Yours Ever (26 page)

THE SUPPOSED BLINDNESS
of love has always been a measure of its irrational intensity and even nobility. In its purest form, love fails to notice physical appearance, social obstacles, or anything but love itself. To fit it with lenses would be to cure and thereby kill it. By contrast, except for the “deaf ears” upon which the pleas of an unsuccessful suitor may fall, deafness rarely provides metaphors for romance. And yet it is within the surrounding silence of actual deafness that Eva Weintrobe and Morris Davis, an English seamstress and a tailor, conducted a flinty and spirited epistolary courtship during the late 1930s.

Thirteen years older than Eva, Morris, at thirty-eight, has just returned to England from a decade in New York when he meets her at the Warrington Deaf Club in Liverpool in the summer of
1936. The son who will eventually publish their letters explains that Morris “had seen a photograph of Eva while he was in London and went to Liverpool with the express purpose of meeting her.” As fast a worker as Woodrow Wilson, he will be suggesting marriage after about a dozen letters and a third as many meetings.

In fact, the lovestruck tailor is pressing two suits at once: he wants Eva not only to marry him but to settle in America as well. But she is skeptical of any future there: “How can you make money in one year as you say if you have been in the States twelve years & made nothing,” she asks in April of ‘37. What’s more, she does not like emigration being made into the test of her devotion. And anyway, why can’t he just “act like other boys & give in to the girl.”

Only Eva’s side of the early correspondence survives, so Morris’s arguments must be heard in her rebuttals: “You said I should not doubt your love for me as you were the first to declare & also the first to propose marriage, well this is the proper thing to do, did you expect me to propose first.” The way Eva sees it, there are things that women just don’t do, and as for Morris’s idea that he might go back to America by himself for a while, after they’ve married—well, who does he imagine he is? “It is allright
[sic]
for cricketers & film stars, Jewish people never do things like this.”

Morris does go back alone, and still single. Soon afterward, Eva says she’s “honured
[sic]”
to have his first letter from the States, and in August of ‘37 she thanks him for the five dollars he’s sent as a birthday present. Even so, ever cautious and charmingly stubborn, she reveals seven months later that she’s yet to spend it: “I do not know why but I have not wanted to change it to English money, but if all is well between us I will buy something for my trousseau with it.”

As they keep arriving, Morris’s letters do convince her that she will be “safe in America,” and Eva finally agrees to cross the ocean, saying she is “happy & excited at the prospect of seeing you again.” Her exuberance is new, but still not high enough for her to put an exclamation point to it. As it is, what’s been most crucial in making up her mind to emigrate is Morris’s news that he’s been able to get back his old American job.

Red tape and a consular official’s discomfort with her deafness (“he was afraid you would not marry me & then I would be destitute & be dependent on the city”) delay Eva’s departure for a full year, during which a reader sees the conscientiousness and worry that she carries to her job every day. She can’t write the “more sentimental & intimate letters” that Morris would like from her; after all, she’s not a poet and she doesn’t have the
time
. She reminds him that she couldn’t get off from work even to say good-bye when he sailed from Southampton, but when the seamstresses are given an hour and a half’s leave to greet the new king and queen during their visit to Liverpool, Eva does use the time to write to Morris.

The two of them quarrel and apologize and then justify themselves a little further, before agreeing to drop whatever the current bone of contention may be. In the meantime, they’ve hurt each other. During their biggest misunderstanding, Eva complains: “You also write that you will be fair to me & will marry me, although you do not love me as much as before. Morris you would be doing me a great wrong if you do, only if you love me will I marry you …” Replying from Brooklyn, Morris imparts evidence that his love remains deep: “Perhaps you will wonder differently if I tell you how much I suffered for almost ten weeks and how I lost 9 lbs. in weight within a few weeks, although I neglected my training in my [track and field] club.”

Morris and Eva are proud, vulnerable people, full of wariness. An absence of gush makes their courtship letters a truer preview of married life than most beribboned clutches of old love letters would be. Eva assures him, “You have no need to worry, I will be a good wife to you, & will do everything for you as long as you are good to me.” Morris needs to remember that she is “going to give up a lot for you leaving all my family & friends, so this ought to prove something to you.” Eva relaxes only the least little bit in the direction of playfulness when he tells her about the kind of apartment they might soon have. She responds: “I am very glad & happy Morris & I do love you very much. I am waiting for the day when you will be telling me that there is too much pepper & not enough salt.”

Each of them—even the more demonstrative Morris—is muffled
in a cloak of reserve and formality; their manner of expression seems the opposite of our own era’s compulsive, therapeutic directness. Both strain to sound correct and self-assured: “I received your parcel this morning & thank you for same,” Eva writes to Morris. Prior to her departure for America, he declaims: “I hope you will enjoy yourself very much during your trip on the high seas, and please take good care of yourself and enjoy yourself in the company of your fellow passengers.” Eva employs the phrase “your welcome letter,” that archaic courtesy letting the earlier sender know that his envelope has been ushered into the house. The effect of such language is less pretentious than touching; the letters are whisk-broomed with the same kind of aspirant self-respect that can be seen in the couple’s snapshots, where Morris and Eva and their friends are beautifully spiffed up and turned out.

This regard for convention extends to the letters’ closings, where Eva finds subtle opportunities for variation. Her sign-offs are a barometric reading of the state of her feelings for Morris: her “best love & kisses” can be replaced with “kindest regards,” and when she’s truly angry she will dispatch a letter “From” Eva, or with nothing but a signature. Her emotional precision is such that the first time she calls Morris “Darling,” he seizes the word like a victory: “I sure like it, and you can see now how easy it is for you to express your feeling in your letters, whenever you feel like doing so.”

How much more reflectively some of our personal dramas played out before electronic mail, let alone text-messaging, which has now made e-mail seem almost sealing-waxed. Morris tells Eva that he will “always write the names of the fastest liners on the envelopes of the letters I send you so that the letters may catch these boats just in time before they sail.” Once, just after mailing a letter in which he confides to Eva his worry that a case of mumps may have rendered him sterile, he decides that he’s been foolish to alarm her and put their engagement at risk. So the amateur track star races to the post office in Manhattan and manages, in his peculiar-sounding voice, to convince a clerk to let him retrieve the letter. Today, multi tasking at her sewing machine, Eva would already have clicked open the fateful e-mail. “If the letter had gone through,” wonders the
son who decades later edited their correspondence, “perhaps I would have never been born.”
^*

To the question of whether his parents’ long married life in America was a success, Lennard J. Davis gives “a qualified ‘yes,’” the answer one would expect for two such “stoical people.” Davis—who recalls from his early childhood a lot of arguments conducted via “emphatic signing, with its audible hand-slapping, and [his parents’] involuntary verbal expostulations”—grew up to be an English professor “who specialized in eighteenth-century novels” and “read many epistolary romances.”

AFTER MEETING IN 1924
, Russell Cheney and Francis Otto Matthiessen would spend twenty years together—a period almost equal to the difference in their ages—and just enough time apart to prompt the exchange of three thousand letters.

Cheney was forty-three and Matthiessen only twenty-two when the two began what might have been no more than a shipboard romance: the older man, an increasingly established artist, was on his way from New York to Italy to paint; the younger one would disembark first, in order to take up the second year of a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, where he planned to write a thesis on Oliver Goldsmith.

In the year following the ocean voyage, except for brief reunions on the Continent, the two of them work out, in near-daily letters, the nature of the permanent relationship they are determined to form. “That there have been other unions like ours is obvious,” writes Matthiessen, “but we are unable to draw on their experience. We must create everything for ourselves.” Coltish, literary and idealistic, he declares that he and Cheney will have “a marriage that demands nothing and gives everything,” even if they won’t use that heterosexual term for the union. “Feller, my own dear feller, we have found the key to life, haven’t we?”

Matthiessen tells Cheney that he is trying to make himself “worthy of your love,” a process that includes struggling to keep sex a pure thing between just the two of them. Courting temptation in order to resist it, he takes a late-afternoon stroll by Marble Arch (“The place in London most flagrant”) and reports the results: “Of course I could have stopped in that gesturing crowd. I could have drunk in a lot of luscious slime through my eyes. But who would want to when he can throw back his shoulders, and walk into the sunset, and be at peace with his soul and you?” Cheney, also prone to lust (and to renunciations even more sweeping and unsustainable), gently urges the younger man “to live and stop watching yourself live.”

Eager for Cheney’s protection and tutelage in the ways of the world and the heart, Matthiessen already has his own serious vocation for teaching, a calling that, coupled with the books he would produce about classic American writers, will make him a star professor at Harvard. His view of literature is forthrightly Arnoldian; what’s inside a novel or poem remains without value “unless it can enrich a man’s life.” The young critic’s political engagement follows logically from this, and it proves serious: we see him voting for the New Deal (until something more plausibly radical can come along) and rallying support for a Cambridge bookseller who’s been threatened with the workhouse after selling
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
.

But the life of action can take place only during hurried breaks from the academic assembly line of lectures and papers and conferences and committees to which Matthiessen is lashed: “This morning I was sent a senior who is working in the eighteenth century and wants to write his dissertation on Beattie (My God! I couldn’t even remember who Beattie was …).” Even before he becomes the head tutor in one of Harvard’s undergraduate houses, Matthiessen wonders to Cheney if he isn’t letting himself “be spread as thin as shellac.” Repeated term after term, his routine is “nerve-wracking, alternately very interesting and exhaustingly futile.” For all Matthiessen’s desire to enliven academic writing and enlarge the audience for it, he can never quite shake his sense that scholarship may be smothering the life of the very literature it’s supposed to
clarify: “with such sand slowly piling up how long is it going to be before the house is entirely covered?”

Though far more disciplined than Cheney, whom he scolds for squandering time away from painting, Matthiessen still knows that the older man he loves is the one engaged not in the business of mere explication but in actually creating something. Within months of their first meeting, Cheney had reflected that, thanks to Matthiessen’s enlivening presence, “[t]he black hateful veil between myself and my work is torn.” Six years later, finishing the portrait of a gas-station owner in Santa Fe, he speaks of another breakthrough, one that erases any remaining separation between himself and his work: “the painting of that picture was as sudden as a flashlight explosion. No consideration, no careful preparation, and God damn it, it lives and breathes and this studio is a different place because it is here.” In fact, he tells Matthiessen, he has “crossed the border line into being
me.”

The very nature of criticism keeps the younger man from ever experiencing such transport. His books can admirably illuminate the works of others, but they cannot glow from within, and the yearning for it to be otherwise seems visible in the style of his letters. Compared to Cheney, he is the more self-conscious performer, wishing to appear clever (“[my] trick little mind”) and inclined to self-reference in the third person.

Like literary criticism, love letters are a form of writing that can never quite compete with the real thing—the flesh-and-blood presence of the beloved. But even so, in their long correspondence Cheney and Matthiessen succeed in making themselves remarkably available to each other. Early in the relationship, Matthiessen claims to “keep going entirely on the anticipation of [Cheney’s] letters;” all he has to do is “tear the envelope and Oxford and the world fall away.” A letter from Cheney converts the older man’s “evening alone with Beethoven” into a still-living hour into which Matthiessen can now step. The letters, Matthiessen marvels, “let me live your whole life with you,” a phenomenon that Cheney, thousands of miles away, assures him is mutual: “I live with you all the time.”

When in 1929, Matthiessen holds Cheney’s letter to his cheek,
“letting the full sense of you flood over me,” he probably doesn’t realize that he is making a gesture learned from Cheney himself, who five years before had written of the exquisite frustration involved in receiving one of Matthiessen’s letters