Yours Ever

by Thomas Mallon

  The playfulness in Milton’s youthful letters to friends—another part of the above-quoted RSVP swells with a mock-heroic pileup of classical allusion—surprises and supplements our usual idea of the poet. Decades later, by the time Milton has stiffened into Cromwell’s theocrat and become literally blind to much that once delighted him, it will be too late for us to seek frivolity or fellowship in his company. In the meantime, it’s to Diodati that Milton makes his most fervent expressions of affection. Late in 1637, he tells him that “when it had been fallaciously reported to me in London by some one that you were in town, straightway and as if by storm I dashed to your crib; but ‘twas the vision of a shadow! for nowhere did you appear.” He longs to see Diodati, needs to know when he will. This letter of longing is enthusiastic, flirtatious, more like the production of an undergraduate than the twenty-eight-year-old that Milton is when he writes it. A few weeks later, when he outlines some musings upon immortality and the nature of the beautiful, Milton tells Diodati:

  I would not have true friendship turn on balances of letters and salutations, all which may be false, but that it should rest on both sides in the deep roots of the mind and sustain itself there, and that, once begun on sincere and sacred grounds, it should, though mutual good offices should cease, yet be free from suspicion and blame all life long. For fostering such a friendship as this what is wanted is not so much written correspondence as a loving recollection of virtues on both sides.

  English literature’s most august and terrifying adherent to convention here criticizes, if not letter writing itself, then rote epistolary expression, almost as if he were Whitman trying to liberate a genre from the overused forms that are crushing the emotions it’s supposed to convey.

  IF FRIENDSHIP DEPENDS on the endurance of similarities—not the combustibility of opposites that passion requires—then George Sand and Flaubert should have enjoyed a torrid fling. And yet, despite wildly disparate temperaments, they sustained a close epistolary companionship over the last decade of Sand’s seventy-two years. “I don’t think there can be two workers in the world more different from one another than we are,” she writes to the much younger but already middle-aged Flaubert in January of 1869. There he is, she imagines, “confined to the solitary splendour of the rabid artist,” struggling for the mot juste and “scorning the pleasures of this world,” while she goes on gobbling them up, never allowing the production of mere literature to keep her from the delights of the table or the garden or the bedroom.

  Their correspondence begins in 1863, at a moment when Flaubert is critically friendless. Against the contempt of other reviewers, Sand rises in print to defend his Salammbô. He writes to thank her, suppressing the revulsion he’s often felt toward her own crowd-pleasing and message-laden books. Three years later, once their exchange gets going in earnest, Sand sends him her complete oeuvre, with a warning that “There’s lots of it.”

  In the time he takes to finish a chapter, she can usually complete a book, barely noticing she’s done it amid the rest of her life in the country: “every day I pitch myself into an icy brook that shakes me up and makes me sleep like a top. How comfortable one is here, with the two little girls [her granddaughters] laughing and chattering like birds from morn till night, and how foolish one is to go writing and putting on fictions when reality is so easy and good!” When Flaubert reports feeling nauseated over the last corrections he’s making to L’Éducation sentimentale, Sand confesses that, when it comes to reading her own proofs, “I always scamp it, but I don’t set myself up as an example.” Early in their friendship she’s abashed by his exacting artistry (“When I see the trouble my vieux goes to to write a novel I’m depressed at my own facility and tell myself my work is only botched stuff”), but as the years pass she relaxes into a kind of amusement about the contrast: “We’re not literary enough for you here, I know, but we love, and that gives life a purpose.”

  Admitting to the “mania of Perfection,” Flaubert says he can only remain the way he is, “living absolutely like an oyster,” his novel “the rock I’m attached to.” He won’t so much as attend the christening of Sand’s grandchildren, lest witnessing such an event inflict too much life upon his art: “My poor brain would be filled with real pictures instead of the fictive ones I’m at such pains to invent; and my house of cards would crumble to dust.” The reader can picture Sand throwing up her hands over this; she responds with a request that Flaubert at least admit the pleasure his aesthetic hair-shirt gives him. Ten days later he owns up to it—more or less: “As to my mania for work, I’ll compare it to a rash. I keep scratching myself and yelling as I scratch. It’s pleasure and torture combined.”

  There are real rashes, too—a nervous eczema, as well as grippe, a facial boil, morbid sensitivity to noise and capacious self-pity. Living with his frail and ever-more-deaf mother, Flaubert complains—no more convincingly than when he curses his creative burdens—about the “terrible solitude” of his “arid” existence. He is probably at his most considerate and least self-absorbed when he concedes to Sand, “I must be boring you with my eternal jeremiads.” On one occasion she does lose patience with him, but confides the irritation only to her son: “I’ve had enough of my young friend. I’m very fond of him, but he gives me a splitting headache. He doesn’t like noise, but he doesn’t mind the din he makes himself.”

  Aside from displacing himself into his novels (“Madame Bovary, c’est moi”), Flaubert’s chief means for getting out of himself is to flay the rest of mankind, whose “irremediable wretchedness has embittered me ever since my youth.” Sand’s belief in socialist progress can’t tempt him away from a loathing for the whole political spectrum from royalists to Communards. He would do away with politics and religion both, replacing them with objective science. Sand refuses to despair of France or humanity and suggests that, at a minimum, they try to “die without cursing [their] own species!” Even during the atrocious Franco-Prussian War, she would have the two of them go on loving life: “We need these harsh lessons in order to realize our own foolishness, and we must make good use of them.” But her heartfelt gropings are met with mere wit. Flaubert replies that “The vile things I witnessed in the capital are enough to add years to a man’s life.”

  Sand calmly answers what she calls “weighty” arguments with “sincere” ones, and she would prefer that emotion trump analysis: “Je t’aime—that’s how all my dissertations end.” Flaubert, by contrast, declares himself to be “choking on gall.” In 1875, as Sand’s death approaches, he will express envy of her condition, hope that there is no hereafter, and sign himself “St Polycarp.”

  Can his endlessly forbearing correspondent really be the pants-wearing sorceress who once devoured Chopin like a truffle and whose long amatory life was a kind of intermissionless opera both grand and bouffe? Yes, in however measured and mellowed a way. One of Sand’s biographers, Benita Eisler, points out that the erotic and maternal were almost always conflated within her, and Sand’s adoption of Flaubert is not without its own avidity and passion. Within months of their friendship’s real beginning, she would be proclaiming that she had come to love him with all her heart. She finds Flaubert “a very special and mysterious being, and yet as meek as a lamb.”

  Whatever joking attempts the two of them make to erase the difference in their sex and years—he calls her a “fine fellow,” and they both claim the title of “old troubadour”—Flaubert and Sand are always male and female, a prescriptive mother and her stroppy son. She steadily sets an example of ease and self-sufficiency, telling him of her “rude health,” of how well she’s sleeping, about how enjoyable even winter can be. He should lead a more varied life, she says; he should exercise. Sand had often made her romances into projects, not just passions, and Flaubert is there in this late part of her life to be straightened out and smothered with solicitude.

  “Your Strength charms and amazes me,” he writes a half dozen years into their friendship. “I mean the Strength of your entire person, n
ot only your brain.” It’s doubtful he ever thought much of the latter, but when it came to this capitalized Strength, he was able not just to admire but also to derive a portion of it—as Sand intended—for himself. Francis Steegmuller, the editor of their letters, points out that Flaubert, after a visit from Sand in 1868, reported to one friend as follows: “Such character! Such strength! And at the same time there is no one whose company is more soothing. Her serenity is contagious.”

  In considering the relationship she and Flaubert had constructed, Sand could liken and contrast it, in a single sentence, to love: “our real discussions must remain between ourselves, like lovers’ caresses, only more delightful, since friendship has its own mysteries, untroubled by the storms of personality.” Even Flaubert could contemplate their closeness with a certain sentimental swelling. “You know, chere maître,” he writes in January 1869, “it’s very nice about the two of us—writing to each other simultaneously on New Year’s Eve. There is clearly some strong bond between us.”

  It was a bond forged from appreciating a disparity that Sand expected to widen even further beyond the grave. “My ambition has never flown as high as yours,” she tells Flaubert late in 1872. “You want to write for all time; I think I shall be completely forgotten, perhaps severely denigrated, in fifty years’ time. That’s the natural fate of things that are not of the highest order.” She would not have stopped to think that her letters to Flaubert, productions even hastier than her novels, might have a kind of incidental, lasting greatness.

  BETWEEN MARY McCARTHY and Hannah Arendt it was love at first slight. At the end of World War II, McCarthy was an intellectually racy novelist and Partisan Review’s ferocious theatre critic, Arendt a political philosopher who had taken refuge from Nazi Germany in New York. They were acquaintances, a bit fascinated with each other, but the possibility of friendship seemed lost when McCarthy made a foolish witticism about Hitler and Arendt protested with an exaggeration of her personal sufferings at his hands. The two women steered clear of each other for the next few years, until finally Arendt approached McCarthy on a subway platform: “Let’s end this nonsense. We think so much alike.”

  So much so that, where they’re concerned, the word “correspondence” seems to speak more to intellectual affinities than the actual letters that passed between them for twenty-six years. Each a believer in individual moral responsibility and the values of what used to be called the “democratic left,” both of them skeptical of cant and technology and mass culture, they admitted few impediments to the marriage of their minds. After making up on that subway platform, they tested the waters of epistolary friendship with two fan letters (one for McCarthy’s satirical novel The Oasis, the other for Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism), after which McCarthy pressed forward like a suitor determined to prove herself worthy of Arendt’s formidable mind and ethics.

  The philosopher embodies a seriousness to which the novelist will constantly aspire. In her letters McCarthy declares the older woman an inspiration, calling Arendt’s replies gifts that she doesn’t deserve. “The sensation of being honored” by Hannah’s praise “doesn’t diminish with familiarity.” Arendt inspires McCarthy toward a certain restraint (“My novel [A Charmed Life] is going ahead, but I have you horribly on my conscience every time sex appears”), while McCarthy nudges her toward a greater gaiety in return: “I bought the dress,” Arendt reports after dutifully following McCarthy’s suggestion that she treat herself to something new for an awards ceremony.

  It is McCarthy’s geographical displacement, as voluntary as Arendt’s was enforced, that allows the correspondence to flourish. In the 1950s, she begins spending long periods in Europe to work on books like The Stones of Florence. Arendt’s letters are sources of advice and calm, whether McCarthy is dealing with an unexpected pregnancy, an extramarital affair with a chronic liar (“Their charm,” Arendt explains, “is that they with all their lies are somehow more truthful than all the philistines who don’t lie”) or, back home, The New Yorker’s fact-checking department. McCarthy, who can be as self-critical as she is merciless toward others, complains: “A normal person cooperates with the checkers or uses them as a convenience, but I cannot help competing with them.” Arendt reassures her that institutionalized verification is only “one of the many forms in which the would-be writers persecute the writer.”

  What makes their letters so pleasurable, sometimes even thrilling, is a consistent mixture of the abstract and concrete, of world politics and personal foibles. Along with meditations on the nature of will and the problems of equality, one finds literary gossip (“this is the second mad girl [Raymond Aron] has been involved with; the first tried to commit suicide to embarrass him”); sharp dismissals (“Dame Rebecca [West] is a good talker and cracked … she imagines that various authors are alluding to her and all her relatives under disguises in their books”); and quick character sketches that rise above comic specificity toward some larger insight. It’s inevitable that most of the letters’ sparkle, including the quotations above, comes from McCarthy. Her eye for misbehavior was unerringly avid, and linguistically she stood on native ground—though Arendt’s malapropisms (“ends and odds”) have their charm.

  The greatest romantic drama of McCarthy’s life comes at the beginning of the 1960s, when she finds herself “totally, entirely in love” with the man who will become her fourth husband, the American diplomat James West. The complications are formidable. West’s current wife seems ready to use their children as a weapon against him, while he and McCarthy, trying to secure divorces, conduct their affair behind the backs of West’s State Department bosses and within earshot of the Communist authorities in Warsaw, where he is posted: “we’ve come to look on my hideous [hotel] room with flowered bedspreads and curtains decorated with Red stars and the listening device in the lighting fixture as a tenderly loved home and refuge. As though we were living a peculiar modern idyl: intense love in extreme conditions, to be transcribed by the Secret Police.”

  McCarthy typically views her experience in such literary categories, a tendency not shared by Arendt. But both of them, however they may conduct their own lives, like to exhibit an almost frilly antifeminism. When reporting to McCarthy on an honorary degree she has received with “Margaret Mead, a monster, and Marianne Moore, an angel,” Arendt decides to call Mead “by her second name, not because she is a man, but because she certainly is not a woman.” McCarthy and Arendt each display something like a protective crush on their buccaneering publisher, William Jovanovich, who did much to secure a measure of commercial success for their less saleable work.

  In 1963, by which time McCarthy has settled in Paris with James West, both she and Arendt find themselves caught up in far greater literary celebrity than they have previously enjoyed, or endured. The Group brings McCarthy real fame and money—“That is the right thing for you, dear, enjoy it and be happy!” Arendt reassures her, perhaps a bit condescendingly—while Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its characterization of the “banality” of Nazi evil, earns Arendt a torrent of vicious criticism. The attacks excite McCarthy to a vigorous defense of her friend: “I want to help you in some way and not simply by being an ear. What can be done about this Eichmann business, which is assuming the proportions of a pogrom?” McCarthy’s public riposte on Arendt’s behalf (an essay called “The Hue and Cry”) satisfies her aggressive streak, which sometimes surfaces with a life of its own inside the correspondence: “I think I’ve been longing to get into a fight with someone.”

  Away in Paris, where she has “no real friends,” McCarthy depends on Arendt as a link to America, even while the philosopher is beginning to be overwhelmed by widowhood, sickness, and what she calls the “relentless defoliation” of friends. As the years pass and technology improves (the almost Luddite McCarthy would hate to see that last noun ever accorded such a verb), phone calls become more frequent, but the women never abandon the exchange of letters. If much of their correspondence seems to come from another age (McC
arthy arguing with a postal clerk about regulations governing scotch tape; asking for the return of newspaper clippings instead of sending Xeroxes), that’s because it does. The small hardships of letter writing—having to think a moment longer before completing utterance; remaining in suspense while awaiting reply; having one’s urgent letters cross in the mail—are the things that enrich it, emotionally and rhetorically.

  The remoteness of each writer from the other provokes both of them into a kind of telepathy. On April 2, 1965, Arendt asks: “Do you ever see Lippman’s [sic] columns about Vietnam?” The same day McCarthy, in Paris, is writing: “I am in a state of doubt and dismay about Vietnam … I read with slight relief the New York Times editorials and Walter Lippmann.” The rituals of letter writing, with its non-instant gratification, excite and regulate the emotions. “Here is the ‘Arrived safe’ letter,” McCarthy writes upon reaching Rome in 1960, some months before Arendt sighs: “Oh Mary, how I wish you were here and how tired I am of this letter writing. I somehow had the feeling during the last week or so that you would suddenly stand in the door.”

  When it comes to their work, the two women learn to exchange not only admiration but concrete suggestions and editorial help. Still, it is the independent operation of their intellects, rather than the cooperation, that most entertains a reader. A week after rhapsodizing to Arendt over Nabokov’s Pale Fire, McCarthy gets a response: “There is something vulgar in his refinement,” Arendt believes. McCarthy finds that “in Rome even the weather seems to belong intimately to the Romans, while in Paris it is just a pleasant fact,” but Arendt sees the latter capital differently: “it is like a house … the whole city really is, with many many rooms; but you feel never exposed, you are always ‘housed,’ protected, an entirely different spatial feeling from all other big cities I know.”