Yours Ever

by Thomas Mallon

  A measure of the romance’s depth can be found in the letters Macaulay writes to Father Johnson during the early 1950s, while she is trying to find her way back to the Anglican church. Macaulay sends the priest—a distant relative and long-ago acquaintance now living in America—frequent and pain-filled communications by both air and sea, wondering if God has ordained this new correspondence in order to end her absence of almost thirty years from the sacraments.

  She tells Father Johnson that her losses are helping to motivate the search for “another sphere of life.” With abashed simplicity, she explains: “The people I love most have died. I wish they had not. But there is nothing to be done about it. Not only my parents—that was to be expected, of course—but my favourite sister, two brothers, and the man I loved.” Though unnamed and otherwise undescribed, O’Donovan, placed at the end of Macaulay’s sentence, seems to bring her grief to a crescendo. And yet, in the letters to Father Johnson, Macaulay appears bent on abandoning his memory as much as cherishing it, because O’Donovan is the heaviest of the sins she believes herself to be carrying through her exile from God’s grace: “is the whole basis and structure of character sapped by the long years of low life? I see horribly clearly how low it was, and how low I am.” After she has returned to confession and the Eucharist, she feels more conscious, not less, of her decades as a sinner: “I told you once that I couldn’t really regret the past. But now I do regret it, very much. It’s as if absolution and communion and prayer let us through into a place where we get a horribly clear view—a new view—so that we see all the waste, and the cost of it …”

  The local priest who hears her confession and absolves her of her sins frustrates Macaulay by having little to say beyond what’s mandated by sacramental procedure. The reader of her letters to the faraway Father Johnson realizes that the mailbox provides more relief than the confessional, but even so, Macaulay’s agony remains. She may include her “beloved companion” in the prayers she’s saying these days and may tell Father Johnson that he and the still-unnamed O’Donovan would have liked each other, but she is compelled to disavow the romance that once sustained her and to do it in a way that seems brutally self-punishing: “Not all the long years of happiness together, of love and friendship and almost perfect companionship (in spite of its background) was worth while, it cost too much, to us and to other people. I didn’t know that before, but I do now. And he had no life after it to be different in, and I have lived the greater part of mine. If only I had refused, and gone on refusing.”

  Macaulay compliments Father Johnson on the “range, depth, breadth, humour, wisdom, interest, sympathy” and affectionateness of his own letters, qualities a reader cannot assess, since Macaulay asked that Johnson’s part of the correspondence be destroyed after her death. She claims to understand the benefits to posterity in having the letters of such priests and saints as Fénelon and Francis de Sales, but tells Johnson she is queasy about the publication of an Anglican cleric’s once-confidential counselings in The Life and Letters of Father Andrew (1948). She finds it “interesting trying to construct, from [Father Andrew’s] answers, the kind of situations his correspondents had written to him of,” but points out that “some of them seem too private, and, though veiled by anonymity, one would know that some of one’s friends and relations would recognise things in them.”

  Father Johnson had no such scruples. After Macaulay’s death in 1958, he provided “constant encouragement” to a third cousin of the novelist, Constance Babington-Smith, as she prepared Macaulay’s side of the correspondence for publication.

  One contemporary critic in the Telegraph recounts how “the conventionally pious” praised the letters’ appearance and “the more bohemian writers’ lobby” voiced reprehension. (Writers of course always have to fear the sort of letter-hungry “publishing scoundrel”—i.e., the literary biographer—first decried by Henry James’s Juliana in The Aspern Papers.) The Telegraph’s critic goes on to note that Evelyn Waugh expressed himself at least twice on the subject of Macaulay’s letters, once to Nancy Mitford (“I met [Macaulay] once and thought her sharp but ladylike. Not at all the kind of person to gush to a parson”) and once to Graham Greene: “Do you think her adultery was an hallucination?” he asked.

  Actually, any delusion seems doubtful. Of Greene himself Macaulay had once written: “What a mess his mind must be; nothing in it, scarcely, but religion and sex, and these all mixed up together.” Her own scarifying refusal to let those two things coexist animates the authentic struggle she confessed to Father Johnson’s encouraging and treacherous ears.

  E. M. FORSTER ADDED his own long life to a line of long-livers. His great-aunt Marianne Thornton, whom he knew and whose biography he wrote, was born in 1797, and Forster himself died in 1970, the year the Beatles broke up. The most famous two words he ever wrote were also the most characteristic: “Only connect.” This epigraph for Howards End, his novel about the hazards of attempting to bridge gaps in the English class system, might have done just as well for A Passage to India, in which he explored the thwarted efforts by some English and their subjects to become friends. Few novelists have written more perceptively of the forces that separate people or have been more aware of their own separation from passions they felt a duty to know.

  Perhaps the most poignant thing a reader learns from Forster’s letters is how long it took him to grow up. Raised by his mother amid the company of many aunts, he left home poorly armed for the traditional awfulness of English public schooling. Even when he reached Cambridge, a place so congenial he would end up spending much of his life there, he seems to have glimpsed most of what went on from a distance. It won’t surprise readers of A Room with a View to find its author, in his letters, observing life instead of living it: “O such fun on Friday night! all the undergraduates ran up & down the streets yelling at the tops of their voices. Very foolish, but I much enjoyed it, for I saw it from my window beautifully.”

  A sense of incompleteness continues to frustrate Forster throughout his early success as a novelist. He travels in Italy with his mama; tutors for a wealthy family in Germany; makes a visit to India that excites but somehow fails to enlarge him. He experiences his first hangover at twenty-six and doesn’t lose his virginity until thirty-seven. Exclusively homosexual in desire, he manages to write a novel about homosexuality (Maurice, unpublished until after his death) before he’s ever had a complete homosexual experience. His initiation finally comes during World War I, while he’s doing Red Cross work in Alexandria; like Walt Whitman with Peter Doyle, he falls in love with a tram conductor, Mohammed el Adl.

  The letters Forster sends home are suddenly alive with joy and discovery. If his love is something he cannot confess to his mother, it is something he must confide to his friend Florence Barger: “I want it to be known if ever I should die … I was resting my head on him all the time … and his hands were stroking it.” Realizing that he will not, after all, die only having guessed at the intimacy he’s always sought, he exults in his luck: “I wish I could convey to you what I feel at this unique time … It isn’t happiness; it’s rather—offensive phrase—that I first feel a grown up man.”

  It’s hard to think of another collection of letters that describes the finding of love more delicately or movingly. With correspondents other than Florence Barger, however, the younger Forster does not rise to great letter-writing heights. He lacks both spontaneity and contrivance, generally pitching things down the middle. In 1913, he tells the novelist Forrest Reid that “it bores [him] to write insincerely,” but it’s this lack of insincerity that may be his chief epistolary problem. A reader craves some sparkling artifice, not just sense and precision, from what he writes to relatives and friends.

  The second volume of his letters opens in 1921, with Forster, now forty-two, serving as secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas: “The whole of this month has been wasted in cumbersome festivities; yesterday we had a funeral feast in commemoration of an aunt, before that 15 days on end to
salute the arrival of a daughter.” From this experience Forster gathers material for what will be his final novel, A Passage to India. After returning to England, he will spend the last decades of his career composing essays in the service of a culture running to barbarism. But as his fiction dies out, his letters gain liveliness. There are fewer dutiful communications to “Dearest Mummy” and more to such artists as Constantine Cavafy, Siegfried Sassoon, Christopher Isherwood, Benjamin Britten and Virginia Woolf. And yet, as the rest of his correspondence opens up, his letters to Florence Barger constrict: “My relation to her is queer,” Forster writes his friend Jack Sprott in 1929. “I told her all about myself up to 1921—i.e. the year Mohammed died, and she has made something sacred and permanent for herself out of this, which fresh confidences would disturb.” Without her having preserved Forster’s letters from Egypt, one might have to depend on the cautious, retrospective characterization he made of that time when writing to the novelist Hugh Walpole: “not bad years on the whole: any how I learnt how to use the telephone and how to swim.”

  Forster offers various explanations for his long silence in fiction. Aware of his “creative impotence,” he sometimes makes foolish excuses for it: “I never felt work was a duty—indeed, the less one adds to civilisation the longer perhaps it will take to topple over.” He has wearied of the “conventionalities of fiction-form” but has no ardor for modernist experimentation in the manner of his friend Virginia Woolf (“I expect even Virginia will get bored finally, though she has scooted down a very exciting passage of which I can’t predict the end”). He thinks for a while that his abandonment of the novel may have something to do with the fact that his “patience with ordinary people has given out,” but by 1966, he can “only suggest that the fictional part of [himself] dried up.”

  Other possibilities present themselves in the letters. For many years his mother’s longevity forbids the appearance of Maurice, and after her death the respectable position of his lover Bob Buckingham (a married policeman and probation officer) presents another obstacle. From time to time, Forster appears to consider taking the risk, only to end up feeling annoyed by his own lack of courage. He may finally have tired of fiction from a kind of resentment: if he is prohibited from writing about the emotions that have touched him most deeply, why should he write novels at all?

  His despair over the world’s prospects, particularly during the 1930s, pushes him onto the platforms of public life. He becomes a literary politician, working with the National Council for Civil Liberties and PEN, earnestly writing and broadcasting to his countrymen about the threat to “personal relationships and the arts” in “this age of break-up.” He takes false steps—credulous participation in the Communist-dominated International Congress of Writers (Paris, 1935), a foolish declaration that he would rather betray his country than his friend—but he lives on the whole a civilized and civilizing life. His epistolary status rests, curiously, upon a stack of confessional letters he wrote not to the object of his love but to an encouraging third party—as if he at last wanted someone to see him through a window.

  ASSIGNED TO OCCUPY the Trinity College rooms of George Gordon Byron during a year when their regular tenant would be away from Cambridge, Charles Skinner Matthews was given a warning by his tutor: “I recommend to your attention not to damage any of the moveables, for Lord Byron, Sir, is a young man of tumultuous passions.”

  From birth, Byron seemed bent on becoming an adjective; he brawled toward his destiny inside a body that must have felt like a kettle at full boil. Prone to migraines (“thunder headaches”), fainting, “hysterical merriment,” depression and more or less constant lust, he was inclined to loathe—and love—himself excessively, and to cast sharp scorn upon others. As he assured his poet friend Thomas Moore: “agitation or contest of any kind give a rebound to my spirits.”

  More than most poets’, Byron’s life may legitimately be sought within his works, those liberty-loving, score-settling productions of exile and priapism. “As to ‘Don Juan,’ confess, confess,” he orders his friend and banker, Douglas Kinnaird: “It may be profligate but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world?—and fooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney-coach? in a gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis-à-vis? on a table? and under it?”

  The only three women he truly detested turned out to be, alas, his mother, wife and mother-in-law. Instead of finding medical help for her child’s clubfoot, Catherine Gordon Byron preferred to see it as an emblem of his inherent sinfulness, and from the time he was an adolescent, her son treated her in turn to bold, epistolary contempt. After being insulted by one of his masters at Harrow, Byron sends his mother an ultimatum: “If you do not take notice of this, I will leave the School myself”—not that it’s home he’d care to come back to. “I dread the approach of the holidays,” he explains to his half sister, Augusta, “more than most boys do their return from them.”

  After refusing his mother’s written order to dismiss a particular servant, he writes Augusta from Trinity: “I sent back to [her] Epistle, which was couched in elegant terms, a severe answer.” This response “so nettled her Ladyship, that after reading it, she returned it in a Cover without deigning a syllable in return.” By November of 1808, he can proudly inform his sister that “Mrs. Byron I have shaken off for two years, and I shall not resume her yoke in future.” His heart is not naturally bad, he insists, just “hard as a Highlander’s heelpiece” from all the abuse it’s been dealt.

  Byron may have “no very high opinion” of the female sex, but he declares this position to a woman whose letters he values for their “traits of discernment, observation of character, knowledge of your own sex and sly concealment of your knowledge of the foibles of ours.” Lady Melbourne, the correspondent in question, occupies in 1812 a pivotal position in Byron’s life as both mother-in-law to Caroline Lamb—whose notorious affair with the poet will prompt her famous judgment that he is “mad, bad and dangerous to know”—and aunt to Byron’s future wife, the misery-inducing Annabella Milbanke.

  Byron dismisses Caroline’s claim that she can make any man fall in love with her, by asking Lady Melbourne: “was there ever yet a woman, not absolutely disgusting, who could not say or do the same thing? Any woman can make a man in love with her; show me one who can keep him so!” But right now it’s the niece, Annabella, who “requires time and all the cardinal virtues,” none of which Byron has in large supply, since he’s also romancing a married woman with olive skin, black eyes and too much of an appetite. “I only wish she did not swallow so much supper,” he tells Lady Melbourne; “chicken wings, sweetbreads, custards, peaches and port wine.”

  Byron would be making a play for Lady Melbourne herself were it not for “the very awkward circumstances in which we are placed.” Even so, amidst all the other women and girls, she is to remain uniquely his confidante and confessor: “you always must know everything concerning me. It is hard if I may not have one friend.” If she ever suffers his neglect, there will be a simple explanation: “When I don’t write to you, or see you for some time you may be very certain I am about no good.”

  The letters to Lady Melbourne are so filled with female reference that in order to keep things straight, Byron resorts to what rhetoricians call “transitional markers”: “Now for Caroline,” he’ll begin one passage; “As to Annabella,” he’ll start another. Additional women are reducible to initials and aggregate numbers. Commenting in disgust on Caroline’s need for calling his attention to all the men in pursuit of her, he asks: “Can’t she take example from me? Do I embarrass myself about A? or the fifty B., C., D., E., F., G. H’s., &c. &c., that have preceded her in cruelty, or kindness (the latter always the greater plague)?” It strikes him as being really too much that, during this same period, he’s also got to deal with the amorous delusions of Lady Falkland. A girl named Charlotte Harvey might solve everything “if she could always be only eleven years old.” As it is, he�
�ll likely marry her “when she is old enough, and bad enough to be made into a modern wife.”

  His actual choice of a wife proves disastrous. “Miss Milbanke is the good-natured person who has undertaken me, and, of course, I am very much in love,” he assures one female friend in a letter that fairly howls with protesting-too-much. Even readers innocent of literary history won’t give the union with Annabella more than twenty pages from where it begins—not when Miss Milbanke can be found explaining it to one of her friends in a starchy, footnoted letter that makes the match seem more like a disease than a romance: “You have also, I trust, a sufficient confidence in my principles to believe that I would not marry any man whom I could not ‘honour’ as well as ‘love.’ It is no precipitate step. The attachment has been progressive for two years.”

  A month after his own statement about being very much in love, Byron is still writing to Lady Melbourne about his attempts to make headway with the bride-to-be: “I am studying her, but can’t boast of my progress in getting at her disposition … However, the die is cast; neither party can recede.” Once the wedding has occurred, he can address Lady Melbourne as “Dearest Aunt” and make a joke of the whole just-consummated horror: “I got a wife and a cold on the same day, but have got rid of the last pretty speedily.” A postscript to this letter makes its most important point: “Lady Byron sends her love, but has not seen this epistle; recollect, we are to keep our secrets and correspondence as heretofore, mind that.”

  Thirteen months later, Byron and Annabella have separated; their infant daughter is said to be somewhere in the countryside with her mother. But it’s another little girl, Elizabeth Medora Leigh, now nearly two years old, who is the focus of rumor and scandal and the Milbanke family’s implacable hostility. Is Byron the girl’s half uncle, or is he her father? Are the ardent verses he composes to Augusta a literary extravagance or evidence of an incestuous romance with his half sister? In April 1816, Byron concludes a letter to Augusta with the suspiciously overripe pledge that he is “ever and again, and for ever, thine.” She is later asked “not [to] be afraid of the past; the world has its own affairs without thinking of ours and you may write safely.”