YOU KNOW A GREAT LOVE letter when you get one. It's the one that still makes you feel weak in the knees when you read it for the hundredth time.
Recognizing a great love letter isn't hard. Writing one is, because it doesn't have anything to do with the right paper or the proper grammar or complete sentences.
David Lowenherz, who edited The 50 Greatest Love Letters of All Time, says he doesn't have a clue what stationery the love letters in his book were written on. "It's the phrasing that matters, the deep sense of caring, the belief in the other person."
If you want to know what a great love letter sounds like, the following qualifies, although it's not in Lowenherz's book. (Excerpts from the book can be found at the end of the story.)
"And that night was wonderfullest of all. The light and the shadow and quietness and the rain and the wood. And you. You are so beautiful and wonderful that I daren't write to you ... And kinder than God.
"Your arms and lips and hair and shoulders and voice -- you."
It's part of a letter Rupert Brooke wrote to Noel Olivier in 1911. Of course, he had the advantage of being a poet; she rejected him and he died of septic pneumonia from an infected mosquito bite four years later. But it's still a great love letter.
A century later, in an era of cell phones and computers, you might think that the writing of a love letter is a dying art. Not so, says Robert Schreur of Towson, who has written love letters with pens and pencils, on lined and unlined paper, typed them on paper and on a computer, e-mailed them and faxed them. He still sends love letters to his wife after 11 years of marriage.
"I like how I sound often better than I sound in person," he says. "I can get at more intimate things and not stumble."
The couple met through a personal ad in the City Paper. "In a sense, through a love letter, before match.com."
Sometimes his letter is just a note with a few lines, says his wife, Laura Coleson-Schreur. "But a lot of thought has been put into it. It's about someone knowing who you are and being able to speak to it."
For their tenth anniversary she created scrapbook pages from his letters and photographs, and sent him on a scavenger hunt with an empty scrapbook. The clues led to places that were important in their relationship, ending with the sculpture garden at the Baltimore Museum of Art where they had gotten engaged. Friends waited at each stop to hand him a page. She waited in the sculpture garden.
If she has any advice about love letters, it's "keep them."
"They're written to be overheard by future selves," he says.
About the recipient
It's easier to write a love letter if you love to write, as Schreur does, but it's not a prerequisite. Babbette Hines, author of Love Letters, Lost, started collecting love letters at flea markets and estate sales. She was inspired by her grandparents' love letters. They had exchanged a hundred or so in the three years they were courting, even though they lived only a mile and a half apart.
Some of the letters she's collected are articulate, some are sweet but barely literate.
"Each of them has a level of intimacy implied or hoped for," she says. "All are touching. The reaching out is amazing."
The love letter most likely to achieve its objective, she believes, is about its subject, not so much about the person writing it.
"Each letter is a secret language between the writer and the recipient. It conveys intimacy without revealing intimate details." (See Rupert Brooke's letter above.)
She admits she's written only one love letter to her husband, although they've been married 10 years; but she thinks more people ought to try it.
"No one on the planet isn't excited these days if they even receive just a postcard," she says. "If people would pony up and spend 10 minutes out of their lives writing a love letter, there would be a payoff."
It's 'very brave'
Easier said than done, counters Sheri Parks, an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, who writes about culture and gender. "As a woman who's been swayed by a lovely letter before," she says with a laugh, she feels qualified to speak.
"Love is one of the hardest things to do," she says. "Kids in their 20s will have sex before they'll say I love you. Romantic love is too scary. A letter gives them a little bit of safety, but making that approach is very frightening, and very brave. It's putting yourself out there on paper."
For those who are both frightened and inarticulate, there are professional love letter writers for hire, just as you can find term papers over the Internet. Or you can download love letter templates.
"Over the years I'd mentioned to friends that my husband and I write love letters and how great it is," says Jill Brennan by e-mail from Australia. Her digital book 101 Love Letters: Prewritten Love Letters for Every Mood & Occasion can be downloaded for $19.90. "While most of them could see that it is a good thing to do, their fear of not being able to write a letter they would feel comfortable giving stopped them from taking it any further. So I set about putting the book together to help people write their own letters."
Of course, it's easier if you're already married. Then a love letter isn't an approach or a helpless longing, but a sort of icing on the cake or part of the glue that holds the relationship together, to mix a couple of metaphors.
Counting the ways
Jeff Cohen, the dating expert at About.com, and his wife of six years have committed to writing each other three love letters over the course of each year. They try to be creative with both words and photographs.
"We met in a corporate environment," says Cohen for example, "so one year I wrote it in terms of a performance review." Yes, she received all excellents.
On their birthdays they open one letter, not knowing what year it's from.
While nothing is more powerful or more personal than a handwritten love letter, the romantic possibilities of e-mail shouldn't be discounted.
Hillary Hollander, a Baltimore native who now lives in New York, knew Zack Shankman, then living in Chicago, only casually before they started sending e-mails to each other. At first, it was just one every once in a while, and then 10, and then 20 e-mails a day.
"He became the person I wanted to tell everything to," she says.
After nine months he arrived on her doorstep and handed her a collection of all their e-mails. He had had them bound in leather and had entitled the book E-piphany.
"This is the reason I'm moving to New York," he told her. Last year they were married.
elizabeth.large@baltsun.com
Excerpts from great love letters
Dearest little wife, if only I had a letter from you! If I were to tell you all the things I do with your dear portrait, I think that you would often laugh. For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say, "Good-day, Stanzerl! -- Good-day, little rascal, pussy-pussy, little turned-up nose, little bagatelle, Schluck and Druck"...
-- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Constanze Mozart
Please write me, Pickle. If it were a job you had to do you'd do it. It's tough as hell without you, and I'm doing it straight but I miss you so [I] could die. If anything happened to you I'd die the way an animal will die in the Zoo if something happens to his mate.
-- Ernest Hemingway to his wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway
My body is filled with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night, the violent flash of lightning. The dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. My fingertips touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.
-- Frida Kahlo to her husband, Diego Rivera
Dear First Lady, As Pres. of the U.S., it is my honor & privilege to cite you for service above and beyond the call of duty in that you have made one man (me) the most happy man in the world for 29 years. Beginning in 1951, Nancy Davis, seeing the plight of a lonely man who didn't know how lonely he really was, determined to rescue him from a completely empty life. Refusing to be rebuffed by a certain amount of stupidity on his part she ignored his somewhat slow response
Excerpts taken from "The 50 Greatest Love Letters of All Time," edited by David Lowenherz