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A Candy Box of History's Sappiest Literary Lovers
by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

Familiar figures among upper echelon literary lovelorn include Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, Robert Louis Stevenson and Fannie Osbourne, Gerard de Nerval and Jenny Colon, to name but a few. Their stories have all the poignancy, drama, humor and pathos of popular romance. Cupid's unpredictability is never to be denied and there can be little doubt that the mischievous cherub was wearing his blindfold too tight when he shot the darts that created these legendary couples.

When Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (b. 1265 – d. 1321) first met Beatrice Portinari (b. 1266 – d. 1290), he was nine years old. From the time of this first meeting, she became his guiding passion, his lifelong muse and "soul’s delight." He encountered her a second time nine years later, as she was walking in the streets of Florence in the company of two chaperones. Not a word was exchanged between them but, according to Dante, Beatrice saluted him with her eyes in such a way that he was electrified by such a vision of courtesy and sublimity that he seemed to "behold the very limits of blessedness." Dante’s obsession with this noble lady was the perfect embodiment of the chivalric ideal. He venerated Beatrice and enshrined his love in two masterpieces of literature: The Divine Comedy and A New Life. The plot line of the former, mapping in detail the medieval model of the moral cosmos, follows Dante’s progress through purgatory and hell en route to eventual arrival at earthly paradise and ultimate reunion with Beatrice in heaven. Beatrice married and died at the age of thirty-five. Dante wrote a sonnet suggesting that God had recalled Beatrice to his side because he regarded the evil and imperfect earth unworthy of her grace. Two years after her death, Dante married a lady of noble birth named Gemma, who brought him little, if any, happiness. He passed the remainder of his life in troubled spirits, itinerant toil, and exile. Ironically and pathetically, his exalted Beatrice, the focus of what generally has been considered the greatest literary tribute in history, went to her grave ignorant of the monumental devotion of "the noblest heart that ever beat in Italy."





A younger contemporary of Dante, Petrarch seemed immune to the temptations relished by another medieval literary great, his close friend and confirmed skirt chaser Giovanni Boccaccio. In Petrarch’s case, women were a matter of indifference and a well-turned ankle left him cold. Though "ladies of high degree sighed and made eyes at tall, handsome Petrarch as he passed, they made eyes in vain. He was wedded to literature." That is, until he met Laura. Sitting forlornly on a church pew Good Friday, 1327, he lifted his eyes and his gaze fell upon a vision of loveliness: Laura de Noves, the golden-haired wife of Hugh de Sade, ancestor of the notorious marquis. Even though Petrarch had entered the priesthood, and sworn off fleshly fellowship with womankind, the smitten poet was so thunderstruck by this sudden encounter with feminine perfection that he wandered the streets in a daze. But the exalted object of his ardor, being already married and a lady of noble birth, was untouchable and, in fact, Petrarch had little or no actual contact with her. There was nothing to do but bumble about the streets of Avignon mooning and swooning until he became so lovesick he had to retreat to another city to cool off. When he had somewhat recovered his senses, he began to pour out love poems in the form of what was to become known as the "Petrarchan" sonnet, later assembled in his Song Book and Sprinkling of Rhymes. Coquettish Laura, content to stimulate the poet’s lavish effusions, but otherwise unwilling to gratify him, died at age forty, mother of ten, none of them by Petrarch. Griefstricken at first, Petrarch continued to idealize his beloved, with the added exhilaration of knowing he was exempt from scandal, since there was no longer any possibility his passion could be consummated. (Though, while Laura was still alive, her chaperone had offered herself, for a price, in Laura’s place.) For his efforts in immortalizing his beloved with his superlative poems of devotion, Petrarch was crowned Poet Laureate of Italy, and is considered the father of modern poetry. From his twenty-third year to his seventieth, Petrarch dedicated poems to Laura, despairing while she was alive, grieving after her death, though she never reciprocated his affections save by accepting them out of vanity. Petrarch is the very exemplar of Courtly Love. He expressed the eternal dream of a love blending the hopes, desires, thoughts and deeds of two beings as one and, through this spirit, "forgetting the sordid present, the squalid here, the rankling now." Petrarch praised his lady in every particular but never referred to her physically "above the foot." This was likely not because he had a fetish for this anatomical appendage but to imply that Laura was a goddess and he, a humble poet, worthy only to throw himself at her feet. Permanently celibate, the poet confessed in his Secretum that he was as prey to the longings of the flesh as the next man, and "would be lying" if he said he wasn’t but, by spiritualizing his love, he had reached an altitude where he was no longer in danger of wearing it out. Such is love's bliss, such is love's folly...







Giant of French literature Honore de Balzac was, oddly enough, molded as a creative writer by the persuasions of two women. The first was Madame de Berney, a matronly and sympathetic socialite whose son Balzac had been engaged to tutor. Madame de Berney, twenty-two years Balzac's senior, and married to a wealthy paralytic afflicted with locomotor ataxia, was gentle, compassionate, and intellectually-inclined. She found herself taking long walks with Balzac deeply engrossed in soulful discussions about every subject under the sun. Her prolix communions with the novelist-in-the-rough soon reached a breakneck pace. So difficult was it to keep up that, in exasperation, she encouraged him to write out his thoughts. "As soon as he had written something he hastened to hunt up 'La Dilecta,' as he called her. He wrote her letters in the morning and at night. They dined together, walked, talked, rowed and read." In no time, the pair found themselves entangled in the toils and meshes of the love thrall. Balzac wrote a dozen books or more a year. Because he was something of a spendthrift and had no time to look after business details, his heedlessness bred lawsuits. He loaned money to everybody and borrowed from Madame de Berney when credititors pressed in. All the while, he churned out manuscript after manuscript. He pulled double shifts, from two to ten in the morning, and from noon until eight o'clock at night. "Then for a month," Elbert Hubbard tells us, "he would relax and devote himself to La Dilecta. She was his one friend, his confidante, his comrade, his mother, his sweetheart. No woman was ever loved more devotedly, but the passionate intensity of the man's nature must have been a sore tax on her time and strength. He was absorbed in his work and in his love, and these were to him one."

Madame de Berney decided that, by virtue of the difference in their ages, they were doomed to separation by the ineluctable tractions of time and "could never grow old together and go down the hill of life hand in hand." So Madame De Berney took the initiative, telling her inamorato, "You shall not see me grow old and totter, my body wither and fail, my mind decline. We part now and part forever, our friendship sacred, unsullied, and at its height. Good-bye, Balzac, good-bye!" Balzac was dumbstruck but, having been barred by the servants from de Berney’s house, and banished from her sight, his rage relented, and he resigned himself to his loss. Then his attention was caught by a persistent onslaught of messages from one Madame Eveline Hanska, a countess living in far-off Poland.

"From her letters," Hubbard informs us, "she seemed intelligent, witty, sympathetic." Turning to her in his distress, Balzac discovered Hanska to be a twenty-eight-year-old member of the landed gentry whose elderly Russian husband maintained a vast estate in the Ukraine replete with serfs. As Balzac completed his Droll Stories, he and Hanska threw themselves into a systematic, increasingly intimate correspondence until it became clear to both that they were destined for a closer relationship than that afforded by the overland mail. They arranged to meet in Switzerland and again in Vienna, and became lovers. Agreeing to marry upon the death of her husband, Balzac and Hanska resumed their long-distance courtship. The novelist applied himself round-the-clock to a project called The Human Comedy, a series of a hundred books devised to "run the entire gamut of human experience and picture every possible phase of human emotion." The conception of this awesomely ambitious project rested with none other than Countess Hanska. It was she who, from afar, now prodded and enticed Balzac to work, work, work, then work some more. Balzac eagerly complied, being under the impression that his efforts, in helping to clear his overwhelming debts, would put him in a better position to contract a satisfactory marriage with his beloved. With this prize as his incentive, he frantically labored until his health began to break. Hanska's husband went to his heavenly reward, but still Madame held Balzac at arm's length. Despite Balzac's earnest entreaties that they be wed as soon as circumstances might permit, Hanska begged off, goading the writer to absorb himself with his work until such time as she could set her affairs in order and they could reunite. The years wore on much as before, and Hanska was "strangely cold: in sore distress — children sick, peasants dissatisfied, business complications and so forth." Nevertheless, she advanced Balzac several hundred thousand francs to buy and furnish a house in Paris for their eventual cohabitation. When she and her daughter arrived in the French capitol, they were delighted with the domicile but stayed only a month, which was long enough for Balzac and the younger Hanska to become acquainted in a more than familial fashion before pressing affairs in Poland abruptly required the ladies to cut short their stay. Meanwhile, Madame Hanska "ruled him," says Hubbard. "She alternately beckoned and pursued. Without her Balzac could not have gone on. She held him true to his literary course, and without her he must surely have fallen a victim of arrested energy. She demanded a daily accounting from the mill of his mind." Balzac's vitality was waning. "She sapped his life-forces and robbed him of his red corpuscles; so that before he was fifty, he was old, worn-out, undone, with an excess of lime in his bones." The great writer "was growing stout; physical exercise was difficult. Dark lines were growing under his eyes. He suffered from asthma and aneurism of the heart. His eyes were failing him so he could not see to write by lamplight." Growing alarmed, Hanska pleaded with him to join her at her country home in Poland, where they would be married. Arriving at her side in the Church of Santa Barbara in Berdychiv, Balzac finally marched with her down the aisle. The newlyweds excitedly made far-ranging plans for the future and proceeded to Paris. Upon arrival Balzac, leaning wearily on Hanska's arm, managed to hobble to the threshold of their nuptial nest where he "lingered on miserably for the few months before his death."





Before establishing her thriving salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus in Paris, Amercian expatriate poetess Gertude Stein had lived in much of Europe and in Oakland and San Francisco, Baltimore and Boston. In 1903, after studying psychology with William James at Radcliffe and brain anatomy at Johns Hopkins, Stein forsook an intended career in medicine and left behind a broken romance with girlfriend May Bookstaver for the life of a literary bohemian in the French capitol. In 1907, while entertaining destitute artists such as Juan Gris, Henri Matise, and Pablo Picasso (who painted a well-known portrait of her), Stein met fellow ex-Californian Alice B. Toklas, who was to become her secretarial assistant, lover, and lifelong partner. Stein characterized their relationship as a "marriage" and the two tribades, described by Jay Robert Nash as "dowdy and repulsive of figure and face," frequently disrupted literary gatherings with heated arguments, after which they regaled visitors with round after round of noisy lovemaking in an adjoining bedroom. Re-emerging from their lair, the pair could be heard exchanging such pet names as "Mama Woojums" (Stein’s familiar tag for Toklas) and "Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle" (Toklas' tag for Stein). Avant-gardist Gertrude was the dominant partner, "an intellectual and physical oddity for her day with her short, cropped hair, constant stare and bullying manners," relates Nash. Stein, famous for such one-liners as "There is no there there," "A rose is a rose is a rose," and "You are all a lost generation," eventually generated a body of cubistic, syntax-shattering poetry which continues to hold a solid, if eccentric, position in twentieth century letters. Stein's memoirs of life in Paris during the formative years of modernism were cleverly entitled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, while Toklas, who outlived her "Cuddle-Wuddle" by twenty years, published her own reminiscences in the 1960s.






American poets Vachel Lindsay (1879 – 1931) and Sara Teasdale (1884 – 1933) seemed made for each other. Both were Midwesterners, both had been homeschooled as young children; she was a hothouse flower, he a wild orchid; both made their marks as lyricists. Both exhibited artistic inclinations from an early age: Vachel learned to read using Grimm’s Fairy Tales; Sara’s first word was "pretty"; both were writing creatively before they were out of grammar school. In one respect they differed, however: Sara was a sheltered, sickly juvenile who spent her childhood attended by a nurse, and was cut off, to a certain extent, from contact with the "outside world." Vachel, on the other hand, had such a yen to see the world that, by the time he reached his twenties, his itchy feet impelled him to tramp the length and breadth of America, exchanging poems and drawings for food and lodging. By the time Lindsay and Teasdale met around 1913, both were established literary figures: Teasdale with her Sonnets to Duse (Italian stage actress Eleonora Duse, shut-in Sara's exciting idol) and self-styled "folk poet" Lindsay with his "singing" verse delivered in his trademark "higher vaudevillian" style. At one point, Lindsay bombarded Teasdale with a daily barrage of "fantastic" love letters and always asserted that the poem he considered his best — The Chinese Nightingale — was inspired by the poetess. Teasdale was courted simultaneously by troubadour Lindsay and by an affluent businessman, who won his suit and betrothed her in 1914. News of Sara's matrimony left Vachel feeling "baffled, empty and puzzled." Teasdale maintained a fond friendship with Lindsay thereafter, but was unhappy in her marriage and ultimately divorced. Lindsay, meanwhile, cut short his epic tramps, recitals and lecture tours long enough to marry a woman half his age and take up residence in the elegant old dowager of a grand hotel, the Davenport, in Spokane, Washington. Now as far-famed for his percussive poetry and impassioned performances as for his peripatetic lifestyle, Lindsay nevertheless gradually forsook his life of visions and vagabondage to adopt the habits of a devoted family man. He moved his young family back to his boyhood home in Springfield, Illinois. Against his wishes but out of sheer financial necessity, he resumed a regimen of national tours and continued to receive honors and awards from a number of sectors. It was during this, period, nevertheless, that his mental condition began to deteriorate. He was diagnosed with epilepsy, started to suffer "delusions of persecution," and sometimes flew into rages at his audiences, whom he resented as having forced him into the role of an itinerant entertainer, though they failed to properly appreciate his poetry. Teasdale, meanwhile, had parted from her shoe manufacturer spouse several years earlier and, though managing to publish many collections of verse both critically well-received and well-beloved by the public, was strangely unhappy and given to disturbing contemplations of death. On December 5, 1931, Vachel Lindsay self-immolated by ingesting a bottle of Lysol. Fourteen months later, Sara Teasdale swallowed a fistful of sedatives, climbed into a warm bath, lost consciousness, and never reawoke.





A biographer once referred to the conflict-riven life of late Romantic Germanophone poet Heinrich Heine and to "the manifold and frequently incompatible facets of his personality and work" as a "lifelong search for personal and national identity." A palmist scanning Heine’s hand would certainly note, perhaps with some alarm, that his life path was destined to be splintered into a far more than ordinary number of forks, chicanes and shunts. Before becoming the leader of the Young Germany literary movement and the greatest lyric poet Germany ever produced, he was a businessman, a lawyer, a historian, a Jew who became a Lutheran, a romantic anti-Romantic, a pantheist, and a utopian socialist. Born in Dusseldorf, he moved to Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bonn, Gottingen, then traveled to England and Italy, and settled in Paris. He was considered so dangerous that, while living abroad, he was constantly watched by German government spies, yet his gentle verse was considered so tender and so moving that it was set to music by a train of major composers including Mendelssohn, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Strauss and Wagner. Born in Dusseldorf, he moved in quick succession to Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bonn, Gottingen, then traveled to England and Italy, and settled in Paris. He was suspended from a university in Germany for planning a duel; ten years later he was injured in the hip in a duel in France. He became an invalid as a result of an affliction variously diagnosed as spinal tuberculosis (tabes dorsalis) of syphilitic origin; multiple sclerosis; congenital neuropathy; or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Whatever it was, the grim malady caused a progressive paralysis which confined him to bed for the last ten years of his life and eventually became so severe that he had to prop open an eyelid with one hand so he could see to write with another. Heine famously characterized the bed which became the mainstay of his physical environment during these declining years as his "mattress-grave." During his early days in Paris, Heine lived with and later married Crescencia Eugenie Mirat, a shopgirl he called "Mathilde." Prosaic and unlettered, Mathilde has been a perennial source of consternation to historians inasmuch as she has seemed to many of them so unsuited a match for a man of Heine's cerebral disposition and towering talents. The story of Heine and Mathilde, as Richard Le Gallienne puts it, "is the love of a man of the most brilliant genius, the most relentless, mocking intellect, for a simple, pretty woman, who could no more understand him than a cow can understand a comet." While Mathilde patiently nursed and devotedly attended to Heine's every need during his protracted illness, there entered, during the final phase, one Camille Selden, an Austrian bluestocking and literary dilettante he called "The Fly," who dramatically broke onto the scene at the eleventh hour, upstaged Mathilde, hovered solicitously about the dying poet, and enmeshed him in a supposed "spiritual love." Perhaps the exact nature of Heine's relationship with these women or with any woman will never be entirely clear. What’s certain is that he was a romantic ironist who had endured his share of suffering and disillusionment. He once said that "woman is the best antidote to woman" although "this is driving out Satan with Beelzebub." His poems reflect past attachments to more than a few young ladies -- Amalie and Therese, Seraphine, Angelique, Diane, Hortense, Clarisse, Emma, Sefchen. Heine bequested his estate to Mathilde, whom he called his "Treasure," and Camille Selden did just fine with the publication of her remembrances The Last Days of Heinrich Heine.





It has been said that Augustan author Jonathan Swift had the "moon’s mysteriousness" in showing one face to the world and another to his lifelong sweetheart "Stella," the name he conferred on one Esther Johnson, whom he first met when she was but a child living in Ireland at Moor Park, the grand manor of his employer, Sir William Temple. Swift's relationship with Johnson was the greatest enigma of a thoroughly enigmatic life. Known as the "Dean," the great satirist who was to give the world Gulliver's Travels and A Tale of a Tub, attended Kilkenny and Trinity College in Ireland, before moving to Moor Park, where he tutored the young creature who grew into "one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young women in London — her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection." Swift, a pamphleteer and something of a social and political agitator, was a cousin of John Dryden, a classmate of Congreve, and a founder of the Scriblerus Club. He suffered from chronic vertigo, and lived in dread of losing his sanity. He was "not a comfortable companion"; in fact he could be decidedly unpleasant, a "loathly brutal bully." He was irascible and autocratic, a mean-spirited, misanthropic crank who enjoyed humiliating others, especially those who couldn't fight back. But Swift's inner beast was soothed by the gentle beauty of little Esther, for whom he compiled Journal to Stella, an album of dedicatory epistles addressed to her and her friend Rebecca Dingley, written partly in "baby language." The possibility that Swift may have entered into a "secret marriage" with his Stella is a subject of endless speculation, but his devotion to her is beyond question. Even when a second Esther — Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he called "Vanessa" — fell passionately in love with him and wished to become his wife, he spurned her cruelly following a brief fling. Vanhomrigh is said to have died of shock (and of jealousy of Stella) when he severed relations with her. As a "moon," Swift didn't exclusively show his "dark" side to the world, but most of his lunar phases ranged from somewhere between "dried prune" and "shriveled sourpuss." After Stella died, he lost his faculties, fell into mental decay and ended his days insane. A lock of Johnson's tresses was found in his desk wrapped in a sheet of paper inscribed "only a woman’s hair." On his death, he was buried alongside his beloved, and his fortune was left to endow the Hospital for Imbeciles, a lunatic asylum in Dublin.






Universally acknowledged master of the fairy tale Hans Christian Andersen was one of the most sexually frustrated human beings who ever drew breath. He considered himself unattractive to the distaff gender and did not give serious thought to any need for conjugal relations until the age of twenty-nine when he wrote in his diary "I feel a tremendous sensuality and fight with myself. Is it really a sin to satisfy this powerful lust? So far I am innocent but my blood burns, when dreaming my whole being boils." Nevertheless, he did not capitulate to his urges. A few years earlier, he had fallen head over heels for Riborg Voigt, a local girl who was secretly engaged to the pharmacist’s son and whom she soon married. At Andersen’s death, a letter from Riborg was found in a leather pouch strung round his neck. He was spurned as well by Sophie Ørsted and by Louise Collin, the daughter of his patron. In the 1840s, despairing of ever enjoying the love of a woman, the lonely and erotically ambivalent Andersen conceived passionate attachments to his young male friends Henrik Stempe and Edvard Collins, who likewise repelled his advances. To Collins, he exclaimed, "I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench..." Later he pursued Carl Alexander and Harald Scharf, also unrequitedly. Andersen's romantic ideal was the operatic soprano Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale," so named in connection with the celebrated fairytale Andersen had written about her. In one of literary history's most famous brush-offs, Lind, in rebuffing Andersen's suit, finally wrote to him the words "Farewell. That God may bless and protect my brother is the sincere wish of his affectionate sister, Jenny." Understandably shy around members of the fairer gender, Andersen never married. His pattern of forming infatuations for possibilities of companionship beyond his reach led to what has been termed a chronic state of "sexual grief." Pitifully disappointed in his quest for intimate human warmth, Andersen strongly identified with the outcast and the downtrodden. Many of his fairytales end with inner worth and nobility of soul triumphing over the injustice of arbitrary circumstance. On a trip to Paris at the age of sixty-two, Andersen persisted in his program of virginal abstention. His diary records, at the time, a visit to a bordello where he paid a soiled dove for the favor of twelve francs' worth of nothing but amiable chitchat. At the age of sixty-seven, the world-famous author injured himself after falling out of bed. He was never the same afterward, and expired three years later, bereft of the basic human experience of physical love, but destined for the dubious compensation of adoration by generations of children all the world over, and commemoration as a Danish "national treasure" by an imposing statue erected in his honor in Copenhagen's town hall square.






The conjunction of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett is a tale of twinned eclipses. Monarchs of Victorian letters, the Brownings were sentimental favorites in the public mind, devoted and inseparable Gemini of ars poetica. Her reputation overshadowed his at first; posterity would reverse their positions. Mid-nineteenth century British spinster Elizabeth Barrett lived a life of seclusion in a fusty, third-floor back bedroom in the household of her tyrannical father at No. 50, Wimpole Street, London. Her father, a slave-owner with a plantation in Jamaica, treated his children as property, and forbade any of them to marry. Talented poetess Elizabeth was tubercular, and her illness contributed to her life as a shut-in but, matters of health aside, she was a virtual prisoner in her father’s home. When she became the object of admiration in a courtship-by-correspondence from rising literary star Robert Browning, several years her junior, she was flattered and amazed. Dazzled by the attentions of the dashing young poet, Elizabeth's relationship with Browning quickly progressed from “postal friendship” to full-blown romance. Secretly, the pair conceived a plan to wed and spend their lives together in connubial bliss. On the way to the church to officially consecrate the blending of their destinies, the Brownings had to stop their carriage when Elizabeth was so overcome by emotion and fatigue that she fainted and had to be revived with sal volatile — smelling salts procured from a local pharmacy. A week later, she snuck downstairs and bid farewell to Wimpole Street forever, rushing to keep a faithfully appointed rendezvous with Robert before making a fevered sprint for the coast. The fateful pair successfully eloped to Italy, first settling in a rented apartment in Pisa, near the leaning tower. Sustained by the happiness of her new domestic habitat and the healthy climate of her adopted land, Elizabeth quickly shed her accustomed status as ailing invalid and hopeless valetudinarian. Her letters home to her father were returned unopened. Then they moved to a magnificent new home in Florence, the Casa Guidi, where their son was born. Elizabeth died in 1861, after their love affair had captured the imagination of the world. Robert pledged himself to her for all eternity and died twenty-eight years later. More famous for the hearts and flowers that enwreathed their image than for their work, Elizabeth was the more popular poet of the two during the years of their marriage, though Robert eventually outgrew a dull reputation and finally found his place among the stars of the literary firmament. Bearded, deep-browed, and universally respected, he became a convivial old man of letters and a fixture on the formal dinner circuit.







They met first in Hollywood around 1930, found instant rapport, and remained an item for the next thirty years. She wrote plays about nasty children and avaricious cousins; he was the dean of hard-boiled detective fiction, creator of pre-eminent private dicks Nick Charles and Sam Spade. Besides melding pheromones, the two meshed ideologically, sharing political positions which they frequently put into action. In the volatile climate of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, these propensities often put them afoul of the authorities and, during the HUAC probes of the McCarthy era, Hammett found himself incarcerated and Hellman brought before an investigative committee sniffing out reds in Tinseltown. The pair seemed to have assigned themselves roles in some sort of secret espionage narrative, inserting themselves in political intrigues according to some higher but inscrutable personal code. This murky, moral-political agenda to which they had pledged themselves supplied the cement that kept them close even as each bedded any number of other lovers. In the end, their mutual urge to protect and defend one another prevailed. Hellman's much-publicized memoirs jealously defended Hammett's reputation, both professionally and personally; her insistence on editing his uncollected works for posterity was so heavy handed as to raise suspicions as to her true motives...







Jeanne Duval was Charles Baudelaire's 'black Venus,' an actress who was only too happy to help him run through his inheritance in record time. Baudelaire's beautiful Haitian vamp companion was the perfect fashion accessory for a suave young urbanite such as himself, and the inspiration for much of his jaded, cynical, sarcastic, world-weary verse.





Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Lafacadio Hearn was married to a black woman in Cincinnati — a thing illegal at the time. He left his illicit bride behind and emigrated to Japan, where he married the daughter of a samurai family.




French fantaisiste poet Francis Carco was a committed bohemian and exponent of free love. Novelist Katherine Mansfield was a free spirit from New Zealand in search of adventure and a fuller life than that afforded by her native land where, she claimed, her provincial countrymen "didn’t know the alphabet." By the time she began an affair with Carco during the early years of World War I, Mansfield had already logged a number of passionate love affairs with both women and men. Carco was a wolf and a womanizer from way back, a gash hound of epic reputation. The mutual attraction between them was irresistible. Both had had multiple lovers before they met and launched themselves into a torrid fling during the throes of World War I. Mansfield, while at a field station in France, even went so far as to visit the trenches in search of her inamorato. Then they parted ways and each went on to a succession of fresh conquests and carnal adventures. Never were two souls more eerily alike. But like poles repel. Two ships passing in the night...





From the moment they met in a public house in London in April, 1936, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and ingénue Caitlin Macnamara hurled themselves down the chute of a reckless, fifteen-year ride of desperate living, artistic glory, romantic ecstasy, poverty — often to the point of penury — and boozing. At the outset, the pair led a carefree and idyllic bohemian existence of reading, beachcombing, wandering the ragged cliffs of Wales' wild seacoast, walking in the parks and cycling in the hills. Caitlin did her eurhythmic dancing a la Isadora Duncan. Dylan wrote, drank, published, read, and wrote and drank some more. They married. They fecklessly squandered every penny they got their hands on. He had multiple affairs. She had multiple affairs. He drank some more. She never scolded him for his drinking, nor for his profligacy with money; they knew one another’s weaknesses all too well. Constitutionally incapable of leading a bourgeois existence even though both longed for it, they lived like wild gypsy souls rolling and tumbling from one end to the other of a wild gypsy land, inhabiting a succession of cottages, houses, apartments and garrets from Swansea to Hampshire. He wrote and published and went on tour. He drank to the extent that life was becoming one prolonged debauch. His bacchanalian tendencies inflamed petty jealousies and incited fights over real and imagined infidelities. Worn out by debt and worry, and the demands of supporting a growing family, and sick in body and soul, he started to experience blackouts related to the alcoholic destruction of his brain. One night in 1953, during one of his vicious American tours, he walked into a bar and downed 17 whiskeys. He managed to return to his hotel and fell into a coma. Within days, at the age of 39, he was dead. Caitlin, whom Dylan had once described as being enveloped by an actual, all-but-palpable, physical glow, flew to New York to collect his body for burial at home in Wales. Then she composed her memoirs, slyly titled Leftover Life to Kill.





To this day, Roman neoteric poet Catullus is remembered for the lines he wrote immortalizing Lesbia's pet sparrow. Lesbia was his own pet name for his girlfriend Clodia, whose loose habits and wandering ways are plainly indicated by the title of another of his poems: On Lesbia's Inconstancy. Born at Verona around 87 B. C. to wealthy father Valerius who was a friend of Julius Caesar, young Catullus ran with a fast crowd. Since he did not have to earn a livelihood, Catullus wrote to please himself and to entertain his friends, chief among them being the kitten Clodia who was, for him, an endless source of delight and despair.





Through much of their lives, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender were well-acquainted. Auden and Isherwood met as school chums, and Auden and Spender first crossed paths as fledgling poets. Gay to a man, they did not form a sexual triumvirate per se. They practiced a form of musical beds by virtue of which each, at some time, was intimate with each of the others. This arrangement seems to have been patterned after the classical Greek mentor-disciple relationship in all its particulars. While Isherwood was an early exemplar and counselor to Auden, the latter remained the closest friend and advisor to Spender to the end of his days. Ultimately, Auden and Isherwood paired off in long-term partnerships with other men; by the age of thirty, Spender had converted to heterosexuality and, following a few flings with women, married twice and sired a daughter.




The early decades of the nineteenth century were a time of ferment and upheaval which produced any number of extraordinary individuals. Surely, liberated French novelist George Sand (nom de plume of Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, Baroness Dudevant), who dressed in men’s clothing and adopted a male pseudonym in order to have her books published, must be counted among them. Sand threw herself into colorful dalliances with many prominent men, including composer Frederic Chopin and playwright Alfred de Musset who called such persons as Sand and himself children of the century, the distinguishing characteristic of whom was the temper of "disillusionment" they shared with their contemporaries. After calling it quits with Sand, Musset consoled himself with other entanglements, including one with Gustave Flaubert's former mistress, Louise Colet. For her part, Sand commemorated her passionate liaison with Musset by writing the memoir She and He…

Vive l'amour!