Stories

by Susan Sontag

  The characters are illegible. Her letter is never found.

  Here’s a cache of old letters. Old leaves … I have been having a go at rereading them. They are from my ex-husband. We had been married for seven years, and since we were going to be married forever we had granted me a sabbatical, I’d won a fellowship to Oxford, we had separated for the academic year, and we wrote each other blue aerograms every day. One didn’t use the transatlantic telephone in those days, so long ago. We were poor, he was stingy. I was drifting away, discovering life was actually possible without him. But I did write, each evening. During the day I’d be composing my letter to him in my head, I was always talking to him in my head. I was, you see, so used to him. I felt safe. I didn’t feel like a separate person. Whatever I saw when I was apart from him for an hour made me think first of how I would describe it to him; and we never separated for more than a few hours, just the time he taught his classes and I took mine—we were insatiable. My bladder might be aching, but I didn’t want to interrupt myself or him; talking, he would follow me into the bathroom. Returning at midnight from what academics in that staid era were pleased to call parties, more than once we sat in the car until dawn lightened the street, forgetting to go into our own apartment, so absorbed were we in our dissections of his exasperating colleagues. So many years of that, the delirious amity of nonstop talking—now more than three times those years ago! I wonder if he kept my letters. Or did he, the better to unite with his second wife, pitch them into the fireplace? For a year after the divorce I awoke most mornings with a foolish smile on my face, from the surprise, the relief, of no longer being married to him. I’ve never felt so safe with anyone since. It’s not right to feel so safe. I don’t, I can’t reread his letters. But I need to think of them there, in the shoebox, in the bottom of my closet. They are part of my life, my dead life.

  Act I, Scene 2. “Why did you visit us, but why? Lost in our backwoods habitation, I would not have known you. Therefore I would have been spared this laceration. In time—who knows?—the agitation of inexperience would have passed. I would have found a friend, another, and calmly grown into my part, of virtuous mother and faithful wife.” Tatyana has her indisputable feeling. But how does a feeling in one breast ignite a feeling in another? What are the laws of combustion? She can speak only of her own feeling—indisputably hers, after migrating from the lachrymose epistolary novels about love she loves to read. Of uniqueness. “Another! Now there can be no thought of another. Never could another rule my heart. My feeling for you is decreed forever, by Heaven’s will. For you I’m set apart. And my whole life, whether you will or not, is pledged to you.”

  Pledges, promises—doesn’t the fervor with which we make them testify to the strength of the opposing force, that of forgetfulness? An indomitable power of forgetfulness is necessary to close the doors and windows of consciousness, to make room for something new. Tatyana leans back in her chair, quivering, perspiring, and passes a hand over her brow. Nothing in her fragrant childhood spent among the silver birches has prepared her for this dire contraction. She tries vainly to conjure up her dear sister, her plump, kindly parents. The whole world has shrunk to the image of Eugene’s grim, restless face. Then away with the past, let it be dissolved by the pale moon, evaporate like the treble notes of a perfume. Without forgetfulness there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present. Without forgetfulness there could be no despair, no anxiety, no abjection, no longing, no future.

  Other pleas for love, other styles of diffidence.

  The first time I saw you, you had a white scarf knotted at the throat, the sun lay in your hair, your blouse was striped, you were wearing linen pants and espadrilles. From the table on the café terrace overlooking the Piazza del Popolo, I saw you approaching. I didn’t think you were beautiful. Talking gaily of having spent the night in jail for seizing the ticket for speeding the policeman had just written out and tearing it up, you sat down and ordered a lemon sherbet. I saw you and thought, If I cannot say I love you I am lost. But I didn’t. Instead I am going to write a letter. The weakest move.

  Now that I see how beautiful you are, your face gets in the way. As on a lenticular screen, the eyes follow me. I do not want to tell you you are beautiful. I must think of something else. Custom and my unfair heart demand that I flatter you. To coax a feeling from you. I want to pronounce those blessed words: love, love, love.

  I received a letter from a close friend. I did not open it for a week. It lay smoldering on my night table. The envelope bearing the name of a mere acquaintance I tore open eagerly as I came up the stairs, confident that the letter inside would contain nothing that could disturb me or hurt me.

  I have to tell you that I write in a very tiny script, so tiny it could be thought impossible to decipher; except that it is not. This script might seem to express my unwillingness to be known, my retreat from human contact; except that I want you to know me, which is why I am writing you, my dear.

  My love, this morning I received your wonderful letter (typed) and hasten to answer. Please write more.

  More effort than you can imagine—that’s what it means. In my lair, under a dirty-paned window that lets in the sour light, I sit at the kitchen table pondering what I might say to you. This causes me to brush the frame of my typewriter with the flat of my hand, twiddle my hair, finger my chin, pass a hand over my eyes, rub my nose, push the lock back from my forehead, as if my task lay in that, and not in the sheet of paper which lies folded into the typewriter. Perhaps I will fail in my effort to write you, and yet not to try means to fail in the same way.

  A black-bordered envelope arrives from Germany, the printed announcement of a dear acquaintance’s death, which I had learned about by telephone a week earlier. I would find it easier to open my mail if all the major messages were color-coded. Black for death. (Christoph died at forty-nine of his second heart attack.) Red for love. Blue for longing. Yellow for rage. And an envelope with a border the color once known as ashes of roses—could that announce kindness? For I’m prone to forget this kind of letter exists, too: the expression of sheer kindness.

  Hello, hello, how are you, how are you, I’m well, I’m well, how are, how is …

  And you, my dear?

  Act I, Scene 2. Sighing, trembling, Tatyana continues writing her letter, riddled with mistakes in French. (She’s feverish, as I’ve suggested.) She hears herself, her words. And the nightingale’s cadence. (Have I mentioned there was a nightingale in the garden?) Dawn is close to breaking, but she still needs the taper’s flickering light. She sings her love. Or, rather, it is the opera singer singing Tatyana. Though Tatyana is very young, the role is often sung by a mature diva whose voice can no longer perform as it should. It should float. But when there is a tendency to labored phrasing, the vocal line rarely floats or springs; it seems held back or driven forward. Happily, this is a good performance. The line soars. Tatyana writes. And sings.

  I cannot bear not getting a letter from you, and no longer go out. Can it be that I was once carefree and giddy? Now I drag a long shadow behind me that withers the greenery as I pass.

  I stay indoors, waiting for your reply. My self-imposed house arrest is turning out to be a longer sentence than I ever envisaged. Sometimes I go back to bed in the late morning or early afternoon, after the mail has been delivered: the daytime sleep that inmates of prisons call fast time. Your letter will come.

  I write your name. Two syllables. Two vowels. Your name inflates you, is bigger than you. You repose in a corner, sleeping; your name awakes you. I write it. You could not be named otherwise. Your name is your juice, your taste, your savor. Called by another name, you vanish. I write it. Your name.

  “Dear Friend! Dear Friend! You are all that remains, my only hope, my one friend. Only you can save me. I want to come where you are, be near you, next to you. I won’t bother you, I won’t come visiting, I won’t interrupt your work, I only need to know you are there, that beyond the wall of my room
there is a living human presence. You. I need your warmth. They have crushed me! I am beaten! I am worn out! After the nightmare of this year I must come to you—under your wing! Could you find me a room? Anything will do, all I need is a table, and a view, that is, a window to look out from, where I see something, not a wall, but if it does look out onto a wall, then it doesn’t matter, as long as I am close to you. You will save me, you will show me what I must do, how I must live. And could you lend me the money for a ticket? I need nothing, I will ask nothing from you. I will not bother you once I am there, you have my solemn promise. Who understands better than I your need for privacy? How I admire your independence, your strength! And your generous heart. With you as my guiding star, I will be as independent as you. I will cook my own meals if I have to, I’m used to taking care of myself, but if you could find someone in the village who can look after my few simple needs, that would make it easier for me to just stay in my room, looking out the window, serenely thinking of you, never daring to bother you. You are the only one I can turn to, but you are the only one I need. Do you remember our first meeting, and how the filaments of the copper lamps glowed above our heads? You understood then. You have always understood me. Please work a miracle. Arrange it! Hide me! Find me a room!”

  And I found him a room, a room in the house next to mine, on a hill above the dunes. And I wrote him that from the windows he would see trees and open spaces, and children flying kites by the sea. And that we would fly them, too.

  “It’s the handwriting of a lunatic,” said a friend to whom I showed the letter, with its oversized script, after his death. No, not of a lunatic but of a child: they were the same large letters a child makes, writing not with the hand alone but with the arm, from the shoulder. Dear Mommy, I LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY HEART. I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU.

  I found him a room. And he never came.

  In actual size above, fig. 1 (illustration to come), and enlarged below, fig. 2 (ditto), is an example of a writing used by Richard Anton in the 1920s, apparently as a means of protecting his manuscripts from unwelcome scrutiny. Prof. Joachim Greichen has established that most such texts are decipherable as scribbled drafts of prose texts which Anton completed and later published. Although by 1931 he had returned to his normal hand, shown opposite, fig. 3 (ditto), he was still wont to vary the size of his writing. For instance, in his most personal correspondence he often wrote in very large printed capitals.

  I NEED, I WANT. I NEED, I WANT.

  I love a tender climate. I loll by the swimming pool. My letters are my diary. I deposit my life with another. With you. A summer thunderstorm is on its way. Shall I describe the weather (or landscape), using weather (or landscape) to portray the vexations of self? If I write, I feel safe. I am humming something. I am bristling with sexual trepidation.

  Desire is rapid as the postal system is slow. These delays in the mail make my letters obsolete at their creation, make whatever I write wrong. For even as I write, taking up each of the points in your last letter, there already exists a subsequent letter from you, written in response to the last one received from me, saying something else. As I write, there is already a letter from you which I have not read. The Letter God is sporting with us. Our letters cross, but our limbs do not.

  Mused the diva:

  “I adore having visitors, I detest going to see people. I adore receiving letters, even reading them. But I detest writing letters. I adore giving advice but I detest being its recipient, and I never follow at once any wise advice that is given me.”

  Sometimes the letters contain a photograph, which the diva is pleased to sign. Yours, she writes. My best wishes. Your friend. Warmly. Love. Yes, on photographs to perfect strangers, but they are fans—exactly, that’s what I said, perfect strangers—she signs Love.

  Letters are sometimes a way of keeping someone at a distance. But for this purpose one must write a great many letters—at least one, sometimes two, a day. If I write you, I don’t have to see you. Touch you. Put my tongue on your skin.

  At first he writes mainly about his astonishing and now legendary discovery, that of a “six-class” marriage system on nearby Mortimer Island. He is happy. She can feel that. And she is happy for him, and tells him that. And he feels it, feels her wanting him to be happy, to give himself over entirely to his work, to be indivisible from his work, not to think of her, worry about her. And he seems to fall deeper in love through writing; he longs to be with his correspondent, though not back in England (but neither could she come out and join him); then the writing stops. Trevor’s last letter arrived more than a month after Elizabeth had heard by telegram that he was dead, carried off at the age of twenty-four by blackwater fever. She recounts the moment sparely, with almost no comment, leaving us—as she was left for a half century—with the wound, the silence and the possibility, open. Would they have lived happily ever after?

  I couldn’t tell him I wanted a divorce, not by letter. My letters had to be loving. I had to wait till I returned. He met me at the airport, breaking out of the waiting area onto the tarmac as I stepped off the plane. We embraced, collected my suitcase, reached the parking lot. Once in our car, before he put his key in the ignition, I told him. We sat in the car, talking; we wept.

  Of course, it should be easier to say no—or never, or no longer—in a letter. Easier, far, than face to misery-darkened face. And to say yes? Yes.

  Act I, Scene 2. Tatyana rereads the three pages she has written, and signed. Words are crossed out, tears stain the paper—but no matter, this is not a school exercise. It will stand as written, sealed.

  Sunrise. She pulls the bell rope to summon her befuddled Nanny, who supposes her high-strung darling has simply risen earlier than usual, and instructs the old woman to give the letter to her grandson, who must carry it quickly, quickly to their new neighbor. Who? Who? Tatyana points mutely to the beloved name on the envelope.

  And Eugene? Tatyana’s Eugene. The pale, slim scowler in the expensive foreign boots, who had barely talked to anyone the other night when he had come, everyone hoped, to visit. The lover always sees the beloved as solitary. But Eugene (Eugene’s Eugene) is, actually, as solitary and miserable as Tatyana imagines him.

  So is this Eugene (my Eugene), who has finished a haughty letter of six pages breaking off all relations with his father. He will allow no claims on his heart; from now on he will be dead, he vows, to all claims of affection.

  But then he learns that his father has died (did he, before dying, receive Eugene’s letter?) and—here my story rejoins theirs—returns to Petersburg for the funeral and to settle the estate, is about to go abroad, hears that his father’s elder brother is dying (how mortal are these fierce old men!), arrives dutifully at his uncle’s high-ceilinged manor in the remote countryside to find his uncle in the yard, already laid out in a coffin, and decides to stay for as long as it pleases him (could rustic life revive his poetic gift?), stays much alone, but after a month of seclusion most disapproved of by the neighboring gentry allows himself reluctantly to be brought to a gathering in the house of a local family with two daughters, a simple family night, really, with a few neighbors. And he does notice the pretty gravity of the figure in the window seat, and thinks, If I could fall in love, it might be with a girl like that. He finds her air of melancholy … well-bred.

  And when he receives Tatyana’s letter, he is moved, but more from pity at her artless innocence, for love has been banished from his imagination. He rereads her letter, sighs; he does not wish to hurt her. At the end of the day, the longest day of Tatyana’s life, he will ride over to her house—he will find her in the garden—to explain with as much gallantry as he can muster that he is not meant for marriage and might feel for her no more than the sentiments of a brother. No letter for Tatyana. She does not obsess him. He will do it face to face.

  In the same way that you find the courage to write me, I find the courage to read your letter. Do not imagine that I mull over every line, but I think I’ve understood why i
t is hard for you to write me. (See, you have allowed me to know you.) It’s because with each letter it is as if you were writing me for the first time.

  Eugene does not know that, after their conversation in the garden, Tatyana falls ill, that she almost dies. Of shame, of grief. But he does hear two years later, from an old classmate at the Cadet School, that she has married, married well—indeed, her husband, a general and a decent man, is a friend of Eugene’s family—and now lives in Petersburg.

  Has he forgotten when, some two years after that, he is invited to a reception at the Gremin mansion in Petersburg? Presented by General Gremin to his young wife, at first Eugene doesn’t recognize in the stately, tiaraed, even more beautiful woman the vulnerable, dark-browed girl he dismissed in her parents’ garden. Her eyes see but they don’t look. They don’t ask anything.

  Torchères, chandeliers.

  He finds himself returning often to the Gremin mansion, contriving to meet her at the opera, at other parties, but he and Tatyana never exchange anything more than calm civilities. Sometimes he manages to be the one who sets her fur cape on her shoulders. She nods gravely—meaning what? Sometimes she seems to be hiding her dear face in her muff. Bewildered, he slowly acknowledges that he loves her, loves her beyond saying. That it is a love decreed by Heaven. He knows this because he wants to write her. Could this be the solution to the riddle of his arid heart? Now he’s ridiculous—no matter. One night he stays up until dawn writing a four-page epistolary howl of love. He writes another letter the next day. A third.

  And he waits and waits. For a reply.