Yours Ever (3 page)

Like deeds and wills, letters were instruments that helped a man to hold his place in the turbulent medieval world. The Pastons’ constantly challenged claims to land and wealth required, as much as anything, paper proof. More than five hundred years later, the written tidings they sent among themselves are all that remain to vouchsafe even their existence. The family died out in 1732.

IF WE DISPATCH
ourselves two centuries ahead and across the Channel to the world of Louis XIV, we will find Marie de Rabutin Chantal—Madame de Sévigné—in a perpetually clever orbit around the Sun King’s court. “Receiving and answering letters takes up a large part of our lives,” she writes in 1689, toward the end of a twenty-year exchange with Françoise de Grignan, her married daughter in Provence. Indeed, Madame de Sévigné owes her literary survival to the production of mere letters just as surely as her English contemporary Pepys secured his with nothing but a diary. Each made what is supposedly literature’s supporting material into a finished product.

If one compares Margaret Paston’s letters and Madame de Sévi-gné’s, the most striking difference arises from the lack of necessity attaching to the latter. So
little
depends on them but pleasure. Vital information has become gossip, and letter writing transformed itself from a task into an art.

Though news of Louis XIV’s court may not “last from one post to the next,” Madame de Sévigné has managed to keep it fresh for three centuries. Even the stock market of the king’s female favorites continues, in her reports of it, to absorb the reader. “Here is the present position: Mme de Montespan is furious. She wept a lot yesterday. You can imagine the tortures her pride is going through. It is even more outraged by the high favour of Mme de Maintenon.” Part of the punch here derives from Madame de Sévigné’s absolute regard for her absolute monarch. Unsparing of anyone else, she remains rapt by the king’s generosity, friendliness and general near-divinity.

She declares to Françoise that she “cannot invent anything,” pronouncing herself “quite satisfied to be a substance that thinks and reads.” But more important, she is a substance on whom “nothing is lost.” She more than once expresses contempt for exaggeration and “false details,” though there was scarce need for anyone to resort to those in surveying the Sun King’s domain. On April 24, 1671, she recounts the catastrophe befalling a Chantilly chef who
let down the monarch’s hunting party. Milking the suspense, she withholds the crucial verb until both the periodic sentence and no doubt Françoise are ready to burst:

If only poor Vatel had possessed the sangfroid that the Marquise de Brinvilliers would exhibit five years later, after poisoning her husband: “She listened to her sentence in the morning with no fear or weakness, and at the end had it read over again, saying that the tumbril had seized her attention at the beginning and she had not followed the rest … She was given a glimpse of a pardon, and such a clear glimpse that she did not think she would die, and said as she climbed the scaffold, ‘So it’s serious?’”

The letters reveal a markedly modern mother-daughter relationship. Madame de Sévigné has time with Françoise—as Margaret Paston did not with her sons—to indulge feeling for its own sake. More than a soupçon of neurosis and passive aggression go into the envelopes. “When you want to be you are adorable,” she writes at the start of their separation; she tells Françoise that her love for her is genuine, “whatever you may think about it.” She asks why the daughter doesn’t return her demonstrations (“Are you afraid I might die of joy?”), and her response to a report that Françoise has been crying sounds like an ancien-régime version of the classic I’ll-just-sit-in-the-dark Jewish-mother joke: “I do urge you, dear heart, to look after your eyes—as to mine, you know they must be used up in your service.” She cannot stop crowing once she’s found the right wet nurse for her granddaughter (“This is how we manage your affairs”).

She appends compliments with nudges (“I am delighted to know
you are beautiful, and would like to kiss you. But how silly always to wear that blue dress!”), and she deploys feelings like troops: “Do you think I don’t receive your caresses with open arms? Do you think I don’t also kiss with all my heart your lovely cheeks and bosom? Do you think I can embrace you without infinite affection? Do you think that affection can ever go further than mine for you?” No,
maman
, no.

But enough about Françoise. Like all great letter-writers, Madame de Sévigné writes mostly for herself, inverting the paradox that governs the best diarists, who whether they admit it or not are really writing for others. She will “make so bold as to quote [herself],” and she knows that she writes too much (“I am producing prose with a facility that will be the death of you”), but what else is she to do when she does it so well?

She makes frequent pronouncements upon the proper way to compose correspondence, an activity so serious that even birdsong is an interruption: “I set aside part of this after-dinner period to write to you in the garden, where I am being deafened by three or four nightingales over my head.” She urges Françoise to adopt a natural style, not to skimp on narrative and to put down what’s on her mind right at the moment, even if the fifteen-day postman’s journey may render it stale. She will give her daughter material to use in provincial conversations but expects a service in return: “Refer to certain people in our letters, so that I can say so to them.” Explaining that “I have gone in for a lot of details but I am sending them because on a similar occasion I should like them myself,” she promulgates a timeless epistolary standard: send the letter you’d like to receive. In the fall of 1676, she pays Françoise the ultimate compliment: “I have never seen such a brilliant letter as your last. I nearly sent it back to you to give you the pleasure of reading it.” Nothing could better illustrate letter writing’s movement out of utility and into aesthetics.

As befitting a friend of La Rochefoucauld’s, Madame de Sévigné’s style rises, at its best, to aphorism: “One can’t prove that one is discreet, for by proving it one ceases to be so.” Part of an age that knew how to put intellect over feeling, she can appear icily detached
in her amusement. Her own granddaughter “is no beauty but she is very nice.” If her outpourings of sentiment toward Françoise seem like rhetorical manipulation, the disdain with which she perceives her son’s romantic entanglements comes straight from her head-ruled heart: “His emotions are quite genuine and quite false, freezing cold and burning hot, quite villainous and quite sincere; in fact his heart is crazy. [La Rochefoucauld and I] laughed a lot about it, even with my son, for he is good company and can cap anything. We get on very well together.” Together they laugh at the spelling and style of his mistress’s letters. When the young man distinguishes himself in the king’s wars, his mother grows better disposed toward him, even if at the start of one military campaign she wearily notes how “the vogue for being wounded is setting in.”

In assessing herself, Madame de Sévigné claims to resist both decorum and licentiousness; declares herself afraid of both other people’s sympathy and her own self-reproach. (On the latter score she hasn’t much to worry about.) She claims to be “very sorry” about an insufficiency of religious feeling, but the piety that comes most naturally to her is the mock variety, not offered at an altar but cackled behind a fan: “Everything you write about the Marans woman is delightful, and the punishments she will have in hell. But do you realize you will accompany her if you continue to hate her—just think that you will be together for all eternity. Nothing more is needed to persuade you to seek your salvation.” She will promise to answer a packet of Françoise’s letters when she’s feeling “much less devout,” and three days later, in reporting an embarrassment suffered by Madame de Gêvres, she announces her own recovery from the lapse into spirituality: “My dear, I’m spiteful—I was delighted.”

Three hundred years later, we would no more have her on her knees than we would ask Pepys to stop groping the servant girls.

THE PALACE
of the Sun King would probably have rendered Mark Twain less comfortable than King Arthur’s court left a certain Connecticut Yankee. Though he had met the czar of Russia in 1867 and
found himself well enough treated (“we staid 4 hours and were made a good deal more at home than we could have been in a New York drawing-room”), the passing of the years left Samuel Clemens a strident antimonarchist. “Another throne has gone down,” he writes to the
Boston Herald’s
Sylvester Baxter in 1889, when the Brazilian monarchy falls; “I swim in oceans of satisfaction.” He came to regard royalism as “the grotesquest of all the swindles ever invented by man;” the czar as “the head slave-driver of Europe;” and the “stench” of titled Englishmen as being so bad it called for shipping to foreign parts. The basic ingredient of Clemens’s epistolary humor is usually a deadpan hyperbole, but the very idea of a king makes him lose his head.

On democratic home ground, this first completely American prose writer displays a range of letter-writing moods and methods that can surprise even those who know full well that
Huckleberry Finn
is not a Young Adult novel. The propulsion and vividness of Clemens’s letters—his narratives are always descriptive and his descriptions are always narratives—can be seen in especially stunning combination in what he writes from Elmira, New York, to Mr. and Mrs. William Dean Howells on August 25, 1877. He tells them the story of a debt-ridden black farmer who, by some spectacular quick thinking and courage, has just saved the occupants of a runaway horse-and-buggy:

Clemens always appreciates strong, plain style in the letters he receives—praising, for instance, the prose of his daughter Susy for having “no barnacles on it.” And when he relaxes into his own epistolary
labors, he seems to enjoy them, taking the time to send his wife, Livy, a “rebus,” that form of letter in which certain words, mostly nouns, are eliminated in favor of little sketches depicting them.

But he did not like having to put anything conventional or obligatory into his correspondence (“I cannot overcome my repugnance to telling what I am doing or what I expect to do or propose to do”) or to keep up with the letter-writing demands of literary success and celebrity. People visiting him with letters of introduction could get a chilly reception, as could those who approached only through the mails. He professed not to understand why strangers should feel the impulse to annoy him with “kindly letters” that left him with the choice of being “rudely silent” or annoyed by the labor and distraction of responding.

Clemens composed unsent letters—those black-inked jeremiads providing so much relief to the writer while doing no damage to the unaware “recipient”—with unusual frequency. He once even wrote an introduction for a collection of them that he contemplated publishing, and he advised all those inclined toward this subgenre to pigeonhole any letters they produced in it for much-later reading: “An old cold letter like that makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about nothing.”

Clemens’s letters have retained a full-bloodedness that gives biographies of him a peculiar animation; the reader feels treated by the subject himself to a moving picture instead of the typical collection of stills. Once he leaves Hannibal, Missouri, for New York City in the 1850s, the future Mark Twain sends home repeated, bumptious assurances that success will soon come and be entirely his doing: “I fancy they’ll have to wait some time till they see me down-hearted or afraid of starving while I have strength to work and am in a city of 400,000 inhabitants.” When he learns to pilot boats along the Mississippi, his self-confidence shows no sign of cooling off: “what vast respect Prosperity commands! Why, six months ago I could enter the ‘Rooms’ and receive only a customary fraternal greeting, but now they say, ‘Why, how
are
you, old fellow—when did you get in?’” After life on the river come his years
in the West, with all their adventures in mining and prospecting and journalism, and all their sights and smells, to be mailed to people still in Missouri: “When crushed, sage brush emits an odor which isn’t exactly magnolia and equally isn’t exactly polecat, but is a sort of compromise between the two.”

This description, from 1861, appears in a letter to his mother, whose long life and heart’s secrets would excite Clemens’s imaginative respect for decades to come. But the family member who would forever provoke his greatest wonder, and exasperation, was his feckless brother Orion, who spent life in a prolonged, cheerful fit of self-delusion, bouncing from one ill-conceived business and belief to the next. In February 1879, while traveling in Munich, Clemens writes to Howells, his own greatest literary supporter, about Orion’s scheme to make money by lecturing on his famous brother: “Did you ever see the grotesquely absurd and the heart-breakingly pathetic more closely joined together? … Now only think of it! He still has 100 pages to write on his lecture, yet in one inking of his pen he has already swooped around the United States and invested the result!”

Clemens suggests that Orion’s ever-shifting allegiances and enthusiasms would make him a great literary character for Howells:
“you
must put him into romance.” Or perhaps the two of them can write a play about him: “Orion is a field which grows richer and richer the more he mulches it with each new topdressing of religion or other guano. Drop me an immediate line about this, won’t you?” When the brother proves incapable even of hiring a home nurse for their ailing mother, Clemens blows his top: “Jesus
Christ!”
he roars at Orion. “It is perilous to write such a man. You can go crazy on less material than anybody that ever lived.” And yet it is Orion, flitting between the Republicans and the Democrats, the Methodists and the Swedenborgians, chicken-farming and the law, who provides the comic material that any reader of Clemens’s correspondence winds up craving most.