One measures the sincerity of a Love letter by its attachment to the receiver – the lover, or hoped for lover, on the other end of this outpouring of sentiment. That attachment is signalled by a certain privacy of tone more than anything else. The tone in writing is, overtly, a clumsy thing – it is underlining, italics, exclamation points, a rather miserable attempt to make the hand that writes take on a function of the tongue that speaks. To make the tone work, to rise above these poor instruments, requires, even of the most silly love letter writer, a certain sense of nuance. A certain sense of tickling, so to speak. And we know that some are born ticklish, and others aren’t.
Thus, the love letter is bound to an aesthetic purpose that may not be shareable. Love letters that have passed into literature, that please people beyond the narrow circle of the couple, are rarely the most successful love letters in terms of their immediate purpose.
I came across this love letter from Paul Nizan to his wife, Henriette, dated 5 November 1939. P.N. is in the army, at this point, but the war seems “phony” – nothing seems to be happening. It is one of the rare love letters that delights on the two levels sketched above. So, I thought I’d translate it. Which is inevitably to distort it.
Perhaps this gains in poignancy for me, knowing the end of the story – Nizan’s mysterious death in the woods six months later, and the way his name was dragged in the mud by Stalinists for years, and Sartre’s amazing preface to Aden Araby which brought Nizan’s name back into the light.
“Rirette my dearest. Received your letter of Nov. 1 yesterday evening. It is so very nice to be able to say, after fifteen years, that we love each other enough to exchange love letters, and that we have triumphed in the end over everything that separates people. This stay in the army has reminded me a bit of my stay in Arabia [About which Nizan wrote his first and most famous book], but we know more things, we are much more deeply complicit, we have learned to go beyond mere literature. So that without doubt this time will not be lost, if it isn’t prolonged up until I have a long white beard and promenade along the Maginot line in a little tank. Julie de Lespinasse, Juliette Drouet, and other women only had to hold tight. You know, the legend says that, in order to appease the combattants and consecrate them exclusively to thoughts of war and the contemplation of their military destiny, the powers that be put saltpeter or camphor in the wine, the salt, and the coffee. This legend, I think, is frivolous : if there were camphor in the wine and saltpeter in the coffee, men with more sensitive palate would have perceived it, but I have no need for the witness of taste : it is enough that I read a letter of yours, or write one to you, that I think of your rose Piana dress, your pleated dress of last winter, of that return from Prague in December 37 when you could not stop climaxing, in order for me to have a personal and physical proof that they haven’t put saltpeter in the wine. So that we shouldn’t have any worries for my moment of leave, and it will be enough for me to see your knees, your thighs, that you, without any previous sign, put your tongue in my mouth for us to arrive at some frank result. Perhaps it will be wise for you to renounce the vain usage of panties. And there will be time to talk and to say important things to each other. A propos of the Talmud, I just read that Eben Haeser prescribes that workers not make love more than twice in the week, that savants confine themselves to the sabbath, that muleteers do it once per week, and camel drivers once per month, and only rentiers can do it every day: I will have to put myself in the last category. Also, I read in the Talmud, a naughtier books than I thought, that anyone who makes love to a woman on the bottom will suffer from delirium: ah, but what a wonderful delirium! I embrace you in this spirit. »
