What Am I Bid For This Heart?

By Roger Rosenblatt

Had it been up to Oscar Wilde, there would be no auction this week of the private property of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, or any such event. Writing a sonnet in 1895, "On the Sale by Auction" of John Keats' love letters to Fanny Brawne, Wilde compared the "brawlers of the auction mart" to the Roman soldiers who tossed dice for the garments of Jesus.

That may be a bit much, but the auctioning of the stuff of private lives is still a creepy little business. It creates a way for people to die a second time. First they expire when their hearts stop. Then they have a redeath when what was the tendency of their hearts is made the property of strangers.

You may not care that among the Windsor-family items being put up on the block are a pair of silver asparagus tongs, two Portuguese silver Fu dogs and a silver vesta case for, I suppose, one's silver vesta. I don't care either, but I do think there is something crummy about the blithe auctioning off of things like love letters, diaries and personal photos. The Windsors always seemed a pair of yacht-hopping nitwits to me, and I'm fairly certain that their expressions of passion are not to be compared to Keats', much less to Jesus'. But they were the personal artifacts of individual lives.

So was the chunk of their wedding cake stored in a box all these years, which is also up for bids. Either the couple liked Great Expectations or believed in "Waste not, want not," but surely they had a right to have their cake, not eat it too, and not have it sold for a fistful of dollars.

This particular auction represents a rescheduling of the one that was being planned shortly before the death of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, son of Mohammad al Fayed, who had originally intended the Windsor auction to further enrich his world. Now, the net proceeds will go to a charitable foundation, which is proper and commendable but does not change the basic invasive nature of these events.

Every day, it seems, a celebrity's something-or-other is on the block. A year ago, Albert Einstein's love/hate letters to his first wife Mileva Maric were sold at Christie's. A Christie's spokesman explained why he thought Einstein's relativity-theory manuscript went for more money than the letters. "I think Einstein will be known as a scientist," he said.

In 1992 the artist John Bratby's love letters were put up by Sotheby's. Bratby, the Kitchen Sink school leader of the 1950s, had a hellzapoppin love affair with a much younger Diane Hills, to whom he wrote letters, as did Hills' father (less affectionately), as did Bratby's wife Jean Cooke (less affectionately still). "I understand from my husband," wrote Cooke, "the man with whom you fornicate on the floor of your flat..." All 25 boxes of the highly charged mess are now in some stranger's possession.

What auctioneers are doing by this indiscriminate practice is selling all that remains of people's feelings. We learn in science class that no element of matter completely disappears, and if that is true of human beings, then the outpourings of our hearts become evidence of immortality. Take away that evidence, give it up as if it were any old commodity, and feelings are no different from asparagus tongs.

And please don't tell me that these artifacts are important to history. History doesn't bid on them. And if indeed they prove to be important enough, that will take years of consensus, and then they will go to public places like museums or published collections (see Keats' Letters) when the time is right. In any case, the originals will not lie around like shrunken heads on a chiropractor's coffee table.

Auctions are strange activities anyway. Sotheby's invented them in 1744 when a bookseller named Samuel Baker wanted to live better. Since then they have grown into wonderfully weird hybrids of culture and capitalism. In movies like North by Northwest and the Marx Brothers' The Cocoanuts, where Chico bids against himself, they are accurately portrayed as miniworlds of crookedness and anarchy. Brawlers compete in cool frenzies of acquisitiveness.

The funny part is that all this stufflust is covered over by a sheen of hauteur, loads of English accents and names like Sotheby's and Christie's. No one ever got a catalog from Finkelstein's or the House of Lopez.

Harmless snootiness, if you ask me. And auctions can be a lot of fun, which is why they have lasted. But they can also be tasteless and stupid, and revealing of us. When we get all excited about the idea of owning a love letter from a duchess to a duke, we ought to be embarrassed; it simply shows us up as dirty little snoops.

On July 25, 1819, Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne: "My sweet girl...I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. I hate the world." Going once? Going twice?