To the Letter
Page 27
I have been horribly chatty in this L.C., that’s the result of worrying, I have kinda got you on my mind in a different way, the situation in Greece is getting in my hair, despite all efforts to remain calm. Keep calm is my motto. But I do wish I knew how things were with you. Keep well, keep safe.
I Love You.
Bessie.
27 WOOLACOMBE RD, LONDON SE3
18 December 1944
Dearest,
I shouldn’t really feel anxious about your possible conduct while you are away, because we love so much, we do really care. I know it’s just as unthinkable for you as it is for me, my heart is in Greece and nothing else can touch it. But I know of so many people whose lives have gone awry it’s a bit horrifying, and I think you might feel tempted in a lonely moment, I don’t mean cheap temptations. No, as I write that, I don’t believe it, because like me you don’t allow the situation to arise, there can’t be temptation when all your heart and mind and body is straining to somebody so far away, no I won’t worry further, we are one, we really do care, in each other we can rise above the second rate, you make me feel that. You do brighten the scene, indeed you do, we will, will it so, in those future days, grand days – we trust, oh! We do trust, Chris.
To go out together – knowing that we shall go home together, knowing that we shall pass the night together – to go out together knowing that – I think of that so often, really just belonging – that makes my inside sing, to be together so that I can answer your demands, make my own, just put my arm around you at any time, sometimes in public, would that embarrass you? I know it’s rather a possessive thought, but I do feel rather proud that you are mine, I could be rather blatant over that in front of your friends, am I being too awful, but I can’t help that proud elated feeling, to put it baldly, you are a wonderful catch, I want everybody to know you are mine.
Have given up present-giving with my pals by mutual consent, thank goodness, in the end it becomes a racket, much too wearing to keep up, most of ’em can’t afford it, so found it kinder to cut it out. It’s most awkward this business of being unable to give people anything without they must return it, most natural I suppose, but difficult with present financial straits. Funny how people get the urge at Xmas time for a holocaust of present giving, you should see the crowds in town, all trying to buy what isn’t there. Dear oh dear what a game.
I wonder how you will spend Xmas.
Oh Darling, I Love You.
Bessie
On the day this letter was written, Chris Barker was stationed in Athens’ Hotel Cecil. He awoke to shouts from ELAS (the Greek People’s Liberation Army), of ‘Surrender comrades, we are your friends’. He wrote in his notebook: ‘At 11.30, ELAS started serious attack: shells, Bren, rifle, mortar. The last was quite frightening . . . Mortars started firing and got very close . . . Panic in the passage. ‘Close the door!’ The Bren gunner still outside . . . got more ammo, then with Bert and Jack sat on the first floor landing. Ordered downstairs, then upstairs again. Bofors or dynamite through end passage. Much glass falling under shelling . . . Then, suddenly, ‘Cease Fire!’ Joyously, all over the building the cry was taken up . . . Came downstairs, laid down our warm weapons and was greeted by long-haired partisans, with ‘Hail, Comrades!’ during the dark hour, before dawn.
Led away in small parties while above us the Spits (Spitfires) looked wonderingly on . . . Walk about 4 miles to a mansion. Lady partisans. Lovely, interested and approving. Water and 2 ozs of bread. Then about 15 mile march through the woods and forest glades. Led away to a mountain fastness blindfolded.’
Chapter Thirteen
Love in Its Later Forms
Each day Charlie Brown would look, and each day he would be disappointed. It was like the Carpenters’ song Please Mr Postman: he’d be waiting so patiently, and all he wanted was a card or a letter, and could the postman check one more time and see – but nothing. What Charlie Brown wanted specifically was a Valentine’s card, from anyone in particular one imagines, although something from the Little Red-Haired Girl would be particularly fine. But every time he folds down that metal hatch on his mailbox and stretches his stubby arms to the very back . . . he gets only air and fluff. Ah well, maybe next year. Some hope.
When Charlie Brown failed to get even one card in his comic strip, and when the humiliation was compounded by the TV broadcast of the animated Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown, sympathetic observers sent him hundreds of cards, such is the power of the media, such is the poignancy of the post. Charlie Brown later sought to capitalise on the response: ‘There must be millions of people all over the world who never get any love letters,’ he surmised. ‘I could be their leader.’
Early on in the TV animation, Lucy is leaning against Schroeder’s piano as he plays his usual Beethoven sonata, and she begins to read cheerily from a book: ‘It says here that it is probable that the Valentine was the first of all greetings cards. The paper Valentine dates from the sixteenth century.’ Lucy smiles at Schroeder, who carries on playing obliviously. ‘By 1800 hand-painted copper plates were produced to meet the large demand. Get it, Schroeder? To meet the large demand for Valentines?’ He plays on, deaf to her suggestions, but she perseveres. She plays with her hair and smiles at him, but Schroeder doesn’t look up, so she throws the book away and asks whether he is sure he really wants to suffer the tortures of a memory of a lost love. Schroeder finally looks up in astonishment, and Lucy starts destroying his piano. ‘You’ll wake up at night SCREAMING!’ she wails. ‘You’ll wanna smash things!’
In the United States Valentine’s cards were certainly not unknown before 1840 – in that year some 1,100 were sent in New York – but their popularity blossomed with the introduction of stamps and cheaper postage, and in 1847 some 30,000 Valentines were mailed. February 14th became a unique thing – a postal holiday, and the Post Office was aided in its windfall by advertisers seizing on the possibility of attaching gifts to this transaction. Mothers’ and Fathers’ Day would follow suit, but they would be modest in comparison with the ‘heaving postbags’ and ‘thronging crowds’ that dominated cartoons and comment pieces in the newspapers at the time. In mid-Victorian Britain and antebellum America it emphasised powerful things about the post that had not been evident before: that the mail could be used for leisure and provocation, and that these things could be conducted more or less anonymously. When the San Francisco Daily Evening News reported in 1855 that ‘The rap of the postman, on the morning of 14th February, causes many a maiden’s bosom to throb with love and curiosity,’ it was clear that the mail had found a new purpose: a service of pure, inessential pleasure.
But the popularity of Valentine’s Day has ebbed and flowed. In 1958 Harper’s Weekly wrote that 30 million cards were sold in the United States, while three years later in the UK the Daily Mirror reported a figure of 27 million. This was quite a recovery from an inter-war slump that had seen the same newspaper ask ‘Is St. Valentine Dead? . . . The young . . . are no longer sentimental. The cinema has formed a generation with unabashed methods of courtship – if indeed it can be called by any such old fashioned name.’ But by 1962, sentimentality was back: ‘This year, Valentine’s Day will be spelt with a capital R for Romance.’
The appeal of a Valentine’s card is that it says nothing and everything all at once. One doesn’t have to be very skilled at expressing love or longing to send one, for someone has done that for you with a poem or illustration of a rose, and the real work is done by the recipient. And the recipient is never obliged to reply to one, merely to cherish it and wonder. They are not real love letters, and these days they are unlikely even to be a prelude to them; they are date-appropriate arousals, really not much more than the Facebook poke, and they may ever teeter on the brink of timidity and alarm. Real love letters are something else, and soon we will all be like Charlie Brown, reaching for what isn’t there.
No art flourishes in a vacuum. In Novem
ber 2012, Sotheby’s New York was delighted to unveil the line-up of its pre-Christmas Books and Manuscripts sale, a predictably eclectic array of Isaac Newton, F. Scott Fitzgerald and George Gershwin, and a fragment of the first bible to land on the moon. But the noise around the auction was generated by another lot, described in the catalogue as ‘the largest and most significant group of correspondence and drawings by Charles Schulz ever offered at public sale’, documenting ‘the romantic pursuit of Tracey Claudius by the celebrated creator, author, and artist of Peanuts’.
Schulz and Tracey Claudius sent each other Valentines all year round. Tracey Claudius (whose name would not have been out of place alongside Peppermint Patty and Linus van Pelt in the comic strip) was 25 when she first met Schulz in March 1970, when the cartoonist was 48. A friend of hers was interviewing Schulz for a magazine, and Claudius tagged along to take photographs. She was a huge fan, and explained that she really just wanted to meet her hero. She admitted as much in a letter she sent him after returning home the same day: she adored Charlie Brown and ‘that stupid beagle’, she wrote, and meeting their creator ‘was like being Charlie Brown and getting to meet Willie Mays . . . Happiness is discovering your idol’s feet are not clay, but pure and durable gold.’
According to his biographer David Michaelis, Schulz fell under her spell from the off. His marriage was apparently in disarray, and he was in need of another woman to anchor him. ‘From the start,’ Michaelis writes, ‘the unspoken assumption between them was that Tracey was going to make him happy.’ In the following week the couple met often – ice-skating, an outing to a bookstore in San Francisco, a hotel dinner. And then Schulz recreated their meetings by sending Claudius a series of letters and cartoons, casting himself as Charlie Brown and his new squeeze as Lucy. In the first, Charlie Brown asks ‘Remember?’ and in the second his speech bubble says ‘March 16th was the day we met.’ Subsequent drawings depict other early meetings, and in the sixth, Charlie Brown asks, ‘On April 22nd you squeezed my hand in the Dark! Remember?’ Another drawing, in which Schulz apparently recalls their first night together (and what may have been his first infidelity) in a Monterey hotel, says, ‘May 1st and 2nd were so neat I can hardly stand to think about it.’
In July 1970, four months after their meeting, Schulz sent Claudius a postcard from Honolulu, where he was vacationing with his wife and another couple. ‘Aloha – Like Gatsby, I’m pursuing the “green light” . . . Hope to see you soon – I miss you very much.’ The green light, Schulz reminds Claudius in another letter, is Gatsby’s interpretation of ‘the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.’
The Sotheby’s catalogue claims that many other letters
rehearse all of the features that Schulz finds most attractive about Claudius. More often than not, her name is written in longing triplicate: Tracey Tracey Tracey. Schulz variously comments on her sweet voice, her nose and beautiful profile, her prettiness, her beautiful eyes, her fascinating weirdness, her deeply musical laughter, her golden eyes, her soft hands, and her marvelous face. One letter is actually a compilation of Tracey’s ‘Good Points’, which includes charming, cute, beepable, huggable, buggable, sensitive, athletic, and bookable.’
Frequently he tells her how much he loves her; occasionally there are red hearts.
Charles Schulz didn’t always keep his love private; he also wrote syndicated letters to the world. David Michaelis has detected the parallel appearance of certain words and themes in his correspondence with Claudius and his speech bubbles in Peanuts. Snoopy had previously referred to himself as ‘buggable and huggable’; in two letters to Claudius, Schulz writes that his wife had found out about his many long-distance phone calls to her, and in a Peanuts strip at about the same time Charlie Brown berates Snoopy for his obnoxious behaviour when he is denied a visit to ‘that girl beagle’ he met. In the fourth panel, showing Snoopy picking up the telephone, Charlie Brown yells at him, ‘And stop making those long-distance phone calls!’ In another strip, Charlie Brown calls at Lucy’s psychiatric help stand (‘The Doctor Is In’) and asks, ‘Do you think monogamy is possible for humans, given how we’re wired?’ And then there’s the one where Peppermint Patty dozes in class and says ‘Tracey! Tracey, I love you! Tracey, do you hear me, I love you?’
According to his biographer, Schulz twice proposed to Claudius. She declined, she later said, because she doubted whether she could make Schulz happy, and because she despaired of wrecking the public image of the creator of a comic strip she considered ‘holy’. The couple remained in contact until 1973, when Schulz, a year after his divorce, married someone else.
The emergence of the letters did not delight members of Schulz’s family, who declared their sale tasteless and heartless; the image of Schulz that Claudius was keen to protect while Schulz was alive clearly no longer applied (he died in 2000 at 77). The media reported that the family of Tracey Claudius was selling the archive (44 letters in all) to finance her deteriorating health, at which point close readers were able to deduce that the collective childhood memory of one of the most popular cartoons in America was being sacrificed on the altar of a health system that was failing to adequately care for its seniors.
The letters didn’t sell.
What makes a great love letter? Truth, vulnerability, passion, secrecy, vulgarity, fervour, delusion, exquisitely painful ecstasy? Something so intense you want to shout it or burn it? Something that speaks to us all through the ages? Something Goethe called ‘the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others’?
Love letters catch us at a time in our lives where our marrow is jelly; but we toughen up, our souls harden, and we reread them years later with a mixture of disbelief and cringing horror, and – worst of all – level judgement. The American journalist Mignon McLaughlin had it right in 1966: ‘If you must re-read old love letters,’ she wrote in The Second Neurotic’s Notebook, ‘better pick a room without mirrors.’
But of course there are exceptions, those letters whose shelf life is everlasting and whose lessons are immutable. We may look at Petrarch’s and Shakespeare’s sonnets this way, and there are correspondences with equal weight. We would expect the Romantic poets to come up trumps, and so too the buttoned-up Victorians: the courtship between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett is one of the great mythical romances, created entirely through letters. But the catalogue extends deep into the last century too, with Henry Miller/Anaïs Nin and Robert Lowell/Elizabeth Bishop leading the glittering literary way through a million less celebrated heartbreaks in wartime. And they all have a patron saint, wittingly or not.
On 1 November 1820, John Keats wrote to another Charles Brown, his great friend back in London. Keats was in Naples, on his way to his final lodgings in Rome, an increasingly futile attempt to find warmer air and recovery from tuberculosis. A tortuous month-long crossing had been followed by a 10-day ship-bound quarantine, Italian officials worried that its passengers would export London’s latest cholera outbreak. To add to his woes (the whole blood-coughing consumptive ordeal), Keats was also lovesick, and his longing took up the greater part of his letter to Brown. The object of his affection, of course, was his fiancée Fanny Brawne, the woman he would never marry. They had known each other for two years; he had left for the continent certain that he would never see her again.
His regret worsened with his illness.
The persuasion that I shall see her no more will kill me . . . My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die – I cannot bear to leave her. Oh, God! God! God! Every thing I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her – I see her – I hear her.
Keats, ever financially embarrassed, had begun to share Charles Brown’s house in Hampstead named Wentworth Place in December 1818; Fanny Brawne and her m
other lived next door. Brown subsequently observed him writing some of his greatest poems in the house and garden, most famously ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (although Brown’s account of this is disputed). The two went walking in Scotland together and discussed literary matters, and when doctors advised Keats to move to Italy he tried to persuade Brown to accompany him. But Brown stayed behind, and resolved to write often. In one letter to Italy he told Keats: ‘If I have a right to guess, a certain person next door is a little disappointed at not receiving a letter from you, but not a word has dropped. She wrote to you lately.’
‘I cannot bear to leave her’: John Keats ponders his fate in this engraving by Joseph Severn.
Brown was unaware that Keats had determined never to write to Fanny Brawne again, or read anything she sent to him. He hoped this might ease their separation; he found it did not.
There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment. This was the case when I was in England; I cannot recollect, without shuddering, the time that I was prisoner at Hunt’s,* and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead all day. Then there was a good hope of seeing her again – Now! – O that I could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her – to receive a letter from her – to see her hand writing would break my heart – even to hear of her any how, to see her name written would be more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do? Where can I look for consolation or ease? If I had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me . . .
My dear Brown, for my sake, be her advocate for ever. I cannot say a word about Naples; I do not feel at all concerned in the thousand novelties around me. I am afraid to write to her. I should like her to know that I do not forget her. Oh, Brown, I have coals of fire in my breast. It surprised me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery. Was I born for this end? God bless her, and her mother, and my sister, and George, and his wife, and you, and all!