Love in Letters – Author to Author (Part One)

Feb 14, 2014 | History, Literature

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, and happily without the expected recital of the Sonnets, we’ve put together a list of literary greats as they fawn over one another in displays of love, mentorship and camaraderie. There were so many examples, in fact , that this blog will be a two-parter. Check back next week for the second installment. 

Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller

Over the course of a correspondence that lasted more than twenty years, Nin and Miller came to represent the bohemian ideal of both love and sex in modern times. Their adventures in Paris together at the break of the Second World War – Nin married but somewhat estranged from her husband; Miller married and encouraging both his wife and Nin on a venture of sexual discovery – culminated in a furious love affair and an inimical divorce.

 

Henry Miller's Scenario (A film with sound).

Scenario (A film with sound) by Henry Miller, published 1937, first edition, first printing, inscribed by the author to Hans Reichel

The following excerpts are taken from various letters written and received in the early 1930’s, firstly from Nin to Miller…

“You destroy and you suffer… I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you.

And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate.”

“Something stirs in me as I look at it, and it is certainly the human you. It is a vision of the human you revealing an amazing delicacy to me. It is your khaki shirt and you are the man who is the axis of my world now. I revolve around the richness of your being.

 ‘Come closer to me, come closer. I promise you it will be beautiful.’

 You keep your promise.”

with examples of Miller’s own declarations of love in 1932 equally impassioned, as follows:                                                                                                       

“Anais:

Don’t expect me to be sane anymore. Don’t let’s be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can’t dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old.

Here I am back and still smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the paper about suicides and murders and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one’s time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible. Where has gone the time when men fought, killed, died for a glove, a glance, etc?”

Eventually, through the intensity of both their passion for each other and the pressures and pleasures of their many respective lovers, Nin and Miller allowed themselves to drift apart. Their lives remained inescapably interwoven until Anaïs’ death in 1977.

 

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas

The written evidence of Wilde and Douglas’ love affair was given up to the scrutiny of the courts during the now infamous trial of the former, condemning the duo utterly in the eyes of 1895’s outraged intolerance.

Wilde to Douglas, 1985:

My Own Boy,
Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days. Why are you alone in London, and when do you go to Salisbury? Do go there to cool your hands in the grey twilight of Gothic things, and come here whenever you like. It is a lovely place and lacks only you; but go to Salisbury first. 

Always, with undying love, 

Yours, Oscar

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

The Ballad of Reading Gaol. By C.3.3. (Oscar Wilde), first edition, first printing, with a poem on verso title page written by George Ives condemning Wilde’s betrayers.

Douglas to Wilde, 1897:

My dearest Oscar,

My time with you just now was such a glorious reunion. I can still feel the effect of your hands on my skin, your lips against mine. I cannot wait to see you again, even now my thoughts are only of you and being near you. I can hardly bear it, this distance between us. Only knowing it is temporary makes it something which I can endure.

You are right to say that things must begin fresh, that we must build something new. Things will be different when we are in Naples. There is so much art, so much architecture – your body and mine. That will remain the same, at least.

I long to feel your lips against my skin – all of my skin, all of it, everywhere.

I remain your darling boy, now and always,

Bosie.

Fifteen years his senior, Wilde was accused by Douglas’ father, the Marquess of Queensberry, of attempting to corrupt his son. While the court case remains much quoted along with the poet-playwright himself, the letters are not so much in the public eye. Imprisoned for Gross Indecency in 1895, Wilde wrote a 50,000 word letter to Douglas that he was allowed to keep upon his release. De Profundis or, From the Depths, serves as an account of all that happened, and all that the artist felt.  The last letter Wilde wrote to Douglas before his imprisonment in 1895 is this:

My dearest boy,

This is to assure you of my immortal, my eternal love for you. Tomorrow all will be over. If prison and dishonour be my destiny, think that my love for you and this idea, this still more divine belief, that you love me in return will sustain me in my unhappiness and will make me capable, I hope, of bearing my grief most patiently. Since the hope, nay rather the certainty, of meeting you again in some world is the goal and the encouragement of my present life, ah! I must continue to live in this world because of that.

Wilde spent the last three years of his life abroad in exile, where he was joined for a matter of months by Douglas until they were separated by their families with the threat of a cutting-off of funds.

In the autumn of 1900, Wilde realised he was dying of meningitis, related to an injury sustained in prison, yet Douglas did not return to be with him when he died. Douglas went on to live for another 45 years, marrying two years after Wilde’s death, and later condemning both his past lover’s works and his homosexuality.

 

Virgina Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

The most famous of Virginia Woolf’s affairs was with The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, more commonly known to contemporary readers as Vita Sackville-West. First meeting in 1922, having both belonged to social circles that accepted sexual exploration if not endorsed it entirely, the two women fell into a passionate relationship that transformed them both.

Jacob's Room

Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf, published 1922, first edition, first impression, one of 1200.

 Woolf to West, 1926:

“Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.”

West to Woolf 1927:

“…I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it….”

Perhaps the greatest love letter from the author to the Lady was her novel Orlando, written as a tribute. A small act of revenge in retaliation to one of their many disputes, it is also an act of affection, in which Woolf restores one of Vita’s most desired possessions, family estate Knole House.  Their affair lasted until late 1927 or perhaps early 1928, though their friendship continued until Woolf’s suicide in 1941.

Part two is here

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