Reading other people's letters

     With a number of letters of my own to write, I've been neatly avoiding doing them by reading other people's. No particular aim in mind, just a browse and a glimpse of other lives through snatches of their written conversations. But letters can be so personal, so intimate, that reading them even long after the deaths of writer and recipient can seem intrusive and inappropriate. Such sensibilities notwithstanding, these examples in their different ways make touching reading.
First I picked up a book I've yet to read: There are No Letters Like Yours: The Correspondence of Isabelle de Charriere and Constant d'Hermenches is an account of an eighteenth century amitie amoureuse. Here is what the older, married Constant says to his young Isabelle who, unlike anyone else of his acquaintance, has presumed to try to curb his excesses and apply a slight corrective hand - "I bless Heaven, perhaps for the first time in my life, with an entire and complete sincerity. It has made me a gift that I had always hoped for, that seemed my due, and that for the last several years I had despaired of obtaining..... What radiance your friendship and your penetrating mind have brought to my existence! Ah! if only this fortune had befallen me earlier, what might I not be today!"

The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his Wife, Lady Emily includes this from Lutyens writing in 1913: "I have a vasty insight into things, somehow, but no authority, no education. I take paragraphs at a run. I hear things, see things, unconsciously almost, and store them and they turn up afterwards - from whence I know not. I believe I am more astral than you, but I have one huge anchor in this plane and that is you, incarnate, darling. You are more logical than I am, more determinate, consciously aspiring to spiritual things and having pleasure in the statement of them, so we are severally the two faces of a medal - the same medal."
His words are semi-prophetic when you read on and discover that a year later his wife informed him - by letter - of the cessation of the physical side of their relationship. And to add insult to injury, she then had him build her a meditation room complete with a picture rail - a feature he particularly detested!

Written over the course of a long marriage, Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill are full of affection, and here in 1958, after fifty years together, is Winston writing from France: "My darling one, All is peace and quiet here....I am passing the morning in bed - reading a book about ancient Greece which is rather good. Tomorrow I shall try to paint... But I am doubtful, inert and lazy. I wonder what you will be doing and when you will set off for Chartwell. Would you give some food to the fish? They are very appreciative. And the black swans.... You have all my fondest love my dearest. The closing days or years of life are grey and dull, but I am lucky to have you at my side. I send you my best love and many kisses. Always your devoted W".

Comments

[Dark Puss]

Dear Cornflower, I think you are now the only person to whom I write a real letter, sadly I doubt very much if any will be worthy of reading after my demise!

I must try harder!

[Nancy B T MA]

Lutyens: Now, that was a pair! She left him for quite some time to galivant around following her 'guru' while he awaited her return to him - all the while, leaving him to share his doting efforts on Lady Sackville (another interesting pair but none of their correspondence survives).
For info about Jane Ridley's book The Architect and His Wife:
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/007921.html

[Cornflower]

That's a very interesting piece, Nancy. Thankyou for the link.

[Margaret Powling]

My favourite letters are the 6 volumes of the Lyttelton Hart Davis Letters (George Lyttelton, son of the late Humph - he was Humph's house master at Eton - and Rupert, the publisher, and father of Duff and Adam of TV fame.) And, of course, 84 Charing Cross Road!