To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  His letter to Bessie Moore and her boyfriend Nick was just one amongst many (Chris had worked with Bessie at the Post Office). She was now working at the Foreign Office, where her training in Morse code was employed to translate intercepted German radio messages. She was 30 when their correspondence began. She remained in London throughout the war.

  Our disembarkation arrangements were perfect and after a not uncomfortable rail journey we were brought to the above address. I had expected to be parked on a pile of sand, and told it was ‘home’, but the Depot is a very pleasant place, surrounded by pine and eucalyptus trees. The water comes from a tap, and one sits down to meals. There is a Church Hut, quiet and fly-free, an Army Educational Corps hut, where are excellent books, a good NAAFI and a Cinema. A little further away is a tent, run by voluntary labour, where refreshments are served (not thrown at one) at reasonable prices, and there is a lounge, library, writing room, games-room, and Open Air Theatre, where a free film show takes place weekly, also a Concert. There is a lecture one night, bridge and whist another, and a more ‘highbrow’ musical evening another night.

  Directly I arrived, my brother applied for my posting to his units, and after two months of base life I started on the wearying but interesting journey to him. I met him after a separation of 26 months, and had a fine time talking of home and all that had happened there – the rows and the rejoicing – and in the evening walked through the sandy vineyard to swim in the blue waters.

  Since leaving the [Post Office] Counter School and joining the Army, a period of twelve years, I had little real rest. I was either actually on the counter or doing some Union work. If I did relax, it was not for long and I was conscious of being ‘guilty’. Since joining (or being joined to) H.M. Forces, I have had a great deal of leisure, and I have spent most of it reading and writing.

  Since I have decided to make this my last sheet I had better drop a few remarks on the people here. The Egyptians, nominally neutral, are hostile, as are most people without ‘independence’. The Arabs, poor, unhealthy, ignorant, need to be seen to be believed. Metropolitan life turns them into pests, but away from town they are not bad people. They work 12 hours for the shilling; only 25% of them can read and write, 170,000 have only one eye and they die about 40.

  Oh, the Pyramids; yes, I have seen them, sat on them, and thought what a gigantic case for Trade Unionism they present. How many unwilling slaves died in the colossal toil involved in erecting these edifices. And how insignificant the erection compared with Nature’s own hills and mountains?

  I visited the Cairo Zoo, happily in the company of two young Egyptians who were being educated at the American mission. They made the day a success. The cruelty of having a polar bear (noble creature) in this climate, and the effort to console him with a 10 second cold water dip!

  Excuse the writing, and confusion of this effort. But it’s me, alright. I hope you are O.K. Nick, it’s a long way from our Lantern Lecture on Sunny Spain at Kingsway Hall!

  All the best Bessie.

  Chris

  Chapter Four

  Love in Its Earliest Forms

  You will not believe what a longing for you possesses me.

  Around AD 102, more than 20 years after Vesuvius, Pliny was writing to his third wife Calpurnia.

  The chief cause of this is my love; and then we have not grown used to be apart. So it comes to pass that I lie awake a great part of the night, thinking of you; and that by day, when the hours return at which I was wont to visit you, my feet take me, as it is so truly said, to your chamber, but not finding you there I return, sick and sad at heart, like an excluded lover.

  Calpurnia had been unwell; Pliny had been away on legal business. In another letter he wrote:

  You say that you are feeling my absence very much, and your only comfort when I am not there is to hold my writings in your hand and often put them in my place by your side. I like to think that you miss me and find relief in this sort of consolation. I, too, am always reading your letters, and returning to them again and again as if they were new to me – but this only fans the fire of my longing for you. If your letters are so dear to me, you can imagine how I delight in your company; do write as often as you can, although you give me pleasure mingled with pain.

  The letters were an addiction now, reinforcing the couple’s devotion just as they confirmed their absence. ‘Write to me every day, and even twice a day: I shall be more easy, at least while I am reading your letters, though when I have read them, I shall immediately feel my fears again.’

  How can the modern reader not be stirred by these outpourings? But Pliny’s letters (alas we don’t have Calpurnia’s) are valuable for another reason beyond their intimacy. They’re almost all we’ve got. Beyond them, as we’ve seen, there’s little evidence that epistolary love existed at all in the ancient Roman world.

  But there is one other exception, discovered by chance in the Ambrosian Library in Milan in the nineteenth century. Cardinal Angelo Mai was something of an expert in the palimpsest – a scroll or document that has been scrubbed clean of its original inscriptions to be used again. In 1815 he came across something exciting written beneath something boring: the Acts of the first Council of Chalcedon of 451 concealed the second-century correspondence between leading orator and teacher Marcus Cornelius Fronto and a youthful Marcus Aurelius written some twenty years before he would become Roman emperor.

  Three years later, the cardinal discovered further letters beneath the same Council document, this time in the Vatican Library. Both finds created an air of expectation. Could this be an early nineteenth-century revelation of the formative years of one of ancient Rome’s great emperors? Absolutely, but not in the way anyone expected. In fact, when Cardinal Mai published his new collection the response was one of widespread disappointment. The letters appeared to be primarily about Latin prose style. The first full English translation appeared only in 1919, and again the response was muted. But hidden in plain view were many expressions of love and physical intimacy that may have struck even the most liberal of Georgian readers as a tad excessive; Mai had found a stash of something approaching imperial pornography, a rare documentary example of boy meets boy, or, more accurately, boys.

  Marcus Aurelius, lovelorn and erotic.

  In recent years an even stronger theory of infatuation between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius has been advanced, culminating in 2006 with the publication of Marcus Aurelius in Love, edited and translated by Amy Richlin. Richlin is in no doubt about their deep mutual affection, and wonders how deep this went. She suggests that the ‘disappointed’ Victorian reaction to the letters may suggest that their intimacies were judged to be in bad taste, and that it upset the traditional view of Marcus Aurelius as a saintly hero. But she finds it intriguing that even in the later periods, the letters were seldom analysed for their erotic qualities, nor regularly examined by students of gay history as a fine epistolary exemplar of homosexual love.

  The letters between Marcus Aurelius and Fronto track the rise and fall of a courtship from about AD 139, when Aurelius was in his late teens and his teacher in his late thirties, until about AD 148. The heart of their correspondence is ablaze with passion. ‘I am dying so for love of you,’ Aurelius writes, eliciting the response from his tutor, ‘You have made me dazed and thunderstruck by your burning love.’

  We do not know how often they met for tutelage, although it is clear that the intervals were, for both of them, rather too long. Perhaps it was merely their minds that coalesced so fruitfully and willingly – Aurelius enraptured by his master’s grasp on rhetoric, Fronto ensnared by his pupil’s sparkling potential – but their letters speak of more than just deep intellectual mingling: the mind of the solitary writer wanders to other, sometimes unattainable, possibilities. It could also be that the letters were a form of erotic rhetorical art in themselves, a seductive bit of homework:

  How can I s
uffer when you’re in pain, especially when you’re in pain on account of me? Shouldn’t I want to beat myself up and subject myself to all kinds of unpleasant experiences? After all, who else gave you that pain in your knee, which you write got worse last night . . . So what am I supposed to do, when I don’t see you and I’m tormented by such anguish?

  This kissing and thunderstriking aside, letters of longing are not much to be found in late antiquity, nor in the origins of the Christian or Byzantine worlds, nor indeed during the whole of the European Dark Ages, something we may blame on a collapse in literacy and the rise of the Church with more doctrinal and domineering affairs on its mind. The heart could freeze in such a period. There is devotion in Paul’s letters in the New Testament, of course, and personal messages scattered through 1,000 years of official communications, but a search for intimacy and passion will not be fruitful until one reaches what can only be described as the reinvention of romantic love in the twelfth century, when we encounter the epistolary delights of one of the greatest true-love romances of any age.

  That the desperate story of Abelard and Heloise still smoulders more than 800 years after its enactment is due entirely to the existence of letters and the interpretation one places upon them – be it celebratory humanist or condemnatory moralist. The saga provides the fullest and earliest example of what happens when unbridled sexual desire meets a suffocating religious society not altogether keen on such things, a raw and rare combination of doctrinal pedagoguery and cassock-ripping salaciousness.

  The story begins around 1132, when Pierre Abelard, early fifties, a philosopher-monk in exile in Brittany, writes the story of his life. Abelard’s autobiography is in the form of a letter to an unnamed friend, and takes on what will become a familiar form, a consolation letter – Historia Calamitatum – designed to make the recipient feel better about his own plight by learning of the far worse fate of another. Within it, as part of a full and grander Latin narrative about his life’s travails, we learn of his involvement with a highly literate and intellectually attractive woman he once used to tutor, another weighted master-pupil relationship that, for all its pledges of lifelong devotion, has embedded within it the seeds of its own demise.

  Abelard was one of medieval Europe’s great iconoclasts. Famous for his originality of thought and quick-witted argument, and never doubting his own abilities or convictions, he was as sure of his appeal to women as he was of his skills as a commentator on Ezekiel (‘I had youth and exceptional good looks as well as my great reputation to recommend me’).* His optimism was well placed. Having seen a young woman (believed to be at least 17, probably older) living in Paris, possessed of an outstanding education and looks ‘that did not rank lowest’, he set upon seducing her by impressing her uncle and guardian Fulbert (a canon at Notre Dame Cathedral), and successfully enrolling her as his protégé. ‘Need I say more?’ Abelard asks his unnamed correspondent. ‘With our lessons as our pretext we abandoned ourselves entirely to love.’ There followed ‘more kissing than teaching’ and hands that ‘strayed oftener to her bosom than the pages’. Indeed, Heloise seemed to receive very little formal teaching at all, as ‘our desires left no stage of love-making untried, and if love could devise something new, we welcomed it’.

  As their nocturnal passion endured, so Abelard found his teaching beginning to suffer. He became bored with his other duties, and his lectures became uninspired. And he never failed to be amazed at how everyone apart from Heloise’s uncle had a fairly good idea of what was going on. Abelard quoted St Jerome in his letter to Sabinian: ‘We are always the last to learn of evil in our own home, and the faults of our wife and children may be the talk of the town but do not reach our ears.’

  But when he did find out, Fulbert, not an entirely indulgent guardian (he had previously told Abelard that he was permitted to hit Heloise with force if she didn’t apply herself), was not wholly happy at the way Heloise had applied herself. The lovers flee his anger, Heloise finds she is pregnant, and the two agree on a secret marriage, which initially seems to please Fulbert. A son is born named Astrolabe. But when Fulbert decides to make the marriage common knowledge, it is Abelard – shamed by his actions – who breaks off their relationship, sends Heloise to a convent and Astrolabe to his sister. And that should have been that, were it not for a fuming Fulbert, who sees his niece abandoned and her life ruined. So Fulbert and his friends hatch a plan.

  As Abelard describes it, ‘one night as I slept peacefully in an inner room in my lodgings, they bribed one of my servants to admit them and there took cruel vengeance on me of such appalling barbarity as to shock the whole world; they cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained.’

  Thus mutilated, Abelard takes up holy orders and devotes himself to the love of God and the scriptures. But he was a questioning soul, and he did not endear himself to his peers by exposing what he saw as the many inconsistencies in Christian teaching. He wrote much in favour of rational understanding, and publicly – by anatomical necessity – he renounced the pleasures of the flesh. But when, nine years after his castration, his epistolary confession fell into the hands of Heloise in her convent at St Argenteuil (how, we don’t know – it could be that Abelard sent her a copy), he again became ensnared with his former lover.*

  Heloise disagreed with some of the details in Abelard’s account to his friend, and was wholly dismayed at his previous silence, but it was clear she was still devoted to him. More to him than God, indeed:

  Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purest, lewd visions of the pleasures we shared take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on my own prayers. Everything we did, and also the times and places, are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live through it all again with you. Even in sleep I have no respite. Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in the movement of my body, or they break out in an unguarded word.

  Heloise is convinced that her life has been wrecked, and is certain she has suffered more than Abelard. He has found redemption in faith; she feels only shame at her failure to do so.

  Where God may seem to you an adversary he has himself proved himself kind: like an honest doctor who does not shrink from giving pain if it will bring about a cure. But for me, youth and passion and experience of pleasures which were so delightful intensify the torments of the flesh and longings of desire, and the assault is the more overwhelming as the nature they attack is the weaker.

  Abelard’s rational response to her outpouring is subdued, and far more measured than she was asking for. He offers spiritual and religious assistance, and trusts that she will run her convent well. But he has abandoned all sexual desire for her, and it is not just his castration that has made this switch for him. He now regards libido as degrading, and views his nights with her as offering only ‘wretched, obscene pleasures’. He believes he often forced his lust upon her unwillingly, and is now grateful for his reduced state, regarding it as ‘wholly just and merciful’.

  for me to be reduced in that part of my body which was the seat of lust and sole reason for those desires . . . in order that this member justly be punished for all its wrongdoing in us, expiate the sins committed for its amusement, and cut me off from the slough of filth in which I had been wholly immersed in mind as in body. Only thus could I become more fit to approach the holy altars.

  Heloise reluctantly appears to accept these arguments, or is at least defeated by their force. The couple’s letters end on philosophical rather than intimate concerns, the so-called ‘Letters of Direction’, although the chiming of their minds appears still to form an irrevocable bond.

  Chaste as angels: Abelard and Heloise keep their secrets at Père Lachaise.

  But the story does not end there. In the early 1970s, a German ecclesiastical scholar named Ewald Koensgen published a thesis in Bonn describing a series of love letters wri
tten on wax tablets that had originally been published in an anthology compiled by the fifteenth-century monk Johannes de Vepria. The writers of the letters were unknown, but Koensgen had a hunch – little more – that they might be the original letters of Abelard and Heloise written to each other in Paris before things went wrong. His hunch had become a little stronger by 1974 when he published Epistolae duorum amantium. Briefe Abaelards und Heloises?, but the slim book created little noise. There was more of a controversy in 1999, when Constant J. Mews, a professor at Monash University in Melbourne, published the letters under the unequivocal title The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, and there was yet more commotion when the Latin letters appeared in a French translation in 2005. The debate still enflames medieval scholarly debate: are the letters genuine? If so, are they the genuine letters of Abelard and Heloise?*

  Certainly there were letters between the two at the height of their passions. In his autobiography, Abelard reasoned that in their earliest days together, even when separated, ‘we could enjoy each other’s presence by exchange of written messages in which we could speak more openly than in person’. The more Professor Mews studied and translated the letters, the more he had become convinced of the similarities in grammar and language between the established letters and the later discoveries. When he examined their context within the mores and other manuscripts of twelfth-century France he found only further confirmations. The 113 letters range considerably in length from three or four lines to more than 600 words, and from incomplete snippets of prose to strictly metered long passages of verse. They speak of a constancy of love found in faithfulness, and there is a repeated mingling of human love, spiritual love and the love of God. Many seem to exist quite independently of any others, as if written into the wind with no expectation of consequential reply.