Written in History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  My only sweet and dear child,

  Thy dear dad sends thee his blessing this morning and also to his daughter. The Lord of Heaven send you a sweet and blithe wakening, all kind of comfort in your sanctified bed, and bless the fruits thereof that I may have sweet bedchamber boys to play me with, and this is my daily prayer, sweet heart. When thou risest, keep thee from importunity of people that may trouble thy mind, that at meeting I may see thy white teeth shine upon me, and so bear me comfortable company in my journey. And so God bless thee, hoping thou will not forget to read over again my former letter.

  James R.

  Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, 21 January 1926

  Vita Sackville-West was an aristocratic poet and novelist, daughter of Lord Sackville. After she married the diplomat Harold Nicolson in 1913 she continued to have love affairs with women, and perhaps the greatest love of her life was with the novelist Virginia Woolf. In February 1923, Woolf wrote in her diary: “[Vita] is a practiced Sapphist & may…have an eye on me, old though I am.” Virginia, neé Stephens and married to Leonard Woolf, was then forty-four, ten years older than Vita. Virginia considered herself provincial and dowdy by comparison with Vita’s flamboyant libertinism, as well as less successful as a writer. Vita admired Virginia’s “exquisite” writing. In this unshowy love letter, Sackville-West, writing to Woolf from one of her Italian retreats in early 1926, reassures her lover of her affections, even though she has other lovers. The relationship was over by 1928, but it inspired Woolf’s novel Orlando which, with its recognizable gender-switching protagonist, is in some ways Virginia’s love letter to Vita.

  MILAN THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 1926

  I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoiled creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this—But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it….

  Please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.

  V.

  Between Suleiman the Magnificent and Hurrem Sultan, c.1530s

  These two love letters tell the story of the partnership of a slave girl and the most powerful monarch in the world. She was probably a blonde Russian priest’s daughter, a Christian, who was captured and sold into the harem of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled for forty-six years from 1520. She was obviously a remarkable character of force and intelligence. Although he had access to thousands of odalisques in the harem and already had a consort who had given him a son and heir, Prince Mustafa, Suleiman fell in love with Roxelana, giving her the new name Hurrem, “Delight,” for her exuberance and “eyes full of mischief.”

  Ottoman padishahs wrote love poetry using noms de plume, and Suleiman, often away fighting the Hungarians or the Persians, wrote Hurrem poems under the name Muhibbi. Here is one of his verses that are still celebrated.

  Suleiman to Hurrem

  Throne of my lonely niche, my wealth, my love, my moonlight.

  My most sincere friend, my confidante, my very existence, my Sultan

  The most beautiful among the beautiful…

  My springtime, my merry faced love, my daytime, my sweetheart, laughing leaf…

  My plants, my sweet, my rose, the one only who does not distress me in this world…

  My Istanbul, my Caraman, the earth of my Anatolia

  My Badakhshan, my Baghdad, my Khorasan

  My woman of the beautiful hair, my love of the slanted brow, my love of eyes full of mischief…

  I’ll sing your praises always

  I, lover of the tormented heart, Muhibbi of the eyes full of tears, I am happy

  Around 1521, Hurrem gave birth to a first son—the essential male heir. Suleiman ignored the restriction of one son to each concubine, and around 1533, he married her, breaking the precedent that sultans didn’t wed concubines. Hurrem had the luck to give her emperor five sons and a daughter, mentioned in this letter. Most lived long lives—especially their beautiful and intelligent daughter Mihrimah, who became her father’s trusted aide and the adviser to her brother Selim, too. Over the years, Hurrem proved a formidable politician, challenging the monarch’s eldest son Mustafa, who was strangled on the orders of his father. Hurrem died in 1558, before Suleiman, but she managed to contrive the succession in 1566 of her son Selim. Hurrem’s domed tomb stands next to Suleiman’s in the Süleymaniye Mosque, Istanbul. Here is one of Hurrem’s letters to Suleiman on campaign:

  Hurrem to Suleiman

  My Sultan, there is no limit to the burning anguish of separation. Now spare this miserable one and do not withhold your noble letters. Let my soul gain at least some comfort from a letter….When your noble letters are read, your servant and son Mir Mehmed and your slave and daughter Mihrimah weep and wail from missing you. Their weeping has driven me mad, it is as if we were in mourning. My Sultan, your son Mir Mehmed and your daughter Mihrimah and Selim Khan and Abdullah send you many greetings and rub their faces in the dust at your feet.

  Anaïs Nin to Henry Miller, c.August 1932

  Born in France in 1903 to Cuban parents, Anaïs Nin gave new expression to female power, freedom, and eroticism as well as to female suffering from male abuse. She kept diaries that recorded her incestuous, abusive relationship with her father, then as she grew up she celebrated her own sensibilities, literary, emotional, and erotic. Living with her Scottish banker husband Hugh Guiler in Paris in the 1930s, she was writing essays and stories but putting her talent into her diaries.

  The American writer Henry Miller, nicknamed “the gangster author,” was living hand-to-mouth in Paris while he completed the first of his erotic, ribaldly Rabelaisian, masculine masterpieces, Tropic of Cancer. But both lived for writing—“at the core of us is a writer, not a human being,” Nin wrote. He was thirty-nine, penniless, and married to his second wife, June Smith, a fascinating, secretive beauty, when he came for lunch at the Guilers’. He came alone—June was still in New York.

  Nin, aged twenty-nine, first becomes obsessed with Miller as a writer. When she meets his wife, June, the two women have a short affair. Then Anaïs and Henry embark on their own voyage of sex and literature. He admires her diary and stories; she recognizes the greatness of his novels Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, in which June appears as the femme fatale, Mona/Mara. Nin and her husband paid for their publication. Their affair was always adventurously erotic and also a celebration of life. “He is a man who life makes drunk,” she wrote, “like me.” But after making love, they discussed books at length: “Henry used my love well, beautifully—he erected books with it.”

  Theirs is one of the best romantic correspondences—sexy, messy, uninhibited, poetical, beautifully written, unhinged: “Anaïs,” he writes in the summer of 1932, “Here is the first woman with whom I can be absolutely sincere….I mean I can never be absolutely loyal—it’s not in me—I love women or life too much….But laugh Anaïs….I love to hear you laugh. You are the only woman who has had a sense of gaiety, a wise tolerance—no, more, you seem to urge me to betray you. I love you for that. And what m
akes you do that—love? Oh it is beautiful to love and to be free at the same time….I love you laughingly….Come here quickly and screw me. Shoot with me. Wrap you legs around me. Warm me.” When Tropic of Cancer was published in 1934, Miller became famous and notorious for this and his Rosy Crucifixion trilogy. Anaïs became famous for her diaries and novels such as A Spy in the House of Love. Her erotic short stories Delta of Venus changed female eroticism when finally published posthumously in 1977. Their affair ended after ten years but they remained friends for life—and master letter writers. This letter catches the passion and the hatred of their ménage a trois—and Anaïs’s generosity of spirit.

  You are right, in one sense, when you speak of honesty. An effort, anyway, with the usual human or feminine retractions. To retreat is not feminine, male, or trickery. It is a terror before utter destruction. What we analyze inexorably, will it die? Will June die? Will our love die, suddenly, instantaneously if you should make a caricature of it? Henry, there is danger in too much knowledge. You have a passion for absolute knowledge. That is why people will hate you.

  And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

  What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.

  I want to both combat you and submit to you, because as a woman I adore your courage, I adore the pain it engenders, I adore the struggle you carry in yourself, which I alone fully realize, I adore your terrifying sincerity. I adore your strength. You are right. The world is to be caricatured, but I know, too, how much you can love what you caricature.

  How much passion there is in you! It is that I feel in you. I do not feel the savant, the revealer, the observer. When I am with you, it is the blood I sense.

  This time you are not going to awake from the ecstasies of our encounters to reveal only the ridiculous moments. No. You won’t do it this time, because while we live together, while you examine my indelible rouge effacing the design of my mouth, spreading like blood after an operation (you kissed my mouth and it was gone, the design of it was lost as in a watercolor, the colors ran); while you do that, I seize upon the wonder that is brushing by (the wonder, oh, the wonder of my lying under you), and I bring it to you, I breathe it around you. Take it. I feel prodigal with my feelings when you love me, feelings so unblunted, so new, Henry, not lost in resemblance to other moments, so much ours, yours, mine, you and I together, not any man or any woman together.

  What is more touchingly real than your room. The iron bed, the hard pillow, the single glass. And all sparkling like a Fourth of July illumination because of my joy, the soft billowing joy of the womb you inflamed. The room is full of the incandescence you poured into me. The room will explode when I sit at the side of your bed and you talk to me. I don’t hear your words: your voice reverberated against my body like another kind of caress, another kind of penetration. I have no power over your voice. It comes straight from you to me. I could stuff my ears and it would find its way into my blood and make it rise.

  I am impervious to the flat visual attack of things. I see your khaki shirt hung up on a peg. It is your shirt and I could see you in it—you, wearing a color I detest. But I see you, not the khaki shirt. Something stirs in me as I look at it, and it is certainly the human you. It is a vision of the human you revealing an amazing delicacy to me. It is your khaki shirt and you are the man who is the axis of my world now. I revolve around the richness of your being.

  “Come closer to me, come closer. I promise you it will be beautiful.”

  You keep your promise.

  Listen, I do not believe that I alone feel that we are living something new because it is new to me. I do not see in your writing any of the feelings you have shown me or any of the phrases you have used. When I read your writing, I wondered, What episode are we going to repeat?

  You carry your vision, and I mine, and they have mingled. If at moments I see the world as you see it (because they are Henry’s whores I love them), you will sometimes see it as I do.

  Alexandra to Rasputin, 1909

  All of Russia was gripped by the nature of the empress Alexandra’s relationship with her confidant, Siberian peasant holy man, Grigory Rasputin. It was a fascination that, step by step, would destroy the monarchy’s prestige.

  From 1905 when they first meet him, Alexandra, her husband Tsar Nicholas II, and their children write regularly to Rasputin who gives them all advice and guidance. The tsarina believes that he has the power to stop the bleeding of her hemophiliac son Alexei. But as this letter shows, Rasputin is also essential to the tsar and tsarina as a combination of priest, psychiatrist, and adviser. They revere him as a Christ-like link to God and an authentic peasant who confirms their belief in the mystical connection between tsar and people. It is astonishing that this haughty, neurotic monarch, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, wishes to kiss his hands and sleep next to him, but contrary to popular belief, Alexandra was extremely prim: she had no sexual contact with Rasputin. He is, as she writes, “my beloved mentor.” It is a reverence that endures to his murder in 1916 and beyond, to the murder of the Romanovs themselves in July 1918, when their bodies are still wearing keepsakes given to them by Rasputin.

  It was a mark of Rasputin’s lack of judgment that he allowed this letter to fall into the hands of a rival priest who deliberately leaked it to embarrass Rasputin and his royal patrons. When it was published, many thought it was too outrageous to be real. But it was genuine.

  My beloved and unforgettable teacher, savior and mentor.

  How tiring it is for me to be without you. My soul is calm and I can rest only when you, my teacher, are seated next to me, and I kiss your hands and lay my head on your blessed shoulders. Oh, how easy things are for me then. Then I wish only for one thing—to fall asleep, fall asleep forever on your shoulders, in your embrace. Oh, what happiness it is just to feel your presence near me. Where are you? Whither have you flown? It’s so difficult for me, such longing in my heart….But you, my beloved mentor, don’t say a word to Anya [Vyrubova, Alexandra’s friend] about my sufferings without you. Anya is good, she is kind, she loves me, but don’t tell her of my sorrow. Will you soon be here near me? Come soon. I am waiting for you and am miserable without you. Give me your holy blessing, and I kiss your blessed hands.

  Loving you for all times. Mama.

  Horatio Nelson to Emma Hamilton, January–February 1800

  Horatio Nelson had first met Emma, Lady Hamilton, beautiful former actress and wife of the super-rich British ambassador to the court of Naples, in the first years of the wars against Revolutionary France. When they met again, Nelson had become Britain’s foremost naval hero and a physical wreck. He had already lost an eye (“I got a little hurt his morning”) and had an arm amputated (“the sooner it’s off the better”) after being wounded in battle. Then in August 1798 he fought the Battle of the Nile—“Before this time tomorrow, I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey.” Hit by shot on the forehead with a flap of skin obscuring his remaining eye, he said, “I am killed. Remember me to my wife.” But the wound was light and he wiped out Napoleon Bonaparte’s fleet, leaving the French general stranded in Egypt.

  Afterward, he beca
me a legend—Baron Nelson of the Nile and Duke of Bronte—and spent much time being lionized in the exotic city of Naples where he and Emma fell in love. Nelson was forty-two, a ruin of a man, and she was thirty-five and still beautiful. The lovers spent much time with her old husband, the ambassador Sir William Hamilton, a scandal that naturally reached the ears of Nelson’s long-suffering wife Fanny and London society.

  When peace was finally signed with France, Nelson and the Hamiltons went on a European cruise during which their daughter Horatia was conceived, returning to London in 1800. Emma was besieged with admirers, including the Prince Regent, and when Nelson grew jealous Hamilton wrote a rather unusual letter to him, insisting that his wife, in her infidelity to himself, was staying faithful to Nelson.

  When the war started again in 1804, Nelson moved to confront the Franco-Spanish fleet, first writing a will ordering that Emma be granted “ample provision to maintain her rank in life,” and that his “adopted daughter, Horatia Nelson Thompson…use in future the name of Nelson only.” Nelson destroyed the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar but was shot dead by a French sniper. He was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral but his will was ignored: Emma died in penury ten years later. This blazingly ardent letter dates from the first days of their passion: ordered to report to his admiral at Livorno, every mile away from Emma is agony. Nelson has promised to not “sleep on shore”—lest he flirt with anyone else—and swears not even to enjoy pudding, until he makes love to her again. The “obstacles” are their spouses, Sir William Hamilton and Fanny Nelson.