Valentine’s Day invites declarations of love and their opposite. As Dylan, the reliable author of anti-love songs puts it, “You've got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend.” Some find the day’s institutional sentiments insufferable, or at least worthy of mockery. Charles Lamb, that lifelong bachelor, writes in "Valentine’s Day”:
“[T]his is the day on
which those charming little missives, ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross
each other at every street and turning. The weary and all for-spent twopenny
postman sinks beneath a load of delicate embarrassments, not his own.”
Lamb was an unrequited admirer
of the actress and singer Frances “Fanny” Kelly. He even wrote her a sonnet, “To Miss Kelly.” Having seen her the night before on stage, Lamb writes to her on
July 20, 1819, saying her performance “has given rise to a train of thinking,
which I cannot suppress”:
“Would to God you were
released from this way of life; that you could bring your mind to consent to
take your lot with us, and throw off for ever the whole burden of your
Profession. I neither expect or wish you to take notice of this which I am
writing, in your present over occupied & hurried state.—But to think of it
at your leisure. I have quite income enough, if that were all, to justify for
me making such a proposal, with what I may call even a handsome provision for
my survivor.”
Lamb approaches “stalker”
status. Has anyone ever proposed marriage so obliquely? And is he asking Kelly
to marry “us” – that is, Lamb and his matricidal sister Mary? And what happened
to his sense of comedy? It gets worse: “I am not so foolish as not to know that
I am a most unworthy match for such a one as you, but you have for years been a
principal object in my mind. In many a sweet assumed character I have learned
to love you, but simply as F. M. Kelly I love you better than them all.” Our
eloquent Elia – he would soon write his first essay under that pseudonym – is
tongue-tied.
Reading this letter, I’m
embarrassed for Lamb but sympathetic. Anyone who has been romantically rebuffed
can’t help but feel for the guy. At the time, he was forty-three and Kelly was
twenty-eight. As insurance, he writes: “It is impossible I should feel injured
or aggrieved by your telling me at once, that the proposal does not suit you.”
Kelly’s reply, a masterpiece of tact and diplomacy written the same day, is a
single sentence:
“An early & deeply
rooted attachment has fixed my heart on one from whom no worldly prospect can
well induce me to withdraw it but while I thus frankly & decidedly decline
your proposal, believe me, I am not insensible to the high honour which the
preference of such a mind as yours confers upon me—let me, however, hope that
all thought upon this subject will end with this letter, & that you will
henceforth encourage no other sentiment towards me than esteem in my private
character and a continuance of that approbation of my humble talents which you
have already expressed so much & so often to my advantage and
gratification.”
Kelly signs off as “Your
obliged friend.” Within hours, Lamb replies to her reply, having regained some
of his sense of humor:
“Your injunctions shall
be obeyed to a tittle. I feel myself in a lackadaisacal no-how-ish kind of
a humour. I believe it is the rain, or something. I had thought to have written
seriously, but I fancy I succeed best in epistles of mere fun; puns & that
nonsense.”
Lamb died unmarried and
perhaps celibate in 1834. Mary, who also never married, outlived him by
thirteen years. Kelly died unmarried in 1882 at the age of ninety-two. My
favorite anti-love poem was published by A.E. Housman, another bachelor, in More
Poems (1936):
“Stone, steel, dominions
pass,
Faith, too, no wonder;
So leave alone the grass
That I am under.
“All knots that lovers tie
Are tied to sever;
Here shall your sweetheart
lie,
Untrue for ever.
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