Yours Ever (27 page)

Even during the Second World War, when Matthiessen is in Massachusetts and Cheney away in the Southwest, they will connect themselves by listening to the same live radio concert: “Mahler has just finished—very rich and full, wasn’t it?” writes Cheney on a Sunday in November 1944.

What they are up against, socially and psychologically, is never far from the page. At the start of their partnership in 1924, the very young Matthiessen pronounces the two of them “beyond society. We’ve said thank you very much, and stepped outside and closed the door.” But he can never long stop worrying about what might be getting said back in that room he’s vacated. Six years later, in the thick of his Harvard success and responsibilities, he writes: “My sex bothers me, feller, sometimes when it makes me aware of the falseness of my position in the world. And consciousness of that falseness seems to sap my confidence of power. Have I any right in a community that would so utterly disapprove of me if it knew the facts?” When the university’s professor of public speaking comments on his “blurred and soft” enunciation, Matthiessen wonders: “Am I just like any fairy?”

Cheney absorbs similar hurts even in the bohemia of Santa Fe. “I hate like poison to write it to you,” he tells Matthiessen around Christmas 1929: “A telegram to [Phelps Putnam] was on the table when I got up containing the words: ‘our best to Cheney and his little boys’ signed Hester and Larry … I wrote ‘inexcusable’ across it and am sending it back to Larry. At least I leave it here on the
table [for] Put to mail if he thinks best. It plain broke me—such indecency.”

In the long run, alcoholism did the worst damage to Cheney and his relationship with Matthiessen, who observed the affliction with a mixture of perplexity and anger. In April 1942, when Cheney is in a sanatorium, the younger man writes: “I don’t think that I goad you into drinking but once you’re started I’m sure that my intensity doesn’t help matters any. I wish that I could learn not to be so torn to pieces by your deceptions, which, though ugly, are only symptoms of your by then desperate state.” For his part, Cheney is contrite, resolute and naïvely optimistic about the possibility of change. But he never conquers his condition, and less than a year before his death in 1945 is writing in a manner that seems already posthumous: “don’t worry about me. [Dr.] Mera will fix me OK in about four days. I will look out. Weedsie, you have the most beautiful loyalty the world has known. You are a very lovely character, and you have had the entire love of another feller.”

Matthiessen may have been mystified by Cheney’s binges, but he was no stranger to his own kind of blackness, a severe recurring depression. His occasional sense of life’s pointlessness (“God how I want to put my head in your lap,” he writes Cheney) could sometimes be alleviated by working even harder than usual, but he was still left to wonder whether his own “bright scrutiny, the self-knowledge which I have believed to be my sureness in making my life an integrated one” hasn’t “left nine-tenths of the iceberg hidden.”

In late 1938, having become suicidal, he receives treatment in Massachusetts at McLean Hospital, the site of so much Brahmin literary misery. Determined to “find my way back to the light,” he receives a guilty letter that Cheney writes from their house in Maine: “I fight my own devil who whispers I have drained too much life from you by my constant demand lately for help and backing.” The reference is to a terrible bender Cheney went on after the great hurricane of that year, an episode that left him wanting to die and left Matthiessen confronting the possibility that he would. In a long journal-letter written at McLean, Matthiessen reflects: “Having
built my life so simply and wholly with Russell’s, having had my eyes opened by him to so much beauty, my heart filled by such richness, my pulse beating steadily in time with his in intimate daily companionship, I am shocked at the thought of life without him. How would it be possible? How go on from day to day?” He has become, he realizes, his own hostage to fortune: “When you give yourself entirely to love, you cannot demand that it last forever. For then fear intrudes and there I am.”

During this breakdown, Matthiessen’s “death wish” assumes the form of “agonizingly vivid images of jumping out of a window”—the fate he would actually inflict upon himself, from the twelfth floor of Boston’s Manger Hotel, in 1950, five years after Cheney’s death. However terrible this end, readers of the love letters Matthiessen wrote and received may be drawn to see it as the high price life demanded for fulfilling the hope he had expressed, as a shining certainty, to his new love a quarter century before: “You’ll give me balance, a touch with life. And instead of being an energetic accurate little machine, why I may be a personality.”

THE WRITER OF A BOOK
such as this finds himself grasping at synonyms for the main subject—whatever will let him avoid the sentence-after-sentence repetition of “letters.” What’s available, alas, seems pretty musty and artificial-sounding. One might get away with “missive” a couple of times in the chapter on love letters, but the word looks awfully silly anywhere else. “Epistle” is another creaky, thesaurus choice—except perhaps here, at the start of a chapter about the letters of priests and philosophers and other seekers after life’s essential spirit.

“Epistle” remains the agreed-upon term for the open letters—apostolic spreadings of good news and chastisement and doctrinal elaboration—addressed to the early Christian church’s far-flung potential converts. Saint Paul is the New Testament’s most prolific letter writer, and his Epistle to the Romans perhaps the central explanation of his new faith’s demands. This momentous communication really had two initial audiences, as Thomas Bokenkotter explains in his
Concise History of the Catholic Church;
it was “intended for Jerusalem as much as for Rome,” in the hope that it would “clear up any remaining doubts the Jewish Christians still entertained” about the Gospel’s new precedence over all previous Law.

The epistle begins, more or less, as a thank-you letter, expressing gratitude to the Romans for their remarkable ongoing conversion. But it doesn’t take many short chapters for Paul to hit his stern or-else stride. The choice for waverers, he makes plain, is between joy and death: “Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off” (11:22). The apostle’s favorite technique is to harrow his new flock with rhetorical questions—“What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?”(6:1)—and to say “God forbid” when the temptation for his audience may be to answer yes.

But the weak in spirit can take comfort from the autobiographical shout that splits the epistle in two: “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (7:24) cries Paul—a daunting admission of need from someone who’s been vouchsafed visions on a road to Damascus that the recipients of his epistle will never get to travel themselves.

Thirteen centuries later, Ibn Abbad of Ronda would be trying, through his
Letters on the Sufi Path
, not to get a spiritual movement off the ground so much as to keep the factions of an existing one united in the celestial air. The advice he writes to his followers is marked by, more than anything else, a calm, soothing empathy: “In short, you are a man with faults,” he tells one correspondent. Well, so is Ibn Abbad. It is actually a gift to be disgusted with one’s spiritual condition and sins, he argues; what else provides the opportunity to repent?

The high decibels of Pauline epistle are largely absent from Ibn Abbad’s letters. (In fact, after laying out one complicated piece of theology, he charmingly confesses, “I am not swayed by my own line of argument.”) But the two proselytizers have in common a strong belief that while the spirit gives life, the letter—i.e., the law—killeth. The importance of mystic truth over formal learning is perhaps Ibn Abbad’s principal message. He himself may move from topic to topic, but he urges his listeners not to wear themselves out with spiritual searching: “If, therefore, what you seek is already found and present to you, why do you look beyond Him and why do you search for mediation from other than Him?” Ibn
Abbad is happy for his letters of individual counsel to be seen and debated by others, no matter if they earn the scorn of “Zayd or ‘Amr”—individuals his translator identifies as the Arabic equivalents of “every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

Even for this comforting Moroccan mystic, urging the seeker to look for what’s already in sight, the
journey
, the needy man’s self-chosen setting out on foot, remains, as it does perhaps in all the creeds of the world, the central metaphor for spiritual growth. The religious epistle probably has its closest genre-cousin in the travel letter; on occasion, even today, the two will combine into one. The director of the Western Buddhist Order, the former Dennis Ling-wood, who became the monk Sangharakshita following his World War II service with the British army in India, has for years stayed in touch with his disciples (“Dear Dharmacharis and Dharma-charinis”) through open letters, keeping them posted (as we still say) about his activities and whereabouts, sometimes in rather numbing travel-diary detail: “we had a late meal at Hockneys, followed by a quiet browse in the Centre bookshop.” As the leader of an established sect—neither the upstart Church of Paul nor the troubled movement of the Sufis—Sangharakshita can often make his trip reports sound like filings by a UN secretary-general (“In the course of the last three-and-a-half months we have visited eight FWBO centres in four countries”), but even if the author seems more occupied by the bureaucratic than the beatific, there are still the occasional self-examinations that get made and then offered as strength for others’ journeys: “Was thought indeed dependent on physical energy, and if so to what extent?” These speculations, ready for mass spiritual mailing, can be prompted by simple personal discoveries, such as Sangharakshita’s late-in-life one that, Buddhist contemplative though he may be, he is suffering from high blood pressure—perhaps exacerbated by stress.

IN NOVEMBER 1833
, a year after resigning as a pastor of the Second Church of Boston, thirty-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson first mounted a public lecture platform, secular wooden space that he
would come to regard as the “new pulpit” of New England. Emerson spent most of his life preoccupied with what he called, in a letter to his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, the “stone walls of in-communicability [that] exist between mind & mind,” but in shifting back and forth from the public hall to the private letter, he occasionally had trouble adjusting the tenor and amplification of his own utterance: “I really did not mean when you asked me for a letter to write a homily,” he apologizes to Harrison Gray Otis Blake, one of the Harvard students who asked him to give the Divinity School address, in August of 1839.

Letter writing appears often enough as a subject in Emerson’s letters to give the reader a strong feeling of their moment of composition, whether it occurs on the high seas (“Forgive these ricketty faltering lines of mine; they do not come of infirm faith or love, but of the quivering ship”), or in a parlor, when Emerson finds himself distracted by others’ chatter: “forgive me this gossiping letter—I had company in the room so you must fill out its elliptical logic.”

His mother had urged her young sons to write one another “improving” letters, filled with what they’d gleaned from their reading, but as he matured Emerson saw far richer opportunity in the genre than the creation of yet another commonplace book. He would tell his own daughter to think of a letter as “a kind of picture of a voice,” and would complain to Margaret Fuller about how the production of our most pleasurable correspondence tends to be postponed for those letters “that, like duns, do threaten & chide to be answered.” One can sense him prolonging epistolary delight when he carries around, instead of mailing, an Italian travel letter he’s been writing for his Aunt Mary: “I began this letter at Rome, I am finishing it at Florence close by the tombs of Galileo, of Michel Angelo, of Machiavel & the empty urn of Dante. My letter sheet has got sadly soiled & so I give the history of its places.”

Despite his mother’s premium on seriousness, the young Emerson’s letters to his brothers could be quite playful and entertaining. And in later years, albeit with a certain effort, he could still put an amusing show onto the page. He probably never wrote a funnier
paragraph than the one he sent to Charles Anderson Dana in 1843 about the Transcendentalists’ short-lived magazine,
The Dial: