Yours Ever

by Thomas Mallon

  Self-exiled to Venice, Byron will look back, cryptically, on “the nightmare of my own delinquencies” in a letter to Thomas Moore. At the trouble’s height, he confesses, he “should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.” For the next few years the poet fills his letters with offhand expressions of hope that this same woman will, along with her daughter and her husband, drop dead. He requests that Douglas Kinnaird “ask Lady Noel not to live so very long” and composes an elegy not upon her death, but upon her recovery from illness.

  When Augusta and Byron were adolescents and often apart, his sister had requested that he burn her letters; in reply, he declared: “If you burn any of mine, I shall be monstrous angry.” And so should we be. Byron’s epistolary production is a constant thrill ride, brave and preposterous and enduringly loud. Exile—and for this we must thank the Milbanke family—increases the necessity and frequency of his letter writing. Once settled in Italy, he refuses entreaties to come home, and the longer he’s away, the less he regrets it. He hates running into the English in Venice, unless they’re sick, in which case he’s helpful: “I return my card for theirs, but little more.” His time on the Continent passes “viciously and agreeably.” He finds Italian life quiet, except for the native tendency to murder friends and relatives.

  Love remains a “hostile transaction,” but business is brisk. Upper-class Italian women may be ugly, but Venetian women kiss especially well. Most convenient is the nature of Italian loyalty: “You hear a person’s character, male or female, canvassed, not as depending on their conduct to their husbands or wives, but to their mistress or lover.” Byron himself starts out with Madame Segati, “the wife of a ‘Merchant of Venice,’” who has a charming panoply of qualities to recommend her: “she is very pretty and pleasing, and talks Venetian, which amuses me, and is naive, and I can besides see her, and make love with her at all or any hours, which is convenient with my temperament.” Madame Segati is soon, however, replaced by the Countess Guiccioli, whose three years with the poet end with her husband’s threat to put her into a convent, “for doing,” as Byron puts it, “that with me which all the other countesses of Italy have done with everybody for these 1000 years.” Before this unfortunate dénouement, Byron has fallen in love with the countess’s friend Geltruda, “who is very young and seems very well disposed to be perfidious; but alas! her husband is jealous.” He concludes a report of these latest entanglements on an optimistic note: “there are hopes that we may quarrel.”

  Long before leaving England, Byron had observed to Lady Melbourne that egotism “is said to be allowable in a letter, and only in a letter.” Like exile, this quality, too, helps to fatten his correspondence. The greatest rhymer of English poetry chronicles his exploits and imprints his face, like a cameo, upon each linen sheet he sends home. Eight years after his famous swim across the Helles pont, Byron can inform his friend John Hobhouse that he has now swum “from Lido right to the end of the Grand Canal”—though in a modest P.S., he notes: “The wind and tide were both with me.” Shelley, by contrast, cannot swim at all, a fact that Byron imparts to the publisher John Murray on May 15, 1819. Three years later he will be posting news of Shelley’s drowning and funeral to Thomas Moore, composing his famous description of the pyre (“All of Shelley was consumed, except his heart, which would not take the flame”) only after he has described his own sunburn: “I have suffered much pain; not being able to lie on my back, or even side.” The difference is simple: he is alive and Shelley is dead. He writes one letter to Moore at four a.m., while “dawn gleams over the Grand Canal, and unshadows the Rialto. I must to bed; up all night—but, as George Philpot says, ‘it’s life, though, damme it’s life!’”

  Having seen how wrong his fellow Romantics could be about a figure like Pope, Byron takes the long view of his own literary reputation and digs in his heels with friends and editors. No, he won’t cut Don Juan, he swears in January 1819: “I will not give way to all the cant of Christendom. I have been cloyed with applause, and sickened with abuse; at present I care for little but the copyright.” Nor will he entertain the suggestion that he write an epic, presumably religious in nature: “is Childe Harold nothing? You have so many ‘divine’ poems, is it nothing to have written a Human one?”

  Well before meeting his death in Greece—where he would try, almost against his better judgment, to liberate its people from the Turks—Byron had wrestled with a sense that his time (he was nearing thirty) had already passed. By 1818, he is insisting he’s seen too much to feel anything anymore; not even the death of Lady Melbourne that year can impact his emotions. Dying young will make him a more valuable literary property; if he lives long—and he’d prefer not to—one of his children, legitimate or otherwise, will have to support him. In the meantime, he’s “‘in for a penny, in for a pound,’” determined to do what he can “for the Ancients.” So it’s off to Missolonghi, and death from a fever, one that measured perhaps a tenth of a degree higher than the one that had burned in him all along.

  “ONE ALWAYS FEELS a little guilty writing next to someone who is asleep,” admits Colette in a letter from the summer of 1925 to her actress friend Marguerite Moreno. But not too guilty; not when the breezes of the Côte d’Azur are coming over the terrace and the person asleep beside you is an amiable younger lover having his afternoon nap.

  Now in her fifties, with two stress-inducing husbands behind her—she cut the second one loose after the affair she had with his son—Colette is free to relax with the thirty-six-year-old man who will become her third spouse, though not for another ten years. There’s never any hurry with Maurice Goudeket; it’s one of the nicest things about him. “He savors the heat, the sea, and my patio court,” she tells Moreno in 1928 from Saint-Tropez; he’s “always the perfect companion, warm, full of tact, and born under the sign of Apropos.” She will never have cause to regret the “wise improvidence in my behavior” that made her get hold of him.

  Several years before Maurice even enters the picture, Colette can be heard in one letter giving Moreno the Wildean advice to “make do with passing temptations.” After all, “What can one be sure of if not what one holds in one’s arms at the time one is holding it? And we have so few chances to be proprietary.” Few? A reader of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette’s letters sees her living her long lifetime as a kind of giant maw. She originally titled her book of sexual adventuring, Le Pur et l’Impur, even more inclusively, as Ces Plaisirs, a phrase capacious enough that one might consider it for her collected letters, covering as they do the romancing of all her five senses—by lovers male and female, by food, animals, flowers and the warmth of the sun. In July 1911, assuring the French caricaturist André Rouveyre that he has moved from being an acquaintance to a friend, she informs him: “you may write me and tell me everything you wish, without wounding or shocking me.” Her own letters, to all those occupying Rouveyre’s new category of amitié, are a decades-long confessional cascade of pleasures sighted and pleasures taken.

  “The state of the weather has always had a large place in my life,” Colette tells Renée Hamon, the writer and diarist, on February 25, 1938. The climate is an exasperating lover, blowing hot and cold, and while Colette will do most anything to escape its chillier moods, she keeps every pore open to its other whims and possibilities: “The weather has been Rozven weather, that is, never cold, often stormy, dead calm without rain, or scorching hot with a light wind—deliciously variable.” It’s only the cold, especially the bronchitis-bearing northeast wind, that she looks upon as a foe. She’s even willing to summon the warmth, like a gigolo, with cash. Stuck in Paris during a terrible December, she makes her wishes known to the hotel that soon awaits her in Brittany: “tell Madame Angèle that, even on moderately cold days, I shall gladly pay for supplementary heat.” The best and most beloved things are marked by elevated temperatures, real or imagined. “Now I’m going to bed, beneath the large warm rug of the moon,�
� she writes Marguerite Moreno from Paris on the night of July 15, 1943.

  Rarely has anyone so avid felt so lazy. Early in her career Colette admits to an appetite for work, but by middle age literary labor seems frankly “unwholesome,” the thing that’s “poisoning my life.” When she has to finish a novel, she can still “grab it by the scruff of its neck” and get it done, but unlike George Sand, whose general gusto extended to her hasty, exuberant writing, Colette doesn’t “know how to work with joy;” she can only go about her writing with “exasperated resignation.” Indeed, the beauty-products business that she and Maurice begin when they’re in need of money during the early 1930s may surpass novel writing when it comes to fulfilling the personal creed she imparts to the novelist Anna de Noailles: “I have very often deprived myself of the necessities of life, but I have never consented to give up a luxury.”

  Whatever she’s working at, “an hour’s pleasure undoes the rest of [her] day,” loosens its strings as if it were a corset, leaving it good for only more pleasure. An inflamed right knee forces Colette to work in bed, but that’s her “preferred manner” in any case. At the age of sixty, she tells Marguerite Moreno from Saint-Tropez: “All I want to do is go on with the unbridled life I lead here: barefoot, my faded bathing suit, an old jacket, lots of garlic, and swimming at all hours of the day.”

  Enough garlic, in fact, that she worries whether one letter she’s writing to her friend Léon Hamel doesn’t smell of it. (Posterity, alas, will never know: the editor of Colette’s correspondence tells us that the “tender and tactful” Hamel “carried delicacy to the point of destroying the originals of all of Colette’s letters, but only after copying their contents, with coded names, into the sort of schoolgirl’s notebook Colette herself used.”) A writer should never, by Colette’s reasoning, “lose his fat the way a pierced cask loses wine,” and everyone needs to remember that a full stomach is a defense against flu: one friend, Anne de Pène, would have survived the 1918 pandemic, Colette feels certain, had she not “skipped a meal to lose weight.” Colette herself stays full and round: “I had just enough time to eat your strawberries, wipe my mouth, and leave for Saint-Malo,” she tells Rouveyre. When it comes to food, overdoing it has its own pleasures: in the same letter where she reveals “a bet with myself to eat four hundred nuts between lunch and dinner,” she extols the “pure—and purgative—joy of eating black cherries which the sun has ripened on the tree.”

  Colette is so elementally attached to the earth that at one point she even discovers a gift for dowsing. More inclined to think of herself as an animal than a mind, she can be found “pawing the ground with impatience” or delivering a new book that’s “moist as a newborn cat.” She tells Marguerite Moreno that a real feline, a tom six months old, “has just walked across my paper”—attracted perhaps by the smell of garlic. In the summer of 1940, having fled Paris with Maurice, she finds herself in an old Lyon hotel where “the mice flourish. There is one in particular who has been loyal to me for a month. She is very tiny, but I feed her well and she’s grown so fat that she can no longer get through her mousehole. She uses the door, and while I have been writing, she has appeared twice, looking for bits of bread I leave for her on the marble mantelpiece.” Years before, Colette had caught “a little 75-centimeter shark” with her own hands and marveled at its “skin like a moist leather slipper”—a sensual treat on the order of the “dewy mushroom noses” on a pair of lambs. One August, after writing a letter from Saint-Tropez that’s filled with mentions of cats, butterflies, swallows, lizards, snakes and toads, she finally asks its recipient: “Have you had enough?”

  For herself, no; never enough of anything. “Lord, how sweet it is to live physically,” she writes, after cleaning the roof with “muscles one had forgotten.” Colette even claims the ability, or curse, to hear the sound of the quickly passing days in her own ears. During travels in Italy, she declares less enthusiasm for Herculaneum (“I remained cold before so much marble”) than the Grotto of the Sibyl, “which you visit on the shoulders of a half-naked guide, with the delicious odor of torches smoking in the darkness.” Her everlasting preference is for the body over the mind, for living above work. Her letters are the place to ravish everything a second time, and to own up to having possessed it, for real, the first. When her mother dies in 1912, she confides only one grief to Léon Hamel: “I am tormented by the stupid notion that I shall no longer be able to write to her as I always have.”

  WHENEVER HIS WIDOWED MOTHER had to leave his side, Proust would sign letters to her with “A thousand loving kisses.” He took pleasure in complaining to her along the “sort of wireless telegraphy” he imagined connecting them, until Madame Proust’s death in 1905 allowed him to inflate real grief into a kind of infantilism he seemed to crave.

  Being able to admit that one has never finished Proust is a sign of cultural security, even if the admission is usually followed by a declaration of intent to try again someday, perhaps by starting in the middle. Opening up the second volume of his letters, which runs from 1904 to 1909, may be a way of warming up for the task.

  “I have just spent an entire year in bed,” he writes on August 6, 1907. A reader quickly finds that Proust’s asthma—as famous as Milton’s blindness, and in its way perhaps as propelling—is monitored with astonishing detail in this second volume of correspondence. At its beginning in 1904, the writer is thirty-two years old and has just endured the death of his father. He has pulled back from much of the social life he pursued in his twenties, relegated by his ailments to a strange nocturnal timetable: activity comes easier late at night. In May 1905, he writes his fellow invalid, Madame Émile Straus: “If I find an oculist who is prepared to see me at 11 o’clock in the evening I shall consult him.”

  By the time he is thirty-five, he can at last think of himself as an orphan. He won’t attend a lecture near the anniversary of his father’s death, finds “unspeakable” a novelist pursuing an antifamily theme and extends the worship of his own ancestors to everybody else’s. He calls the mother of his friend Georges de Lauris “a person I never knew but whom I mourned and still mourn as though I had always known her.”

  As George Painter’s biography showed, Proust’s homosexuality eventually became feverishly active, but in 1908, he is still so confused as to be able to indulge and repress it in the course of a single letter. A paragraph after telling de Lauris of the joy he would experience “reciting in your presence the litany of your ankles and the praises of your wrists,” he says he’ll refrain—“because of the misunderstandings and misinterpretations which would spring up in others’ thoughts.”

  If there is a confessional aspect to these letters, it resides not in the admission of sexual exploits or emotional duplicity, but in the stealthily increasing revelation of an ambition, a mission that he will have little more than a decade to fulfill once he has fully embarked on it. All of his personal preoccupations, so mannered and exaggerated, are actually the feathers and fuss of procrastination.

  Take, for example, the art of the compliment. However assiduously it may have been practiced in the Belle Époque, Proust’s ornate courtesies remain positively exhausting to read. The characters in the short stories of Anatole France are, he tells their author, “freshly born of the miraculous foam of your genius,” and he reassures Anna de Noailles (also Colette’s friend) that some praise he’s passing on to her is “the inevitable echo of your divine accents in any human ear capable of hearing them.”

  Like all gossips, he is touchy, though a little anger proves therapeutic: “when I have a grievance against people I like them to be guilty of wrongs against me which sound warlike fanfares in my heart.” He enjoys his epistolary tiffs with such aristocratic friends as Antoine Bibesco and Robert de Montesquiou, who more than once imputes hypochondria to him. It is, however, Prince Léon Radziwill who receives Proust’s testiest sign-off: “I was your truly sincere friend. Marcel Proust.”

  Proust is well informed of both literary and na
tional politics—where people stand on the Dreyfus affair is a basis for his judgment of their characters—and he eventually becomes adept at following the progress of his portfolio, which includes New York City bonds. But it is another sort of portfolio that is really on his mind, gnawing at it with a demand to be taken seriously.

  As this volume begins, he is still hesitant about his literary career, devoting most of what energies he has to critical essays and translating Ruskin. Worried that he might “die without ever having written anything of my own,” he moves on to parodies (“pastiches”) and finally to his novel—but only by way of criticism: an essay taking issue with the biographical critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve turns into an early draft of Remembrance of Things Past.

  His “horrible anti-asthmatic medicaments” may leave him unable to “remember what happened the day before,” but it is a remoter past he now goes after. By May 23, 1909, he is asking de Lauris if he knows whether the name Guermantes is “entirely extinct and available to an author.” The last letter in this volume mentions “some alterations which are essential for my peace and quiet [being] done to my room in Paris.” The famous cork lining is being applied to the walls of his bedroom. His imaginative galleon is being assembled, against all odds, like a ship in a bottle.

  OUR FIRST EPISTOLARY ACQUAINTANCE, Charles Lamb, could match Colette’s gusto for anything emerging from the oven (“God bless me, here are the birds, smoking hot!”), but he tended to ask politely, rather than grab, for the platter. Even when trying to borrow an algebra text for his hapless friend George Dyer, Lamb confessed to the item’s owner that, in seeking the right delicate manner for the request, he has consulted the letters of Pliny, “who is noted to have had the best grace in begging of all the ancients.”