough to exhibit the seventeenth century’s delight in paradox: “love me always and make me suffer even greater woes.” She rather likes the idea of other women loving Chamilly, at least under certain circumstances: “I think I would not be angry if affections found in others could, in some way, justify my own, and I would like that all the women of France found you charming, that none be charmed, and that none please you.” She’ll go a step further, in fact: she can sometimes even imagine herself serving “the one you love.” Chamilly once told her that, pre-Portugal, there had been someone else. Has that woman, she wonders, come back into the picture? Getting news like that might have a healthful shock-effect: “send me her portrait with a few of her letters, and write me all that she tells you.”
But Mariana doesn’t really want to be jolted out of her suffering. Indeed, in contrast to it, she pities Chamilly’s “indifference;” she’s glad that he “seduced” her, because she “could not live without the joy I am discovering of loving you amidst a thousand sorrows.” The worst fate, she decides, would be to forget him.
Her health deteriorates inside the walls of “this miserable cloister,” which she tells him has been a prison to her since she was a girl. Even the most severe nuns “have pity on my state” and are “touched by my love.” But they also believe she’s mad. For them, in return, she feels only scorn. Chamilly is her vocation now (“I am resolved to worship you all my life”), and she might as well keep practicing it.
Mariana does not compose her letters within any writerly structure—how could she, when her mood must swing from rage to rapture and back in the course of a paragraph? Piercing the pages with interjections (“Ah!” “Ho!” “Forgive me!”), she worries that Chamilly will be put off by the length of what she sends. She faints as she finishes one letter, and wishes, as she completes another, that she could fall into Chamilly’s arms the way the letter will.
Inevitably, she will scold: “why have you not written to me!” In fact, Chamilly does write, but for the most part unsatisfactorily, “only icy letters, full of repetitions—half the paper is empty, and I can see that you are dying to have them finished.” We don’t have his side of the correspondence, but one feels safe in saying that its reception depended less on its matter than on Mariana’s mood. A month or two before her just-quoted complaint about his half-heartedness, some of his words drove their recipient toward an ecstatic convulsion:
Your last letter reduced [my heart] to a peculiar state: its pounding was so extreme it made, so it seemed, efforts to leave my body and go find you; I was so overcome by all these violent emotions that I remained abandoned by my senses for more than three hours; I stopped myself from returning to a life I must lose since I cannot keep it for you; at last, despite myself, I saw light.
But more often Chamilly’s letters, with their “ridiculous civilities,” are poor, wet kindling for a mighty emotional machine that begs to be stoked. In June 1668, Mariana decides that she will keep only two of them; she will return the rest and stop writing any more herself. With new backbone and clarity, she puts to Chamilly a declarative question: “Am I obliged to provide you with an exact account of all my varied emotions?” The greatest argument against the letters’ authenticity may be that this letter she says will be her last turns out to be just that; silence is not, after all, the sort of pledge that obsessive lovers are generally able to keep.
But even if she’s henceforth able to hold her tongue, what about the words she’s already committed to paper? “Would you not be very cruel,” she asks Chamilly, “to use my despair so as to render yourself more engaging, and to have it known that you aroused the greatest passion in the world?” What if he shows the letters to others, or even publishes them?
According to a recent book by Miriam Cyr, most believers in Mariana’s authorship have decided that the letters began to circulate in Paris when, home in France once more, the lionized Chamilly was invited to the salon of the marquise de Sablé: “guilty of a momentary lapse in moral rectitude, [he] flaunted the letters in an effort to shine.” Cyr is unable to bear the thought of even this much caddishness, and she constructs an alternative, exculpatory explanation for the surfacing of the correspondence—a theory, alas, as implausible as it is intricate.
Most scholars believe that Mariana may have existed but that her letters were actually the creation of Gabriel Joseph de La Vergne, the comte de Guilleragues, who would have known enough about Chamilly’s Portuguese escapade to fabricate the letters, which he published early in 1669, while Chamilly was away on a different, this time ill-fated, military campaign, against the Turks. That little book, “small enough to be concealed by a fan,” writes Cyr, made a spectacular debut, and its contents have never quite stopped speaking since. The letters intrigued Rousseau (who thought their genuine understanding of passion argued for a male author), moved Gladstone and may even have influenced the titular disguise that Elizabeth Barrett Browning gave to her Sonnets from the Portuguese. (Sonnets from the Bosnian, an earlier choice, was discarded.)
Publication of the letters led to an investigation of the convent in Beja and ultimately much stricter rules governing visits. Mariana would continue to live there—losing two elections to become the abbess—until her death at the age of eighty-three. Chamilly took for his wife a clever but ugly woman who nursed the wounds he suffered against the Dutch in 1676. He lived to be seventy-nine and, according to Cyr, whatever may be said of him from the letters, “never denied his affair with Mariana.”
AFTER SOME LONG-LOST CORRESPONDENCE between William Wordsworth and his wife was sold at Sotheby’s in 1977, the letters’ designated editor, Beth Darlington, even while arguing the case for their publication, could not resist quoting Oscar Wilde’s sonnet “On the Sale by Auction of Keats’ Love Letters”:
These are the letters which Endymion wrote
To one he loved in secret and apart,
And now the brawlers of the auction-mart
Bargain and bid for each tear-blotted note,
Aye! for each separate pulse of passion quote
The merchant’s price! I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart,
That small and sickly eyes may glare or gloat.
The appeal of letters as real property—tactile couriers of a lover’s very DNA—can scarcely be denied, and certainly not to a third party with a platinum Visa.
But William and Mary Wordsworth did not, in their letters or lives, love “secret and apart,” and the highest bidder on their exchange was buying a record of marital devotion, not illicit passion. Wordsworth’s famous involvement with his French mistress, Annette Vallon, who bore his daughter, was really just a premarital interruption to the attachment he and Mary Hutchinson had begun as children. As husband and wife, their letters were occasioned by separations that came when Wordsworth traveled on personal and literary business. Lengthy and news-filled, the correspondence chronicles the doings of two people accustomed to sharing all dailiness, but it also allows the future poet laureate to be a player in an epistolary genre more associated with other more reckless Romantics: “Fail not to write to me with out reserve,” he implores Mary on July 22, 1810; “never have I been able to receive such a Letter from you, let me not then be disappointed, but give me your heart that I may kiss the words a thousand times!” While writing this, he is staying at his sister-in-law’s and is expected to share the contents of Mary’s letters; but as he reminds his wife, “I need only read parts to the rest of the family.”
Startled by her husband’s request—“
it was so unexpected—so new a thing to see the breathing of thy inmost heart upon paper that I was quite overpowered”—Mary tries rising to the amorous occasion but doesn’t quite make it, producing instead a sort of domestic diary, full of tidings about the new curate, her small son’s love of string, the children’s health and her own.
Even so, happy to know that she was moved by his plea for a love letter, Wordsworth enlarges in his next dispatch upon the emotional vista he sees before them: “a deep affection is not uncommon in married life, yet I am confident that a lively, gushing, thought-employing, spirit-stirring, passion of love is very rare.” There’s no reason their letters can’t have it all. And yet, however heated up he may now be, he gives Mary his news before his feelings, because he has only an hour in which to write, and fears that his emotions, if put before the “facts,” will devour the entire time. It is only before rushing to catch the post that he manages some excited vocative (“O Mary I love you with a passion of love which grows till I tremble to think of its strength”) and a line that recalls one of his most famous verses: “thus did I feed on the thought of bliss that might have been.” He also reports a recurring fantasy of sexual frustration: since they parted he has “ten thousand times” thought of the mouth pain she had been experiencing, and has “fancied that I was caressing thee, and thou couldst not meet me with kindred delight and rapture from the interruption of this distressing pain.”
Three days later, Mary, still occupied with the responsibilities of home, writes of her annoyance with the servants and about her attempts to cure their daughter of left-handedness. She also makes fun of her own domesticated appearance: “I believe the fine folks at the church style fancy as I pass with the Baby in my Arms that I am a shabby Nurse Maid at the great house.” The discomfort that letter writing causes her, its disruption of her domestic routine, is different and more easily alleviated than the trouble endured by stock epistolary lovers, whose plaintively passionate letters tend to inflame the condition they are seeking to quench.
Wordsworth’s later paean to marital affection—“What rapture is … a kiss from a lip of the wife & mother, even if time have somewhat impaired the freshness of her virgin beauties”—is, as presents go, more on the order of a flannel nightgown than black lingerie, but its comfort to a wife unused to her husband’s absence was probably considerable. By the time Mary reaches middle age, conscious of her missing teeth and graying hair, she assures her husband that one of his letters has even occasioned an improvement in her looks and apologizes for what she sends in return: “pray do not measure my love by my letters,” she asks; they would be longer but for the demands of her noisy children.
From London in 1812, Wordsworth’s unfavorable comments on the manners of Lady Davy—“All this has originated in affectation, but she now does without knowing what she is doing”—remind a reader, as much as anything, of the poet’s own future pomposity. But for the moment, still in his early forties, he can yet send Mary spontaneous accounts of life in the capital, whose bustle forces him to rise early if he’s going to get his letters written. We hear of such diverse matters as the prime minister’s assassination; a young Lord Byron “who is now the rage;” and the Lambs: “Charles seems to think the dawn of [his sister’s] recovery is at hand.” (Lamb, by the way, saves his friend money through the time-honored means of abusing the office mail: he can receive letters for Wordsworth at the East India House without having to pay postage due.)
From the time of his and Mary’s first separation, Wordsworth makes plans to put their letters “side by side as a bequest for the survivor of us,” and while he understands the maternal pressures that keep Mary from writing at the length and pitch he would like, he proposes a scheme by which she might do better: “Surely by taking a little pocket book You may have a Letter going forward and may finish it by snatches, at those intervals when you are resting. I was half hurt when you said that you would ‘write if you can.’ Can there be a doubt that you may.”
What Mary’s letters do convey is the extent to which our so-called distractions are really the warp and woof of life. “I am sitting in thy study,” she writes to her husband on a Saturday night in August of 1810. The “rain beats against the window—the fire is flapping & the Baby in the Cradle upon the Sofa, nestling about warning me that he will presently awake, but all these quiet sounds are disturbed by a restless, noisy, chirping, dying (I am afraid) chick that is within the Fender & which the children left to my care therefore I have not the heart to dismiss it.” We are most essentially ourselves when frantic and fidgety; we worry more about whether and how soon our letters will arrive than about what they have to say: “your former letter was written on a Saturday & it came by Wednesday’s post this by Friday’s,” Mary writes her husband, trying with unintentionally comic complexity to sort things out. “Yet I cannot but think that this was written on Saturday likewise, because you say this day 3 weeks in the one, & this day fortnight in the other—without mentioning that you have departed from your intention—Yet I do not positively expect you so soon as tomorrow week, anxious as I am to have you here, therefore I shall send off this letter to Hindwell—had I been confident I should have directed to Mr. Crump’s.” The misnamed poste restante, always one step behind or ahead of where it should be, is perhaps the most perfect literary projection of ourselves.
HER FAMOUS FICTIONAL INCARNATION strides into Orlando “slicing at the head of a Moor.” In her actual sex and century, Vita Sackville-West swept over the land like some fifth season, harvesting sensations as soon as the earth could thrust them up. On May 29, 1926, her letter to “darling Virginia” has her shingling her hair, felling an oak, delivering puppies, and reading a lover’s book, “propped open by a fork,” at the dinner table. To Virginia Woolf, Vita was “all fire and legs and beautiful plunging ways like a young horse.” They met in 1922, became lovers a few years after that and then counted themselves among those lucky people who see eros burn itself into devotion instead of recrimination.
Each of their marriages is by now a legend of accommodation. Leonard Woolf put his talent at the service of his wife’s genius, and Vita’s husband, Harold Nicolson, finally saw no reason why his own homosexuality or his wife’s should preclude their having the satisfactions of marriage and family. The frequent separations brought on by his diplomatic career were described by Vita as genuine “matrimonial miseries”—even if the night prior to lamenting these separations to Virginia she had been enjoying a German revue in which “two ravishing young women sing a frankly Lesbian song.”
What do these two women, Vita and Virginia, want from each other?
For Vita there is the excitement of talking to her imaginative superior: “I don’t know whether to be dejected or encouraged when I read the works of Virginia Woolf. Dejected because I shall never be able to write like that, or encouraged because somebody else can?” Vita can flatter her “gentle genius” back to the physical health and creative confidence that Virginia Woolf is always losing. Mrs. Dalloway, she declares, makes it “unnecessary ever to go to London again, for the whole of London in June is in your first score of pages.” Where Woolf’s books are experimental, diaphanous, endlessly flinging metaphors, Vita’s poems and novels are sturdy productions of regular metrics and reliable narration that make a good deal of money for the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. As an artist, she was never in the race with Virginia Woolf. That she never tried to be is only one of the indicators of healthy self-awareness found in her letters.
To Virginia, Vita is the “scandalous ruffian” who can scold and soothe her childlike anxieties, who can bring her reports from realms that she might imagine but which Vita, with her aristocratic birthright and natural gumption, will actually maraud. Who else can tell her of embassy parties in Teheran and Berlin (“gold plate in rivers down the table”); or about pouring bowls of the shah’s crown jewels through her fingers (“We came away shaking the pearls out of our shoes”)? A train crossing the Russian steppes is stuffy: “So,”
Vita writes, “I have smashed the window with a corkscrew, and a thin shrill pencil of frozen air rushes in reviving us.” Vita treats inanimate objects as if they are the lower orders, and to a correspondent for whom shopping for a dress was social torture, these reports must have been dazzling. Vita remains Virginia’s standard of “real-womanliness,” whether she’s stealing men’s wives, sending sons to Eton, or supervising a Boy Scout jamboree at the family estate. She brings adventures home like Othello, and they are incomplete until Virginia can hear the news: “Oh Christ, how much I always want to see you when life becomes exciting.” For her part, Virginia seizes what she calls “eunuch” pleasures: “Here in my cave I see lots of things you blazing beauties make invisible by the light of your own glory.”
All love survives and imperils itself by manipulation. We try to regulate our lovers’ psychologies, reposition their caresses. We even prescribe their epistolary styles. In 1929, Vita cries in mock exasperation: “You said I was to write an intimate letter, and this is the result!” But she can give her own stylistic orders: “Put ‘honey’ when you write.” In fact, it is the voice of power, loving and authoritative, that is her best note. On January 11, 1926, she writes to an ailing Virginia: “I don’t care a damn, not a little row of pins, whether I catch it [influenza] or not; I’d travel all the way to Egypt with the fever heavy upon me sooner than not see you.” Among the greatest pleasures provided by their two decades’ worth of letters is the chance to recall every love affair’s keenest intoxication—the thrill of hearing the thing you want insisting that you take it.
Virginia and Vita ought to remind us of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas—genius pursuing aristocratic beauty; minor talent feeding off greater gifts—but they don’t. How much less sad, how utterly unsordid, is these women’s story. Early in the relationship, Vita writes to Harold: “I love Mrs. Woolf with a sick passion.” But that wasn’t really the case on either side. Love was never allowed to overwhelm work, marriage or self-protection. Vita kept her distance from the alien territory of Bloomsbury, and Virginia did what she could to minimize the inevitable rejection: “But you dont see, donkey West, that you’ll be tired of me one of these days (I’m so much older) and so I have to take my little precautions.”
Yours Ever Page 18