To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  . . . I have summoned the courier; he tells me that he crossed over to your house, and that you told him you had no commands. Fie! naughty, undutiful, cruel, tyrannous, jolly little monster. You laugh at my threats, at my infatuation; ah, you well know that if I could shut you up in my breast, I would put you in prison there!

  By February the following year, things are clearly going awry. ‘Peace with Rome has just been signed,’ he informed Josephine from Bologna, a monumental act which would see the capitulation of the pope. He had already entered Bologna, Ferrara and Romagna, and he was heading for Rimini and Ravenna. But his wife was either finding it hard to keep up, or didn’t care. ‘Not a word from you,’ Napoleon complained,

  what on earth have I done? To think only of you, to love only Josephine, to live only for my wife, to enjoy happiness only with my dear one – does this deserve such harsh treatment from her? My dear, I beg you, think often of me, and write me every day.

  You are ill, or else you do not love me! Do you think, then, that I have a heart of stone? And do my sufferings concern you so little? You must know me very ill! I cannot believe it! You to whom nature has given intelligence, tenderness, and beauty, you who alone can rule my heart, you who doubtless know only too well the unlimited power you hold over me!

  Write to me, think of me, and love me.

  He signed off ‘Yours ever, for life,’ a forecast which, by 1798, as Napoleon moved on Egypt, was already looking distinctly optimistic. News of an affair reached Napoleon while engaged on his Middle East expedition, and his letters cooled instantly; his infatuation and kisses were replaced by travel itineraries, financial instructions and weather bulletins. Napoleon began his own affairs, fathering illegitimate children en route, while maintaining the outward show of unity; he granted Josephine the title of empress in 1804.

  I start at once to outmanœuvre the English, [he wrote from Madrid in December 1808] who appear to have received reinforcements and wish to look big.

  The weather is fine, my health perfect; don’t be uneasy.

  I am despatching a page to bring you the good tidings of the victory of Enzersdorf, which I won on the 5th, and that of Wagram, which I won on the 6th [he wrote in July 1809].

  The enemy’s army flies in disorder, and all goes according to my prayers . . . Bessières has been shot through the fleshy part of his thigh; the wound is very slight. Lasalle was killed. My losses are full heavy, but the victory is decisive and complete. We have taken more than 100 pieces of cannon, 12 flags, many prisoners. I am sunburnt.

  ‘L’empereur est parfait pour moi’: Josephine addresses her son Eugene de Beauharnais in 1809.

  The couple divorced shortly before his marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria in 1810. His letter to her the following year carried a rather bold kiss-off:

  I send to know how you are . . . I was annoyed with you about your debts. I do not wish you to have any; on the contrary, I wish you to put a million aside every year, to give to your grandchildren when they get married. Nevertheless, never doubt my affection for you, and don’t worry any more about the present embarrassment.

  Adieu, dear. Send me word that you are well. They say that you are as fat as a good Normandy farmeress.

  A few of these letters had come up for sale before. In July 1933, eight early examples were sold at Sotheby’s as a single lot, with the London bookseller Ben Maggs spending £4,400 in order to see off several eager bids from what the New York Times described as ‘manifestly disappointed’ Frenchmen.* Maggs was evidently mad about Napoleon: in the same sale he had bought several of the emperor’s less glamorous but more strategic letters, at what appear to us now to be knock-down prices: he paid between £37 and £72 per letter. And almost 20 years earlier, Maggs Brothers was the top bidder in an auction for Napoleon’s penis, which Maggs staff proudly displayed in a velvet case at their Mayfair shop. (The article in question was variously described as ‘a mummified tendon’ and ‘a shrivelled eel’).

  Men and women have been collecting letters since letters began. Unlike other collecting hobbies, philately say, or beautiful antique cars, the collecting of letters has always been a wholly natural endeavour. If you treasured what was said in a letter you kept it, and once you had three, you had a correspondence, and no one would accuse you of being a nerd or obsessive. But as the correspondence piled up over time you would have a decision to make: would you destroy the evidence? Or would you have the foresight/arrogance/grasp on social history to keep them for a future generation? The collecting of letters of the famous and influential had other motives: the archival connection with the sweep of history; and the belief that the archival connection with the sweep of history would one day go up in value.

  Albin Schram was born in Czechoslovakia in 1926, schooled in Prague and Bavaria, and conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1943. He became a Russian prisoner of war, escaped just before hostilities ceased, and developed a career in Austria and Germany as a civil servant in the justice ministry, and then as a banker and legal historian. He was living in Switzerland in the early 1970s when he received an unusual and unexpected gift from his family; unusual because Schram had never shown much interest in historical manuscripts before, and unexpected because the letter was written by Napoleon, with whom Schram had only a passing interest, perhaps no more than any other cultured man concerned with the great turning points in history.

  The letter told of a quarrel and Napoleon’s hope that three kisses would make it right. It set something off, and Schram became what the auction houses dream of – a hooked client with means. From nowhere, Schram, who was now in his late forties, became a letter collector. His motives were unknown, but they were probably similar to the norm: there is wonder to be had from handling a sheet of paper that was once inscribed by someone you admire, or someone who had a say in the world. And if you can own it, so much the better, for you then become a custodian of history rather than just an observer; through fate and fortune you hold an historical sliver of power. Money plays a big part in this custodianship, of course, but there is more: there is also judgement of worth and the thrill of the quest. Some collectors hire agents to do their bidding for them, or they buy from dealers. Schram primarily bought at auctions he attended himself. He did the annual rounds of Marburg, Paris and London, buying perhaps 10 choice items a year, the last purchase made just a fortnight before his death in 2005. And thus his collection became great and mouth-watering, and posthumously he achieved what all collectors secretly long for: a sale at a leading auction house devoted entirely to one’s passion, with your name on the catalogue and a photo inside, the final transition from dabbling enthusiast to connoisseur.

  The Albin Schram collection at Christie’s.

  ‘Schram’s guiding principle was his own insatiable intellectual curiosity,’ Christie’s manuscript specialist Thomas Venning writes in the introduction to the catalogue, noting that he was particularly interested in figures from his native Bohemia. ‘But above all, it is a remarkably comprehensive collection, in all the principal fields: literature (from Donne and Defoe to Kleist, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Hemingway, Borges), the visual arts (Goya, Bernini, Vasari, Gauguin), history and politics (Napoleon, Calvin, Elizabeth I, Churchill, Cromwell, Gandhi), music (Telemann, Beethoven, Smetana, Tchaikovsky), and science and philosophy (Newton, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Einstein, Hume, Kant, Locke).’ There were women too: Madame de Sévigné of course, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Catherine de Medici, George Eliot.

  The Gandhi letter, written less than three weeks before he was assassinated, arguing for religious tolerance between Hindus and Muslims, was withdrawn and sold privately to the Indian government. But everything else was included and reached crazy prices. There were 570 lots in all, with many offering multiple letters, some from famous people that said little of note and were valuable primarily for their signatures. But the majority were remarkable, and a few of them merit brief atten
tion.

  In October 1624, the poet John Donne wrote what many consider to be his finest and most significant single letter. Addressed to his friend Bridget, Lady Kingsmill, it was a letter of consolation composed on the day of the death of her husband, and encapsulated the messages of his religious sermons, his metaphysical philosophy and his epistolary style. It was his ‘God moves in mysterious ways’ variation – a stained and browned letter for the ages.

  In the letter, Donne is keen to distinguish between the things that God may destroy in one stroke (the universe at the Apocalypse) and ‘those things w[hi]ch he takes in peeces, as he doth Man and wife’, for they will eventually be reunited. And we shouldn’t doubt God’s purpose or methods: ‘We would wonder, to see a Man, who in a wood, were left to hys liberty to fell what trees he would, take only the crooked, and leave the straytest trees; but that Man had perchance a ship to build, and not a house, and so hath use of that kinde of timber’. It was unwise to question God’s actions, ‘as though we could direct him to do them better’.

  There were several letters in which authors reflected on the critical reaction to their work (Chekhov, for instance, expressing his delight in the praise heaped on The Cherry Orchard: ‘I shan’t hide it,’ he wrote three months before he died). The most dissatisfied was Charlotte Brontë, unhappy at a snarling of Shirley, her follow-up to Jane Eyre, in the Spectator and Athenaeum. Writing to William Smith Williams, a literary adviser at her publishers Smith, Elder in November 1849, she observed that while the critics were ‘acute men in their way’, they were unsuitable to comment on her fiction. ‘When called on to criticise works of imagination – they stand in the position of deaf men required to listen to music – or blind men to judge of painting. The Practical their minds can grasp – of the Ideal they know nothing.’ The letter closes with a further regret – her inability to wrap books: ‘I fear the unseemly bundles I produce must shock you much.’

  Other writers provide tantalising glimpses of work in the works: T.S. Eliot writes to the art critic Clive Bell in 1941, thanking him for his kind words, ‘all the more welcome at a time when one needs encouragement, if one is to persist in this odd occupation of making patterns with words. It will require only a little more such flattery, however (so exquisitely concentrated) to persuade me to complete work on my scheme of a set of four’ [the Four Quartets were completed in 1942]. In 1949, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote from Oxford to the artist Pauline Baynes, thanking her for her illustrations for his ‘rather slender squib’ Farmer Giles of Ham, but regretting that her illustrations had been reduced in size. He hoped ‘soon to get some larger works published, and in a more ample fashion.’ and wondered whether she would consider illustrating these works too. ‘One, a long romance in sequel to The Hobbit, is finished after some years of work, and is being typed.’ It was The Lord of the Rings.

  In Swansea in 1926 (so it is thought – the date is unconfirmed) Dylan Thomas wrote his first known letter. He was probably 12, and already keen on rhyme. His older sister Nancy had been unwell, and he wrote to cheer her up, quoting a popular American verse:

  A drummer is a man we know who has to do with drums,

  But I’ve never met a plumber yet who has to do with plums.

  A cheerful man who sells you hats would be a cheerful hatter,

  But is a serious man who sells you mats a serious matter?

  Another copied poem considers the inconsequential concerns of daily local life, a theme he would echo in Under Milk Wood.

  There’s a worry in the morning because the coffee’s cold,

  There’s the worry of the postman & the ‘paper’ to unfold.

  It’s a worry getting on your boots & going to the train,

  And you’ve got to put your hat on & take it off again.

  It’s a wonder how I live with such a constant strain . . .

  Now comes the awful ‘wowwy’ of finishing this letter,

  One word before I end Dear – let’s hope you’re beastly better.

  The most brutal letter on sale on 3 July 2007 was by Ernest Hemingway. Written to Ezra Pound in July 1925, Hemingway was in Spain, on his way to the running of the bulls at Fiesta de San Fermin de Pamplona, the great inspiration for The Sun Also Rises. He thanks Pound for a recent flattering profile of him and says he feels good for the first time in months, in fact ‘so good there’s nothing to write about’. But there is something: his distrust of Ford Madox Ford. The English novelist, aged 52 at this point, had just published the first of the Parade’s End quartet, and had been a success since the appearance of The Good Soldier a decade before. He had evidently just delivered a talk about new writing, which Hemingway described as ‘imaginary conversations between himself and Americans speaking an imaginary Yankee dialect . . . It gave his megalomania a gala night.’ Hemingway then launches a tirade about the advantages bulls have over Ford and other things that don’t appeal. Bulls are not political exiles, or print reviews, or expect to be invited to dinner; bulls do not tend to borrow cash or expect you to marry them. Bulls did not concern themselves with ‘delicate studies’ of American culture. Bulls, Hemingway attested, ‘are not Jews’. He signed the letter ‘Mother Eddy’ after Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. And he closed it with the desire to have ‘more and better fucking, fighting and bulls.’

  Hemingway’s cat skips over the correspondence on his bed.

  And then, thankfully, there was something charming from Albert Einstein. Written in July 1936 from Old Lyme, Conneticut, to Paul Habicht, a friend from his youth, the letter is resonant in its innocence, and has attained greater poignancy with the passage of time. He reminisces in German about their former days together, ‘working on the nice little electrostatic machines’, while also pondering German political ambitions. Habicht had apparently defended Germany during the Great War, ‘while I had already got to know extremely well the dangers involved in it. I did at least weigh anchor in time’. The US had many comforts for him. People are given more space, he wrote, and he could sit by a quiet bay and sail his boat.

  The weight of the universe lives on in these letters, a fair array of Western genius, prejudice, arrogance and generosity. We catch Napoleon’s infatuation, Tolkien’s modesty, Einstein’s measured nostalgia, and Hemingway’s anti-Semitism. And we are shocked, entertained and educated as a result.

  The Donne fetched £114,000. The Brontë went for £21,600, the Eliot £8,400, the Tolkien £7,800, the Dylan Thomas £6,600, the Hemingway £78,000 and the Einstein £15,600. And Napoleon’s letter to Josephine (the one after the quarrel but before the steady conquest of Europe and the infidelity and the divorce) went for £276,000.*

  But how would Napoleon fare against Nelson? The Albin Schram collection made up a venerated sale, but there are venerated sales of great letters every few months. In July 2005, for example, at an auction devoted to Horatio Nelson and the Royal Navy at Bonhams in New Bond Street, a letter set out something pivotal in British history: the position and ambitions of Nelson below decks on the Victory on 5 October 1805. It was 15 days before the Battle of Trafalgar, and the urgency of the admiral’s letter to his superior Lord Barham, First Lord of the Admiralty, is unmistakable. Reading it now, even with its distant topography and unwieldy punctuation, one can still grasp the issues at stake and the anxieties at hand:

  On Monday the french and spanish Ships took their Troops on board which had been landed on their arrival and it is said that they mean to sail the first fresh Levant Wind and as the Carthegena Ships are ready and when seen a few days ago had their Topsail Yards hoisted up this looks like a Junction, the position I have taken for this Month is from 16 to 18 Leagues West of Cadiz for although it is most desirable that the fleet should be well up in Easterly Winds, Yet I must guard against being caught with a Westerly Wind near Cadiz for a fleet of Ships with so many three deckers would inevitably be forced into the Streights and then Cadiz would b
e perfectly free for them to come out with a Westerly Wind as they served Lord Keith in the Late War. I am most anxious for the arrival of frigates less than eight with the Brigs &c: as we settled I find are absolutely inadequate for this Service and to be with the fleet, and Spartel, Cape Cantin or Blanco, & the Salvages must be watched by fast Sailing Vessels in case any Squadron should escape. I have been Obliged to send Six Sail of the Line to Water & get Stores &c: at Tetuan & Gib.r for if I did not begin I should very soon be Obliged to take the whole fleet into the Streights. I have 23 Sail with Me and Should they come out I shall immediately bring them to battle but although I should not doubt of Spoiling any Voyage they may attempt Yet I hope for the arrival of the Ships from England that as an Enemys fleet they may be annihilated.

  What would this fine specimen be worth (four pages, minor dust-staining and weakness at folds, modern archival restoration but overall in fine and attractive condition)? The Battle of Trafalgar – arguably Britain’s greatest tactical victory at the height of its naval dominance, a battle at which the Franco-Spanish fleet lost 22 ships and Britain none (fulfilling Nelson’s flagged missive that England expected every man to do his duty, a cause for which he gave his own life) – how, in the balance of history and celebrity, would one weigh such a thing against, say, the lustful hubris of Napoleon? Not entirely comfortably. In letters as everywhere else, sex sells: the Nelson went for £66,000, a fair sum but less than a quarter of a Bonaparte. C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.