Love in literature

What do we talk about when we talk about

love? Early poets reached for the sun and
stars to describe their beloveds, while
novelists have struggled to convey their
'wretched ordinariness'
Tessa Hadley

The Guardian, Saturday 7 May 2011

'Love-language has been pulled differently in different eras between the great
generalising symbols the heart, the rose, the fixed star.' Photograph: Bob
Thomas/Popperfoto/Getty Images
At matins on 6 April 1327, in the church of St Clare in
Avignon, Francesco Petrarch may or may not have seen
Laura for the first time: her skin "whiter and colder than
snow, not touched by the sun for many years", golden hair,
black eyes. We don't know for sure whether Laura really
existed. Some of Petrarch's contemporaries thought she
was just a symbol and a pretext, though on the flyleaf of
his Virgil he noted not only the date of his original glimpse
of her but also that 20 years later he had news of her death
in the plague and a passing remark implies she was
married and might have been worn out over the years with
childbearing. From that moment of encounter in Avignon
anyway whether mythic or actual - flowed the
inspiration for the Rime Sparse, written over the next
quarter of a century: poems dwelling on Petrarch's
helpless love for Laura, his dreaming and desires, his
excited and jaded senses, his dismay at his own ageing and
his grief over Laura's death and on the work of poetry,
forging its tribute to her.
. Love: A Secret History
. by Simon May
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In the poems there's no mention of Laura's husband or
children. Nothing actually happens between the lover and
his beloved. The meetings he describes only take place in
fantasy, in the writing itself; fulfilment is held off all the
way up to the end of the 366th and last poem, where the
idea of a virgin Laura mingles with praise for the Virgin
Mary.
Petrarch draws on the traditions of the troubadours and
Dante's Vita Nuova, but his representation of his
convoluted, darkened inner state is distinctively original,
and tremendous. Somehow his idealising language
manages to also be gritty and surprising, rich with
contradictions. "When I remember the time and place
where I lost myself, and / the dear knot with which Love
with his own hand bound me (he / so made bitterness
seem sweet and weeping pleasure), / I am all sulphur and
tinder, and my heart is afire . . ." Even readers who need
the literal translation can feel something of the poetry's
loveliness in Italian, how the vowel-music opens its airy
spaces round the lament, makes elegant the complexity of
allusion.
Quando mi vene inanzi il tempo e 'l loco
ov' i' perdei me stesso, e 'l caro nodo
ond' Amor di sua man m'avinse in modo
che l'amar mi fe' dolce e 'l piange gioco,
solfo et esca son tutto, et il cor un foco . . .
English by contrast is so consonantal. Two hundred years
later, Thomas Wyatt used one of the sonnets in the Rime
Sparse as the basis for his own poem. "Who so list to
hount," he wrote, "I knowe where is an hynde . . ." The
familiar semi-magical Petrarchan markers are in place a
forest where the weary lover-hunter will lose his way, the
elusive and singular deer who is both prey and fatal
enchantress. But something has happened to the love story
in its travels across time and geography. It's partly in the
sounds of the language, so dense and intricate in the
mouth, and the freer play that English poetry can have in
rhyme. But it's not only that. In Petrarch, the white doe
wears a collar studded with diamonds and topazes
(emblems of steadfastness and chastity), which proclaims
her untouchable: "It has pleased my Caesar to make me
free." The collar in Wyatt's poem declares:
"Noli me tangere, for Cesars I ame; And wylde for to
hold, though I seme tame."
Which doesn't sound like the same thing at all: it seems to
suggest a fraught earthly terrain where love and power and
possession interact, rather than an idealising dream. And
the woman isn't merely the inspiration-aspiration of the
poem's trajectory, but has a psychology and will and
passions of her own, which are part of the poet's difficulty,
as well as her attraction ("Yet may I by no meanes my
weried mind / Drawe from the Diere"). The "Noli me
tangere" reference to the Christian ideal whose spirit and
language underpins the love-pursuit feels more risky,
almost blasphemous, in Wyatt. It might have been written
about Anne Boleyn whom Wyatt may have loved, and
who certainly wore Caesar's collar. (Is it Anne who in a
different poem dies unknown of herself, "dazed with
dreadfull face"? There is a story that Wyatt was made to
watch her execution.) In other Wyatt poems, it's more or
less explicit that the affairs are consummated. A girl
walked in his chamber once "with naked fote"; "her lose
gowne from her shoulders did fall, / And she me caught in
her armes long and small". That's a real chamber, with
boards underfoot, not a symbolic mind-space under a
green laurel tree (lauro, Laura).
This is the double pulse of the expression of erotic love in
literature, between the ideal and the real; between the
archetypal space that the dreaming and the words open up
in imagination, and the strong resistance that life and
other people offer to assimilation to any idea.
Shakespeare's sonnets are structured around just this
fertilising tension. He isn't only torn between the male
beloved ("lord of my love", the fair angel, more lovely and
temperate than a summer's day) and the black-browed
female whose eyes are nothing like the sun and whose
breath "reeks" (the contrast between these extremes seems
almost parodistic). The sonnets' ambivalence is at the core
of loving "mine eye and heart are at a mortal war". A
language aspiring towards perfection and immutability is
entangled in the knotty real textures of unfulfilment,
difficulty, decay. Sonnet 95 is about the fair angel, not the
dark one:
How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame Which
like a canker in the fragrant Rose Doth spot the beautie
of thy budding name? Oh in what sweets doest thou thy
sinnes inclose! That tongue that tells the story of thy
daies, (Making lascivious comments on thy
sport) Cannot dispraise, but in a kinde of
praise, Naming thy name, blesses an ill report. Oh what
a mansion have those vices got, Which for their
habitation chose out thee . . .
Simon May in his ambitious new book Love: A Secret
History wants to trace the evolution of the idea of love in
western culture, from Plato through the various phases of
Christian thinking, via German romanticism and
Nietzsche to the present day. He argues that we have a
problem because "the tremendous liberation of sex and
marriage over the past hundred years has been
accompanied by love's ossification, rather than its
reinvention", and that human love is now "widely tasked
with achieving what once only divine love was thought
capable of: to be our ultimate source of meaning and
happiness, and of power over suffering and
disappointment". Such exaggerated hopes for love, he
fears, can only set us up for failure.
Novalis's Hymns to the Night were published in Prussia in
1800, when the poet-philosopher was 28; the moment of
German romanticism is central to May's argument
because he believes the cult of love was born out of
"reactions to the irretrievable loss of a divine world-order
and the firm moorings it afforded". Novalis's 15-year-old
fiance Sophie von Khn had died, and the hymns were
inspired in a moment when he was "shedding bitter tears"
beside her grave, "which in its narrow dark bosom hid the
vanished form of my life". A vision of Night came to him,
"and at once snapped the bond of birth the chains of the
Light"; the broken lover was made whole in an upside-
down world, where light and life turn out to be the lesser
part of the world's possibility; only death and night which
hold out the possibility of renewal, and restoration of the
lover's loss. In the Hymns Sophie doesn't actually feature
much at all, and when she does she's dissolved into an
idealising generality: "through the cloud I saw the glorified
face of my beloved. In her eyes eternity reposed I laid
hold of her hands, and the tears became a sparkling bond
that could not be broken." The Night is a haven and its
light is the Beloved. Creative love is the daughter of Night.
Poignantly the poetry infuses its deathly philosophy with
youthful ardour and eroticism, recoiling from the terrible
null sum of real sufferings. "Do we perhaps need so much
energy and effort for ordinary and common things,"
Novalis wrote in his Miscellaneous Observations, "because
for an authentic human being nothing is more out of the
ordinary nothing more uncommon than wretched
ordinariness." And, "at present this realm certainly seems
to us so dark inside, lonely, shapeless."
But that tradition in love-literature which sets a
transcendent value on love, merging the love-object with
divinity, is only one element in a developing complex
whole. For every dream of unfettered longing a
counteractive impulse seems sooner or later to assert
itself: the restless scratch of observation, which snags on
real things and difficult "wretched ordinariness". Love-
language has been pulled differently in different eras
between the great generalising symbols the heart, the
rose, the fixed star and language's opposite capacity:
finding words to capture the unique specificity of the loved
one, inside her real moment in history. If all the Beloveds
are fair, and roses, and fixed stars, then why one rather
than another? Wouldn't anyone do? Whether Petrarch's
Laura was real or not is a question for the margins of
poetry. More important is whether it matters inside the
poetry what Laura or the fair angel, or the Beloved was
like, or what she felt, or whether she bore children or grew
old. It has mattered more or less, at different moments in
the history of literary sensibility.
May doesn't write very much in his book about the novel
form; but he ought to be reassured that on the whole it has
cherished less transcendent expectations of romantic love
than the troubadours. (In fact it's never quite clear whose
love-longings they are that seem to May so problematically
idealising, at the end of a European 20th century when our
scepticism has gone through idealisms pretty thoroughly,
at least in serious writing the story is different perhaps
in film and pop music. His analysis ends with Freud and
Proust, master demythologisers from 100 years ago, which
doesn't help explain.) Courtship, marriage and adultery
have been the engine of the novel's plot, significantly
often. Yet there's something in the novel's fundamentals
its sheer volume unfolding in real time, its prose sentences
tending onwards out of the moment, its prose-sound
which can't help resembling reasoned explanation that
makes it tend to act love out on earth, not aiming at the
heavens.
There's plenty of room inside a novel for love's dreaming.
Prince Andrei in War and Peace listens to Natasha Rostov
singing one evening at the clavichord; that night he can't
sleep, he's helplessly happy and has "a sudden, vivid
awareness of the terrible opposition between something
infinitely great and indefinable that was in him, and
something narrow and fleshly that he himself, and even
she, was . . . he felt as joyful and new in his soul as if he
had gone from a stuffy room into God's open world." He
knows next to nothing about Natasha, her separate life
and thoughts (she knows even less about him). Love opens
up for him on to this vision of a meaning beyond either of
them; yet it depends on his electric attraction to her and
her only, her particular slim girl's body and mix of
effrontery and naivety. The transcendent ambitions of his
love are real and not to be discounted even when later
poor Natasha makes such a mess of everything. Confused
by postponement and her ignorant sex-longings, she tries
to run away with another man; Andrei falls back on the
false reassurance of disillusion, discounting the hopes he
had had as puerile (though he had accepted, in the depth
of his vision, that she too was "narrow and fleshly"). Irony,
however, isn't meant to have the last word. It's just that
the story has to move on beyond the moment of ideal
aspiration to its difficult fulfilment in time (and then on
again, beyond the end of the lovers' rupture, to when they
are strangely reconciled in the flight from Moscow).
Realism needn't aim to dismantle the ideal, or prove that
it's hollow. Tolstoy here only wants to capture the mystery
of that generalising, transcendent yearning and then
correct, as the story unfolds, for its likely interactions with
the real. He's like a painter making a mark on his paper
and looking up to check, then making another mark closer
to the way things actually are. Without the ideal longing
grown out of our pair-bonding nature which first dreams
love into being, there's nowhere for its reality to take root.
But in novels, love's dreaming has consequences, it has to
co-exist inside a book's whole length with change and
accidents and the sheer difficulty of mutuality (and
sometimes, depending on the novelist, with disillusion,
contempt, parody irony may be allowed a freer rein than
in Tolstoy).
In her 1995 novel The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald
pays tender homage to Novalis's romanticism, but tells the
story of his love for Sophie in a language very different to
the poet's own. The novel begins not in "holy,
unspeakable, mysterious Night", but with the poet
returning with a friend from university to his family home,
finding them in the middle of washing-day, throwing
"great dingy snowfalls of sheets, pillowcases, bolster-cases,
vests, bodices, drawers, from the upper windows into the
courtyard, where grave-looking servants . . . were receiving
them into giant baskets". Exuberant, spilling over with
their high spirits, imitating Fichte with whom they have
studied in Jena, the two young men advance into the
courtyard: "There is no such concept as a thing in itself" . .
. "Let your thought be the washbasket! Have you thought
the washbasket? Now then, gentlemen, let your thought be
on that that thought the washbasket!" The housekeeper
complains they are trampling on the unsorted garments.
For long periods the world of love has been represented in
literature by those whose focus was less on the mantle of
the Beloved than on what was hidden under or beyond it
on the one hand her nakedness, on the other essence,
light, bliss (and the focus was also on the desiring self
"let your thought be on that that thought"). But the
Beloved, all that time, had been taking care to dress to
attract the desire of the Lover, choosing and sewing and
maintaining the mantle. Once women stepped out of their
place in the frame and began to write the story from their
own point of view (and once their servants stepped out
from invisibility), the sewing and washing side of love was
bound to be brought rather more inside the picture.
There have been, of course, idealising portraits of the male
beloved, but it's difficult to imagine any male ideal,
whether adored by a woman or by another man, offering
to the adorer's gaze quite the same unchanging stillness,
the same rich eloquence of non-response as female love
objects did, once upon a time. Even men's love-writing
about men, including Shakespeare's, has tended to find
the beloved love-object more agitatingly reactive than
Petrarch ever found Laura; the attraction of the male is too
firmly fastened to his being something, rather than simply
being contemplated. And it's unthinkable that Petrarch
could ever have written into Laura what Cavafy rejoices at
having seen in his boys: "desires glowing openly / in eyes
that looked at you, / trembling for you in voices. . ." When
Natasha burns in response to careless, useless, sensual
Kuragin, it ruins her for Prince Andrei, not only because
she's betrayed him, but also because she's betrayed his
ideal of her chaste girlhood.
The Blue Flower is a study of just how the ideal in love
might be interfused with the real, and the real with the
ideal. Sophie is 12 when Novalis (22) first meets her and
determines to marry her. Fitzgerald makes Sophie
cheerful, childish, boisterous, affectionate, reluctant to
commit to words. "She is not beautiful, she is not even
pretty . . . empty-headed, moreover at twelve years old she
has a double chin", the poet's brother thinks. Novalis asks
her to write to him, but her letters are forced and dutiful.
She is the solid object that stops and absorbs his airy
aspirations; the living counterpoint to his abstractions.
Stubbornly she deflects all his attempts to get her
philosophising. "('Should you like to be born again?' 'Yes,
if I could have fair hair.') 'I can't comprehend her, I can't
get the measure of her. I love something that I do not
understand.'" Without her poet-lover to dream her
transcendent mystery into being, would Sophie only have
been half herself, half realised? Certainly no one would
remember her now. Perhaps she was simply ordinary, and
only the poet's fantasy made her exceptional. Or, perhaps
"wretched ordinariness" itself is the deepest mystery, if
love (and art) have only the genius to find it out.
Fitzgerald's Sophie refuses to believe in the afterlife. Does
Novalis betray her memory in his poetry, having her
disembodied spirit appear to him at her graveside?
In All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Lisa
Appignanesi has made a sort of compendium of love
stories, picking them from literature and history and
philosophy and anecdotally from life. The effect of
cramming so many passions all together inside one book is
sometimes a bit like cake for breakfast, cake for lunch,
cake for tea you feel the need after a while for greens, or
a nunnery (although no doubt it all goes on in nunneries
too). What can we learn, from putting so many examples
side by side? If anything, that the forms of love aren't
eternal. Our love-icons and constellations of love-imagery
aren't perennials, they're rather what archaeologist Colin
Renfrew calls constitutive symbols: "in defining symbols,
we are not just playing with words, but recognising
features of the material world with which human
individuals come to engage"; "that engagement . . . is
socially mediated, and it comes about when other features
of the society make that feasible." Desires, having their
origin no doubt in the requirements of our biology and our
socialisation, take on shapes and colours differently inside
each different historical moment. Fitzgerald makes it clear
in The Blue Flower just why love-language in early 19th-
century Europe was so death-haunted: her last page is a
litany of losses. Not only Sophie died, but also Novalis's
brothers and sisters, one after another, in their teens and
twenties and then the poet himself, of tuberculosis, less
than a year after the publication of his Hymns. He needed
to invent an upside-down night-world.
Appignanesi has enjoyed putting some unlikely writers to
bed together; 12th-century Capellanus's rules for love
("When a lover suddenly catches sight of his beloved his
heart palpitates") sit alongside The Rules: Time-Tested
Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr Right, 1995 ("Don't
meet him halfway or go Dutch with him on a date", and
"Always end phone calls first"). "It is terrible to desire and
not possess, and terrible to possess and not desire," says
Yeats; and Queen Victoria rants against the Women's
Rights "on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting
every sense of womanly feeling and propriety". "Happiness
is not the question here," Appignanesi writes. "We need
love because it confronts us with the height and depths of
our being." Well, something like that. It's hard, after all
these centuries' accumulations of love-writing, finding the
new words to express new forms.
May's preferred description of love is as "a yearning for
ontological rootedness". Which definitely leaves the last
word to the poets and songwriters: such as Joni Mitchell,
who calls it "the strongest poison and medicine of all". Or
Goethe in his Roman Elegies, taking time out from his
studies "on classical soil" to spend with his new lover,
fulfilling a literary tradition and at the same time seizing
the once-only real opportunity of love in the here and now.
In the Elegies ideal and real are poised in a perfect
conjunction.
. . . when she sinks into sleep, wakeful and thoughtful I
lie. Often I even compose my poetry in her
embraces, Counting hexameter beats, tapping them out
on her back Softly, with one hand's fingers. She sweetly
breathes in her slumber, Warmly the glow of her
breath pierces the depths of my heart. Eros recalls, as
he tends our lamp, how he did the same service For his
Triumvirs, the three poets of love, long ago.


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