By KATE MURPHY
Flowers, trinkets, borrowed
sweaters and other reminders of our romantic past may get tossed out. But love
letters, for those lucky enough to receive them, are different. They are more
likely tucked in a wallet or safeguarded in a box under the bed.
Increasingly rare in an age
when affection is more often expressed with a kissy-face emoji, actual,
hold-in-your-hands love letters are special even to people who weren’t the
intended recipients. Indeed, collectors tend to value love letters written by
famous figures more than other kinds of correspondence. Which is why the
auction this week of love letters by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to the British
diplomat David Ormsby Gore has made headlines. The price of love in this
instance? An estimated $125,000 to $187,000.
“When you have a letter
destined for only one very special person, you know it’s going to be intimate,
and there may be thoughts and feelings that the writer might not have revealed
to anybody else,” said Devon Eastland, the director of fine books and
manuscripts at Skinner, a Boston auction house, which in May will offer a
collection of 40 love letters by the artist Andrew Wyeth to his girlfriend,
Alice Moore. The collection is expected to fetch $80,000 to $120,000.
According to historical
manuscript dealers and appraisers, the hammer prices, or winning bids, for love
letters in recent years tend to correlate with the fame of the writer, rarity
and the condition of the document. But most of all they depend on the
revelatory nature of the content. If in real estate it’s all about location,
for love letters it’s all about heart.
Instructive is a letter
from Abraham Lincoln to his first fiancée, Mary Owens, which sold for $700,000
in 2002, then the highest price ever paid for a Lincoln letter and still the
highest paid for a love letter. The well-preserved document is one of only
three known that he sent to Owens and reveals the future president as
ambivalent and insecure, seeking reassurance that she really does want to marry
him despite his meager income: “I know I should be much happier with you than
the way I am, provided I saw no signs of discontent in you.” Compare that with
a newsier letter he wrote to her earlier in their relationship. Lacking
emotional depth — “I have been sick ever since my arrival here” — and the paper
being a bit more discolored, it went for $110,000 last September.
Data provided by American
Book Prices Current, which tracks rare book and manuscript auction results,
show that, after the Lincoln letter, the highest prices paid for individual
love letters are predominantly for those written by military men. Take the one
from Napoleon Bonaparte to Joséphine de Beauharnais in 1795 or 1796, during the
three-month affair that preceded their marriage. The letter, which was sold in
2007 for $467,958, follows a quarrel. Napoleon admits to being cross but
declares his love: “I send you three kisses — one on your heart, one on your
mouth and one on your eyes.”
A letter written in 1800 by
the British naval hero Horatio Nelson to Emma Hamilton describing an erotic
dream — “I kissed you fervently and we enjoy’d the height of love” — sold for
$175,050. And then there’s the love letter Winston Churchill wrote in 1899 to
Pamela Plowden, who has been called the first great love of his life, which
sold for $113,782. In it, he wrote, “Marry me — and I will conquer the world
and lay it at your feet.” By contrast, a draft of a letter from Churchill to
Stalin on the “Polish troubles” went for $30,165.
“What draws people to
letters in general as things to buy is that feeling of making a really direct
connection with a historical figure,” said Thomas Venning, director of books
and manuscripts at Christie’s in London. “You’ve got a piece of paper, it was a
blank piece of paper when that person put it in front of them, and they filled
it with a part of themselves.” In the case of grand military figures’ love
letters, he said, the allure is perhaps more intense because “you see the
unexpected vulnerability at the heart of them.” (This may be one reason letters
from famous women tend to carry lower price tags: When women talk of love, it
doesn’t defy our stereotypes.)
Tenderness hidden behind a
tough guy facade may explain why an immaculately handwritten love letter from
the slugger Joe DiMaggio to Marilyn Monroe went for far more ($62,500) than any
of the several typewritten love letters to her from the playwright Arthur
Miller ($1,024 to $9,728). Miller had an easier time expressing his feelings,
but his prolixity comes off, perhaps, as more annoying than enchanting. For
context, one of Ms. Monroe’s brassieres went for $16,000.
But sometimes peering into
someone’s heart is not a selling point, as with 44 love letters written by
Charles Schulz, the cartoonist who created Snoopy, that failed to sell at
auction in 2012. At the time the letters were written in the 1970s, Schulz was
middle-aged, married and engaged in what reads as a rather puerile pursuit of a
woman more than 20 years his junior.
“When you have the
unvarnished moment of two people corresponding in an intimate way, it could
definitely cross into ‘ick’ territory,” Ms. Eastland said. “Schulz fans might
find those love letters a little repugnant.”
But then, one person’s
“ick!” might be another person’s “awesome!” An explicit letter written by the
rapper Tupac Shakur to a female admirer while he was in jail in 1995, which
mentions bondage and lollipops, sold this year for an unexpectedly high $28,000.
Love letters sold in a
bundle that give a sense of the arc of a relationship are also highly prized,
particularly if they mention the writer’s work or creative process. An example
is a collection of 53 letters between Albert Einstein and his wife, Mileva
Maric, with references to his scientific endeavors, that sold for $400,000. Ten
letters the Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger wrote in 1969 to his
girlfriend, Marsha Hunt, sold for $234,500. One letter incorporated lyrics for
the song “Monkey Man” with three additional lines.
The buyer of the
Jagger-Hunt series was Anne-Marie Springer of Nyon, Switzerland, a prominent
collector of love letters. She owns some 2,000, including letters written by
Frédéric Chopin, Winston Churchill, James Joyce, Elvis Presley, Napoleon and
Frida Kahlo.
She said what appeals to
her is “these so-called superstars are just as shy, emotional and endearing as
we are when it comes to affairs of the heart.” Perhaps money can’t buy you
love, but it can buy you the solace that no one, not even the most prominent
figures in history, is immune to the humility and heartbreak of love. It
blesses and afflicts us all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/opinion/sunday/the-love-letters-of-manly-men.html?_r=0
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