Words of love
by Bel Mooney, Times Online
The sight of Pete Sampras reading and rereading a letter from his wife at Wimbledon on Wednesday will be remembered longer than his defeat. Letters will always be our most meaningful and precious source of love and inspiration
Whatever words Bridgette wrote to Pete Sampras in the end, they could not help the man she proudly reminded was �seven times Wimbledon champion� � and also her husband. All the power of her positive thinking, all the force of her faith, set down on paper to inspire, could not nudge the tennis ace towards another victory. Yet what remains is the image of Sampras, sitting at the side of Wimbledon�s Centre Court, reading that short letter again and again.
I suspect it will be remembered far longer than his defeat. Because there was something naked and touching about the superb athlete�s obvious belief that his wife�s words would encourage him. It was yet another triumph for an ancient form of communication. The McLuhan theory, that �the medium is the message�, is true.
In the age of e-mail and the ubiquitous telephone the special letter has as much significance as ever. Paper may seem a fragile substance, easily destroyed, and yet it can have the power and durability of words carved in oak. Nobody would send an e-mail of condolence; only handwriting saying (no matter how simply) how sorry we are to hear, what a wonderful person he or she was, and so on . . . only that will do to approach the enormity of loss.
Anyone who has been bereaved will testify that such letters play an enormously important role during the process of grief. They are the visible sign that something has happened which matters. In a sense they are tiny proofs of a form of immortality � that the beloved dead are not quickly forgotten.
Similarly, love letters are kept to be read again and again, refreshing the emotions each time. A text message saying �LUV U� might please an 18-year-old, but only for the minutes it took to execute. But love letters are talismans: urgently awaited and devoured eagerly, revealing different meanings in time. I wonder which word will mean more to Sampras in the long term: �champion� or �husband�?
The novelist Edith Wharton describes the arrival of such a letter: �. . . the first glance to see how many pages there are, the second to see how it ends, the breathless first reading, the slow lingering over every phrase and each word, the taking possession, the absorbing of them one by one, and finally the choosing of the one that will be carried in one�s thoughts all day, making an exquisite accompaniment to the dull prose of life�.
Love letters do not, of course, have to be written between spouses. Some are a permanent testimony to the love between parent and child, or very close friends. Yet the ones that come most readily to mind convey the rapture and agony of forbidden love, like those between Abelard and Eloise, or the anguish of Carrington writing to Lytton Strachey.
But some years ago I decided to compile an anthology to celebrate the always-beleaguered institution of marriage, in verse, prose, diaries and letters. People are always plundering it for poems to read aloud at weddings, yet to me some of the most moving items I found are letters between partners bound by rings of gold. Or about to be bound. How fortunate that this anonymous young man in 19th-century America was not able to drop down on one knee in that commonplace way, but was forced to pen his proposal: �I feel sad when I don�t see you. Be married, why won�t you? And come to live with me. I will make you as happy as I can. You shall not be obliged to work hard; and when you are tired you may lie in my lap and I will sing you to rest. I will play you a tune upon the violin as often as you ask and as well as I can and leave off smoking, if you say so . . . I would always be very kind to you, I think, because I love you so well. I will not make you bring in wood or water, or feed the pig, or milk the cow or go to the neighbours to borrow milk. Will you be married?�
Letters like that one speak to us across the centuries: a reminder that although times change, human emotions are the same in the inner core.
The famous Paston letters provide a unique insight into the life of a 15th-century family, and among them we find reassuring evidence that love can develop, even in an arranged marriage. In 1440 the family arranged for John Paston to be married to an heiress, Margaret Mautby, and her first surviving letter to him is short and polite.
But soon the tone changes. By 1441 Margaret is pregnant and writes: �Please wear the ring with the image of St Margaret that I sent you as a keepsake until you come home. You have left me with such a keepsake as makes me think of you both day and night when I want to sleep.�
In the same letter she is asking for a new gown and girdle, in the manner of wives throughout the ages.
Then, in 1443, we read a touching and intimate love letter to Margaret�s �right worshipful husband�. Her relief at his recovery from illness and family gossip is followed by this: �I beg you with all my heart to be kind and send me a letter as quickly as you can, if writing is not difficult for you . . . If I could have had my way I would have seen you before now. I wish you were at home . . . you would have been more comfortable here . . . I would rather have had you here than be given a new gown, even though it were a scarlet one.�
Aldous Huxley disliked love letters on the grounds that the language used in them was commonplace. My novel, Intimate Letters, hinges on the discovery by a wife, after her husband�s death, of love letters to a mistress written on his computer. Quite apart from the sense of betrayal, she feels outraged contempt at the silly, over-the-top sentimentality of his words. Yet that is how people are. No doubt Bridgette Wilson-Sampras expressed herself in the terminology of a self-help manual but it doesn�t matter one jotting.
Within the intimacy of the letter, great statesmen can be �reduced� to the linguistic skills of the most ordinary person. So Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, wrote to his wife Margaret in 1897 � clearly after a disagreement: �My dearest Wiffie, I am very wretched for this morning. I forgot myself � why? I do not know . . . � He signed off, �Ever, my dearie, your own unsatisfactory man.�
Sir Winston Churchill�s powers of rhetoric were not needed when he wrote simply to Clementine, on November 10, 1909: �You ought to trust me for I do not love and will never love any woman in the world but you, and my chief desire is to link myself to you week by week by bonds which shall ever become more intimate and profound . . . your sweetness and beauty have cast a glory on my life.�
The existence of the letter is its own reality � whatever the circumstances surrounding it. For example, we know that the marriage of the historian Thomas Carlyle and his long-suffering wife Jane was stormy at times. Like many great men he was a pain to live with. Yet he sent her his manuscripts and their correspondence is full of her passionate support of his work � and I like to think he valued this wifely encouragement as much as Pete Sampras does.
M uch has been written about the complex sexuality of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, yet this only renders the intensity of their love letters more affecting. In 1929 she wrote: �You are dearer to me than anybody ever has been or ever could be . . . I could not live if I lost you . . . Darling, there are not many people who could write such a letter after 16 years of marriage, yet who would be saying therein only one-fiftieth of what they were feeling as they wrote it.�
In 1940, years after the tumult of infidelity, Harold wrote in time of war: �My dearest, I felt so close to you yesterday. We never need to put it all in words. If I believe in anything surviving, I believe in a love like ours surviving . . .�
The point is, there will always be the need to �put it all in words�. Agonising over Leonard Woolf�s proposal, Virginia wrote: �One doesn�t get much said in a letter, does one?�, innocent of the fact that the letter which contains that phrase reveals so much about her character that it is a testimony to Leonard�s devotion that he did not turn tail.
Letters from wives to husbands about to be executed (Arundel Penruddock to her Royalist husband in 1655), and similar great statements of love and suffering resonate down the years, and the fact that they needed to be written down confirm for us all what is best in our shared humanity.
One soldier, Bert Fielder, wrote to his Nell: �Please don�t cry so much when you write next, as it makes an awful mess.� He was killed in 1916, but his �dear Scrumps� kept his letters for ever.