To the Letter. Simon Garfield
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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