An Irishman's Diary

YOUR STARTER FOR 10. Who is this, writing to his new girlfriend? “I came in at half past eleven. Since then I have been sitting in an easy chair like a fool. I could do nothing. I hear nothing but your voice. I am like a fool hearing you call me ‘Dear’. I offended two men today by leaving them coolly. I wanted to hear your voice, not theirs. [. . .] I wish I felt your head on my shoulder. I think I will go to bed. I have been a half-hour writing this thing. Will you write something to me? I hope you will. How am I to sign myself? I won’t sign anything [. . .] because I don’t know what to sign [. . .]”

The author appears to be self-effacing, socially awkward, and painfully short of words. So congratulations if you recognised James Joyce, writing to Nora Barnacle in August 1904, four weeks after their first date which – when he eventually pulled himself together – would be immortalised in a 700-page literary masterpiece.

As another Valentine’s Day looms, we may hear renewed laments about the lost art of love-letter writing. But Joyce’s example begs the question: was it ever an art? Most love letters are written for a readership of one, after all. And however literate that reader, he or she will usually welcome a certain amount of incoherence, suggestive of a mind unhinged Here, clearly unhinged, is Franz Kafka, addressing his “Fräulein Felice” in 1912.

“I am now going to ask you a favour which sounds quite crazy [. . .] Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday – for I cannot endure your daily letters [. . .] I answer one [. . .], then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it [. . .] But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life [. . .]” A few days later, Kafka was berating the fräulein for not writing frequently enough. Such is the nature of the genre, however. Before he died, poor Kafka asked for all his literary output to be destroyed. He can hardly have realised his love letters would outlast him.

Napoleon was a prolific writer of billets doux. These span the range of human emotions (those of a passionate Frenchman, anyway). And here he is in an apparent fury with Josephine, berating her lack of reciprocation.

“I love you no longer; on the contrary, I detest you. You are a wretch, truly perverse, truly stupid, a real Cinderella. You never write to me at all, you do not love your husband; you know the pleasure that your letters give him yet you cannot even manage to write him half a dozen lines, dashed off in a moment! What then do you do all day, Madame? [. . .] Who can this wonderful new lover be who takes up your every moment [. . .]? Beware, Josephine; one fine night the doors will be broken down and there I shall be.”

Here, just when Napoleon has us fully absorbed in their row (not that he knows we’re reading his letters), he suddenly reveals that his rage is a pretence. The note continues: “In truth, I am worried, my love, to have no news from you; write me a

four page letter instantly made up from those delightful words which fill my heart with emotion and joy. I hope to hold you in my arms before long, when I shall lavish upon you a million kisses, burning as the equatorial sun.”

Yes, I know. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Napoleon or anyone else. That sort of thing is just embarrassing to read, unless you’re the person it was intended for.

Maybe Shakespeare had the right idea. He didn’t leave any letters. Instead he confined himself to love poetry, most famously the sonnets, which are all the more interesting because most of them are addressed to a young man; some to a woman – “the dark lady”; a few hinting at an affair between the young man and the dark lady; and at least one suggesting Shakespeare would like to do with the young man what he had done with her.

All of which emotions are carefully contained within the disciplines of a 14-line structure and iambic pentameter; in which there is nothing Shakespeare wouldn’t want us to read.

But maybe there is a happy medium, even for love letters. Lord Byron wrote his share of the incoherent variety. Here, though, addressing his future wife from the far side of Europe, he strikes a balance between passion and literary restraint: “My Heart – We are thus far separated – but after all one mile is as bad as a thousand – which is a great consolation to one who must travel six hundred before he meets you again. If it will give you any satisfaction – I am as comfortless as a pilgrim with peas in his shoes – and as cold as Charity, Chastity or any other Virtue.”

Mark Twain was another writer who could balance the demands of a relationship with his vocation. Witness the obvious sincerity of this message to his future wife, even as he retains full control of the metaphor: “Out of the depths of my happy heart wells a great tide of love and prayer for this priceless treasure that is confided to my life-long keeping. You cannot see its intangible waves as they flow towards you, darling, but in these lines you will hear, as it were, the distant beating of the surf.”