There’s something a bit embarrassing about other people’s love letters. Like glimpsing lovers in an embrace, it’s an insight into human nature at its most elevated, or its basest. And it is, like passing a road accident, almost impossible not to peek.
This is how I felt when I saw that Elizabeth Taylor was allowing the publication of her love letters from Richard Burton. It’s not hard to see why she would do it (although his widow Sally Hay Burton might disagree); Burton’s language is poetic and magnificent.
Who couldn’t feel stirred by his protestations that “I am forever punished by the gods for being given the fire and trying to put it out. The fire, of course, is you.” It’s like one of their film scripts brought to life.
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When he fumes “we operate on alien wavelengths. You are as distant as Venus – planet, I mean – and I am tone deaf to the music of the spheres”, we see the whole of the male-female conundrum laid bare (and, more importantly, a whole generation of self-help books).
But there is also, in the Burton-Taylor correspondence, as the young people put it: TMI. Too Much Information. When I think of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, I want to think of an epic, tumultuous love between two people more vibrantly sexual and passionate than nature had a right to make them. I do not want to hear that in private he called the violet-eyed screen goddess “My Lumps” or “Dearest Scrupelshrumpilstilskin”. Or even that he signed himself off with the tediously suburban: “Husbs”.
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Because epic romance relies on what remains hidden. It cannot survive the revelation of the domestic, or the mundane. Walter Bagehot said of the monarchy that “mystery is its life. We must not let daylight in upon magic." I think I speak for all of us when I say I would have been quite happy had daylight not fallen upon Prince Charles’s exchange with Camilla Parker Bowles in which, amongst other things, he professed a wish to be reincarnated as her knickers. (Or indeed, her response “You could come back as a box of Tampax so you could just keep going”.) Yes, it’s earthy, and one might almost call it endearing. But actually, as the young people also also put it, ewww.
The elevation of statesmen, like royalty and movie stars, relies on an inherent belief that they are somehow closer to God. The revelation of their mortality, with its neediness, pet names and fixation on underwear, is somehow more shocking than if we had heard the same of our neighbour.
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US Governor Mark Sanford’s political career – and marriage – never recovered last year after details of his intimate correspondence to a mistress were made public. It wasn’t his infidelity that made him a laughing stock. It was the breathtaking cheesiness of his prose. “I could say that I […] love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light – but hey, that would be going into sexual details…” manages to combine schoolboy smuttiness with the language of a priapic travelling salesman.
In another missive to “Maria”, he tells of “something wonderful about listening to country music playing in the cab, air conditioner running, the hum of a huge diesel engine in the background.” Oh, Mark, there’s nothing that gets a girl going like the hum of plant machinery.
If Lloyd George’s endearments to mistress Frances Stevenson – “My darling Pussy. You might phone… on Friday if you can come. Don’t let Hankey see you” – had been made similarly public, would he have maintained his own reputation as a towering statesman?
The publication of private messages of endearment is a dangerous strategy at best, and at worst a terrible betrayal. Last year James Albright, one of Madonna’s former lovers, put her love letters up for sale (bet the girls are lining up to put pen to paper for Mr Albright these days). Madonna is no wilting flower. But I can’t think she was delighted to have broadcast her habit of signing intimate correspondence “Lil Booty”.
June 4, 2010
