What love most resembles is a bad cold: it takes all your attention while you have it and eventually it passes and you feel better.
That was the impression I got from "Love Letters," a new anthology edited by Lady Antonia Fraser.I like reading letters. Their spontaneity and lack of guile appeal to me. But love letters proved unnerving. Passion, instinctual and consuming, levels everything in its path - character, intelligence, integrity. Nothing can stand up to it. That is its biggest drawback and greatest appeal.
In this book, anything goes for the poor Goofos who, when you're not pitying them, you can't help but envy. (Goofo is Zelda Fitzgerald's word, used in her letters to Scott Fitzgerald and refers to being crazy-in-love, which they were.)
For each letter writer and person addressed, there is a short biography in the back of this book. It was a little like reading the end before the beginning but I was always flipping pages. I couldn't wait to see what happened:
Heloise and Abelard: They eloped. Her uncle castrated him. She joined a nunnery. Abelard was a distinguished philosopher but she was the better letter writer - wanton and ribald.
Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey: She loved him. He was gay. She married Ralph Partridge. They all lived together. When Strachey died of cancer, Carrington killed herself. In a letter to Carrington, Strachey wrote: "We are all helpless in these things - dreadfully helpless."
John Keats' voice was the most poignant. In love with Fanny Brawne and full to overflowing with things to say and poetry to write, he knew tuberculosis would kill him. The intensity of his frustration makes his prose shimmer on the page.
There are letters to confirm that the game is in the chase. Henry VIII's to Anne Boleyn: He loved many women - none more than Anne. From where they started, one wonders how they could have ended up where they did.
Napoleon and Josephine: She ran, he ran after. She let herself be caught. With regret, he left her to marry an Austrian princess whom he hoped would provide an heir.
Victor Hugo and Adele Foucher: Hugo insisted, demanded, that Foucher marry him. He wrote, "Have no fears, therefore, Adele, about continuing a love which it is no longer in the power of God himself to terminate. I love you with this love based not on physical attractions but on moral qualities, with this love which leads either to heaven or hell, which fills one's entire life with joy or bitterness. I have laid my soul bare to you."
When she did marry him, against her parents' strenuous objections, he was rapidly and repeatedly unfaithful. When he met his Maker, how did he explain his behavior?
Walter Bagehot wrote to Elizabeth Wilson, 22 November, 1857, ". . . the feeling (love) has been too eager not to have a good deal of pain in it, and the tension of mind has really been very great at times; still the time that I have known and loved you is immensely the happiest I have ever known."
The Bagehots lived with pleasure in each other's company for 19 years.
Others, like the Prince de Joinville and Rachel Felix, were content with a few nights.
Love is essentially humorless. One laugh and one giggle is all I got from the collection of letters.