With Edith making visits to the White House, and Wilson’s orchid deliveries following her home, even people well outside his circle soon knew something was afoot. Continuing the letters was a substitute for going out in public together, and Wilson, who in drafts of some official correspondence used a shorthand comprehensible only to himself and his White House stenographer, must have enjoyed the subterfuge. As with Chekhov and Olga Knipper, the correspondence is one of its own main themes. In prose as purple as her writing case, Edith asks the president if he can feel her letter “throb and beat” as he holds it. She tells him to “let it nestle” close to his heart, leaving “no room between for loneliness or sadness.” One night in August she lets him know that the pencilled letter she’ll be sending from Geneva, New York, is being written in bed. Realizing it’s “absurd,” Wilson sends a letter that may be traveling to her on the same train he’ll be taking himself.
From the beginning, he wants Edith’s opinions. His troubles with his secretary of state become an early bond between them, and her tough line (“Hurrah! Old Bryan is out!”) brings to the contemporary reader’s mind that other presidential second wife, Nancy Reagan. “You are so sweet in your judgments of people and I am so radical,” Edith will say after calling Roosevelt a “villain.” Wilson must remind her how much he relies on his chief secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, even though Tumulty isn’t her idea of a gentleman.
After a couple of months, Wilson begins sending state papers along with his letters (“By the way, do not trouble to return any of the documents I send, Sweetheart, unless I specifically indicate that I should like to have them back”). He annotates them with explanations, for which Edith professes gratitude (“You are a dear person to take the time to write little sentences on each of the papers you send me”). Neither one knew that this would be training for the year and a half she would serve, in the estimation of some, as the nation’s first woman president. Back in 1915, she merely loved holding one of Wilson’s hands “while with the other [he turned] the pages of history.”
Midway through one letter written to Edith on a Saturday night in August, Wilson provides an unforgettable glimpse of his presidential self: “I got back to the house before the band concert on the South Lawn was over and heard, I fancy, the greater part of the program as I sat writing at my desk. At the end, when they played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ I stood up all alone here by my table at attention and had unutterable thoughts about my custody of the traditions and the present honor of that banner. I could hardly hold the tears back! And then, the loneliness!” He had always been a victim of the high achiever’s fraud complex, writing his first wife, thirty years before, that “Complete success, such as I have had at [Johns] Hopkins, has the odd effect … of humiliating rather than exalting me.” Later he saw himself as only “the (temporarily) beloved President of 100 million people.”
In October of 1915, with his dependence on Edith so evident, and the gossip so embarrassing (one Washington paper, excitedly dropping a syllable, reported that the president had spent an evening “entering” Mrs. Galt at the theatre), the official announcement of their engagement must have come as a relief to anyone in the know. At that point a direct phone line was run between the White House and Edith’s Twentieth Street home, where they were married on December 18. As was not the case with Wilson’s first marriage, the letters now ceased, Edith’s physical proximity more than compensating for whatever pleasures the two of them might have kept supplying each other on paper.
After five years in the White House (together, in 1918, they dedicated the first air-mail service), they moved to their own state-of-the-art house on S Street, which Edith had adapted to the president’s infirmities. It is now open to the public as a relic of the Wilsons’ brief life there together, and of Edith’s subsequent forty years alone. The ermine cape she wore to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration is upstairs, and on the piano in the second-floor library, one can find sheet music for the song that Colonel Starling of the Secret Service overheard Woodrow Wilson, in top hat and pince-nez, singing to himself on his wedding day: “Oh, you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll!”
FOR A NUMBER OF DECADES the duchess of Windsor had the distinction of being simultaneously the world’s most prominent socialite and its most notable outcast. Reviled by a royal family that owed its throne to her, she put her best face-lift forward at a thousand parties during her exile with the little man who’d given up his crown for her. A volume of their letters, published as she wished after her death in 1986, turned out to be something of an apologia. In particular, she wanted it known that, far from having tried to grab a crown for herself, “the twice-divorced Mrs. Simpson” (as she was always called) did everything she could to make Edward VIII renounce her instead of the throne in December 1936.
Although called Wallis and Edward, the volume contains not only letters between the duke and duchess but also ones from Wallis to her aunt Bessie Merryman of Baltimore. This proves a blessing. For one thing, it is through these postings to Aunt Bessie that we get to hear how everything happened. For another, those letters from the duke to the duchess that are included contain such treacly nonsense (well beyond the usual infantilism of billets-doux) that a reader couldn’t stomach many more of them.
“Was Wallis socially ambitious?” wonders Michael Bloch, editor of the correspondence. One might as well ask if the present queen likes horses and corgis. But was Mrs. Simpson’s specific ambition, from the get-go, to land the Prince of Wales? Bloch says that their first meeting came about “through accident rather than design,” though shortly after it occurred, in 1931, Wallis did write to Aunt Bessie that “it was quite an experience and as I’ve had my mind made up to meet him ever since I’ve been here [in London] I feel relieved.”
It seems clear that she didn’t entertain the idea of actually marrying him. She continued to see the good sense in her comfortable, passionless marriage to businessman Ernest Simpson, even long after the prince had come to depend on her for constant attention (“this man is exhausting,” she informs Bessie) as well as marching orders. She juggled things; and Ernest didn’t slam the door until early 1935.
However shallow, Wallis Simpson was no fool; that was always clear, and her letters make it more so. Cautioned by memories of the “flat where mother had the café and was forever working herself to death to give me things,” she shows no desire to pursue an affair that will end in her own penniless notoriety. She thinks of her liaison with the prince as temporary grandeur; she savors his notice and hoards her press clippings.
It is he who won’t take no for an answer. At the time of the abdication crisis, with her mail full of insults and death threats, the prince insists she go through with her divorce from Simpson and marry him instead. The abdication leaves him somewhat bewildered, but eleven days after it’s done, he writes Wallis that he is “really happy for the very first time in [his] life.”
A reader of their letters has no reason to doubt it. The prince can only be described as besotted. Never a deep thinker (he liked jigsaw puzzles and needlepoint and standing on his head), he writes Wallis notes that have him reveling in his own dependence. He refers to the two of them as WE (Wallis and Edward) and seems to find this coinage the acronym of the age, using it constantly, along with their private word “eanum” (meaning puny or pathetic). A typical example of his epistolary prose: “Your lovely New Year message helped a boy a lot in his lonely drowsy and he was feeling sad. Give Mary [Wallis’s maid] an eanum note for me to keep until WE can be alone together again.”
The prince (and for eleven months king) comes off in these letters as His Royal Ickiness, unable during his brief reign and after to perceive how Wallis really needs to give him a dose of Lady Macbeth. After true humiliations have been heaped upon his exiled head, it is she who urges him to fight back against Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (“You cannot allow that man to finish you”) as well as the new king and queen: “I blame it all on the wife [the eventual Queen Mum]—wh
o hates us both.” But in the months following the abdication, moved by the full realization of what he has given up for her, Wallis lets her affectionate mothering bloom into something that looks like real love.
From the start, her letters are a huge contrast to his. True, she is preoccupied with money, clothes and parties, and on occasion shows Bessie a hint of Marie Antoinette: “The Hunger Marchers arrive in London tomorrow,” she writes in February 1934, “so we are going to the country in time for dinner.” But she is acute and amusing, too. Early in the affair, she tells her aunt: “The English would prefer that he marry a Duke’s daughter to one of the mangy foreign princesses left.”
The collection ends with the duke and duchess’s wedding on June 3, 1937—a good place to call a halt. For years they remained more or less devoted to each other but to little else of consequence. In January 1937, the duchess writes that “whatever happens we will make something of our lives,” but it’s hard to see what, if anything, that turned out to be. In the end, one has to agree with those who have said that her chief public service was to take her husband out of the line of succession. Being king of England is a pretty eanum job these days, but his own letters make a good case for thinking that Mr. David Windsor wouldn’t have been up to it.
THE SUPPOSED BLINDNESS of love has always been a measure of its irrational intensity and even nobility. In its purest form, love fails to notice physical appearance, social obstacles, or anything but love itself. To fit it with lenses would be to cure and thereby kill it. By contrast, except for the “deaf ears” upon which the pleas of an unsuccessful suitor may fall, deafness rarely provides metaphors for romance. And yet it is within the surrounding silence of actual deafness that Eva Weintrobe and Morris Davis, an English seamstress and a tailor, conducted a flinty and spirited epistolary courtship during the late 1930s.
Thirteen years older than Eva, Morris, at thirty-eight, has just returned to England from a decade in New York when he meets her at the Warrington Deaf Club in Liverpool in the summer of 1936. The son who will eventually publish their letters explains that Morris “had seen a photograph of Eva while he was in London and went to Liverpool with the express purpose of meeting her.” As fast a worker as Woodrow Wilson, he will be suggesting marriage after about a dozen letters and a third as many meetings.
In fact, the lovestruck tailor is pressing two suits at once: he wants Eva not only to marry him but to settle in America as well. But she is skeptical of any future there: “How can you make money in one year as you say if you have been in the States twelve years & made nothing,” she asks in April of ‘37. What’s more, she does not like emigration being made into the test of her devotion. And anyway, why can’t he just “act like other boys & give in to the girl.”
Only Eva’s side of the early correspondence survives, so Morris’s arguments must be heard in her rebuttals: “You said I should not doubt your love for me as you were the first to declare & also the first to propose marriage, well this is the proper thing to do, did you expect me to propose first.” The way Eva sees it, there are things that women just don’t do, and as for Morris’s idea that he might go back to America by himself for a while, after they’ve married—well, who does he imagine he is? “It is allright [sic] for cricketers & film stars, Jewish people never do things like this.”
Morris does go back alone, and still single. Soon afterward, Eva says she’s “honured [sic]” to have his first letter from the States, and in August of ‘37 she thanks him for the five dollars he’s sent as a birthday present. Even so, ever cautious and charmingly stubborn, she reveals seven months later that she’s yet to spend it: “I do not know why but I have not wanted to change it to English money, but if all is well between us I will buy something for my trousseau with it.”
As they keep arriving, Morris’s letters do convince her that she will be “safe in America,” and Eva finally agrees to cross the ocean, saying she is “happy & excited at the prospect of seeing you again.” Her exuberance is new, but still not high enough for her to put an exclamation point to it. As it is, what’s been most crucial in making up her mind to emigrate is Morris’s news that he’s been able to get back his old American job.
Red tape and a consular official’s discomfort with her deafness (“he was afraid you would not marry me & then I would be destitute & be dependent on the city”) delay Eva’s departure for a full year, during which a reader sees the conscientiousness and worry that she carries to her job every day. She can’t write the “more sentimental & intimate letters” that Morris would like from her; after all, she’s not a poet and she doesn’t have the time. She reminds him that she couldn’t get off from work even to say good-bye when he sailed from Southampton, but when the seamstresses are given an hour and a half’s leave to greet the new king and queen during their visit to Liverpool, Eva does use the time to write to Morris.
The two of them quarrel and apologize and then justify themselves a little further, before agreeing to drop whatever the current bone of contention may be. In the meantime, they’ve hurt each other. During their biggest misunderstanding, Eva complains: “You also write that you will be fair to me & will marry me, although you do not love me as much as before. Morris you would be doing me a great wrong if you do, only if you love me will I marry you …” Replying from Brooklyn, Morris imparts evidence that his love remains deep: “Perhaps you will wonder differently if I tell you how much I suffered for almost ten weeks and how I lost 9 lbs. in weight within a few weeks, although I neglected my training in my [track and field] club.”
Morris and Eva are proud, vulnerable people, full of wariness. An absence of gush makes their courtship letters a truer preview of married life than most beribboned clutches of old love letters would be. Eva assures him, “You have no need to worry, I will be a good wife to you, & will do everything for you as long as you are good to me.” Morris needs to remember that she is “going to give up a lot for you leaving all my family & friends, so this ought to prove something to you.” Eva relaxes only the least little bit in the direction of playfulness when he tells her about the kind of apartment they might soon have. She responds: “I am very glad & happy Morris & I do love you very much. I am waiting for the day when you will be telling me that there is too much pepper & not enough salt.”
Each of them—even the more demonstrative Morris—is muffled in a cloak of reserve and formality; their manner of expression seems the opposite of our own era’s compulsive, therapeutic directness. Both strain to sound correct and self-assured: “I received your parcel this morning & thank you for same,” Eva writes to Morris. Prior to her departure for America, he declaims: “I hope you will enjoy yourself very much during your trip on the high seas, and please take good care of yourself and enjoy yourself in the company of your fellow passengers.” Eva employs the phrase “your welcome letter,” that archaic courtesy letting the earlier sender know that his envelope has been ushered into the house. The effect of such language is less pretentious than touching; the letters are whisk-broomed with the same kind of aspirant self-respect that can be seen in the couple’s snapshots, where Morris and Eva and their friends are beautifully spiffed up and turned out.
This regard for convention extends to the letters’ closings, where Eva finds subtle opportunities for variation. Her sign-offs are a barometric reading of the state of her feelings for Morris: her “best love & kisses” can be replaced with “kindest regards,” and when she’s truly angry she will dispatch a letter “From” Eva, or with nothing but a signature. Her emotional precision is such that the first time she calls Morris “Darling,” he seizes the word like a victory: “I sure like it, and you can see now how easy it is for you to express your feeling in your letters, whenever you feel like doing so.”
How much more reflectively some of our personal dramas played out before electronic mail, let alone text-messaging, which has now made e-mail seem almost sealing-waxed. Morris tells Eva that he will “always write the names of the fastest liners on the
envelopes of the letters I send you so that the letters may catch these boats just in time before they sail.” Once, just after mailing a letter in which he confides to Eva his worry that a case of mumps may have rendered him sterile, he decides that he’s been foolish to alarm her and put their engagement at risk. So the amateur track star races to the post office in Manhattan and manages, in his peculiar-sounding voice, to convince a clerk to let him retrieve the letter. Today, multi tasking at her sewing machine, Eva would already have clicked open the fateful e-mail. “If the letter had gone through,” wonders the son who decades later edited their correspondence, “perhaps I would have never been born.”*
To the question of whether his parents’ long married life in America was a success, Lennard J. Davis gives “a qualified ‘yes,’” the answer one would expect for two such “stoical people.” Davis—who recalls from his early childhood a lot of arguments conducted via “emphatic signing, with its audible hand-slapping, and [his parents’] involuntary verbal expostulations”—grew up to be an English professor “who specialized in eighteenth-century novels” and “read many epistolary romances.”
AFTER MEETING IN 1924, Russell Cheney and Francis Otto Matthiessen would spend twenty years together—a period almost equal to the difference in their ages—and just enough time apart to prompt the exchange of three thousand letters.
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