Yours Ever by Thomas Mallon

Author:Thomas Mallon [Mallon, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37864-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

“IT IS A DIFFERENT THING working here at this desk now that you preside over it.” A prophetic element hides within this letter of Woodrow Wilson’s, written at seven o’clock in the morning on June 3, 1915, to the woman who would become his second wife and, eventually, after his disabling stroke, a secret surrogate president.

Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt was, in 1915, the forty-two-year-old widow of Washington jeweler Norman Galt, whose store did business in the capital for two hundred years. Wilson’s cousin Helen Bones and his physician, Dr. Cary Grayson, hoped the lively, plump Mrs. Galt would bring the president out of the “grief and dismay” that he himself called his “terrible companions in the still night.” A year and a half into his presidency, the same week in August 1914 that war began overseas, Wilson had watched his first wife, Ellen, die of Bright’s disease. In the months following, the depleted president had struggled both to mediate and steer clear of the Europeans’ fighting; Edith Galt’s appearance proved a sudden, wild tonic, beyond any doctor or family member’s expectation.

Edith knew that she was “playing with fire,” but she let her imagination be captured by Wilson’s muffled charm, as well as by “the picture Helen gave … of a lonely man, detached from old friends and associations.” Within weeks of their first meeting in March 1915, the president declared that his “private life had been recreated,” and the two of them embarked on a months-long letter-writing romance that led to a Christmastime wedding.

On paper, Edith professes anxiety about the coldness of written words, but the love letter had always been Wilson’s favorite mode of communication. His missives to his first wife had continued beyond their courtship through nearly thirty years of marriage; he “was never away from home more than a day without writing to her,” says Ray Stannard Baker, an early biographer, “and not mere letters full of dusty cares.” When Edith came into his life, one letter a day was often not enough, and he took to heading what he wrote with the hour as well as the date.

Our image of Wilson as a skinny pillar of rectitude, remapping the world into an abstract rationality, undergoes a comic transformation in his letters to Edith; he inflates like a cartoon genie. Eager to be goofy instead of brilliant, the author of Congressional Government and “The Modern Democratic State” seizes the opportunity to talk baby talk: “you are a bad girl to sit up so late!” Beyond anything, this fast worker (he first proposes in May) is eager to be helpless: “I need you. I need you as a boy needs his sweetheart and a strong man his helpmate and heart’s comrade.” He is “a longing man, in the midst of a world’s affairs,” “Your devoted friend, and your dependent friend.”

The tendency toward self-plagiarism is greater in the love letter than almost any other genre. Compulsive utterance comes up against a finite number of terms of endearment; limited supply recycles itself to meet demand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.