Yours Ever (36 page)

When Emma Jung grows concerned about the increasing tension between her husband and his mentor, she begins her own correspondence with Freud and pinpoints the nature of Freud’s selfishness: “Doesn’t one often give much because one wants to keep much?” She asks that he not discuss their exchanges with Jung (“he was astonished to see one of your letters addressed to me; but I have revealed only a little of their content”) and admits to her own difficulties with her husband: “I find I have no friends, all the people who associate with us really only want to see Carl.”

As the spring of 1912 approaches, Jung is quoting Nietzsche to Freud, on the need for the student to rebel against the teacher. He has begun tugging noisily at his chain, explaining to the possessive and suspicious older man, “I have not kept up a lively correspondence during these last weeks because I wanted if possible to write
no letters at all
, simply in order to gain time for my work and not in order to give
you
a demonstration of ostentatious neglect. Or can it be that you mistrust me?” Freud responds with tender manipulation: “The indestructible foundation of our personal relationship
is our involvement in
Ψ
A [psychoanalysis]; but on this foundation it seemed tempting to build something finer though more labile, a reciprocal intimate friendship. Shouldn’t we go on building?”

In fact, a new dispute over the libido is ready to blow the house to smithereens. Jung has concluded that incest is “primarily … a fantasy problem,” a desire that didn’t even exist until it was forbidden. He stands his ground against Freud’s more primal view of the matter and is soon delivering a series of lectures in New York that put his heresies on public display. He expresses a hope that things can remain friendly between them but also asserts that professional matters must now trump all else. His correspondent gets the message: for years Freud has saluted the younger man as “Dear friend,” but the next letter from Vienna opens with a stiff new “Dear Dr Jung.”

A move toward reconciliation proves futile, and Jung responds to Freud’s attempt at an elegiac tone (“for me our relationship will always retain an echo of our past intimacy”) with belligerence and sarcasm: “It is only occasionally that I am afflicted with the purely human desire to be understood
intellectually
and not to be measured by the yardstick of neurosis.” Finally, after a letter in which Freud points out a Freudian slip that Jung has made, the younger man has had enough: “You go around sniffing out all the symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty. For sheer obsequiousness nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the beard….” Freud replies with a bland assertion that Jung is mentally ill; the only proposal he can now make is “that we abandon our personal relations entirely.”

Amid all of Freud’s bilious anger and comical formality and jargon (he at one point declares that an Italian vacation “has supplied several wish-fulfilments that my inner economy has long been in need of”), a reader of these letters may forget how much fright and pain Freud swept away from so many mental attics—let alone the bravery it took for him to accomplish that. Auden’s famous elegy to the doctor concedes that “often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,”
but holds that when he died, “Only Hate was happy.” One playful image from Freud’s letters to Jung—“the ego is like the clown in the circus, who is always putting in his oar to make the audience think that whatever happens is his doing”—feels pleasantly similar to the homely, approachable ones in Auden’s tribute. Alas, this clown simile arose in the course of Freud’s denouncing one more heresy committed by one more errant psychoanalyst.

LIKE THE EPISTOLARY NOVEL
, the suicide note caught on in the eighteenth century. In his introduction to an anthology called
… Or Not to Be
, Marc Etkind shows how newspapers catering to the “newly literate” of that era began to print suicide notes that would soon change society’s view of their authors: “Once suicides were considered satanic, now the notes showed them to be human, suffering from such common problems as poverty, infidelity, and plain bad luck.”

Such notes continue to range from the pointedly accusing (“May you always remember I loved you once but died hating you”) to the wanly philosophic: “If we can enter eternal sleep,” wrote the Japanese novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa in 1927, before swallowing sleeping pills, “we may at least have peace, even if we may not enjoy happiness.” Suicide notes are written not only to different audiences—sometimes even pets, Etkind points out—but also in an ever-expanding range of media. The minister who not long ago hanged himself and wrote “God forgive me” on the package containing the rope could today use one of the Internet bulletin boards available to both the sincerely desperate and the perversely joking.

How often an expression of apology enters these notes! Dying from Nembutal as he writes, Dr. Stephen Ward, the London doctor caught up in the Profumo scandal of 1963, manages to say: “I do hope I have not let people down too much.” Virginia Woolf, before drowning herself during the Second World War, addresses her husband, Leonard, in the kind of simple declarative sentences she’d practically banished from the English novel:

In the early days of Bill Clinton’s administration, the president’s depressed aide Vincent Foster, beset with an unexpected host of political enemies, devoted most of his suicide note to rebutting them, but he began by saying, “I made mistakes from ignorance, inexperience and overwork.” And in the end, before shooting himself, Foster ripped his own note into twenty-seven pieces, which he then threw into his briefcase. As Etkind points out, such destruction is common, “since many who feel they are unworthy to live also feel their final thoughts aren’t worth sharing.”

WHEN IT APPEARED
time to fly “to war and arms” on behalf of his beleaguered king, the Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace first had to take leave of “Lucasta,” in a hasty lyric that might as well be a letter. Lovelace’s
Casablanca-style
apologia explains that the problems of two seventeenth-century aristocrats don’t amount to a hill of beans in a world with Cromwell on the horizon; and so, however faithless it might seem:

The history of letter writing demonstrates the human inability to make war without making love. Wartime encourages hasty romances, sunders existing ones (the “Dear John” letter is war’s own epistolary innovation) and with its fiery tests of separation and danger solders the strongest marriage into something even stronger. As the World War II generation takes its long farewell, what once seemed a mundane tendency to do its duty has begun to look not just heroic but romantic. The veterans’ aging children are making bestselling anthologies out of the micro-sized V-Mail their fathers sent home to sweethearts and young wives.

The generally plainspoken GIs tend to move us with their matter-of-factness, but an earlier century’s emotional flourishes have not lost their affecting power, either. The great epistolary moment of Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary came with a letter composed by Sullivan Ballou of the Second Rhode Island Volunteers a week before his death in the First Battle of Bull Run. Writing from Camp Clark, Washington, on July 14, 1861, Major Ballou assures his wife Sarah that

However less jauntily, Ballou makes the same case Lovelace does about the competing claims of love and honor. Something “whispers” that he “shall return to my loved ones unharmed,” but his letter is more alert to the possibility that war will have its own say about both honor and love. Should he die, Ballou offers his wife a ghostly substitute attendance until the two of them can meet once more in eternity:

Over and over, from Peloponnesus to the Persian Gulf, war acts as love’s destroyer and enabler. The soldier, in his letters, follows the orders of both.

NOT ALL OF
Ballou’s comrades in arms could use the language so elegantly as he. But refinement and eloquence are not the same thing, and many ordinary Civil War soldiers do rise to the latter in the kind of straight, simple utterance now being rediscovered in their descendants’ V-Mail. Private James Binford of the Twenty-first Virginia Volunteer Infantry begins one letter home, after the Battle of Cedar Mountain, with a sort of record-setting concision: “Dear Carrie and Annie: Thanks to merciful providence, I breathe and have all my limbs.” On the Union side, Private Chester Tuttle of the Eighty-first New York tells of how his company tended its wounded inside a rebel’s house after the Battle of the Wilderness. A spinet piano “was used to cut off legs and arms on. Ben Ballard … said that the blood run down in on to the strings.”

If the Civil War had one letter writer able to use starkness and economy to astonishing effect, it was Private Tuttle’s commander-in-chief, Abraham Lincoln. On his second-floor desk in the Executive Mansion, the president kept a small stack of cards, suitable for fast responses to pleading widows and office seekers, but the lawyer in him was generally averse “to getting on paper, and furnishing new grounds for misunderstanding.” If Jefferson’s letters can be a sort of Louisiana Purchase, lighting out for more territory than they require, Abraham Lincoln’s are a struggle for union, battles for exactitude and strict coherence, limited-objective campaigns fought on short rhetorical rations. The mere three or four hundred letters Lincoln himself probably composed as
president—similar to Jefferson’s only in their neat, undemonstrative handwriting—have become, by their scarceness and brevity, as familiar to us as his speeches. They are the literal circumscriptions of a man hemmed in by catastrophe. In his White House correspondence, this great storyteller has no time for telling stories.

Lincoln passed many of his presidency’s most important hours in the telegraph office at the War Department, receiving and responding to news from the battlefield. Samuel F. B. Morse, who grew considerably richer off the military’s use of his invention, spent the war agitating for peace with the rebels, but he had provided the president he so disliked with a formidable instrument, one that made the most of Lincoln’s natural powers of brevity and sarcasm. The telegram was practically designed for letting remarks hang in the air, for doubling the impact of the dead-bolt closings Lincoln had already mastered in his letters. “If the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg,” he cables General Hooker, “and the tail of it on the Plank road between Fredericksburg & Chancellorsville, the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?” The president responds to a serving of McClellan’s usual molasses—this time a dispatch about tired horses—with a wire that ends: “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?” McClellan had failed to heed two earlier sign-offs, the magnificently casual one just before Antietam (“Destroy the rebel army, if possible”), and the urgent underlining
(“But you must act”)
in a letter five months prior to that.

Some of Lincoln’s telegrams to the battlefield have a remarkable similarity to present-day, conversational e-mail. “Colonel Haupt,” he wires during the second Bull Run campaign. “What became of our forces which held the bridge twenty minutes ago, as you say?” The speed and spareness of the dispatches kept the recipient to the point, and one wonders if the feeling of control they offered wasn’t what inspired Lincoln to compose the most audacious gamble of his presidency not at his desk in the Executive Mansion but over at the War Department with one of the barrel-pens used by the cipher-operators. David Homer Bates, manager of the telegraph
office, recalled in 1907 how Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation “a line or two” at a time, stopping when “a fresh despatch
[sic]
from the front was handed to him.”

“If [Lee] stays where he is,” Lincoln telegraphs Hooker three weeks before Gettysburg, “fret him, and fret him.” These are the words of a man who thought that “nothing equals Macbeth” but who clearly knew
Othello
, too (“Put out the light, and then put out the light”). We know something of Lincoln’s Shakespeare-reading from a private letter he sent the actor James H. Hackett, who let the president’s “small attempt at criticism” find its way into the newspapers. When Hackett apologized for causing the snickers that ensued, Lincoln told him not to worry: “Those comments constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life. I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.” But not indifferent. Lincoln would die with some favorable press clippings in his wallet.