WOMAN: To one loved thus far and always to be loved: with all her being and feeling, good health, joy, and growth in all that is beneficial and honourable . . . Farewell, farewell, and fare well for as long as the kingdom of God is seen to endure.
MAN: To his most precious jewel, ever radiant with its natural splendour, he purest gold: may he surround and fittingly set that same jewel in a joyful embrace . . . Farewell, you who make me fare well.*
The lapidary cloying never lets up even in longer examples, and remains rather infuriatingly vague. (She: ‘Farewell, sweetest. I am wholly with you, or to speak more truly I am wholly within you.’ He: ‘To the inexhaustible vessel of all his sweetness . . .’ She: ‘Since you are the son of true sweetness . . .’) But the physicality of their relationship does emerge gradually, albeit in a more muted form than we are used to from the fantasy-in-the-pews of the later letters (Man: ‘My spirit itself is shaken by joyful trembling, and my body is transformed into a new manner and posture.’) And then, by Letter 26, off they go into a language of feverish floridness, an ardour we surely recognise from our famous lovers:
MAN: How fertile with delight is your breast, how you shine with untouched beauty, body so full of moisture, indescribable scent of yours! Reveal what is hidden, uncover what you keep concealed, let that whole fountain of your most abundant sweetness bubble forth . . . Hour by hour I am bound closer to you, just like fire devouring wood.
The ‘new’ letters, genuine or not, share one more thing with their established counterparts: nothing runs them close for forthright entertainment.
The Fathers of the Church did not shirk from letter-writing in the long period between Pliny the Younger and Heloise, but neither did they sparkle with the possibilities of the form. Yet for about a thousand years, theological letters are all we have. Literacy was not encouraged among the populace, and in the shadow of the Church their views were deemed inconsequential. An oral tradition largely took the place of a textual one. Only the wealthy could employ messengers, and writing ability and materials were almost exclusively the domain of scribes and their ecclesiastical employers. Moreover, what else of worth could occupy a lay person’s thoughts beyond strict doctrine?
The letters that we do have constitute an uninspiring selection. Their saintly authors were duty bound; they were literate; their letters were more likely than others to be preserved (we are not very aware of royal correspondence until much later). The ecclesiastical choice of greetings and farewells relied much on the practices of late antiquity, but there the comparison ended; they were not concerned with worldly philosophy or self-improvement, and not for them the barefaced political manoeuvrings of Cicero nor the advice on travel or modesty from Seneca. They were concerned predominantly with ecclesiastical matters, as one would expect, a righteous path with few diversions.
We have rather a lot of them to prove the case: about 240 letters survive from Gregory of Nazianzus spanning much of the fourth century, 360 letters of St Basil in the same period, some 2,000 brief notes from Isidore of Pelusium, and more than 200 from Theodoret of Cyrus from the fifth century. You may prefer death to the lingering torture of reading them.
So it is not surprising that the physical candour and the life-as-she-is-suffered quality of Abelard and Heloise still burns. Nor that their letters have entered our culture, one far removed from whispering cloisters. There is a grand poetic memorial by Alexander Pope, whose Eloisa to Abelard (1717) made our heroine long for what she calls the ‘Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!’ (But all in vain, for ‘Soon as thy letters trembling I unclose / That well-known name awakens all my woes.’) This later faced lyrical competition from the opening of Cole Porter’s ‘Just One of Those Things’: ‘As Abelard said to Heloise / Don’t forget to drop a line to me please.’
Just too much: a state of undress brought on by reading Abelard and Heloise in this late-18th century portrait by Auguste Bernard d’Agesci.
Always ripe for oils, the saga is depicted in many forms in many galleries, most plaintively perhaps in ‘Lady Reading the Letters of Heloise and Abelard’ by Auguste Bernard d’Agesci (c. 1780) at the Art Institute, Chicago (the Lady in question appearing so affected by what she has just read that her dress has slid revealingly from her shoulders). At the cinema the couple feature as puppets in the Charlie Kaufman scripted Being John Malkovich. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind also became a Kaufman screenplay for Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. Many television viewers first heard of the letters when they featured in an episode of The Sopranos.
When the story is retold for the modern audience it often comes with a certain amount of studied guesswork written as enlivening narrative, as in James Burge’s Heloise & Abelard (2003), which envisages the heroine writing her first reply to Abelard’s autobiography before ‘the bell sounds for Vespers. The abbess must once again take her love, her emotions and the story that led her to this moment, close them up inside herself and assume her role as leader of a convent. She folds the letter, ties it up and seals it. Perhaps she slips it inside her habit.’
John Cusack and A&H puppets in Being John Malkovich.
But the earliest and biggest crush on the affair came in the fourteenth century from Petrarch, whose admiration for Heloise (‘Totally charming and most elegant!’) ignited a new fascination with the lovers in much the same way he managed to reinforce Greek philosophy with Cicero. There could be no greater champion: more than anyone in the early Renaissance, Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) was the man who rediscovered what letters could be. One of his own letters even defines the history of the word.
He was born in Arezzo in 1304, but his life as a perpetual traveller accounts for the many letters (almost 500 survive) to so many friends and acquaintances as he moved from near Florence to Pisa to Montpellier to Bologna before settling for an extended stay at Vaucluse in Provence and then Milan. A scholar and poet, Petrarch seemed uncertain as to the lasting value of his best work in his prodigious output, but the modern reader will find much of worth in his essays, biographies and religious treaties, as well as his most famous lyrical poems enflamed by his muse Laura, assured by him of immortality after she died of plague in 1348.
But certainly we should also remember him for something else: Petrarch’s letters are intriguing and significant documents. Inspired by Cicero, Epicurus and Seneca, he wrote almost every day in personal terms, and his two large collections (one, Epistolae familiares, is a general gathering from his travels, the other, Epistolae Seniles, more specifically concerned with old age) lay good claim to be the first modern letters by the first modern mind at the dawn of our modern European civilisation.
As if to emphasise the richness of the letters to history, he writes an unfinished biography of his life not in poetry or standard chronological form, but in the shape of a letter ‘To Posterity’. We may regard his opening modesty as a little false (‘Greeting. It is possible that some word of me may have come to you . . .’ ) and he is downright wrong when he claims such an ‘insignificant and obscure’ name such as his ‘will scarcely penetrate far in either time or space’. History has been kind to him, and to us.
At the beginning of his first collection he writes to his lifelong friend Ludovico (whom he nicknames Socrates) of how his letters almost didn’t make it even to their first collected publication (in the 1360s), most being eaten by mice or ‘the insatiable bookworm’, and some deliberately destroyed by him on the fire. He writes of being in one of those gloomy moods where he doubted the worth of all his work, but a dreamlike vision of Ludovico (who had previously expressed an affection for his letters) changed his mind. So now he looked back on his work with some satisfaction, and an ability to offer some observations on letter-writing he hadn’t expressed before.
The first care indeed in writing is to consider to whom the letter is to be sent; then we may judge what to say and how to say it. We address a strong man in one way and a weak one in another
. The inexperienced youth and the old man who has fulfilled the duties of life, he who is puffed up with prosperity and he who is stricken with adversity, the scholar distinguished in literature and the man incapable of grasping anything beyond commonplace – each must be treated according to his character or position.
Writing to Boccaccio in 1365, shortly after his collected letters were evidently being freely copied by numerous scribes, he writes of one overriding wish for his work – that it be legible. Not for him ‘ill-defined though sumptuous penmanship’, nor writing which ‘delights us at a distance but . . . strains and tires the eyes when we look at it intently’. It all comes down to etymology, he writes, for after all ‘the word letter comes from legere, to read’.
The modern reader may have further hopes: that his letters are not only readable but still worth reading. Many are. They are wide-ranging in content, contradictory, sure of themselves, elitist and erudite, which generally guarantees a good read in any language. He wrote to many friends and also some imaginary ones, such as Cicero and Homer. Subject matter ranges from politics, biography, classical poetry and contemporary literature, but one of the essential things that sets them apart is his writing about travel. Petrarch lays a strong claim to being the world’s first tourist.
The first man of letters? Petrarch clasps his legacy in this 19th century painting.
His letters to his friends are nothing if not parchment postcards home, and he writes not as one who has observed novel native customs as he flits through Europe conducting important business, but as a pleasure seeker, a holidaymaker, a flaneur. He travels to Paris, the Low Countries and the Rhine, he climbs mountains, he reports back. The only thing that prevents him travelling further – to Jerusalem, for example – is his terrible sea-sickness. ‘Would that you could know,’ he writes to one friend, ‘with what delight I wander, free and alone, among the mountains, forests, and streams.’ His letters become travel guides, itineraries and mental maps, and an early form of anthropology.
‘I then proceeded to Cologne,’ he writes to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna in the summer of 1333,
which lies on the left bank of the Rhine, and is noted for its situation, its river, and its inhabitants. I was astonished to find such a degree of culture in a barbarous land. The appearance of the city, the dignity of the men, the attractiveness of the women, all surprised me.
The day of my arrival happened to be the feast of St John the Baptist. It was nearly sunset when I reached the city . . . I allowed myself to be led immediately from the inn to the river, to witness a curious sight. And I was not disappointed, for I found the riverbank lined with a multitude of remarkably comely women. Ye gods, what faces and forms! And how well attired! One whose heart was not already occupied might well have met his fate here.
I took my stand upon a little rise of ground where I could easily follow what was going on. There was a dense mass of people, but no disorder of any kind. They knelt down in quick succession on the bank, half hidden by the fragrant grass, and turning up their sleeves above the elbow they bathed their hands and white arms in the eddying stream.
. . . When anything was to be heard or said I had to rely upon my companions to furnish both ears and tongue. Not understanding the scene, and being deeply interested in it, I asked an explanation from one of my friends . . . He told me that this was an old custom among the people, and that the lower classes, especially the women, have the greatest confidence that the threatening calamities of the coming year can be washed away by bathing on this day in the river, and a happier fate be so assured. Consequently this annual ablution has always been conscientiously performed, and always will be.
In whatever high regard we may hold Petrarch’s letters, it would be hard to match the regard in which he held them himself. He desired that his readers, whom he thought of as predominantly male,
should think of me alone, not of his daughter’s wedding, his mistress’s embraces, the wiles of his enemy, his engagements, house, lands or money. I want him to pay attention to me. If his affairs are pressing, let him postpone reading the letter, but when he does read, let him throw aside the burden of business and family cares, and fix his mind upon the matter before him . . . I will not have him gain without any exertion what has not been produced without labour on my part.
His letters usually run to well over a thousand words. The well-hashed line ‘Sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to write a short one’, has been attributed in various forms to Blaise Pascal (1657), John Locke (1690), William Cowper (1704) and Benjamin Franklin (1750), but the thought may have originated – in a naturally elongated form – with Petrarch. Writing again to Boccaccio towards the end of his writing life, aware that his time was now limited, he resolved to keep his letters tight, and to ‘write to be understood and not to please’. Yet he remembered making that promise before: ‘But I have not been able to keep this engagement. It seems to me much easier to remain silent altogether with one’s friends than to be brief, for when one has once begun, the desire to continue the conversation is so great that it were easier not to begin than to check the flow.’
He encountered other difficulties too. Too often he would write letters and they would not make it to their inattentive readers at all, their carrier having been intercepted by anxious agents of the state or random Italian highwaymen, or even an early incarnation of the autograph hunter. Not long before his death, Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio that a combination of old age and the perennial unreliability of the messenger system had resigned him to a regretful fate: he would write letters no more.
I know now that neither of two long letters that I wrote to you have reached you. But what can we do? Nothing but submit. We may wax indignant, but we cannot avenge ourselves. A most insupportable set of fellows has appeared in northern Italy, who nominally guard the passes, but are really the bane of messengers.
They not only glance over the letters that they open, but they read them with the utmost curiosity. They may, perhaps, have for an excuse the orders of their masters, who, conscious of being subject to every reproach in their restless careers of insolence, imagine that everyone must be writing about and against them; hence their anxiety to know everything. But it is certainly inexcusable, when they find something in the letters that tickles their asinine ears, that instead of detaining the messengers while they take time to copy the contents, as they used to do, they should now, with ever increasing audacity, spare their fingers the fatigue, and order the messengers off without their letters. And, to make this procedure the more disgusting, those who carry on this trade are complete ignoramuses . . . I find nothing more irritating and vexatious than the interference of these scoundrels. It has often kept me from writing, and often caused me to repent after I had written. There is nothing more to be done against these letter thieves, for everything is upside down, and the liberty of the state is entirely destroyed.
The liberty of the state destroyed by an uncertain postal service? Even allowing for the odd flourish of Italian melodrama, it did appear that the value of letters – their role in cultural discourse as much as their importance in official affairs – was now something a civilised world at the dawn of the Renaissance could not do without. And this was just the beginning: the worth of letters to historical record, the danger of letters to a nervous monarchy, the importance of a reliable delivery network for the passionate expression of love – all these were just starting to be assessed. Clearly, a growth in literacy was going to be both a blessing and a curse.
How to Build a Pyramid
14232134 SIGMN. BARKER H.C., 3 30 WING,
1 COY., 9 A.F.S., M.E.F.
17th December 1943
Dear Bessie,
I received yesterday your surface letter of 20th October. I read it avidly as from an old pal – noting that though time has chattanooga’ed along, your style remains pretty much as it was in the days when we had that terrifically intense and
wonderfully sincere correspondence about Socialism and the Rest Of It – unlike the present time, when, hornswoggling old hypocrite that I am, the Rest Of It seems infinitely more attractive. Thanks for the letter, old-timer, I am sending this by Air Mail because it will have enough dull stuff in it to sink a Merchant ship.
Yes, I remember our discussions over ‘Acquaintance’ and my views are still as much for as yours remain against. I have, perhaps, one hundred acquaintances (I write to fifty) yet I could number my friends on one hand. The dictionary:
Acquaintance: a person known.
Friend: one attached to another by affection and esteem.
You are ‘known’ to me, and while I have ‘affection’ for you it does not amount to an attachment. You hung on to my coat tails ‘in friendship’, you say?
I am sorry that Nick and you are ‘no longer’, as you put it, and that you should have wasted so much time because of his lack of courage. You must have had a rotten time of it, and I do sympathise with you – but are you writing to the right bloke? I’ll say you are! Joan gave me my ‘cards’ a couple of months back, though I had seen them coming since April, when I got my first letters.
I think you had better write some more on your view of emotions. You say that if they could be ruled out it would make New-Order-building easier. I deny that. We only feel like that when our emotions are tinkered and played about with.
I can quite believe your estimate of the way the London-leave soldier improves the shining-hour. You can understand chaps who get three or four days leave before a campaign opens, ‘painting the town red’, but unfortunately quite a large number who are in comfortable Base jobs have their regular unpleasant habits. When I was at Base our evening passes bore the injunction ‘Brothels Out of Bounds. Consorting with Prostitutes Forbidden.’ Where we collected the passes there was a large painted sign, ‘Don’t Take a Chance, Ask the Medical Orderly for a – doodah’. The whole emphasis of Army Propaganda is ‘Be Careful’, even the wretched Padre at Thirsk, when he said a few words of farewell, said merely that most foreign women were diseased, and we should be careful.
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