To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  In fact, nothing of Shakespeare’s correspondence survives. We know of a carrier named William Greenway who ran mail horses between Stratford and London, but no searching beneath floorboards or local restorations has ever produced a line from the bard not written for profit or publication. But there is another plentiful supply of his letters in his plays, of course, and from these we may divine not only a sense of how the playwright regarded the common use of letters in his day, but an early glimpse of the sort of epistolary drama that would infect so much literary endeavour in the next two centuries.

  The Shakespeare scholar Alan Stewart has found, ‘at a conservative estimate’ 111 letters that make an appearance on stage, and there are many more alluded to in an expository way. It is easier to list the plays where letters do not have a role – The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Henry V and The Tempest – the latter with a dreamy Gonzalo envisaging a land where ‘Letters should not be known’. The onstage letters were all composed at a time before postal reform, where they were still reliant on private carriers, uncertain terrain and regular miscarriages. Letters are delivered from the battlefield in the nick of time, but more usually they arrive fatefully late. Letters in Shakespeare assert authority, conceal identity, and are forged to deceive. They are purposely intercepted or they accidentally fall into the wrong hands. They are not sent via the Royal Mail, but through the messier channels, a reliable fault line of the absent-minded or the inefficient.

  The failed delivery of a letter to Romeo informing him of Juliet’s fake death hastens his own real one; Malvolio’s delusions of grandeur gather hilarious pace as he reads a fake love letter written by Maria in Olivia’s hand; Goneril’s letter to Edmund revealing their adultery and her desire to have her husband Albany killed is intercepted and delivered to Albany instead. But it is Hamlet that has it all: our protagonist writes to Ophelia, to Claudius the king, to his mother and to Horatio. Polonius reads and write letters; Claudius writes too. The play twists a plot we may recognise from Homer, something Alan Stewart rightly calls the oldest letter in the book. The Iliad’s account of Bellerophon’s escape from death at his own command, discussed in Chapter Two, receives a reboot as Hamlet sails to England. It’s the old switcheroo: Hamlet travels with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to England, where a letter carried by the courtiers from Claudius contains instructions for his execution. Hamlet slits the seal, substitutes the letter for one of his own, skilfully folds and reseals it. At the end of the play we learn that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, as Claudius had seemingly instructed.

  The use of letters in drama goes back to the ancients, to Euripides and Plautus. But under Shakespeare’s direction they become something else, not merely a vehicle for news but practically characters in themselves, a constant prop as well as a function of the plot (and for many actors the prop has served as a thankful breather, something they could effectively read rather than learn). Shakespeare has turned what is essentially an anti-theatrical device – words on a page, seemingly private, sent from one person to be read only by another – into something communally witnessed and contested, something entirely necessary to the adornment of the human drama. And yet letters in Shakespeare are also more than dramatic: their insistent, constant presence help to preface a day where they are a normal part of the discourse, objects (rather than just texts) that move from person to person, as expected as the weekday post. If an audience wants to believe a drama, even an historical one, it is required to witness the interplay of letters as a regular part of the action. For letters were rapidly becoming a regular part of life.

  Your New Lover

  14232134 SIGMN. BARKER H.C., 30 WING, 1 COY.,

  9 AIR FORMATION SIGNALS, M.E.F.

  14th March 1944

  Dear Bessie,

  I had not expected that my Air Mail letter would travel so quickly, and am delighted that you should already have it, and have spent some time, probably, in reading it. At the moment, and for the present, there isn’t a shadow of doubt that we are both in the same mutually approving mood, and that if we were within smiling distance of each other, we should soon be doing rather more than that. Of course, maybe the safety of our separate distances permits us to indulge in these happy advances. Perhaps we would beat hasty retreats into our shells if we knew that the seeds we are now sowing were due for early reaping. I might be on another planet for all the chance there is of hearing you say the good things you’ve written. But how much I enjoy you, how jolly fine it is to know that you really do understand what I write, when only a little while ago I was saying that I felt like Marconi would have done on the morrow of his invention, had all the world gone deaf.

  If I had the chance, I might do a lot of things, or nothing. As it is I shall remain very polite and become as friendly as I dare without undertaking obligations I have no intention of fulfilling. I am safe from physical indiscretion for a long while, but I am also wanting you seriously to see that while we might have fun at a later date, it would not be so funny for you ultimately. I can’t help being your ‘hero’ – and I breathe heavily and exultingly at your clear, bare admittance; but please don’t let me make you break your heart in 1946 or 47, when I scurry off with ‘one, two, three, or more’. If I was a wise guy I would not write you and thus encourage your racing thoughts. But I am selfish; at present I need your loyal support of my actions. I admit to a state of gleaming, dangerous excitement as I read again and again your written words. You fascinate and weaken me, and make me feel strong. Presumably you wrote the same in the old days (in an earlier letter I said I was hazy even about any ‘letters’), have I become so much more susceptible to flattery, or is the change due to the fact that I have been away from home fourteen months, and haven’t seen a woman (other than about four on a stage) in the last six?

  You say that men concentrate on the job in hand and it fills their world completely. I would not say that ‘active doers’ are only men. I have seen many a blithering, dithering male who hadn’t any idea of doing anything. I’ve known women who were very competent and energetic. Don’t be a man-worshipper, or an anything-worshipper if you would be happy. The main difference, emotionally, between men and women, is said to be that a woman is loyal to one man always, but that a man’s attention wanders more than a little. This sex item is the biggest there is, apart from the instinct to survive, because no-one is impervious to it and it controls us always. I think I have mentioned that one chap of 18 who I met in hospital told me he had ‘had’ 35 girls, several on the first day of meeting. This ‘loyalty’ of the woman has been blown sky-high during this war – one of the chaps here asked his girl why she hadn’t written for six weeks, and she replied she had been busy, didn’t he know there was a war on?

  You want your old hero to be your new lover. What a pity that they have just given me my mosquito net for my second summer, and not a ticket for an air journey home. I am writing these particular words at midnight 13.3.44 – I could have breakfast with you on the 14th, if only one or two people would co-operate. It might be a little late, but what matter. Here am I, wondering when I last saw you and what you look like. I have an idea, I wish I could confirm by personal investigation. Do you still smoke? A bad habit.

  Expectant, willing, and compliant as you are, I seem to have discovered you anew. I find you very warm and appetising. I rejoice at our intimacy for the present. I simply wallow in your friendly sentiments which I feel as keenly as if a couple of seas and a continent did not separate us. You have smashed my perimeter defences, I am all of a hub-bub, and as I write my cheeks are red and I am hot. When I finish one letter to you, I want to start again on another, as today. I hope that I shall often have something to comment on, rather than initiate my own discussions. I know this strange unity of expression and understanding cannot last, for I feel just as though I was sitting at your feet. This is bound to peter-out sooner or later. You say, ‘here’s to the beginning of a beautiful fri
endship.’*

  You are a terrific love-maker by letter. I can but wonder what you are like at it in the soft, warm, yielding, panting flesh. Please pardon the rub-out, and the re-writing hereabouts. Truth is that with the morning I became timid and decided on deletion. Let me go back a few lines, say that I can but wonder, and warmly do.

  I must avoid writing one whole letter slobbering, however pleasant it is for both of us, I must make a pretence of telling you all about our camp. Our picture on Saturday (luckily I was on duty) was as childish as the previous two I have described earlier. ‘Stars Over Texas’, Stage Coach hold-ups, and pistol duels. We are getting more than disgusted.

  Having interposed that sentence I can return to our new thrilling relationship, to be fully enjoyed while it lasts, and unlamented when it is done. I am ‘all for you, dear’ and the prospect of soaking in you, luxuriously for a while, of touching you where you will let me, from here, is absorbingly, naturally, before us.

  Chris

  Chapter Seven

  How to Write the Perfect Letter, Part 2

  What does it take to become the greatest letter-writer of your age? To build up a reputation of such epistolary grandeur that whenever you were mentioned in centuries to come you would be remembered not by what you had achieved but how you had written about it? How would one ensure immortality as a writer not by grand artistic endeavours – not by the dramas created by your compatriots Molière, Corneille or Racine, nor the sweeping philosophies of Descartes, all of whom you knew – but by simply attending their plays and reading their works and passing opinion on them through the post? And how to establish an historical reputation not by the grand public gesture during a lifetime but by private intimacies and indiscretions revealed after death?

  A tall order these days, but for Madame de Sévigné in the high-haired years of the everlasting reign of Louis XIV it was a different proposition. Precocious, hedonistic, gallant, witty, scathing, protective, bombastic, objectionable, daring and unforgiving: Madame de Sévigné wrote some 1,300 shining letters in a 50-year period. She stands with Voltaire as one of the most enduring epistolary companions. Her letters are not always pleasant to read – too hardened an attitude, too many truths perhaps – but they are consistently compelling.

  There was little in the second half of the seventeenth century that didn’t catch her eye. She was modern in her candour and independence of thought (and must have seemed shockingly and titillatingly so to her subsequent Victorian readers), and she was proud of what she saw as her grounded contribution to philosophical debate (she disputed Descartes’ interpretation of the mechanistic theory of nature, for example, plumping instead for a view that was a forerunner of romanticism, seeking her pleasures of nature in God-given wonder and solitude).* On the big issues she remained fundamentally a traditionalist, seldom breaking with the values of the majority or the court; it was essential for the maintenance of her reputation that she did so. Her letters endure through their emotions: her bereavements, longings and familial worries still reach us because they are seldom very different from our own, although we may baulk at her frivolity and her dismissive attitude towards those in less fortunate positions than her own. But who was this woman, and how best to explain why leather-bound volumes of her letters are still buckling the shelves of the world’s great libraries?

  She was born Marie de Rabutin-Chantal in a Paris suburb, married the Marquis de Sévigné in 1644 at the age of 18, and gave birth to two children before being widowed in 1651 when her husband lost a duel over his mistress. She never remarried, devoting her time to managing various estates, bringing up her granddaughter, conducting literary salons and engaging in the brightly lit life of the Parisian beau monde. And then she wrote.

  She appeared to write every day, and with increasing intensity on Wednesdays and Fridays when the regular post left Paris. Her letters may still be appreciated when read in sequence and in their entirety, a feat seldom recommended for most letter-writers; there is seldom a sense that she is writing out of obligation, and even her business matters are conducted with verve. Her relationships with the principal recipients of her attention develop over time, as one would expect, and it is one of the rare pleasures of the collection that one may watch grudges fester and then fall away (not least with her cousin, the memoirist Roger de Bussy-Rabutin). That Madame de Sévigné possessed a unique talent was acknowledged not only by those with whom she corresponded, but by those with whom she corresponded; her letters contained news and gossip dished up with gasps and relish, and they were anticipated and passed on with the ink still moist. The most famous letter of all – the most anthologised – appeals primarily today for its shrieking hyperbole (which she intended), and its ultimate inconsequence (which she did not). ‘What I am about to communicate to you is the most astonishing thing,’ she wrote to her cousin Philippe-Emmanuel de Coulanges in December 1670. But the thing wasn’t just most astonishing, it was

  the most surprising, the most marvellous, the most miraculous, most triumphant, most baffling, most unheard of, most singular, most extraordinary, most unbelievable, most unforeseen, the greatest, the tiniest, the rarest, the most common, the most talked about, the most secret up to this day, the most brilliant, the most enviable, a thing without parallel in the present age, . . . a thing nobody can believe in Paris (so how could anyone believe it in Lyons?), a thing that makes everybody cry ‘have mercy on us’ . . . I can’t make up my mind to say it. Guess – I’ll give you three tries. Give up? Very well, I shall have to tell you. M de Lauzun is marrying on Sunday, in the Louvre – guess who? I give you four guesses, ten, a hundred . . .

  This was obviously getting beyond annoying, and it went on. Monsieur Lauzun, a louche and controversial figure at court, was due to marry La Grande Mademoiselle, granddaughter of Henry IV. In the end it didn’t happen. After some persuading by the queen and his courtiers, Louis XIV put his foot down, judging Lauzun not quite the right sort. Lauzun married another and lived to 90. Mademoiselle stayed single and suffered an ignominious burial at which her entrails exploded. And Madame de Sévigné went on to write about other most astonishing things, such as the civil war and the fate of the imprisoned disgraced French finance minister Nicolas Fouquet.

  Pearls of wisdom at her fingertips: Madame de Sévigné plucks out another bon mot.

  These days the modern reader may enjoy one thing above all others – her correspondence with her daughter. This was a loving and caring relationship, but it was also an overwhelmingly possessive one. We do not have her daughter’s replies, but we may suspect them to be less fussy, less suffocating and less insecure.

  Her daughter, Francoise-Marguerite, married a military man of whom her mother approved, Francois comte de Grignan, famed both for his ugliness and elegance, a tricky pas de deux. Initially all was well, but things turned sour when Grignan was posted to Provence. For Madame de Grignan this was an opportunity, but for her mother it was a bereavement, and the grieving continued for a quarter of a century. ‘I am dying to have news of you,’ she wrote to her daughter in mid-February 1671, and many times thereafter. ‘As soon as I get a letter I want another one at once, and only breathe again when one comes . . . I feel I suffer at having lost you, and this separation pains my heart and soul like a bodily illness.’*

  A few days later she wrote again, her usual mix of local news and betrothal updates, amid reassurances that ‘you are the delight of my life, that nobody has ever been loved as dearly as you’. And then there was news of a fire, described in a way only a personal letter may do, the sort of immediate account that guaranteed the writer’s reputation. There is, indeed, a touch of the Vesuvius about it. ‘At three in the morning I heard people shouting “Thieves!”, “Fire!” and these shouts were so near me and so persistent that I was sure it was here in the house.’

  I even fancied I heard my granddaughter’s name, and felt sure she had been burnt alive. I got up with this fea
r in the dark and trembled in such a manner that I could scarcely stand. I ran directly to her room, which is the room that was yours, and found everything quiet; but I saw Guitaut’s house all in flames, and the fire spreading to Madame de Vauvineux’s. The flames cast a light over our courtyard and that of Guitaut, that made them look shocking. All was outcry, hurry, and confusion, and the falling beams and joists made a dreadful noise. I immediately ordered our doors to be opened, and my servants to give assistance . . .

  As for our house, I knew it was safe as if it had been in an island, but I was greatly concerned for my poor neighbours. Madame Gueton and her brother gave some excellent directions, but we were all in consternation; the fire was so fierce that there was no approaching it, and no one supposed it would cease till it had burnt poor Guitaut’s house entirely down. Guitaut himself was a melancholy object; he wanted to save his mother, who was in the midst of the flames in the upper part of the house; but his wife clung about him, and held him as tightly as she could. He was in the greatest distress between the grief of not being able to save his mother, and the fear of injuring his wife, who was nearly five months pregnant. At last he begged me to restrain his wife, which I did, and he went in search of his mother, whom he found had passed through the flames and was safe. He then tried to save some papers, but found it impossible to get near the place where they were. At length he came back to the spot where he had left us, and where I had prevailed on his wife to sit down.

  Some charitable Capuchins worked so well, and so skilfully, that they contained the spread of the fire. Water was thrown upon the rest that was burning . . . but not till several of the best apartments were entirely consumed . . .

  You may be wondering how the fire started in that building; but that no one can tell. There was not a spark in the room where it first broke out. If anyone would have thought of diverting himself at so melancholy a time, what pictures could he have drawn of the state we were in! Guitaut was in his nightshirt and breeches. Mme de Guitaut was stockingless and had lost a slipper. Mme de Vauvineux was in a short petticoat with a nightgown. All the servants and neighbours were in nightcaps. The Ambassador was in nightgown and wig, and maintained perfect serenity, but his secretary was a wonderful sight – talk about the breast of Hercules, this was something else. Everything was exposed and we had a full view: white, fat, plump, the string to his shirt somehow lost in the escapade.