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The Book of Love (Magill Book Reviews)

Prompted by her reading of novelist Edith Wharton’s moving love letters to W. Morton Fullerton, Cathy Davidson was lured into thinking about this species of writing and why it is that writers seem to fall in love with men and women physically or emotionally distant, thus creating the need for intimacy by proxy. Davidson, a professor of English at Duke University, has sifted through thousands of letters to produce this richly satisfying collection of lovers’ literary epistles, and readers can judge for themselves whether the primary relationship seems in fact the one between the writer and the paper or the writer and the beloved.

Introduced by brief, evocative accounts of relationships out of which they come, the letters are arranged as if they were all a part of one romance, a single narrative that traces love’s progress through the exhilarations of falling in love to the pain of separation, the anguish of breaking up, and the sober acceptance of love lost. They chart as well the infinite variety of love, celebrating relationships both tender and passionate, parental and friendly. But no matter how seemingly different the personalities, when writers sit down to compose a love letter they enter an oddly universal territory of the heart. There is little to distinguish between the lyrical effusions or bitter recriminations of the young or old, the heterosexual or homosexual, the male or female. In fact, Davidson claims that everyone who writes a love letter becomes a woman. In the love letter even men are required to express the kind and intensity of emotion which has traditionally been expected from women. Gender stereotypes collapse as writers expose their vulnerabilities, strip themselves spiritually and emotionally. And the sentimental note is never very far away, even in so macho a writer as Ernest Hemingway or so reasonable a writer as Voltaire.

Davidson claims that love letters are a literary genre with fixed conventions, and though language has changed over the centuries, the form and content of these letters have remained surprisingly constant. A love letter is first of all a performance requiring a seductive technique; it transforms the mundane, erases differences, escapes time. Whether it is poet Pablo Neruda writing to his wife, novelist John Cheever writing to his anonymous male lover, or activist Emma Goldman writing to the married Ben Reitman, the variations only underscore recurrent themes.

John Cheever once said that saving a letter is like trying to preserve a kiss. Happily, as this collection shows, he was wrong. Cathy Davidson has found her way to scores of preserved kisses, from Walt Whitman, Mary Wollstonecraft, Langston Hughes, and many others. And she has addressed them to readers who will surely be as delighted, amused, and touched by them as their original recipients were.