Yours Ever

by Thomas Mallon

  UNLESS ONE SUBSCRIBES to the more extreme forms of expressionist criticism, hate mail is the only literary genre to be, fundamentally, a psychological symptom. The genre provides satisfaction not only to its practitioners but to many readers as well. These readers—not the original, individual recipients of the mail—derive a sort of pleasure that is also, no doubt, symptomatic: a safe displacement of their own aggressive impulses. They can satisfy themselves with a whole little shelf of anthologized epistolary spleen, which includes hate mail’s more benign cousin, the prank letter. Published collections include: Dear Sir, Drop Dead! (1979); Drop Us a Line … Sucker! (1995); Crank Letters (1986); Idiot Letters (1995).

  The true hate letter does not artfully crescendo. It flings itself, with sudden, unsubtle surprise, like a rancid cream pie. Dear Sir, Drop Dead! shows a number of targets getting it right in the face with the salutation: “Dear Heathen Communist Bitch” goes one greeting to the American atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who inspired correspondents to work harder by her own manifest enjoyment of scorn, even the ad feminam sort: “All you are is nothing but a big old witch with a big ugly fat face and mouth on you.”

  Sarcasm (“My dog left home when he heard I had voted for you”) depends, in both the writer and the reader, on an appreciation of distortion. Paranoia has no time for such contrivances. It is terribly urgent, under the gun and ready to assert itself in ALL CAPS, which even now pack an unsettling punch when they show up in the pixels of angry e-mail—though nothing can be more upsetting than the slithering hate fax, whose paper seems to come, somehow, from the sender himself and not the recipient’s own machine.

  Hate mail wants an answer—“I am speaking from experiance [sic]. I expect a reply from you”—and it will not be thwarted by a quickly executed “return to sender.” Escalation may take the form of small packages—the dead animal; the soiled garment—or, most spectacularly, the letter bomb. As the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski became the most famous hate-mailer of our time, through both the explosive devices he posted and, toward the end of his slow-motion spree, the lengthy manifesto, a sort of giant letter to the editor that The New York Times and The Washington Post agreed to run in exchange for his pledge to stop the violence at three killed, twenty-three wounded.

  Among the more seriously hurt was Yale professor David Gelernter, who lost part of a hand and part of his eyesight. In his book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber, Gelernter reflects upon the irony of his having made Kaczynski’s list: “He picked me out originally, my guess is, with no idea who I was aside from some guy who worked with computers.” Only later, it seems, did Kaczynski discover, from Gelernter’s book Mirror Worlds, that his target, a historian of technology, was actually “one of the very few persons in the field who doesn’t like computers.”

  But Kaczynski, whom the media often treated as a serious if dangerous thinker, was hardly notable for consistency. As Gelernter points out, “He used a typewriter and rode a bus—go figure; but the machines he loved best are the ones that kill people.” Gelernter diminishes his attacker by refusing to use his name; he instead employs the sort of mocking epithets one finds in the salutations of less lethal hate mail than the kind sent by Kaczynski. In Gelernter’s coinages, Kaczynski becomes “Mr. Bucolic Cottage-in-the-Countryside,” “Hut Man,” and “Saint John of Montana.”

  Kaczynski’s bomb came in “a book package with a plastic zip cord,” which Gelernter found on a chair in his office beside a stack of mail that had piled up while he was away on vacation with his family. Since then, the pleasure of opening the mail, even what comes from whittling down a stack of business correspondence, is gone from Gelernter’s life. After the attack, and the receipt of a “truckload of crackpot letters,” he found that “all inbound communication channels are radioactive.” He would “look at the strange message on curling fax paper in the shadows as if it, too, might start hissing and explode.” By 1997, there were thousands of unopened messages in his e-mail queue. Having to type answers with one hand became too embittering a prospect; “the system has all the appeal of a flypaper that has trapped so many creatures it’s disgusting.”

  Kaczynski’s own fate was sealed, in part, with a kiss. He left DNA evidence against himself on an envelope and stamp that he had licked.

  * In homage to the author of this story, one of the largest e-mail programs in the world was named Eudora.

  CHAPTER FIVE Love

  I have something stupid and ridiculous to tell you. I am foolishly writing to you instead of having told you this, I do not know why, when returning from that walk. Tonight I shall be annoyed at having done so. You will laugh in my face, will take me for a maker of phrases in all my relations with you hitherto. You will show me the door and you will think I am lying. I am in love with you. I have been thus since the first day I called on you.

  Alfred de Musset to George Sand, 1833

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO, when Jennifer Hofer set herself up in Los Angeles as an escritorio publico, she did so as a kind of performance art. And yet, as she told Zachary Block, a writer from her Ivy League alumni magazine, the Latin American tradition of letter writing for hire “really does provide a service.” Sitting behind a manual typewriter set up on one of the city’s sidewalks, Hofer composes not only business correspondence for immigrants who can’t write English, but also romantic missives for those not confident of their ability to put things with the proper ardor. Like a sympathetic but disinterested Cyrano, Hofer can fill in sentiments the sender can’t fully dictate himself. According to the Brown Alumni Magazine, she charges “$3 for a love letter. Illicit love letters—she’s written just two, including one for a woman with a crush on a married man—cost $5.” Hallmark used to advertise its Valentines to those who “care enough to send the very best,” but any printed greeting card is second best in the realm of authenticity. Hofer, part amanuensis and part author, offers something that by its one-of-a-kind nature comes closer to being the real thing.

  Love letters can, in fact, seem so alive that, if one object of affection gets replaced by another, any letters that went to the first should be hunted down and gathered up, for sacrificial destruction or especially safekeeping. When H. L. Mencken got ready to marry Sara Haardt, he asked the silent-film actress Aileen Pringle if he could have back the letters he’d once sent her; he now encloses her letters to him. Miss Pringle was unhappy about this, but years later would come back into the critic’s life by sending him a letter of condolence upon Sara Mencken’s death.

  Amorous e-mail can be deleted even faster than paper can be torn, although it tends to live on, like a potential stalker, somewhere in the hard drives of sender and recipient. In the realm of love, however, e-mail’s most peculiar characteristic is the way it so often becomes not a means to romance but the entirety of any involvement. The e-ffairs into which so many postmodern people stumble are, like the chaste pen-palships of times past, relationships sufficient unto themselves, whereas epistolary romances traditionally sought their own extinction—the moment when physical separation ended, along with each party’s need to write to the other.

  More than a decade ago, at the dawn of cyber love, Meghan Daum mused upon her dates in the ether with the screen-named PFSlider: “Thanks to the computer, I was involved in a well-defined courtship, a neat little space in which he and I were both safe to express the panic and the fascination of our mutual affection. Our interaction was refreshingly orderly, noble in its vigor, dignified despite its shamelessness. It was far removed from the randomness of real-life relationships. We had an intimacy that seemed custom-made for our strange, lonely times.” Operating inside the often wildly mendacious realm of cyberspace, Daum and PFSlider actually told the truth about themselves. But when they decided to meet for real, things soon enough went nowhere: in the older meaning of the term, they just didn’t send each other.

  In times past, the paper letter was nicely capable of the restraints and hesitations its computerized descendant later shook off; penmanship and ty
ping could always don just the right amount of formality required to escort sender and recipient into, or out of, love. In May 1903, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, the son of Blanche K. Bruce, an ex-slave who represented Mississippi in the U.S. Senate during six years of Reconstruction, wrote to his young fiancée, Clara, from his administrative post at Tuskegee Institute: “Ask your woman doctor at Radcliffe for literature on the physical aspect of marriage; I have already written to Doctor Francis for similar information. You see, dearie, we must know all about certain things; we must not in a matter of deep concern be ignorant blunderers. I know you don’t like me to write these things to you but we mustn’t be prudish.”

  A quarter century later, using the same forthright primness, Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker, who had realized he would rather be married to the magazine than to his wife, sent her a letter requesting a separation: “We have different tastes, different interests, different instincts, different ideas. We are distinctly two entities, two personalities. We differ in almost everything … Living with you on the basis that I have in the past is, I have concluded, impossible.” He owned up to being “a monstrous person incapable of intimate association,” but hoped that he and Jane could avoid “the emotional element, which is the last thing that ought to be brought in” to any of this. “If you could send me a note here outlining your viewpoint I would appreciate it.”

  THE WESTERN WORLD’S first famous pair of epistolary lovers began their catastrophic twelfth-century romance as teacher and student, when Peter Abelard—thirty-seven-year-old nominalist philosopher and the toast of intellectual Paris—managed, while living in the house of her uncle, Fulbert, to become tutor to the lovely teenaged Heloise. Abelard accomplished his conquest with the kind of pedagogical confidence that’s done the job from the Athenian agora to the campus of Bennington: “I flattered myself already with the most bewitching hopes. My reputation had spread itself everywhere, and could a virtuous lady resist a man who had confounded all the learned of the age?”

  All went well until Fulbert found out and banished Abelard. The lovers proceeded to run away, have a child and marry in secret—developments that, in time, might have brought Fulbert around, but in the event succeeded in driving him over the edge. He hired a gang to castrate Abelard, who entered monastic life and convinced Heloise to enter a nunnery. Abelard chronicled the story of his romance and mutilation in a long letter, the Historia calamitatum, which he addressed to a friend that centuries of editors have called Philintus.

  According to Heloise, this dramatic narrative “happened … to fall into [her] hands,” prompting her to write a letter of her own to her maimed lover. Hoping for a renewed exchange, she tells Abelard that the likeness of him she treasures in her room would hardly be able to compete with the thousands of words he might now send her: “If a picture, which is but a mute representation of an object, can give such pleasure, what cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the transports of the heart; they have all the fire of our passions, they can raise them as much as if the persons themselves were present.” Their correspondence can be, she argues, a kind of substitute romance, a post-facto fantasy that can flourish no matter what real-life damage has already been done: “I shall read that you are my husband and you shall see me sign myself your wife. In spite of all our misfortunes you may be what you please in your letter.”*

  Her uncle, Heloise assures Abelard, made a psychological mistake in ordering the castration: “he measured my virtue by the frailty of my sex, and thought it was the man and not the person I loved. But he has been guilty to no purpose. I love you more than ever; and so revenge myself on him.” As it is, she tells Abelard, she preferred being his mistress (“it was more free”) to being his legally bound wife, and she is angry that he pressed her to enter the convent (“You know it was neither zeal nor devotion that brought me here”). Even now she so lacks penitence that she can scare herself with her own cloistered blasphemy: “Among those who are wedded to God I am wedded to a man … What a monster am I!” She doubts that Abelard’s own passion will long continue, but she will settle for a Saint Augustine-like cure—eventually but not too soon—when it comes to her own: “Till that moment of grace arrives, O think of me—do not forget me—remember my love and fidelity and constancy: love me as your mistress, cherish me as your child, your sister, your wife!”

  In response, Abelard can tell her that the monastery hasn’t worked either: “I betray and contradict myself. I hate you! I love you! … You see the confusion I am in, how I blame myself and how I suffer.” Their love has become “an evil we dote on,” and they need God to put an end to it. In the meantime, however uselessly, he takes cold showers of philosophy: “I comment upon Saint Paul; I contend with Aristotle; in short, I do all I used to do before I loved you, but all in vain …”

  The whole historia calamitatum started with her looks, and she has no right to be asking for an epistolary revival of his love: “Oh! do not add to my miseries by your constancy.” He can still speak to her in the imperatives of a schoolmaster, assigning the task of renunciation as if it were homework: “Nay, withdraw yourself and contribute to my salvation.” He would have Heloise remain in the nunnery, even though he now drops a bombshell about his original urging that she go there:

  I will do you justice, you were very easily persuaded. My jealousy secretly rejoiced in your innocent compliance; and yet, triumphant as I was, I yielded you up to God with an unwilling heart. I still kept my gift as much as was possible, and only parted with it in order to keep it out of the power of other men. I did not persuade you to religion out of any regard to your happiness, but condemned you to it like an enemy who destroys what he cannot carry off.

  In time, both of them get her Augustinian wish. Letters keep the relationship alive, but its passions dwindle into a business-like exchange of clerical concerns between a devoted priest and conscientious nun. Editions of their correspondence are sometimes divided into “The Personal Letters” and the later “Letters of Direction,” in which Heloise will ask Abelard for advice on, say, the Rule of Saint Benedict and how its clear application to monasteries might be adapted to convents: “How can women be concerned with what is written there about cowls, drawers or scapulars? Or indeed, with tunics or woollen garments worn next to the skin, when the monthly purging of their superfluous humours must avoid such things?” Abelard will respond with such suggestions as the need for Heloise and her sisters to “subdue the tongue by perpetual silence, at least in these places or times: at prayer, in the cloister, the dormitory, refectory, and during all eating and cooking …”

  Today, the lovers keep their own eternal silence, entombed together in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery, an arrangement Abelard proposed long before either had gotten over the other. In his first letter to Heloise in the convent, he reassured her about their everlasting proximity: “Your cold ashes need then fear nothing, and my tomb shall be the more rich and renowned.”

  TWO SEPARATE CLOISTERS allowed Heloise and Abelard to retreat from their folie à deux. But a half millennium later, in another (and perhaps just legendary) case of lopsided epistolary love, a nunnery acted as the hothouse for sinning in haste and recriminating at leisure.

  Sometime in the first half of 1666, in the midst of Portugal’s twenty-eight-year-long war of independence, a nun named Mariana Alcoforado may have looked out from the Our Lady of Concieção convent in Beja and spied the attractive form of Noël Bouton de Chamilly a chevalier serving with the French forces who’d come to help liberate her country from the Spanish. His fellow officers were soon being entertained in the convent parlor, and he seems to have ventured a bit further, into Mariana Alcoforado’s room and heart. A year or so later, after prudence and obligation had recalled him to France, he would remain in her imagination as the object of wild longing and anger. And he would take up even more permanent residence in the five long, anguished love letters that she is believed (by some) to have sent
him.

  For the moment, let’s assume of these letters what Mariana assumed of Chamilly: that they’re not too good to be true. Certainly, if anguish could prove authorship, we would embrace Mariana as their authentic creator. Let’s also concede Mariana a few moments of brisk good sense, as when she addresses herself instead of the absent Chamilly: “Cease, cease, unfortunate Mariana, to be consumed in vain, and to look for a lover you will never see.” But what Mariana raises most is the eternally baffled cry of the abandoned and unrequited: why did you let me—no, why did you make me—love you? “I die of shame,” she wails. Chamilly has abandoned her even though the king of France didn’t really need him to come home, and the other obligations he claimed were just as flimsy: “Your family had written; do you not know all the persecutions inflicted by my own? Your honour begged you to forsake me; did I have any care of mine?”

  Chamilly seems to have had a talent for moderation: “you once told me I was somewhat beautiful,” Mariana recalls. The soldier claimed to possess “a great passion” for her, but she now understands how unequal that was to her own self-consuming desire. Near the beginning of 1668, Mariana says that she really doesn’t want him to be punished, but six months later, in what will be her last letter, she declares: “Should chance bring you back to this country I tell you I would deliver you up to my parent’s vengeance.”