[LINK] "A love of tyranny and a fear of intimacy"

The below is excerpted from the article in the Sunday Star of the 10th of this month, Brett Popplewell's "A love of tyranny and a fear of intimacy".

What phenomenon was abandoned by Napoleon, turned Stalin's heart to stone, evaded Hitler, and led a Paraguayan president to try to take over South America? Love.

As Valentine's Day draws near, lovers around the world celebrate their intimacy. But how did some of the world's most infamous dictators experience the emotion?

Nigel Cawthorne, author of Sex Lives of the Great Dictators, says the average tyrant and absolute despot seems incapable of experiencing love in the same way as the average human being.

"In nearly every case, human feeling came second to ambition," he says. "Even Napoleon with his great love for Josephine, put ambition before love."

"That's probably what set them apart from the rest of us."

Hitler's affairs with Eva Braun and his niece, Geli, have long been subjects of intrigue. In the case of Geli, an entry in Britannica says, "it seems that his possessive jealousy drove her to suicide in September 1931."

Meanwhile, though the story of Hitler and Braun's double suicide in 1945 alludes to devotion and love, Cawthorne says Hitler was incapable of such emotions.

"Eva probably fulfilled his deviant sexuality without too many complaints," Cawthorne says.

But Love? "I very much doubt it."

Unlike Hitler, Stalin is said to have experienced true love when he married his first wife, Kato, in 1906.

According to Simon Sebag Montefiore – author of Young Stalin – the future man of steel loved his wife intensely but permitted his politics to destroy and consume her and his family.

Montefiore writes that Kato was neglected and died of either tuberculosis or typhus in 1907.

Standing by her open coffin, the future Soviet leader is said to have uttered: "This creature softened my heart of stone. She died, and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity."

But love seems to play a more important role in the legacies of some more romanticized tyrants.

The relationship of the Roman statesman Julius Caesar with the Egyptian pharaoh Cleopatra has been explored in poetry and fiction for centuries, but like many monarchs of the last millennium, their affair may have been fuelled as much by the ambitions of two despots as by love.

Napoleon's love for his first wife, Josephine, appears to have been genuine. But in the end, the Emperor of the French abandoned his wife for a younger woman who could produce an heir.

The article goes on to cite 7th century Chinese empress Wu Hou and 18th century Russian empress Catherine the Great as examples of women rulers of a similar inclination, and suggests that Paraguayan president, Francisco Solano López, may have been inspired to fight the catastrophic War of the Triple of Alliance against nearly all of Paraguay's neighbours by the wish of his mistress Eliza Lynch to become Empress of South America.

[LINK] "60 years, for better or for verse"

Thanks to thebitterguy for linking to an article in today's Toronto Star, Noor Javed's "60 years, for better or for verse", which describes the 60 years' worth of Valentine's Day love poems that Canadian science fiction writer Phyllis Gotlieb has written for her husband.

The collection, which Calvin "squirreled away" over the decades, includes at least 60 poems written on scrolls, by typewriter, some even scribbled on the back of grocery lists. One is written like a bank statement: "Here's my annual accounting of my love for you," it starts. Another are the lyrics to a song, "Valentine Cowboy."

"It's been a lot of fun, in her writing them and me getting them," said Calvin, 87, a professor emeritus in computer science at the University of Toronto.

"It's a little too cute," said Phyllis, 81, going through some of the poems, which include sonnets, haiku, limericks and ballads.

One of the poems is receiving a more public viewing this Valentine's Day after it caught the attention of U of T English professor Ian Lancashire. A decade ago, he started a project to create a poetry database online. He happened across a poem Phyllis had written to Calvin in 1969, called "First Person Demonstrative," while editing a collection of poems she was trying to get published. He liked it so much he decided to add it to his Valentine's Day edition of the database.

"Initially, I didn't expect these to be any more than dashed-off verses, just private things I wrote," said Phyllis, a science fiction writer and poet.

But her poem resonated with Lancashire and he decided to feature it on the website. "I thought hers was the most honest, heart-rending and human of the love poems that I have read. I thought it was complex because it captured the shyness, the delight and the long feeling of a marriage that has gone on for 20 years."

Gotlieb's "First Person Demonstrative" is here.

[BRIEF NOTE] "Heart's desire"

In the Valentine's Day issue of fab, Bert Archer has an article, "Heart's desire", speculates about the impact that same-sex marriage in particular and the acceptability of long-term same-sex relationships in general on same-sex relationships, by providing these relationships for the first time with the sort of legally- and socially-accepted structures that heterosexuals have taken for granted.

It’s dangerous, or at least precarious, to make epochal statements but I think I’m on pretty solid ground here. John Boswell and his Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe notwithstanding, two people of the same sex have never before, in the recorded history of the world, been able to marry each other using the same system opposite-sex couples do. This changes things a lot.

Reading articles like Archer's reminds me of the results from Zheng Wu's 1998 Statistics Canada paper "Recent Trends in Marriage Patterns in Canada", which suggests that marriage isn't being so much dropped as postponed, with the exception of Québec where long-term cohabitation is emerging as a common alternative to marriage. It seems that some sort of convergence is actually happening in this country, now that the artificial brakes of prejudice and stigma are being removed.

If Canada wasn't that way, I can only imagine how difficult it would be for me to carry on the relationship that that wasn't the case, if I couldn't write the words like "I love you, Jerry." I'm just glad that I don't have to imagine that particular uchronia.