Authors: Thomas Mallon
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, most 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.”
With Edith making visits to the White House, and Wilson’s orchid deliveries following her home, even people well outside his circle soon knew something was afoot. Continuing the letters was a substitute for going out in public together, and Wilson, who in drafts of some official correspondence used a shorthand comprehensible only to himself and his White House stenographer, must have enjoyed the subterfuge. As with Chekhov and Olga Knipper, the correspondence is one of its own main themes. In prose as purple as her writing case, Edith asks the president if he can feel her letter “throb and beat” as he holds it. She tells him to “let it nestle” close to his heart, leaving “no room between for loneliness or sadness.” One night in August she lets him know that the pencilled letter she’ll be sending from Geneva, New York, is being written in bed. Realizing it’s “absurd,” Wilson sends a letter that may be traveling to her on the same train he’ll be taking himself.
From the beginning, he wants Edith’s opinions. His troubles with his secretary of state become an early bond between them, and her tough line (“Hurrah! Old Bryan is out!”) brings to the contemporary reader’s mind that other presidential second wife, Nancy Reagan. “You are so sweet in your judgments of people and I am so radical,” Edith will say after calling Roosevelt a “villain.” Wilson must remind her how much he relies on his chief secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, even though Tumulty isn’t her idea of a gentleman.
After a couple of months, Wilson begins sending state papers along with his letters (“By the way, do not trouble to return any of the documents I send, Sweetheart, unless I specifically indicate that I should like to have them back”). He annotates them with explanations, for which Edith professes gratitude (“You are a dear person to take the time to write little sentences on each of the papers you send me”). Neither one knew that this would be training for the year and a half she would serve, in the estimation of some, as the nation’s
first woman president. Back in 1915, she merely loved holding one of Wilson’s hands “while with the other [he turned] the pages of history.”
Midway through one letter written to Edith on a Saturday night in August, Wilson provides an unforgettable glimpse of his presidential self: “I got back to the house before the band concert on the South Lawn was over and heard, I fancy, the greater part of the program as I sat writing at my desk. At the end, when they played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ I stood up all alone here by my table at attention and had unutterable thoughts about my custody of the traditions and the present honor of that banner. I could hardly hold the tears back! And
then
, the loneliness!” He had always been a victim of the high achiever’s fraud complex, writing his first wife, thirty years before, that “Complete success, such as I have had at [Johns] Hopkins, has the odd effect … of humiliating rather than exalting me.” Later he saw himself as only “the (temporarily) beloved President of 100 million people.”
In October of 1915, with his dependence on Edith so evident, and the gossip so embarrassing (one Washington paper, excitedly dropping a syllable, reported that the president had spent an evening “entering” Mrs. Galt at the theatre), the official announcement of their engagement must have come as a relief to anyone in the know. At that point a direct phone line was run between the White House and Edith’s Twentieth Street home, where they were married on December 18. As was not the case with Wilson’s first marriage, the letters now ceased, Edith’s physical proximity more than compensating for whatever pleasures the two of them might have kept supplying each other on paper.
After five years in the White House (together, in 1918, they dedicated the first air-mail service), they moved to their own state-of-the-art house on S Street, which Edith had adapted to the president’s infirmities. It is now open to the public as a relic of the Wilsons’ brief life there together, and of Edith’s subsequent forty years alone. The ermine cape she wore to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration is upstairs, and on the piano in the second-floor library, one can find sheet music for the song that Colonel Starling of the
Secret Service overheard Woodrow Wilson, in top hat and pince-nez, singing to himself on his wedding day: “Oh, you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll!”
FOR A NUMBER OF DECADES
the duchess of Windsor had the distinction of being simultaneously the world’s most prominent socialite and its most notable outcast. Reviled by a royal family that owed its throne to her, she put her best face-lift forward at a thousand parties during her exile with the little man who’d given up his crown for her. A volume of their letters, published as she wished after her death in 1986, turned out to be something of an apologia. In particular, she wanted it known that, far from having tried to grab a crown for herself, “the twice-divorced Mrs. Simpson” (as she was always called) did everything she could to make Edward VIII renounce her instead of the throne in December 1936.
Although called
Wallis and Edward
, the volume contains not only letters between the duke and duchess but also ones from Wallis to her aunt Bessie Merryman of Baltimore. This proves a blessing. For one thing, it is through these postings to Aunt Bessie that we get to hear how everything happened. For another, those letters from the duke to the duchess that are included contain such treacly nonsense (well beyond the usual infantilism of billets-doux) that a reader couldn’t stomach many more of them.
“Was Wallis socially ambitious?” wonders Michael Bloch, editor of the correspondence. One might as well ask if the present queen likes horses and corgis. But was Mrs. Simpson’s specific ambition, from the get-go, to land the Prince of Wales? Bloch says that their first meeting came about “through accident rather than design,” though shortly after it occurred, in 1931, Wallis did write to Aunt Bessie that “it was quite an experience and as I’ve had my mind made up to meet him ever since I’ve been here [in London] I feel relieved.”
It seems clear that she didn’t entertain the idea of actually marrying him. She continued to see the good sense in her comfortable, passionless marriage to businessman Ernest Simpson, even long
after the prince had come to depend on her for constant attention (“this man is exhausting,” she informs Bessie) as well as marching orders. She juggled things; and Ernest didn’t slam the door until early 1935.
However shallow, Wallis Simpson was no fool; that was always clear, and her letters make it more so. Cautioned by memories of the “flat where mother had the café and was forever working herself to death to give me things,” she shows no desire to pursue an affair that will end in her own penniless notoriety. She thinks of her liaison with the prince as temporary grandeur; she savors his notice and hoards her press clippings.
It is he who won’t take no for an answer. At the time of the abdication crisis, with her mail full of insults and death threats, the prince insists she go through with her divorce from Simpson and marry him instead. The abdication leaves him somewhat bewildered, but eleven days after it’s done, he writes Wallis that he is “really happy for the very first time in [his] life.”
A reader of their letters has no reason to doubt it. The prince can only be described as besotted. Never a deep thinker (he liked jigsaw puzzles and needlepoint and standing on his head), he writes Wallis notes that have him reveling in his own dependence. He refers to the two of them as WE (Wallis and Edward) and seems to find this coinage the acronym of the age, using it constantly, along with their private word “eanum” (meaning puny or pathetic). A typical example of his epistolary prose: “Your lovely New Year message helped a boy a lot in his lonely drowsy and he was feeling sad. Give Mary [Wallis’s maid] an eanum note for me to keep until WE can be alone together again.”
The prince (and for eleven months king) comes off in these letters as His Royal Ickiness, unable during his brief reign and after to perceive how Wallis really needs to give him a dose of Lady Macbeth. After true humiliations have been heaped upon his exiled head, it is she who urges him to fight back against Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (“You cannot allow that man to finish you”) as well as the new king and queen: “I blame it all on the wife [the eventual Queen Mum]—who hates us both.” But in the months following
the abdication, moved by the full realization of what he has given up for her, Wallis lets her affectionate mothering bloom into something that looks like real love.
From the start, her letters are a huge contrast to his. True, she is preoccupied with money, clothes and parties, and on occasion shows Bessie a hint of Marie Antoinette: “The Hunger Marchers arrive in London tomorrow,” she writes in February 1934, “so we are going to the country in time for dinner.” But she is acute and amusing, too. Early in the affair, she tells her aunt: “The English would prefer that he marry a Duke’s daughter to one of the mangy foreign princesses left.”
The collection ends with the duke and duchess’s wedding on June 3, 1937—a good place to call a halt. For years they remained more or less devoted to each other but to little else of consequence. In January 1937, the duchess writes that “whatever happens we will make something of our lives,” but it’s hard to see what, if anything, that turned out to be. In the end, one has to agree with those who have said that her chief public service was to take her husband out of the line of succession. Being king of England is a pretty eanum job these days, but his own letters make a good case for thinking that Mr. David Windsor wouldn’t have been up to it.