Yours Ever (22 page)

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 typing 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:

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.”

Men, it would seem, are all alike. “The officer who will bring you this letter reminds me for the fourth time that he must leave. How he is pressing. He is abandoning no doubt some other unfortunate
woman in this country.” The chance to scatter animadversions like this is an incidental pleasure available in the midst of misery. Mariana admits to a certain enjoyment of romantic martyrdom (“I find myself rather attached to the unhappiness caused by you alone”), enough to exhibit the seventeenth century’s delight in paradox: “love me always and make me suffer even greater woes.” She rather likes the idea of other women loving Chamilly, at least under certain circumstances: “I think I would not be angry if affections found in others could, in some way, justify my own, and I would like that all the women of France found you charming, that none be charmed, and that none please you.” She’ll go a step further, in fact: she can sometimes even imagine herself serving “the one you love.” Chamilly once told her that, pre-Portugal, there had been someone else. Has that woman, she wonders, come back into the picture? Getting news like that might have a healthful shock-effect: “send me her portrait with a few of her letters, and write me all that she tells you.”

But Mariana doesn’t really want to be jolted out of her suffering. Indeed, in contrast to it, she pities Chamilly’s “indifference;” she’s glad that he “seduced” her, because she “could not live without the joy I am discovering of loving you amidst a thousand sorrows.” The worst fate, she decides, would be to forget him.

Her health deteriorates inside the walls of “this miserable cloister,” which she tells him has been a prison to her since she was a girl. Even the most severe nuns “have pity on my state” and are “touched by my love.” But they also believe she’s mad. For them, in return, she feels only scorn. Chamilly is her vocation now (“I am resolved to worship you all my life”), and she might as well keep practicing it.

Mariana does not compose her letters within any writerly structure—how could she, when her mood must swing from rage to rapture and back in the course of a paragraph? Piercing the pages with interjections (“Ah!” “Ho!” “Forgive me!”), she worries that Chamilly will be put off by the length of what she sends. She faints as she finishes one letter, and wishes, as she completes another, that she could fall into Chamilly’s arms the way the letter will.

Inevitably, she will scold: “why have you not written to me!” In
fact, Chamilly does write, but for the most part unsatisfactorily, “only icy letters, full of repetitions—half the paper is empty, and I can see that you are dying to have them finished.” We don’t have his side of the correspondence, but one feels safe in saying that its reception depended less on its matter than on Mariana’s mood. A month or two before her just-quoted complaint about his half-heartedness, some of his words drove their recipient toward an ecstatic convulsion:

But more often Chamilly’s letters, with their “ridiculous civilities,” are poor, wet kindling for a mighty emotional machine that begs to be stoked. In June 1668, Mariana decides that she will keep only two of them; she will return the rest and stop writing any more herself. With new backbone and clarity, she puts to Chamilly a declarative question: “Am I obliged to provide you with an exact account of all my varied emotions?” The greatest argument against the letters’ authenticity may be that this letter she says will be her last turns out to be just that; silence is not, after all, the sort of pledge that obsessive lovers are generally able to keep.