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ОглавлениеChapter 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 suffer 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.
Chaste as angels: Abelard and Heloise keep their secrets at Père Lachaise.
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.
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 written 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.
WOMAN: To one loved thus far and always to be loved: with all her being and feeling, good health, joy, and growth in all that is beneficial and honourable . . . Farewell, farewell, and fare well for as long as the kingdom of God is seen to endure.
MAN: To his most precious jewel, ever radiant with its natural splendour, he purest gold: may he surround and fittingly set that same jewel in a joyful embrace . . . Farewell, you who make me fare well.*
The lapidary cloying never lets up even in longer examples, and remains rather infuriatingly vague. (She: ‘Farewell, sweetest. I am wholly with you, or to speak more truly I am wholly within you.’ He: ‘To the inexhaustible vessel of all his sweetness . . .’ She: ‘Since you are the son of true sweetness . . .’) But the physicality of their relationship does emerge gradually, albeit in a more muted form than we are used to from the fantasy-in-the-pews of the later letters (Man: ‘My spirit itself is shaken by joyful trembling, and my body is transformed into a new manner and posture.’) And then, by Letter 26, off they go into a language of feverish floridness, an ardour we surely recognise from our famous lovers:
MAN: How fertile with delight is your breast, how you shine with untouched beauty, body so full of moisture, indescribable scent of yours! Reveal what is hidden, uncover what you keep concealed, let that whole fountain of your most abundant sweetness bubble forth . . . Hour by hour I am bound closer to you, just like fire devouring wood.
The ‘new’ letters, genuine or not, share one more thing with their established counterparts: nothing runs them close for forthright entertainment.
The Fathers of the Church did not shirk from letter-writing in the long period between Pliny the Younger and Heloise, but neither did they sparkle with the possibilities of the form. Yet for about a thousand years, theological letters are all we have. Literacy was not encouraged among the populace, and in the shadow of the Church their views were deemed inconsequential. An oral tradition largely took the place of a textual one. Only the wealthy could employ messengers, and writing ability and materials were almost exclusively the domain of scribes and their ecclesiastical employers. Moreover, what else of worth could occupy a lay person’s thoughts beyond strict doctrine?
The letters that we do have constitute an uninspiring selection. Their saintly authors were duty bound; they were literate; their letters were more likely than others to be preserved (we are not very aware of royal correspondence until much later). The ecclesiastical choice of greetings and farewells relied much on the practices of late antiquity, but there the comparison ended; they were not concerned with worldly philosophy or self-improvement, and not for them the barefaced political manoeuvrings of Cicero nor the advice on travel or modesty from Seneca. They were concerned predominantly with ecclesiastical matters, as one would expect, a righteous path with few diversions.
We have rather a lot of them to prove the case: about 240 letters survive from Gregory of Nazianzus spanning much of the fourth century, 360 letters of St Basil in the same period, some 2,000 brief notes from Isidore of Pelusium, and more than 200 from Theodoret of Cyrus from the fifth century. You may prefer death to the lingering torture of reading them.
So it is not surprising that the physical candour and the life-as-she-is-suffered quality of Abelard and Heloise still burns. Nor that their letters have entered our culture, one far removed from whispering cloisters. There is a grand poetic memorial by Alexander Pope, whose Eloisa to Abelard (1717) made our heroine long for what she calls the ‘Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!’ (But all in vain, for ‘Soon as thy letters trembling I unclose / That well-known name awakens all my woes.’) This later faced lyrical competition from the opening of Cole Porter’s ‘Just One of Those Things’: ‘As Abelard said to Heloise / Don’t forget to drop a line to me please.’
Always ripe for oils, the saga is depicted in many forms in many galleries, most plaintively perhaps in ‘Lady Reading the Letters of Heloise and Abelard’ by Auguste Bernard d’Agesci (c. 1780) at the Art Institute, Chicago (the Lady in question appearing so affected by what she has just read that her dress has slid revealingly from her shoulders). At the cinema the couple feature as puppets in the Charlie Kaufman scripted Being John Malkovich. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind also became a Kaufman screenplay for Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. Many television viewers first heard of the letters when they featured in an episode of The Sopranos.
Just too much: a state of undress brought on by reading Abelard and Heloise in this late-18th century portrait by Auguste Bernard d’Agesci.
When the story is retold for the modern audience it often comes with a certain amount of studied guesswork written as enlivening narrative, as in James Burge’s Heloise & Abelard (2003), which envisages the heroine writing her first reply to Abelard’s autobiography before ‘the bell sounds for Vespers. The abbess must once again take her love, her emotions and the story that led her to this moment, close them up inside herself and assume her role as leader of a convent. She folds the letter, ties it up and seals it. Perhaps she slips it inside her habit.’
But the earliest and biggest crush on the affair came in the fourteenth century from Petrarch, whose admiration for Heloise (‘Totally charming and most elegant!’) ignited a new fascination with the lovers in much the same way he managed to reinforce Greek philosophy with Cicero. There could be no greater champion: more than anyone in the early Renaissance, Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) was the man who rediscovered what letters could be. One of his own letters even defines the history of the word.
John Cusack and A&H puppets in Being John Malkovich.
He was born in Arezzo in 1304, but his life as a perpetual traveller accounts for the many letters (almost 500 survive) to so many friends and acquaintances as he moved from near Florence to Pisa to Montpellier to Bologna before settling for an extended stay at Vaucluse in Provence and then Milan. A scholar and poet, Petrarch seemed uncertain as to the lasting value of his best work in his prodigious output, but the modern reader will find much of worth in his essays, biographies and religious treaties, as well as his most famous lyrical poems enflamed by his muse Laura, assured by him of immortality after she died of plague in 1348.
But certainly we should also remember him for something else: Petrarch’s letters are intriguing and significant documents. Inspired by Cicero, Epicurus and Seneca, he wrote almost every day in personal terms, and his two large collections (one, Epistolae familiares, is a general gathering from his travels, the other, Epistolae Seniles, more specifically concerned with old age) lay good claim to be the first modern letters by the first modern mind at the dawn of our modern European civilisation.
As if to emphasise the richness of the letters to history, he writes an unfinished biography of his life not in poetry or standard chronological form, but in the shape of a letter ‘To Posterity’. We may regard his opening modesty as a little false (‘Greeting. It is possible that some word of me may have come to you . . .’) and he is downright wrong when he claims such an ‘insignificant and obscure’ name such as his ‘will scarcely penetrate far in either time or space’. History has been kind to him, and to us.
At the beginning of his first collection he writes to his lifelong friend Ludovico (whom he nicknames Socrates) of how his letters almost didn’t make it even to their first collected publication (in the 1360s), most being eaten by mice or ‘the insatiable bookworm’, and some deliberately destroyed by him on the fire. He writes of being in one of those gloomy moods where he doubted the worth of all his work, but a dreamlike vision of Ludovico (who had previously expressed an affection for his letters) changed his mind. So now he looked back on his work with some satisfaction, and an ability to offer some observations on letter-writing he hadn’t expressed before.
The first care indeed in writing is to consider to whom the letter is to be sent; then we may judge what to say and how to say it. We address a strong man in one way and a weak one in another. The inexperienced youth and the old man who has fulfilled the duties of life, he who is puffed up with prosperity and he who is stricken with adversity, the scholar distinguished in literature and the man incapable of grasping anything beyond commonplace – each must be treated according to his character or position.
Writing to Boccaccio in 1365, shortly after his collected letters were evidently being freely copied by numerous scribes, he writes of one overriding wish for his work – that it be legible. Not for him ‘ill-defined though sumptuous penmanship’, nor writing which ‘delights us at a distance but . . . strains and tires the eyes when we look at it intently’. It all comes down to etymology, he writes, for after all ‘the word letter comes from legere, to read’.
The modern reader may have further hopes: that his letters are not only readable but still worth reading. Many are. They are wide-ranging in content, contradictory, sure of themselves, elitist and erudite, which generally guarantees a good read in any language. He wrote to many friends and also some imaginary ones, such as Cicero and Homer. Subject matter ranges from politics, biography, classical poetry and contemporary literature, but one of the essential things that sets them apart is his writing about travel. Petrarch lays a strong claim to being the world’s first tourist.
The first man of letters? Petrarch clasps his legacy in this 19th century painting.
His letters to his friends are nothing if not parchment postcards home, and he writes not as one who has observed novel native customs as he flits through Europe conducting important business, but as a pleasure seeker, a holidaymaker, a flaneur. He travels to Paris, the Low Countries and the Rhine, he climbs mountains, he reports back. The only thing that prevents him travelling further – to Jerusalem, for example – is his terrible sea-sickness. ‘Would that you could know,’ he writes to one friend, ‘with what delight I wander, free and alone, among the mountains, forests, and streams.’ His letters become travel guides, itineraries and mental maps, and an early form of anthropology.
‘I then proceeded to Cologne,’ he writes to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna in the summer of 1333,
which lies on the left bank of the Rhine, and is noted for its situation, its river, and its inhabitants. I was astonished to find such a degree of culture in a barbarous land. The appearance of the city, the dignity of the men, the attractiveness of the women, all surprised me.
The day of my arrival happened to be the feast of St John the Baptist. It was nearly sunset when I reached the city . . . I allowed myself to be led immediately from the inn to the river, to witness a curious sight. And I was not disappointed, for I found the riverbank lined with a multitude of remarkably comely women. Ye gods, what faces and forms! And how well attired! One whose heart was not already occupied might well have met his fate here.
I took my stand upon a little rise of ground where I could easily follow what was going on. There was a dense mass of people, but no disorder of any kind. They knelt down in quick succession on the bank, half hidden by the fragrant grass, and turning up their sleeves above the elbow they bathed their hands and white arms in the eddying stream.
. . . When anything was to be heard or said I had to rely upon my companions to furnish both ears and tongue. Not understanding the scene, and being deeply interested in it, I asked an explanation from one of my friends . . . He told me that this was an old custom among the people, and that the lower classes, especially the women, have the greatest confidence that the threatening calamities of the coming year can be washed away by bathing on this day in the river, and a happier fate be so assured. Consequently this annual ablution has always been conscientiously performed, and always will be.
In whatever high regard we may hold Petrarch’s letters, it would be hard to match the regard in which he held them himself. He desired that his readers, whom he thought of as predominantly male,
should think of me alone, not of his daughter’s wedding, his mistress’s embraces, the wiles of his enemy, his engagements, house, lands or money. I want him to pay attention to me. If his affairs are pressing, let him postpone reading the letter, but when he does read, let him throw aside the burden of business and family cares, and fix his mind upon the matter before him . . . I will not have him gain without any exertion what has not been produced without labour on my part.
His letters usually run to well over a thousand words. The well-hashed line ‘Sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to write a short one’, has been attributed in various forms to Blaise Pascal (1657), John Locke (1690), William Cowper (1704) and Benjamin Franklin (1750), but the thought may have originated – in a naturally elongated form – with Petrarch. Writing again to Boccaccio towards the end of his writing life, aware that his time was now limited, he resolved to keep his letters tight, and to ‘write to be understood and not to please’. Yet he remembered making that promise before: ‘But I have not been able to keep this engagement. It seems to me much easier to remain silent altogether with one’s friends than to be brief, for when one has once begun, the desire to continue the conversation is so great that it were easier not to begin than to check the flow.’
He encountered other difficulties too. Too often he would write letters and they would not make it to their inattentive readers at all, their carrier having been intercepted by anxious agents of the state or random Italian highwaymen, or even an early incarnation of the autograph hunter. Not long before his death, Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio that a combination of old age and the perennial unreliability of the messenger system had resigned him to a regretful fate: he would write letters no more.
I know now that neither of two long letters that I wrote to you have reached you. But what can we do? Nothing but submit. We may wax indignant, but we cannot avenge ourselves. A most insupportable set of fellows has appeared in northern Italy, who nominally guard the passes, but are really the bane of messengers.
They not only glance over the letters that they open, but they read them with the utmost curiosity. They may, perhaps, have for an excuse the orders of their masters, who, conscious of being subject to every reproach in their restless careers of insolence, imagine that everyone must be writing about and against them; hence their anxiety to know everything. But it is certainly inexcusable, when they find something in the letters that tickles their asinine ears, that instead of detaining the messengers while they take time to copy the contents, as they used to do, they should now, with ever increasing audacity, spare their fingers the fatigue, and order the messengers off without their letters. And, to make this procedure the more disgusting, those who carry on this trade are complete ignoramuses . . . I find nothing more irritating and vexatious than the interference of these scoundrels. It has often kept me from writing, and often caused me to repent after I had written. There is nothing more to be done against these letter thieves, for everything is upside down, and the liberty of the state is entirely destroyed.
The liberty of the state destroyed by an uncertain postal service? Even allowing for the odd flourish of Italian melodrama, it did appear that the value of letters – their role in cultural discourse as much as their importance in official affairs – was now something a civilised world at the dawn of the Renaissance could not do without. And this was just the beginning: the worth of letters to historical record, the danger of letters to a nervous monarchy, the importance of a reliable delivery network for the passionate expression of love – all these were just starting to be assessed. Clearly, a growth in literacy was going to be both a blessing and a curse.
How to Build a Pyramid
14232134 SIGMN. BARKER H.C., 330 WING,
1 COY., 9 A.F.S., M.E.F.
17th December 1943
Dear Bessie,
I received yesterday your surface letter of 20th October. I read it avidly as from an old pal – noting that though time has chattanooga’ed along, your style remains pretty much as it was in the days when we had that terrifically intense and wonderfully sincere correspondence about Socialism and the Rest Of It – unlike the present time, when, hornswoggling old hypocrite that I am, the Rest Of It seems infinitely more attractive. Thanks for the letter, old-timer, I am sending this by Air Mail because it will have enough dull stuff in it to sink a Merchant ship.
Yes, I remember our discussions over ‘Acquaintance’ and my views are still as much for as yours remain against. I have, perhaps, one hundred acquaintances (I write to fifty) yet I could number my friends on one hand. The dictionary:
Acquaintance: a person known.
Friend: one attached to another by affection and esteem.
You are ‘known’ to me, and while I have ‘affection’ for you it does not amount to an attachment. You hung on to my coat tails ‘in friendship’, you say?
I am sorry that Nick and you are ‘no longer’, as you put it, and that you should have wasted so much time because of his lack of courage. You must have had a rotten time of it, and I do sympathise with you – but are you writing to the right bloke? I’ll say you are! Joan gave me my ‘cards’ a couple of months back, though I had seen them coming since April, when I got my first letters.
I think you had better write some more on your view of emotions. You say that if they could be ruled out it would make New-Order-building easier. I deny that. We only feel like that when our emotions are tinkered and played about with.
I can quite believe your estimate of the way the London-leave soldier improves the shining-hour. You can understand chaps who get three or four days leave before a campaign opens, ‘painting the town red’, but unfortunately quite a large number who are in comfortable Base jobs have their regular unpleasant habits. When I was at Base our evening passes bore the injunction ‘Brothels Out of Bounds. Consorting with Prostitutes Forbidden.’ Where we collected the passes there was a large painted sign, ‘Don’t Take a Chance, Ask the Medical Orderly for a – doodah’. The whole emphasis of Army Propaganda is ‘Be Careful’, even the wretched Padre at Thirsk, when he said a few words of farewell, said merely that most foreign women were diseased, and we should be careful.
[At the pyramids] when I found a preventative on the place I had chosen to sit down on, I thought it was a nice combination of Ancient and Modern! Whoever told you Pyramids told the time was pulling your leg. No iron or steel was used, cranes or pulleys. Ropes and Levers only. Their erection was due to Superb Organisation, Flesh and Blood, Ho Heave Ho, and all the other paraphernalia of human effort.
I am afraid this letter is not what it set out to be, but I have little doubt you find it acceptable. What paper do you read nowadays?
I luckily secured a bed, a great help when one remembers the many crawly things. Flies are nauseatingly numerous, and fleas annoyingly active. (I got two from my left leg while writing this, earlier. It’s not often you can kill them.) Washing is a difficulty, petrol tins are our bath tubs. Squeeze a rag at the shoulder, and the water trickles interestedly down for re-use. Mice are a nuisance, scratching around. The ubiquitous, utilitarian petrol tin is here made into a trap, properly baited and it gets three or four a day for a time. They go in the tin which is on its side, then a lid comes down and they are trapped. Killing them afterwards is a nasty business, stunning, drowning, then burying. I have avoided it so far. Much rain lately has made an ornamental lake of the wide flatness; but we have now got grass and some tiny flowers where before was merely sand. I have transplanted some of the flowers into a special patch we have made into a garden. Bert and I play chess most of our spare-time, on a set we made with wire and [a] broom-handle. There are some dogs about the camp which is far from anywhere. No civilians. We have two pigs fattening for Xmas, poor blighters, though I believe the uxorious male has given the sow hope of temporary reprieve.
I hope you hear regularly from your brother and that your Dad and yourself are in good health.
Good wishes,
Chris
* The translations of his autobiography and the subsequent letters are by Betty Radice, Penguin Classics, 1974.
* There has been some academic discussion that the unnamed correspondent to whom Abelard sends his confession was a creation of Abelard’s making, a device to focus his attention and garner some sympathy. There is also a theory that suggests that all the correspondence between the lovers was consciously manufactured between the two, or even later invented by another writer, but the authenticity of the early letters at least is generally accepted.
* Forged letters were not unknown at this time, the most famous being a letter purportedly from Prester John in 1165 in which he positioned himself as a mythical king and detailed fantastical creatures in Central Asia. But the motivation behind the possibly fake letters of Abelard and Heloise remains unclear, beyond mere titillation or a desire to re-expose hypocrisy and scandal within the Church.
* Mews and his colleague Neville Chiavaroli uphold Ewald Koensgen’s tradition of crediting the correspondents merely with male/female monikers rather than definite names.
