To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  Your ever affectionate friend,

  John Keats.

  One can view Fanny Brawne’s gold and garnet engagement ring every afternoon from 1–5 p.m. at Keats House, as Wentworth Place is now known. There’s also Brawne’s bodice and bracelet on display, and two mementoes containing Keats’s hair. There is also a letter on show to Fanny Brawne’s mother, which Keats composed at the start of his quarantine in Naples in October 1820. ‘I dare not fix my mind upon Fanny. I have not dared to think of her. The only comfort I have had that way has been in thinking for hours together of having the knife she gave me put in a silver-case, the hair in a Locket and the Pocket Book in a gold net. Show her this.’

  Keats writes further of his illness and his dimming wits, before adding ‘My Love again to Fanny.’ And once again, after the valediction to her mother, he adds a line beneath: ‘Good bye Fanny! god bless you.’ He died four months later, his epistolary legacy as great as his poetic one.

  In fine health, Keats was among the finest letter-writers in the English language. His letters are all that Jane Austen’s are not: a creative torrent, a cascade of insight and illumination, a daily record of a young mind working out a philosophy for life. For a poet whose poems are possessed with a sheen of language that appears, as a recent editor of his work has it, ‘too much like bright monuments in winter sun’, his letters by contrast are spontaneous, sometimes genial, sometimes fiery, consistently chatty.* They are, dare one say it, fun. His letters have their ‘greatest hits’ – their talk of ‘Negative Capability’ (the happy allowance of scholarly doubt and mystery ‘without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’), and his comparison of life to a large ‘Mansion of Many Apartments’ (only two of which he had encountered by the time of his formulation: the ‘infant or thoughtless Chamber’ and the ‘Chamber of Maiden-Thought’, where ‘we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere’). But these are not conscious showstoppers; they are thinking aloud, and Keats is as ready to make a fool of himself as he is to appear brilliant. His letters show a mind exploding with activity, the big thoughts colliding with the mundane.

  His letters were not always so well regarded, but the most famous positive approval (and a resurrection) came from T.S. Eliot, who reviewed a published collection as ‘the most notable and most important ever written by any English poet’, seeing in them ‘what letters ought to be; the fine things come in unexpectedly, neither introduced nor shown out, but between trifle and trifle.’

  Keats’s letters to Brawne are something else. They are not all possessed of the same exploratory flights of intellect, and they have led some of Keats’s greatest admirers, W.H. Auden among them, to believe his mind tainted after 1820 with the twin diseases of lovesickness and consumption, and to wish that his love letters had not been published alongside his more literary output. Certainly they can be imperious, histrionic, chastising, contradictory and self-pitying (and Brawne was rightly reticent, and suspicious of his caprices). But they are daring nonetheless, and – in speaking of the universal lightness and illusions of an emotion that has infected men in their twenties since the concept of love began – they achieve their stated aim of immortality. They reveal a true self. Those from 1819, before his sickness took fatal hold, can be beautiful. Keats is unduly fond of himself in his love letters, but it is his muddled soul on show, not his art.

  ‘My dearest Lady,’ he wrote from Shanklin on the Isle of Wight on 1 July 1819. The couple had been secretly engaged for several months.

  I am glad I had not an opportunity of sending off a Letter which I wrote for you on Tuesday night. ’Twas too much like one out of Rousseau’s Heloise.* I am more reasonable this morning. The morning is the only proper time to write to a beautiful Girl whom I love so much, for at night, when the lonely day has closed, and the lonely, silent, unmusical Chamber is waiting to receive me as into a Sepulchre, then believe me my passion gets entirely the sway, then I would not have you see those Rhapsodies which I once thought it impossible I should ever give way to, and which I have often laughed at in another, for fear you should think me either too unhappy or perhaps a little mad.

  I am now at a very pleasant Cottage window, looking onto a beautiful hilly country with a glimpse of the sea; the morning is very fine. I do not know how elastic my spirit might be, what pleasure I might have in living here and breathing and wandering free as a stag about this beautiful Coast if the remembrance of you did not weigh so upon me. I have never known any unalloy’d Happiness for many days together. The death or sickness of someone has always spoilt my hours, and now when none such troubles oppress me, it is you must confess very hard that another sort of pain should haunt me. Ask yourself, my love, whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately and do all you can to console me in it? Make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me. Write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been.

  For myself I know not how to express my devotions to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days. Three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain . . .

  Though I could centre my Happiness in you, I cannot expect to engross your heart so entirely; indeed if I thought you felt as much for me as I do for you at this moment I do not think I could restrain myself from seeing you again tomorrow for the delight of one embrace. But no, I must live upon hope and Chance. In case of the worst that can happen, I shall still love you, but what hatred shall I have for another! . . .

  Do write immediately. There is no Post from this Place, so you must address Post Office, Newport, Isle of Wight. I know before night I shall curse myself for having sent you so cold a Letter; yet it is better to do it as much as in my senses as possible. Be as kind as the distance will permit to your

  J. Keats

  ‘My dearest Girl,’ Keats began in August 1820, in what is believed to be his last letter to Fanny.

  I wish you could invent some means to make me at all happy without you. Every hour I am more and more concentrated in you; everything else tastes like chaff in my mouth. I feel it almost impossible to go to Italy. The fact is, I cannot leave you, and shall never taste one minute’s content until it pleases chance to let me live with you for good. But I will not go on at this rate. A person in health, as you are, can have no conception of the horrors that nerves and a temper like mine go through . . .

  I do not think my health will improve much while I am separated from you. For all this, I am averse to seeing you: I cannot bear flashes of light, and return into my glooms again. I am not so unhappy now as I should be if I had seen you yesterday. To be happy with you seems such an impossibility: it requires a luckier star than mine! It will never be.

  I enclose a passage from one of your letters which I want you to alter a little: I want (if you will have it so) the matter expressed less coldly to me.

  If my health would bear it, I could write a poem which I have in my head, which would be a consolation for people in such a situation as mine. I would show some one in love, as I am, with a person living in such liberty as you do. Shakespeare always sums up matters in the most sovereign manner. Hamlet’s heart was full of such misery as mine is, when he said to Ophelia, ‘Go to a nunnery, go, go!’ Indeed, I should like to give up the matter at once. I should like to die. I am sickened at the brute world you are smiling with. I hate men, and women more. I see nothing but thorns for the future . . .

  I wish I was either in your arms full of faith, or that a thunderbolt would strike me.

  God bless you. J.K.

  It is through Keats’s letters that we have one of the great histrionic romances in a romantic century. The poet must have hoped we might remember him this way, despite his requested tombstone inscription that hi
s ‘name was writ in water’.

  ‘The fire is at its last click,’ he wrote to his brother,

  I am sitting with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet . . . Could I see the same thing done of any great man long since dead it would be a great delight: as to know in what position Shakespeare sat when he wrote ‘To be or not to be’ – such things become interesting from distance.

  The devotions of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett spawned a courtship correspondence no less fiery and rather happier in its ending: as one review of their collected letters concluded, ‘Reader, I married you’. It commenced in 1845, and concluded with another fleeing to Italy when her father’s disapproval demanded elopement.* One of its joys is its swift 20-month crescendo from endearing fandom to all-consuming craving, from the airiest lines about poetry to the logistics of meeting in secret and the luggage-smuggling that will facilitate their joint escape. Modern readers are within their grip in just three letters:

  Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, 10 January 1845: ‘I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, – and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write.’

  The following day she replies, ‘I thank you, dear Mr Browning, from the bottom of my heart. You meant to give me pleasure by your letter – and even if the object had not been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly answered. Such a letter from such a hand!’

  Two days later: ‘Dear Miss Barrett, I just shall say, in as few words as I can, that you make me very happy.’ His valedictions progress from ‘Yours ever faithfully’ and ‘Ever your most faithfully’ (January) to ‘Ever yours, dear Miss Barrett’ (April) to ‘Yours’ (May) to ‘My love, I am your R.B.’ (November).*

  When he first wrote, she was the more famous. She had attracted other male admirers with whom she had previously corresponded on literary matters, and she assumed that Browning’s correspondence would pan out in the same way. Besides, she liked it like that: a correspondence was the most tightly controlled of relationships, the pace and tone malleable, the scholarly flirtation calibrated line by line. Her poor health and overbearing father ensured that letter-writing was the risk-free option; both elements undoubtedly contributed to the grand, Brontë-like gestures of her romance with Browning – the man who swept her away and liberated her passion.

  ‘An earnest, simple noble artist’: The Brownings write to John Ruskin in 1859 about their artist friend William Page.

  It took more than 20 letters and five months before they met; there would be 574 letters in all before they fled for Europe. Barrett’s biographer Alethea Hayter has compared their correspondence to a tennis match, ‘the long breathless rally back and forth from every corner of the court . . . Excitement and enjoyment shine through their “heart-playing”, their absorbed search for the exact word, phrase, image, to express every shade of feeling.’ The key line in their correspondence may be the very last that Barrett wrote to Browning as a single woman: ‘I begin to think that none are so bold as the timid, when they are fairly roused.’ She was referring to the actions of her maid in Wimpole Street, but of course also to herself. We may detect echoes of this in much wartime correspondence: it is not just distance that binds two lovers’ letters, but the security of that distance – the fact that the real world does not intrude on an ideal, the possibility of writing perfectly and without looking your target in the eye.

  The Barrett-Browning letters facilitate their marriage – which was, by most accounts, a happy one through its 15-year life (Barrett died in 1861) – and they ensure the longevity of their reputations. Even those who cannot quote a line of their poetry beyond ‘O, to be in England/ Now that April’s there’ may know of how their initial intellectual revelations in their letters give way to more instinctual ones, and then to practical considerations of escape, including their rendezvous in a bookshop and consultations of train timetables. The fact that the letters are often self-conscious and rhetorical (they are both poets after all) does not detract from one’s enjoyment any more than a great Rembrandt is dismissed for being too painterly.

  And a week after they are married – no more letters.* It is the agonising nature of love that it flourishes best with doubt and poetic imagining, and there is but one hope for the epistolary historian after love-locked correspondents meet: a separation. With Barrett and Browning it never came; but with a few others we have been more fortunate (it’s yet another delight of letters – their agony is our pleasure).

  Of course, to hope for both an early passion and a prolonged continuation of letters once it subsides is just being greedy; and so it is with fervour that one falls upon the prolonged postal relationship of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. They too could be said to have written their most valuable work away from their fictions – Nin in her scandalous diaries, Miller in his copious correspondences with Nin, Lawrence Durrell and many others.

  Miller certainly knew the value of communication. Long before he achieved condemnation and literary acclaim with his sexually explicit autobiographical novels, Miller worked for the Western Union Telegraph Company in New York City. In 1920, at the age of 28, he began working as a personnel manager in charge of more than 2,000 uniformed telegraph messengers in the city, a role he held for almost five years. In heightened form the job became the subject of Kafkaesque descriptions in Tropic of Capricorn, with Miller depicting long days of menacing and senseless monotony as he tried to replace all the people who had quit the day before; like delivering the post, the job was never done. Miller spoke of some telegraph boys who lasted only hours on the job before abandoning their messages in waste bins or the sewers, and he found that colleagues who lasted any length of time had often developed their own swindles, such as shortening a long telegram and pocketing the difference in cost. Miller attempted to reform the system with limited success, and when he quit to become a full-time writer in 1924 with the encouragement of his new (second) wife June he was convinced of two things: the business world, with its insistence on rules and service, wasn’t for him; and a 20-cent telegram allowed you just 10 words. For a man who would write long letters every day to a great many people – and could, at the end of his long life, claim to have put more words in the post than any other writer in history – it was no great surprise that he opted for a cheaper and longer-lasting form of getting a message through.

  ‘All I can say is that I am mad about you,’ he begins a letter to Anaïs Nin in March 1932, three months after their first meeting. He had already apologised to Nin in a previous letter for sending her an ‘avalanche’ of mail (the word is apt: she was in Switzerland on a rest cure from her demonic and adulterous crushes, not just on Miller but his wife June too).

  The Miller-Nin correspondence initially follows a course we are familiar with: thunderstruck, diehard, sleepless infatuation, combined with the conviction that they are the first true lovers on the planet. There is this from Miller in Paris, also from March 1932:

  Three minutes after you have gone. No I can’t restrain it. I tell you what you already know – I love you. It is this I destroyed over and over again. At Dijon I wrote you long passionate letters – if you had remained in Switzerland I would have sent them – but how could I have sent them to Louveciennes? [Where she lived with her husband.]

  Anais I can’t say much now – I am in fever. I could scarcely talk to you because I was continually on the point of getting up and throwing my arms around you. I was in hopes you wouldn’t have to go home for dinner – that we might go somewhere to dine and dance. You dance – I have dreamed of that over and over again – I dancing with you, or you alone dancing with head thrown back and eyes half shut. You must dance for me that way. That is your Spanish self – your Andalusian blood.

  I am sitting in your place right now and I have raised your glass to my lips. But I am tongue-tied. What you have read to me is swim
ming over me. Your language is still more overwhelming than mine. I am a child compared to you, because when the womb in you speaks, it enfolds everything – it is the darkness I adore. You were wrong to think I appreciate the literary value alone. That was my hypocrisy talking. I have not dared until now to say what I think. But I am plunging – you have opened the void for me – there is no holding back.

  ‘I wrote you long passionate letters’: Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller.

  And this was true: they went at it like an American/French rewrite of Abelard and Heloise, enough heat in their letters to burn down the Louvre, let alone destroy two marriages. They met when they could, and their early literary passions (they were both critically supportive of each other’s work) soon engulfed itself in a physical one. Miller was a literary satyr, Nin a sensualist on any sheet that came to hand, and both flew flags for their own particular war of the sexes.

  Nin’s early letters speak of a similar excitement to Miller’s – a universal excitement even. There is a well of pleasure to be gained – even 80 years on – from reading her falling in love. It is still March 1932, and she has just been to the Beggar’s Opera in German with her husband, a banker whom she finds honourable but charmless; she is not much interested in property prices and a predictable future. She thinks of Miller during the opera, of how he has turned her life ‘symphonic’: