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by Prioleau, Betsy

  Real ladies’ men would please the most exacting romance reader. The medieval French scholar Abelard was not only the “preeminent philosopher and theologian of the twelfth-century,” he was also charismatic—amusing, handsome, and the idol of women. Scholars thronged from all over Europe to Paris to hear his joke-filled, dazzling lectures, and the female population longed for a “place in [his bed].” In an era of lax clerical chastity, Abelard seemed to have availed himself. “I feared,” he wrote, “no rebuff from any woman I might choose to honor with my love.”

  The woman he honored was the niece of the canon of Notre Dame Cathedral, an intellectual wunderkind named Heloise whom he seduced during tutorials and long debates in her study. Their historic romance, however, went afoul. Heloise became pregnant, they married, and the canon’s kinsmen found out and castrated Abelard. Heloise was forced to abandon the child and retire to a convent, and Abelard, to enter a monastery. For the rest of their lives they continued their radiant conversations through hundreds of letters in Latin, but Heloise never reconciled herself. She “remained absolutely and unconditionally in love with him, spiritually and physically.”

  Next to love, conversation was Casanova’s “greatest talent.” Regarded as the “most entertaining man in Europe of his time,” he was a crack storyteller and conversant on a staggering range of subjects, from horticulture to medicine and metaphysics. He couldn’t conceive of speechless romantic passion. “Without words,” he wrote, “the pleasure of love is lessened by at least two-thirds.” And the women he picked knew how to use them as well, if not better, than he. With one inamorata he debated La Fontaine’s epigrams; with another, transcendental philosophy; and with Henriette, his conversational superior, Cicero, opera, and the meaning of happiness.

  Ivan Turgenev might never have enthralled women as he did without his “beautiful faculty of talk.” In the novel Rudin, he draws a portrait of himself in action, sowing heartbreak through his conversation. At a house party, the “irregular”-featured Dmitry Rudin regales guests about his German student days with such colorful word pictures, keen ideas, and bold flourishes that the seventeen-year-old daughter (as happened to Turgenev) falls catastrophically in love. Rudin, he writes, “possessed what is almost the highest secret—the music of eloquence. By striking certain heart strings he could set all the others obscurely quivering and ringing.”

  This was the “secret” of Turgenev’s conquest of Pauline Viardot. An opera diva and seductress, Viardot was an exceptional woman—a superb singer, composer, writer, and an exhilarating conversationalist. When he first heard her sing in St. Petersburg in 1843, he was thunderstruck. Each night he joined her other suitors on a bearskin rug and told such vivacious, vividly spun tales that she returned his passion. Their affair—filled with luminous conversation and conducted under the nose of her “almost silent” husband—lasted four decades.

  Handled seductively, learning alone can be “erotic in its urgency and intensity.” Philosopher Michel Serres believes that “the quintessential ladies’ man is a man of ideas.” It depends, though, on the delivery. Big Thinkers, like the ungainly Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, intoxicated women because they made ideas sing. Sartre was the most baffling case. Only five feet tall, he had a gargoylish face with a blind eye, yet he was “smart and ardent and very funny,” and charmed his many mistresses by “talk[ing] all night.” “Seduction,” he said, “is fascinating speech.”

  Eighteenth-century philosophe Denis Diderot had an unbeatable combination: beauty, a monumental mind, and a “golden tongue.” And he was the very devil with women. A man of letters, he was coeditor of the massive Encyclopédie, a twenty-year project that encompassed every conceivable topic, including art, math, politics, religion, science, and even fantasy travel. To talk to him was like being born along “a fresh and limpid river whose banks were adorned with rich estates and beautiful houses.”

  From the time Diderot left home at sixteen to make his way in Paris, his life was an incessant round of romances. Blond, buff, and gorgeous, he was “loquacious [and] expansive,” and up to his neck in intrigues—with actresses, a neighbor’s wife, a flirtatious book dealer, and scores more. At twenty-eight, however, his famous powers of reason failed him, and he married the wrong woman, a “ravishingly beautiful,” pious lace-and-linen dealer. Their incompatibility soon became evident, and he took his pleasures elsewhere, picking more like-minded women: writer Madeleine de Puisieux and his soul mate of twenty years, Sophie Volland, a bespectacled, lively savante.

  He courted them both, but especially Sophie, with delicious intellectual fare. His letters to her—written as though he “were standing beside her”—showcase his cerebral brand of seduction. He spreads before her the “fruits of the mind” like a banquet: from dissections of farm picnics to digressions on metaphysics and love.

  Although Diderot’s philandering days ceased with Sophie, women continued to pursue him. The salonnière Madame Necker reportedly was “in love with him,” and Catherine the Great found him so delightful that she bought his library, paid him to manage it, and invited him to Russia on the condition that he talk to her each day. No stranger to conversational virtuosi, Catherine reckoned “Diderot among the most extraordinary men who ever existed.”

  The Poetry Potion

  [Poetry is] love’s best weapon . . . more amorous than love.

  —MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, “On Some Verses of Virgil”

  He’s the mascot of the undatables. Cyrano de Bergerac with his huge “tusk” of a nose has such an ugly mug that he’s a laughingstock and romantic reject. But he has a gift denied to lesser men; he’s a verbal prodigy who can duel in rhymed quatrains and compose soaring love lyrics. Afraid that his looks revolt his cherished Roxanne, he feeds his poetry to the dim-witted Christian, and she marries the handsome cadet. After Christian dies, Roxanne retires to a convent where Cyrano visits her for years. At last, fatally wounded, he tells her the truth; she realizes it’s his “wild, endearing” poetry that has made her “drunk with love,” and he dies in her adoring arms.

  Poetry is linguistic seduction on steroids. “Lavish fine words” on women, Ovid exhorted. “There’s magic in poetry; its power / can pull down the bloody moon.” Why the erotic wallop, nobody quite knows. One suggestion is the similarity between poetic expression and passion; they share the same emotional intensity and visceral impact on the body. “I know it’s poetry,” said Emily Dickinson, when I feel “as if the top of my head were taken off.” In thermal imaging experiments, love poetry actually produces a “parched tongue” and “fevered brow”—what Andrew Marvell called “instant fires in every pore.” It can cause, writes critic Jon Stallworthy, “an exaltation comparable to making love.”

  The legacy of prehistory may also account for the libidinal punch of poetry. As cultural historian Mircea Eliade observed, the shaman’s aphrodisiacal chants are “the universal sources of lyric poetry,” and according to Joseph Campbell and others, they are part of our mythic inheritance. Early mating rites, too, may have included prosody contests. Geoffrey Miller argues that Pleistocene man needed his best language for courtship, which was poetry. No other mode of speech exercises such charm or measures fitness so well. Meter, rhyme, and the right words in the right order impose a stiff mental challenge and broadcast verbal expertise.

  Across cultures, women crave poetry. One woman in a survey said her steamiest memory was the day her husband gave her semi-risqué poems with blanks in the rhyme scheme to fill in. Psychology professor Richard Wiseman, who studied sixty-five hundred subjects worldwide, ranked poetry as the third most persuasive tool for men in romance. Women agree; in dating posts and how-tos, they’re unanimous. Leave us a “luscious love note,” they write, or recite a verse, “even if it’s bad.” Unsurprisingly, poets report twice as many sexual partners as other men.

  Why women have such an erotic relish for poetry is unclear. Biology may be partially responsible. Women are more verbal and emotionally expressive and apt to
use both brain hemispheres, just as poetry does. They also like linguistically driven romantic foreplay. Poetry is the ideal vehicle. When we expend energy on language, we’re paid back in energy that, explains psychologist Ilana Simons, can “spur a love bond.” Poems also combine neural surprise with the “bewitchment of magical speech,” which bypasses reason and targets the instinctual, sensual self. At the same time, women have been culturally conditioned for eons to expect and desire love lyrics from men.

  As far back as ancient Egypt, suitors wooed women with hieroglyphic love poems, and in fourth-century BC Sumer, priests beckoned priestesses to the ritual marriage bed in trochaic stanzas. Athenian youths learned “skill in composing and reciting” verse as part of their courtship training, and eleventh-century Japanese aristocrats wrote thirty-one-syllable haikus to lovers before and after trysts. “The first device” in courtship, declared medieval Arabic scholars, was a poetic overture. To entice women, men should “quote a verse of poetry, or dispatch an allegory, or rhyme a riddle, or propose an enigma, or use heightened language.” With courtly love, poetry became ensconced in the male romantic repertoire in the West, where it has endured from Elizabethan rhymsters to twenty-first-century rappers.

  Dramatic heroes traditionally versify ladies into love with them. Christy Mahon of John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World seduces an Irish village and the reigning belle with his “poet’s talking,” and the Don Juan of Derek Walcott’s Joker of Seville is a poet who talks metrical rings around his prey. In the movie Before Sunrise, Jesse commemorates his night with Celine by reciting W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” to her beneath a statue in Vienna at dawn. She doesn’t forget. Nine years later, she sees Jesse again by chance and leaves her boyfriend for him.

  Alexander Portnoy, the frustrated klutz of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, gets one thing right: he reads Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” to his girlfriend and sends her into estrogen storm. The aphrodisiac of poetry can bowl over the unlikeliest couples; in A. S. Byatt’s Possession, two cynical, mismatched scholars become infatuated as they study a cache of erotic poems together. Marge Piercy’s antihero Phil, of Small Changes, is a druggie and a dropout, but he transfixes women with his “dancing cloud of words” and rescues Miriam from her prosaic husband. When Phil reenters her life, she regains her will to live: “She had her poet back.”

  A man can be as lame and surly as Lord Byron, but let him encant some “music of the soul” to a woman and she’ll dissolve. Or pen lyrics of her own. Niccolò Martelli, the “notorious Don Juan” of Renaissance Italy, exchanged verses with poet Tullia d’Aragona, and becharmed Florentine signoras with his sonnets. A modern poetic “lothario,” balladeer Leonard Cohen often tailors lyrics for specific girlfriends, some of whom, like Joni Mitchell and Anjani Thomas, are singer-composers themselves.

  Actor Richard Burton called this form of seduction “poetic love.” “I had a tried and true system,” he said. “I gave [them] poetry.” One of the finest actors of the twentieth century and gifted with an ambrosial voice and innate “lyricism of spirit,” he was a legendary lover. Although not the handsomest of men (with a pockmarked face and stocky build), he withered women, sleeping with nearly everyone in Hollywood. He had only to recite some “wonderful poetry” to Marilyn Monroe for her to smother him in kisses and take him to the prop room. Claire Bloom, his mistress of five years, remembered lying in bed while he sat beside her and reeled off poems “late into the night” with “his beautiful voice.” Despite subsequent lovers, she called Burton “the only man to whom I have fervently given all of myself.”

  He had the same effect times ten on Elizabeth Taylor, then the reigning sex goddess of film. Throughout their decade-long union, he showered her with verse and serenaded her on Broadway with Andrew Marvell’s erotic “To His Coy Mistress” and D. H. Lawrence’s “The Snake.” His letters to her brim with poetry—occasionally his own—on desire, “death,” and “liquor.” Among other excesses, liquor both destroyed their “marriage of the century” and ended his life at fifty-nine. Still, he was a spellbinder who ruined women for other men. “Imagine having Richard Burton’s voice in your ear while you are making love,” exulted Taylor. “Everything just melted away. He whispered poetry—we kissed . . . Happiness!”

  The prose-poetry of the everyday speech can also enthrall. Desmond MacCarthy, a minor member of the 1920s Bloomsbury group, was “tongue-enchanted,” his talk flowing like free verse. Known as the “delectable Desmond,” he spoke in a “stroking, meandering voice,” with the flair of a “troubadour.” He accomplished little as a writer (only four essay collections), but Virginia Woolf thought him “the most gifted” of them all. Her female contemporaries went further: to them, he was an entrancer.

  He wasn’t loved for his looks. He had “smallish genitals,” missing teeth, and the face of a “bald, battered Roman emperor.” Yet one woman after another succumbed to his incandescent conversation. He liked “the company of pretty women” and easily seduced them—notably the glamorous chatelaine of a Greek Island, and the litterateur, Mollie Warre-Cornish, whom he married in 1906.

  Monogamy, however, proved difficult. Admirers hovered around. The charismatic Lady Cynthia Asquith, one of his “distractions,” said that talking to him was like “dancing on a floor hung with chains.” Unable to part with him, his wife endured his romantic capers for decades. Then at age forty MacCarthy met American artist Betsy Reyneau, and his marriage collapsed. MacCarthy’s and Reyneau’s passionate affair lasted twenty years, sustained in part by his lyrical letters. When she moved to New York during World War II, he wrote, Let’s imagine we’re in a Manhattan restaurant, surrounded by “bewildered people” who can’t conceive why we see “a world of delight in each other.” “Absurd?” he asked. “Not from the inside.”

  WHITHER SEDUCTIVE CONVERSATION? Cultural critics fear the art has nearly vanished with the onslaught of i-communication and passive entertainment. We’re living in a postverbal age of wordless love. The typical romantic couple in movies, writes film critic David Denby, is now boringly “inarticulate.” Reality shows stream with nonversation and birdbrain banter between the sexes. Little wonder. Men no longer have to verbally court women in a world of the “seven-minute seduction,” sexts, and mute hookups. Amid this impasse, relationship coaches flog “communication”—dull dialogues in mutual comprehension—but ignore artful, sexy conversation.

  Amorous conversation, though, is the left ventricle of desire. It pumps and preserves passion and keeps the blood up. Romantic love is never a sure thing and needs life support. Good talk—an unspoken/spoken erotic duet—soothes, charms, delights, informs, and thrills. Robert Louis Stevenson thought men and women should converse “like rival mesmerists.” Be a “talkable man,” he urged—summon drama, “giddy and inspiring” words, and transport her to “new worlds of thought.” In the film Sade, the marquis is more direct. Advising a greenhorn suitor, he says, “Talk to her first. Women grow randy through the ear.” Only the fluent deserve the fair.

  CHAPTER 6

  Torching Up Love

  –

  [Without art] none of Medea’s herbs can keep a passion from dying.

  —OVID, The Art of Love

  Sam is a magnate who runs a retail conglomerate and can have his pick of ladies. He’s fetching to women, and still handsome at fifty-five: short and svelte, with a thick shock of black hair and elfin eyes in a rugged Mediterranean face. Tonight I’m his guest at a charity gala, seated beside him and across from his wife, Lynn. They exchange a “private joke” look, and Lynn, an un-Botoxed blonde in plain black velvet, winks back.

  Over the appetizer, I ask Sam about them: “Tell me your secret. You and Lynn seem to be so—like this!—after what? Thirty years.”

  Sam puts down his spoon, glances at Lynn, and talks almost nonstop through dinner. “My only advice to my son, Josh,” he begins, “was ‘marry a woman who wakes up happy, and if she doesn’t, it’s your responsibilit
y to make sure she does.’ ”

  “How so?”

  “Well, first,” he says, lowering his voice a notch, “you’ve got to reliably—reliably—take a woman to a place she’s never been before. Also, I like to give her little surprises, like the Key West Fantasy Fest trip last year.”

  “But there must be more,” I prod. “Staying excited by each other is pretty rare.”

  “Yes, well!” He flings an arm over the back of my chair. “We share a lot of interests. We laugh. Then there’s this other thing: she’s a lawyer, you know, an old school feminist, and holds her own. We tussle over stuff. Plus, now this is strange: I’m a ‘glass half full’ person, extroverted, and Lynn’s the reverse—a mystery woman in some ways—and that’s challenging, interesting. Besides we’re not the rest-easy type—always on the move. Right now, I’ve gotten interested in the Silk Road; long story short, learning Mandarin. Lynn’s off on Roman history.”

  He swivels suddenly. Lynn is giving him the “less talk, please” eye. He blows her a kiss, shrugs, and says, as he turns back to his chocolate bombe, “It’s courtship every day! You have to keep it going.”

  Almost any man can make a woman fall in love with him; the hard part is retaining it. The odds aren’t favorable. Romantic love—much as we like to believe otherwise—is fickle, unstable, and highly degradable. After the first euphoric rush, desire declines, eroding over time into quiet companionate love at best, boredom at worst. Under these circumstances, women may become even more restive than men. They burn out faster in relationships, initiate 60 percent of breakups, and according to some theorists, are more inclined to stray. Since the dawn of history, lovers have dreamed of stemming this tide and preserving the first passion.