To the Letter. Simon Garfield
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу To the Letter - Simon Garfield страница 14

Название: To the Letter

Автор: Simon Garfield

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Языкознание

Серия:

isbn: 9780857868602

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ finds created an air of expectation. Could this be an early nineteenth-century revelation of the formative years of one of ancient Rome’s great emperors? Absolutely, but not in the way anyone expected. In fact, when Cardinal Mai published his new collection the response was one of widespread disappointment. The letters appeared to be primarily about Latin prose style. The first full English translation appeared only in 1919, and again the response was muted. But hidden in plain view were many expressions of love and physical intimacy that may have struck even the most liberal of Georgian readers as a tad excessive; Mai had found a stash of something approaching imperial pornography, a rare documentary example of boy meets boy, or, more accurately, boys.

Image

       Marcus Aurelius, lovelorn and erotic.

      In recent years an even stronger theory of infatuation between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius has been advanced, culminating in 2006 with the publication of Marcus Aurelius in Love, edited and translated by Amy Richlin. Richlin is in no doubt about their deep mutual affection, and wonders how deep this went. She suggests that the ‘disappointed’ Victorian reaction to the letters may suggest that their intimacies were judged to be in bad taste, and that it upset the traditional view of Marcus Aurelius as a saintly hero. But she finds it intriguing that even in the later periods, the letters were seldom analysed for their erotic qualities, nor regularly examined by students of gay history as a fine epistolary exemplar of homosexual love.

      The letters between Marcus Aurelius and Fronto track the rise and fall of a courtship from about AD 139, when Aurelius was in his late teens and his teacher in his late thirties, until about AD 148. The heart of their correspondence is ablaze with passion. ‘I am dying so for love of you,’ Aurelius writes, eliciting the response from his tutor, ‘You have made me dazed and thunderstruck by your burning love.’

      We do not know how often they met for tutelage, although it is clear that the intervals were, for both of them, rather too long. Perhaps it was merely their minds that coalesced so fruitfully and willingly – Aurelius enraptured by his master’s grasp on rhetoric, Fronto ensnared by his pupil’s sparkling potential – but their letters speak of more than just deep intellectual mingling: the mind of the solitary writer wanders to other, sometimes unattainable, possibilities. It could also be that the letters were a form of erotic rhetorical art in themselves, a seductive bit of homework:

      How can I suffer when you’re in pain, especially when you’re in pain on account of me? Shouldn’t I want to beat myself up and subject myself to all kinds of unpleasant experiences? After all, who else gave you that pain in your knee, which you write got worse last night . . . So what am I supposed to do, when I don’t see you and I’m tormented by such anguish?

Image

      This kissing and thunderstriking aside, letters of longing are not much to be found in late antiquity, nor in the origins of the Christian or Byzantine worlds, nor indeed during the whole of the European Dark Ages, something we may blame on a collapse in literacy and the rise of the Church with more doctrinal and domineering affairs on its mind. The heart could freeze in such a period. There is devotion in Paul’s letters in the New Testament, of course, and personal messages scattered through 1,000 years of official communications, but a search for intimacy and passion will not be fruitful until one reaches what can only be described as the reinvention of romantic love in the twelfth century, when we encounter the epistolary delights of one of the greatest true-love romances of any age.

      That the desperate story of Abelard and Heloise still smoulders more than 800 years after its enactment is due entirely to the existence of letters and the interpretation one places upon them – be it celebratory humanist or condemnatory moralist. The saga provides the fullest and earliest example of what happens when unbridled sexual desire meets a suffocating religious society not altogether keen on such things, a raw and rare combination of doctrinal pedagoguery and cassock-ripping salaciousness.

Image

       Chaste as angels: Abelard and Heloise keep their secrets at Père Lachaise.

      The story begins around 1132, when Pierre Abelard, early fifties, a philosopher-monk in exile in Brittany, writes the story of his life. Abelard’s autobiography is in the form of a letter to an unnamed friend, and takes on what will become a familiar form, a consolation letter – Historia Calamitatum – designed to make the recipient feel better about his own plight by learning of the far worse fate of another. Within it, as part of a full and grander Latin narrative about his life’s travails, we learn of his involvement with a highly literate and intellectually attractive woman he once used to tutor, another weighted master-pupil relationship that, for all its pledges of lifelong devotion, has embedded within it the seeds of its own demise.

      As their nocturnal passion endured, so Abelard found his teaching beginning to suffer. He became bored with his other duties, and his lectures became uninspired. And he never failed to be amazed at how everyone apart from Heloise’s uncle had a fairly good idea of what was going on. Abelard quoted St Jerome in his letter to Sabinian: ‘We are always the last to learn of evil in our own home, and the faults of our wife and children may be the talk of the town but do not reach our ears.’

      But when he did find out, Fulbert, not an entirely indulgent guardian (he had previously told Abelard that he was permitted to hit Heloise with force if she didn’t apply herself), was not wholly happy at the way Heloise had applied herself. The lovers flee his anger, Heloise finds she is pregnant, and the two agree on a secret marriage, which initially seems to please Fulbert. A son is born named Astrolabe. But when Fulbert decides to make the marriage common knowledge, it is Abelard – shamed by his actions – who breaks off their relationship, sends Heloise to a convent and Astrolabe to his sister. And that should have been that, were it not for a fuming Fulbert, who sees his niece abandoned and her life ruined. So Fulbert and his friends hatch a plan.

      As Abelard describes it, ‘one night as I slept peacefully in an inner room in my lodgings, they bribed one of my servants to admit them and there took cruel vengeance on me of such appalling barbarity as to shock the whole world; they cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained.’