Yours Ever

by Thomas Mallon

  During one crisis of jealousy, over Vita’s relationship with Mary Campbell, Virginia chooses to invent rather than rant. She writes Orlando, that protean fantasy whose muse and center is Vita. Reading it charms Vita into renewed reverence: “I feel like one of those wax figures in a shop window, on which you have hung a robe stitched with jewels.”

  The relationship survived. In the wartime months before her death in 1941, Virginia would be writing Vita thank-you notes for gifts of butter and wool. Sense always triumphed over sensibility, so much so that there is a kind of erotic rationality to their correspondence. Not the least sexy thing about these lovers is that they never ran away with one another.

  AMERICAN READERS long familiar with Chekhov’s letters only through the 1955 selection edited by Lillian Hellman (a dramatist he couldn’t have been less like) more recently have gotten a chance to view the last portion of his life as a concentrated, two-character play. Dear Writer, Dear Actress, published about a decade ago, begins in 1899, nine months after the thirty-eight-year-old Chekhov has met Olga Knipper; it goes on to present five years during which the tubercular playwright spends most of his time convalescing at Yalta, while Knipper and Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre perform’s his repertory and premiere both The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.

  The beginnings of the correspondence are tentative and courtly (“I take your hand in mine, if you will allow me,” writes Chekhov), but the volume’s main divisions follow Knipper’s progress from “Friend” to “Lover” to “Wife” and then “Widow.” So important was letter writing to their relationship that she continued to write Chekhov after he died.

  Eight years his junior, Knipper is all chatter and charm. She requires constant, almost comical, reiteration of both Chekhov’s affections and his acceptance of her absence: “You’re not angry with me and haven’t stopped loving me? Anton, you haven’t changed? You still have your nose, teeth, hair, eyes, beard?” She is a champion seeker of left-handed compliments, a virtuoso of the passive-aggressive: “You’re sick of writing to me, you don’t feel anything when you write to me, isn’t that right?” She will sometimes retract yesterday’s letter (once its obsolete sentiments are already in the mail), and can be just as unhappy when Chekhov is well as when he’s ill: “I couldn’t help feeling stirrings of jealousy, why are you doing so well without me?” She is, classically, the one who wants to Talk About the Relationship, while he goes on deflecting her real-life complaints: “Dear heart, you are getting worked up over nothing.” However gentle and self-mocking, he can exasperate her, too, as when he signs himself “Father.”

  Knipper cannot fully grasp his invalid’s frustration. “An endless stream of visitors, idle, provincial tongues chatter away and I am bored,” Chekhov complains from Yalta. “I get furious and envy the rat that lives under the floor in your theatre.” He promises to love her “wildly like an Arab” when they are at last together, but with his body not up to such a standard of exertion, the excitement he more realistically craves is backstage gossip. Time and again his letters rush through the personal to get to the professional: “Why don’t you write anything about Three Sisters? How is the play going?”

  Both their personalities can seem almost too Chekhovian to be true. Each counsels the other to stay out of the doldrums, but list-lessness is often the emotional rule between them. When Chekhov sighs “If only we could arrange things so that we could live in Moscow!” the reader checks to make sure one of the Prozorov sisters hasn’t made an unexpected entrance from the right margin.

  The theatre, which is most of what the lovers have in common, is also what keeps them apart. Even as Chekhov’s illness worsens, Knipper is, despite what she writes, not ready to drop everything and rush to his side. Her guilt may be genuine, but Chekhov never forces her to act on it: “You’re a goose, sweetheart. Never, while I’m your husband, will I take you away from the theatre.” His doting mother and sister may fault his absent wife, but he himself finds the marriage more civilized than peculiar. The letters, which in many respects have had to be the marriage, remain to him the chief thing. Instead of summoning her to his bedside, he orders her to buy better ink, since what she’s now using makes the paper stick to the envelope.

  The correspondence is one of its own principal subjects. Endless complaint is made about the other’s not writing, even though the other has, of course, just written: neither of them, despite years of evidence, ever learns to ascribe the other’s silence to the vagaries of the czarist mails. A reader will be glad that Chekhov made as little use as he seems to have of the telephone at Yalta (it’s referred to as early as 1899), but the written cross talk lends a farcical aspect to the narrative. The volume’s editor must also deal with another sort of awkwardness, always the strangest-seeming irony of any longdistance epistolary romance: whenever the lovers do manage to get together, the letters stop dead.

  Chekhov’s gentle forbearance toward Olga provides a pleasing contrast to the super-logical declamations in another famous correspondence between playwright and actress. “Is this dignified? Is it sensible?” shouts George Bernard Shaw, near the start of his infatuated letter-writing to Mrs. Patrick Campbell. “At my age—a driveller—a dotard! I will conquer this weakness, or trade in it and write plays about it.” He, too, had only one style, onstage and off.

  It was a strange coup de foudre that knocked Shaw to his bony knees. He had been acquainted with Beatrice Stella Campbell for more than a dozen years before the 1912 meeting during which he fell “head over ears” in love with her. He was a placidly married man of fifty-six, she a widow of forty-seven. Within two years, the popular “Mrs. Pat” would play Eliza, and Pygmalion would carry them to a joint peak of fame. For a quarter century after that, while Shaw’s achievements piled up and Mrs. Campbell’s star declined, the two of them would continue a chaste lovers’ quarrel, as “Joey” and “Stella,” in their letters.

  Shaw asks for nothing except “to have [his] own way in everything,” exercising control and good sense to the extent of writing on green paper (more soothing) when he has headaches. Though at first badly smitten with Stella, he maintains a mixture of authoritarian kindness and casual cruelty in almost every paragraph. From the beginning he decrees that this Platonic affair will be manageable: “we great people have no need for happiness,” he assures Stella, adding (not quite accurately) that his wife Charlotte is amused and unthreatened by it all.

  Insisting that it is “unprofessional to write under the influence of deep feeling,” Shaw nonetheless admits that he “badly need[s] some sort of humanizing,” or at least temporary relief from being “the supersane man” whose brains are forever “grinding like millstones.” If friendship, according to Byron, is love without its wings, Shaw’s feeling for Mrs. Campbell amounts to love with snow tires—feelings deliberately restrained by irony and ego. He suggests that, when he dies, they put a plaque on one of their rendezvous sites reading HERE A GREAT MAN FOUND HAPPINESS.

  It took a great diva to stand all this, to tell him how ridiculous he could be: “Oh dear me—its too late to do anything but accept you and love you—but when you were quite a little boy somebody ought to have said ‘hush’ just once!” Stella’s own thunderbolts are flung in a perfect mess of penmanship and usage. The correspondence’s editor, Alan Dent, notes how the actress’s “epistolary style … does not always translate easily to the printed page,” not with some words underlined up to seven times, and a thousand punctuation marks missing in action.

  Each of these two natural scolds dishes out, and requires, the other’s contempt. Invective is their sweet nothing. During one early quarrel, not long before Stella has the nerve to remarry, Shaw pronounces her an “Infamous, vile, heartless, frivolous, wicked woman! Liar! lying lips, lying eyes, lying hands, promise breaker, cheat, confidence-trickster!” His Majesty’s mails being faster than the czar’s, it takes her but a day to respond: “You vagabond you—you blind man. You weaver of words, you—and black and purple winged hider
of cherubs—you poor thing unable to understand a mere woman.” And then, to twist the knife, she calls him “my dear friend all the same.”

  She thinks of them as two “Lustless lions at play.” The possibility of a final break never occurs to either beast, no matter how much flesh it’s verbally clawed from the other. “No you dont wound me,” Stella declares in 1914. “I saw into your heart a long time ago.” But where else can she get such loving abuse? “You must be frightfully lonely in New York,” Shaw writes when she’s playing Pygmalion there. “I believe you would give your soul for five minutes even with me, the cast-off. Or are you wallowing in infinite adulation?”

  Once the first years of their carefully unconsummated passion are spent, substantial gaps begin to interrupt the correspondence. Shaw settles into eminence while Stella ages out of her best roles, spending most of her time abroad, lucklessly in Hollywood and then, more and more impecuniously, in New York and Paris hotels. (She vows never to return to England if it means subjecting her Pekingese “Moonbeam” to a six-month quarantine.) As time passes, neither lover can any longer get the same rise out of the other. Now and then Stella requests the old abrasion (“come and call me a fool soon”), while at other times she claims to lack the strength for it: “Don’t be angry with me any more. Life has taken some skins off me and I can’t battle with your jibes and jests.”

  Joey and Stella eventually fight over their own early letters as if the words are children: publication rights are contested like custody or visitation. Whatever she may have said in 1913 about detesting “letters written for an audience—in hopes of publication after death,” Stella comes to realize the financial rescue that publication can offer. The battle she and Shaw conduct over her attempts to print his private words goes on for years, a tedious postcript to the self-controlled romantic fireworks they once shot each other’s way.

  Stella cannot grasp the distinction between physical property (she owns the actual letters—that is, the stationery) and copyright, which remains with Shaw. She argues that publishing the letters will make Charlotte seem admirably forbearing; Shaw, changing the tune he whistled in 1912, disagrees. Stella fires back that he’s being suburban, but he insists that their communications be revealed only when “we are both dead. Then we can be added to Heloise and Abelard and all the rest of them.” It doesn’t matter, she tells him; she needs the money now.

  Mr. Dent, dealing posthumously with the letters, reminds us that it was Alexander Woollcott who described Mrs. Patrick Campbell as “a sinking ship that fired upon those who tried to rescue it.” Her resistance to Shaw’s resistance is never quite so furious as that—she usually sends love with her obstinacy—but money certainly killed the peculiar romance they’d composed for years. “Dear Joey,” she writes on June 30, 1931, “My letters are worth 2d.—yours 50 quid—so don’t bother to answer.”

  “IT IS A DIFFERENT THING working here at this desk now that you preside over it.” A prophetic element hides within this letter of Woodrow Wilson’s, written at seven o’clock in the morning on June 3, 1915, to the woman who would become his second wife and, eventually, after his disabling stroke, a secret surrogate president.

  Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt was, in 1915, the forty-two-year-old widow of Washington jeweler Norman Galt, whose store did business in the capital for two hundred years. Wilson’s cousin Helen Bones and his physician, Dr. Cary Grayson, hoped the lively, plump Mrs. Galt would bring the president out of the “grief and dismay” that he himself called his “terrible companions in the still night.” A year and a half into his presidency, the same week in August 1914 that war began overseas, Wilson had watched his first wife, Ellen, die of Bright’s disease. In the months following, the depleted president had struggled both to mediate and steer clear of the Europeans’ fighting; Edith Galt’s appearance proved a sudden, wild tonic, beyond any doctor or family member’s expectation.

  Edith knew that she was “playing with fire,” but she let her imagination be captured by Wilson’s muffled charm, as well as by “the picture Helen gave … of a lonely man, detached from old friends and associations.” Within weeks of their first meeting in March 1915, the president declared that his “private life had been recreated,” and the two of them embarked on a months-long letter-writing romance that led to a Christmastime wedding.

  On paper, Edith professes anxiety about the coldness of written words, but the love letter had always been Wilson’s favorite mode of communication. His missives to his first wife had continued beyond their courtship through nearly thirty years of marriage; he “was never away from home more than a day without writing to her,” says Ray Stannard Baker, an early biographer, “and not mere letters full of dusty cares.” When Edith came into his life, one letter a day was often not enough, and he took to heading what he wrote with the hour as well as the date.

  Our image of Wilson as a skinny pillar of rectitude, remapping the world into an abstract rationality, undergoes a comic transformation in his letters to Edith; he inflates like a cartoon genie. Eager to be goofy instead of brilliant, the author of Congressional Government and “The Modern Democratic State” seizes the opportunity to talk baby talk: “you are a bad girl to sit up so late!” Beyond anything, this fast worker (he first proposes in May) is eager to be helpless: “I need you. I need you as a boy needs his sweetheart and a strong man his helpmate and heart’s comrade.” He is “a longing man, in the midst of a world’s affairs,” “Your devoted friend, and your dependent friend.”

  The tendency toward self-plagiarism is greater in the love letter than almost any other genre. Compulsive utterance comes up against a finite number of terms of endearment; limited supply recycles itself to meet demand. Suitors will also find the opportunity to court one lover with words they’ve written earlier to another; Laurence Sterne, for example, the sort of classic English author Wilson enjoyed, romanced his mistress with lines he’d once sent his wife. In the president’s case, the overlapping occurred in the enclosures: early on he sent Mrs. Galt a travel book by Philip Gilbert Hamerton, the same author he’d made an engagement present of, back in 1883, to Ellen.

  It was through Ellen that Wilson had become acquainted with much of English literature (in fact, she introduced him to Sterne), which he developed into a frame of personal reference. After hearing her talk about Middlemarch, he went out and read the novel, finding “a very distinct parallel between Lydgate’s aspirations and my own.” Like George Eliot’s young doctor, Wilson craved both intellectual and emotional companionship in a wife. “No man who isn’t merely a student, simply a thinking machine,” he wrote Ellen, “could wish to marry a woman such as John Stuart Mill married and doted on.”

  Edith Galt was a less cerebral companion than Ellen had been. In one décolleté portrait, this juicy, corporeal presence looks like Madame X as seen through the eyes of Botero, and it’s not hard to imagine how Wilson, who once said he was “carrying a volcano” inside, felt ready to blow: “If ever again I have to be with you for an hour and a half,” he writes her on June 5, “with only two stolen glances to express my all but irresistible desire to take you in my arms and smother you with kisses, I am sure I shall crack an artery!” Two weeks later, while Edith has tea at the White House with Helen Bones, Wilson hides behind some lace curtains in the Green Room, writing afterward that he “feasted [his] eyes on the loveliest person in the world,—with, oh, such a longing to go to her and take her in my arms and cover her with kisses.” He more than once talks about his competing personalities (“the boy that is in me and who has found a perfect playmate, the lover in me who has found love like his own … the man of affairs”), and in a summer of war fevers, he turns Edith’s love for him into her patriotic duty: “I am absolutely dependent on intimate love for the right and free and most effective use of my powers … what it costs my work to do without it.”

  Not everyone was so sure. Wilson was so occupied with gushing out letters to Edith’s “own dear, wonderful, delightful, adorable self, the noblest, m
ost satisfying, most lovable woman in the world” that he didn’t notice the displeasure some of those around him, like the White House usher, Ike Hoover (still there from Theodore Roosevelt’s time), were themselves feeling or confiding to their diaries. Hoover thought that the president was forgetting his job, whereas Wilson was merely charmed by the usher’s performance as love’s messenger: “The faithful Hoover,” he writes Edith one night when she is out of town, “went down to the Post Office after all the deliveries had been made, but there was nothing there. He is going down again, bless him, and will report again about 10 o’clock tonight whether the 9:30 mail from New York has brought me what my heart waits for.” The president suffered writer’s cramp from all he was putting down on paper; aboard a jostling train, he would type his effusions on a Hammond portable.

  He knows that the world, already at war, has “gone mad,” and that it is depending “in part on me to steady it and bring it back to sanity and peace.” But one disagreement with Edith makes him scrub a day’s worth of appointments, including a Cabinet meeting, just to sulk. Even after coming to his senses—by resolving, in the common lovers’ breakthrough, no longer “to discuss our love, but live upon it”—he can still declare that “there is nothing worthwhile but love,” a scary enough sentiment in a president.

  Wilson is sure that Edith improves whatever he writes, including drafts of his protest against the Germans’ sinking of the Lusitania: “I have brought it nearer to the standard my precious Sweetheart, out of her great love, exacts of me.” He even appreciates her influence over what his recent biographer August Heckscher calls “one of the major errors of his career,” the speech in which he said there “is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,” a remark that would require some backtracking after Roosevelt and others snarled in disgust. “If I said what was worth saying to that great audience in Philadelphia last night,” he writes Edith on May 11, “it must have been because love had complete possession of me.”