If the great question of this (and every other) age is, “How do you find
somebody to love?” it follows that the other great question must be, “How do
you dispense with them when love has run its course?” There are, as Paul
Simon helpfully pointed out, 50 ways to leave your lover, though probably no
more than half a dozen or so are in what you might call common currency.
Among this shorter catalogue of dismissals there is the Businesslike (send a
fax, in the manner of Phil Collins), the Brutal (send a text saying Ur
Dumped - a popular technique, I gather, among the heartless young), the
Compleat Rat (get another bird up the duff/run off with your sweetheart's
best friend. Alternatively - the Compleat Rat Total Solution - get your
sweetheart's best friend up the duff and run off with her) and the Vanishing
Act (kiss the dumpee fondly, tell her you adore her and will call her
tomorrow first thing. Kiss Kiss. Love you too. Then disappear without
trace).
All these solutions to a tricky problem have about them, you will have
noticed, something a bit ... how to put it? Caddish is an old-fashioned
term. A trifle insensitive, perhaps. A truly modern man, in touch with his
feminine side, would pride himself on handling the matter better than that.
If you have decided to leave a woman, the least you can do is offer her the
respect of explaining yourself (an honourable chap might think). And when
you consider that many men like expressing their innermost feelings exactly
as much as many cats like being hurled into a cold bath from a great height,
the act of writing an End of the Affair letter has to be considered an
enterprise of real heroism.
Where, you are wondering, is this leading? Well, to France, and the moment at
which the then lover of Sophie Calle sat down at his computer to write her a
beautiful e-mail of adieu. An e-mail to bring tears to the eyes - tears of
admiration for his prose style as much as chagrin at the thought of being
plaquée'd by the owner of such a poetic sensibility. The letter is too long
to quote here in full, but I dare say we can find space for a couple of
lines, just to give you a flavour: “Whatever happens, you must know that I
will never stop loving you in my own way - the way I've loved you ever since
I've known you, which will stay part of me, and never die ... I wish things
had turned out differently. Take care of yourself ...”
Now women, as John Buchan's Peter Pienaar astutely observed, are queer cattle,
and you can never be quite sure how they will react to a chap's effort to do
the decent thing. In this case, the anonymous lover may now wish that he'd
followed his original instinct (“It seems to me that it would be better to
say what I have to say to you face to face”). For his spurned mistress,
Sophie Calle, is a conceptual artist of high reputation who has made a
life's work of transforming private pain into art. And that is exactly what
she did with her “Dear Sophie” e-mail. Her artwork, Prenez soin de vous, was
presented at the Venice Biennale last year and has just opened at the
Bibliothèque National in Paris, where it runs until June.
The piece consists of photographs and film of 107 women aged 9 to 90,
including a lawyer, psychotherapist, academic, police officer, the actress
Jeanne Moreau and Carla Bruni, all of whom read and interpreted the text in
their own fashion while their reactions were recorded by Calle, who says
that her former lover “has a sense of humour”. (An indispensable
characteristic, I'd say, for a man whose private letter has just morphed
into a smash hit at the national public library.) The resonances of all this
are so rich that it is hard to know where to begin unpicking them. Why, for
a start, does the fellow call his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend “vous” rather
than “tu”? Surely only someone very grand (or very crushing) would address
his lover as “vous”. (A sagacious blogger points out that L'Oréal's
advertising slogan in France is “Prends soin de toi”, so perhaps it's a
matter of copyright rather than emotional nuance.)
Then there are the murmurs of misanthropy that invariably buzz around an
enterprise such as this. But these we can discount with the help of Serge
Gainsbourg's lyric En Relisant Ta Lettre, in which the (male) recipient of a
desperate, but illiterate, note from his (female) lover indulges in a savage
bit of textual analysis (“En relisant ta lettre, je m'aperçois que
l'orthographe et toi ça fait deux ...”). Deconstructing love letters is
evidently a form of national sport in France.
Which brings us to the issue of fairness. I mean, where would we all be if we
went public every time we were disappointed in love? On YouTube, like Tricia
Walsh-Smith, is the answer to that. And while the romantic among us may
think wistfully of a love affair as a private transaction, it can hardly not
have occurred to Calle's lover that if you get involved with an artist,
sooner or later you'll end up as art. What's more, this is a letter begging
to be read by a wider audience than its recipient. Not since Laclos' Vicomte
de Valmont wrote to his lover using the back of the whore he'd just tumbled
as a desk has a missive been more artfully constructed. It is a triumph of
narcissism: you can imagine the author moved to tears by his own eloquence.
His mistake (if he didn't want the letter published) or his master stroke (if
he did) was that pay-off. There is something about the words “Take care of
yourself”, with their weaselly freight of abandoned responsibility, that
will drive the most placid woman to violence (actually, I reserve my
liveliest hatred for men who say to my son, “Take care of your mother”, but
that's another story).
You will gather that I approve of Calle's ingenious technique for poulticing
her hurt feelings - so much more nuanced than the crude remedies for a
broken heart favoured by Anglo-Saxon women - snipping holes in the crotches
of their loved one's suitings and pouring their hearts out to sympathetic
journalists from the Sunday papers. And however he chooses to dump his
girlfriends in future, I bet that man will never, ever, again say to anyone:
“Prenez soin de vous.”
Illustrations that enlighten and enliven
Mention of Peter Pienaar and his creator, John Buchan, leads me to my latest
acquisition: a 1960s Dent edition of Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, with
handsome illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. There is a particular pleasure
in the way the illustrations bring Buchan's bullying, sentimental hero,
Richard Hannay, down to size. As imagined by Ardizzone he looks like an
older version of the sweet, mannerly Tim of the Tim and Charlotte stories.
This, with a copy of Alison Uttley's memoir, Ambush of Young Days,
beautifully illustrated by C.F. Tunnicliffe, led me to think about the
paucity of illustration in modern books for adults. So many of my favourites
- Gwen Raverat's Period Piece, David Garnett's Lady into Fox, the Scott
Moncrieff Proust - were finely illustrated when they first appeared, but the
habit has dwindled. Among the books on my bedside table, Robert Macfarlane's
The Wild Places has striking black-and-white photographs, W.G. Sebald's The
Emigrants is punctuated with his troubling snapshots, and pencil drawings
enliven Rory Knight Bruce's lovely memoir, Red Letter Days. These are the
exceptions - and how dull they make my other books seem by comparison.
No need for hankies
To the Lyttelton on Wednesday, to see Vanessa Redgrave in Joan Didion's
dramatisation of her own bereavement memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking.
It is an astonishing performance - an hour-and-a-half's wrenching monologue
on an almost bare stage. My friend and I had taken our hankies, expecting to
be sobbing throughout, but left dry-eyed and spent ages afterwards trying to
work out why. My theory is that the written word is the only medium capable
of sustaining the illusion of intimacy between writer and reader. All other
media reduce the audience to passive onlookers. (Though I'd better add that
my friend said this was rubbish, and greatly preferred the play to the book
I admire so much.)
Having lived and taught in Sittingbourne for 35 years I enjoy reading your column, spotting the odd reference to people and places I recognise but did you know that Edward Ardizzone lived in Rodmersham and is buried in the churchyard at Rodmersham church?
Jan Barton, Sittingbourne,
Another good example of the use of illustrations is Seamus Heaney's 2000 translation of "Beowulf". The use of photographs of Viking artefacts and landscapes really brings the poem alive in a way not possible with text only.
Eamonn, Copenhagen, Denmark
Probably we would all be using UK PLC as the new BIG BROTHER House !!!!
Ian Payne, WALSALL,
I'm afraid you can't be right about the written word. How do you explain all those people sobbing at the opera?
James , Canberra, Australia.