Love is a difficult material. Write is a difficult verb. We can draw love, sculpt love, make love and send it. We can write many things, but we can't write love. At best we can only write about it.
This is not to say that it is not worth the attempt. At the least, a love letter can be stowed in a breast pocket (or stuffed into a private orifice, as James Joyce instructed Nora Barnacle to do with his), fondled, smelled and dwelled upon, memorised when the ink grows old and pale, returned to when the lover does the same. A love letter is almost more important as an object-a physical substitute for the loved one, a keepsake, a sample of handwriting, a historical document- than as a verbal message with a meaning.
We love love letters. But publishers will tell you that anthologies of love letters rarely sell. What we want to read are our own love letters- or somebody else's, discovered. A lovers' exchange should be secret, sealed and unpublished. How little of life takes place in private! How uncommon a thing is discretion! The delivery of a hand-written letter fills us with excitement, all the more thrilling for being so rare. Edith Wharton writes about the pleasures of receipt: "The first glance to see how many pages there are, the breathless first reading, the slow lingering over each 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." And these sensations are themselves a reflection of the writer's own delight-in the ink, the page, the licking of the envelope and the drama of the moment when the fingers drop the package into that symbolic neat dark slit of the post box, which should always, naturally, be red.
A love letter is a work of art, intentionally or not; a response to the urge to crystallise feeling and slide it secretly into the loved one's palm. Like all works of art, it is most spectacular where it fails. I was standing in front of Van Gogh's Sunflowers in the National Gallery last summer when a man sidled up to me and said: "It's fine, but the real thing's better." He's right. Part of the pleasure we get from a work of art is in gauging the gap between the thing perceived and the thing expressed, a gap which must be appreciable but not absurd. When the thing perceived is as intangible as love, how shall we begin?
There is competence to fall back on, of course. You need only read the love letters of the professionals (Keats, Joyce, Kafka, Dickinson) to see that literary skill is a definite advantage. But in the end these writers all succeed where others fail because the veracity of their love comes through despite their constant cries-it is one of the principal themes of love letters-that they cannot write their love, that it evades them; is higher, deeper, wider, truer than they can say.
This is not always the case. There are the fantasy correspondents, for whom the reader is sometimes no more than a hook on which to hang a series of amorous abstractions. In such cases the letter comes before the love, and not the love before the letter. How many lovers have fallen in love by correspondence? This kind of correspondence-in-the-dark is as intoxicating to the general reader as it is to the participants themselves. But the reader has the advantage over the participants of not experiencing the terrible let-down of the face-to-face encounter. Sara Thornton, in prison for murdering her husband, corresponded with journalist George Delf for over a year, passionately, joyously, in constant anticipation of a release which would allow them to be together. More than a year after her release they had met only once, in the Penguin offices in Kensington to discuss the deal for publication of their letters in a book.
Love letters exist in separation. "A letter is a kiss sent by the post. If I am with you, who needs the postman?" asks Victor Hugo, self-importantly, of the woman he wrote 5,000 letters to, married, stopped writing to and very soon divorced. Separation gets the ink moving. It is the inaccessibility of one lover to another, not their rapturous union, which has generated this huge and intimate literature of love. Separation, frustration, misunderstanding, impatience, impotence-these are the indispensable grist to the mill of lovers' correspondence. Where the loved one walks in the door, writing flies out of the window.
A true love letter is an exploding star, igniting, shooting, burning, falling to earth, splintering with many different lights, cooling, ageing, fossilising, forgotten, unseen. A love letter will not stay time, nor lengthen life, nor change a heart, but a love letter is a wonderful thing, something to be shown at heaven's door; and anyone who writes a love letter deserves to be let in.
Beware of the lover who never writes his love, who will not let his words fly off and speak for him out of sight, who fears the insolubility of the written word. Whoever truly loves, experiences the pressing desire to speak. This is part of love's paradox, because there is actually so little to be said-which is why some of the most beautiful love letters deal with such mundane matters. "When I write to you," says Dora Carrington to Lytton Strachey, "I talk as if I were by your side, with one arm on the back of your chair, chatting to you. There is no order or plan or logic in what I write; I put down everything that happens both inside and outside the space occupied by my life."
As I sit down to write my letter of love, my pen pauses above the page, heavy with all I ever felt but never expressed. The nib is engorged with unspilled ink; I still believe that the words I will choose will move mountains and might yet even move a man. If it turns out not to have worked, if he proves shy, cruel, unyielding, unfeeling, recalcitrant, absent, bored, a bad reader, gone, it won't matter. I will say I didn't find the right words and I know that one day I'll find some more. A love letter is never the end of the story.
There are as many different kinds of love letter as there are colours of paper and styles of script and stamps: letters ornate and literary, incoherent and untutored, breathless and confused, seductive, erotic (surprisingly few), languishing, despairing, reproachful, repentent, humorous (not many), proud and bereft. The feature they have in common is something often unspoken. And this unspokenness is the key to the very unwriteablity of love. The reason why we cannot write our love is simply this: a love letter must never say "I love you."
There is almost no limit to the things you can say. Nothing is beyond the pale. Say "the window in my bedroom is banging but there is no wind outside today"; say "my pen is failing and my candle is low but I will only leave you when the one ceases to flow and the other to burn"; say "you look great in black"; say "farewell for ever"; say "till Tuesday, then"; say "I will resent my heart being made into a football" (Keats); lie through your teeth, promise the moon, be tender or abject or angry or sad, but be sure not to say "I love you." "I love you" has eaten its own tail. "I love you" is an event, a statement requiring the creaky apparatus of delivery; written down, "I love you" is no more than an image of itself, a holophrase. "I love you" obliterates and buries the object of its love. It's a vitamin pill in place of a meal.
The pop group 10cc made a mint out of its grasp of this simple idea. Consider the phenomenal success of I'm Not In Love. In those early days of pop, unlike today, irony was virtually unknown. Nevertheless, we fall every time for the assertion that x is not in love-precisely because we know the opposite is true. It's a song which speaks for and to the male population of Britain. Quite right, too. How much more effective is "I'm not in love" than "I love you." "I love you," that uncomfortable, composite tri-syllabic word, which does not, will not decline, belongs no more in a song than it does in a letter. It is simply not a rhythmically satisfying phrase.
There is a theory which says that we give presents to our loved ones to assuage a secret sense of guilt. If you find yourself suddenly buying presents for a long-time lover, you should maybe ask yourself for what little infidelity of thought, of word or of deed you are unconsciously trying to make up. No gift is gratuitous, except on official gift-giving days, birthdays, Christmas and so on. Far from feeling there is something bogus about ritualised gift-giving, we should relish the freedom from guilt of No Ulterior Motives Day. The same goes for Valentine's Day-No Ulterior Motives Day for saying "I love you." For once there is no reason why "I love you" shouldn't mean what it says. For once it's unlikely to mean "I fancy my boss" or "I hate it when you do that."
The problem is, it's all too easily said. All you have to do is pop down to the stationer's and pick out a card-the picture will be the Manet of a man and a woman in a punt, the message "I love you." The traditional Valentine's Day conceit even lets you off putting your signature to the petition. All you need is an "x." "x" for a kiss, "x" for anonymous, "x" for the unidentified factor in an unspecified equation. There has to be a better way than this. There is. The better way, for those who are truly lovers, is not the printed card which blandly says "I love you," but the hand-written letter that says it every which way but one.
