All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (6 page)

Edmund White in
A Boy’s Own Story
puts it like this: ‘People say young love or love of the moment isn’t real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development.’

Casting this reflection in a more worldly idiom for his middle-aged hero, Swann, Proust observes how we elaborate on our loves to make them fit an original template:

Turgenev’s
First Love
begins not with Voldemar’s first passion for Zinaida but with a telling conversation between older men who are challenged by their host to narrate the story of their first loves. This sets the frame within which the main story of the novella, the youth’s and his father’s love for the same woman, is told. But the first respondent, plump, light-complexioned Sergei Nikolaevitch, declares:

This dialogue seems startlingly Freudian, until we remember that Freud learned from novelists and poets. The simple fact that we grow up means that early shaping attachments, remembered or shrouded, are always ruptured and lost. Yet, since the inner child never altogether vanishes, the yearning, the repeated desire, the sense of lack which often enough attends our lives harks back to these earliest loves, as irretrievably dead and gone as those years themselves, yet with the power still to haunt and to trigger how and where and with whom we fall in love.

John Updike reflects on it with his usual brilliance. ‘What is nostalgia,’ he asks, ‘but love for that part of ourselves which is in Heaven, forever removed from change and corruption?’ A loved woman, he suggests, ‘eases the pain of time by localizing nostalgia: the vague and irrecoverable objects of nostalgic longing are assimilated, under the pressure of libidinous desire, into the details of her person.’ Inanimate details and images, hoarded from the past, also lie in wait to come together in the object of our desire: ‘a certain slant of sunshine… a kind of rasping tune that is reborn in her voice; they are nameless, these elusive glints of original goodness that a man’s memory stores towards an erotic commitment. Perhaps it is to the degree that the beloved crystallizes the lover’s past that she presents herself to him, alpha and omega, as his Fate.’

So our deepest and earliest sensations and experiences shape the patterns of our love lives, and the figure fuzzily buried in their depths wears the aura of mother.

It is hardly surprising that the ever wisely wry Nabokov in introducing his Humbert Humbert gives him a mother who died in a freak accident when he was only three. He remembers her as ‘a pocket of warmth in the darkest path’, as a furry, animal warmth which he likens to a ‘haze’ of golden midges above a hedge in bloom at the end of a summer’s day. Though Humbert apologizes for his overblown prose, it serves to heighten the sensuous atmosphere that mother is, a warm blur in distant memory–as much a place as a separate being. Place, too, recurs and plays its part in the arousal both of his first conscious love with Annabel and of his second with Lolita. The warm summer days, the sea and the greenery of the Annabel days become the pool of sun in the garden where Lolita is first seen, the ‘haze’ that is also her family name.

Both of Humbert’s first loves are dead and for a long time it is as if he has died with them. The end of love is indeed like death, a wrenching away from the coupled self that was, which catapults the lover into that half-life of melancholy. When Humbert is woken, like Sleeping Beauty or a character from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, it is by Annabel’s reincarnation, Lolita.

Poe himself offers an early punning double for Annabel Leigh in his poem ‘Annabel Lee’, which intertwines love and death. Poe, like Humbert Humbert, was the child of a mother who died when he was very young. And he was also the lover of a girl-child. In that play of allusiveness that
Lolita
provides, it is fitting that Nabokov’s ironic romance with America and obsessive romantic love should refer back to the early master of American gothic.

Envied by the heavens for its perfection, this lovers’ union of body and soul can only end in death:

Like the paradises lost of childhood, lost first loves populate literature and life. But then all love, it seems, takes on some of its force from being a return: a return to a primal sense of oneness where lover and beloved merge, like mother and child–or brother and sister–and there is no demarcation between inside and outside. We are recognized, known by, and know the other. Everything is shared. In the loving gaze of the other, we also love ourselves: our best self comes into being, one filled with new potential. Existential fractures are healed. That abiding loneliness, that emptiness that human beings are prone to, recedes, at least momentarily. A sense of pastoral at-homeness reigns. If and when the rupture comes, whether through death or abandonment, the suffering can be as searing, as transcendent as the initial rapture.

Part of the popular force of a film like
Slumdog Millionaire
hinges on the way its embedded love narrative, despite early loss, allows a happy, redemptive end. No sooner does the child hero Jamal’s mother die, murdered in an anti-Muslim riot, than the girl, Latika, appears in a mist of rain, to take her emotional place. Separated from Latika by the callous rivalry of his older brother, agonized, lonely Jamal spends much of the film trying to find her, then win her once more–an act which entails killing off his rivals and jumping the hurdles of the quiz show that makes him an adult millionaire. In the film’s final scene, when the two meet again, a sequence of images from the past, showing his veiled mother and the child Latika forlorn in the rain, coalesce into an image of the adult Latika waiting for him on a railway platform. They embrace and kiss: loss and loneliness are made good in this double return.

Twin Souls

In the elaborations we give to our cravings at whatever age, certain templates and themes recur.

However much our social and cultural mores change, however acutely we may know–emphatically so in our times–that in humdrum reality, sentimental happy ends are rare or at least rarely outlast the euphoria of a time-stopped moment, the sense of love as a meeting with the long-sought lost half of ourselves persists. Individuals are fragments seeking to be made whole. ‘Love,’ Coleridge wrote, ‘is a desire of the whole being to be united to some thing, or some being, felt necessary to its completeness.’ People may find that sense of completeness in God, in a political party, in a nation or place. Many will find it, certainly dream of it, first of all in another.

The idea of twin souls comes to us wrapped in a romantic idiom. We may read it as propelled by sexual desire, but it is also more than that, reaches beyond it to a sense of visionary identification. As Catherine Earnshaw says in
Wuthering Heights
, ‘I
am
Heathcliff… He’s more myself than I am.’ She tries to explain this sense of being repeated in another to Nelly Dean: ‘What were the use of my creation, if I were contained here?’ she asks. ‘My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself… He’s always, always in my mind, not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.’ Brought up as brother and sister, this transcendental love has an incestuous core. It is based on sameness and proximity, not on the difference and distance which more usually fuel desire for the young as they wrench themselves away from their families. Soulmates are not always and ever sexmates. For Catherine, her love for Heathcliff, forged in childhood, is not the love of men and women, which is ‘like the foliage in the woods: time will change it’. Rather, her love for Heathcliff resembles ‘the eternal rocks beneath’.

In her
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
, published when she was fifty and hardly a young romantic, Simone de Beauvoir evokes her twenty-one-year-old self and her encounter with Jean-Paul Sartre in terms of twin souls destined for each other: ‘Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen: he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence. I should always be able to share everything with him… I knew that he would never go out of my life again.’

Love as twinning or doubling is as old as Western culture, already there in Plato’s myth of the origin of love. In
The Symposium
Aristophanes, his emphasis in part satirical, tells us that humans were originally rounded creatures of three sexes–some of them double males, some double females, some one of each and androgynous. They had four hands and feet and a single head with two faces, and were so strong and ‘the thoughts of their hearts’ were so great that they attempted to scale the realm of the gods and assault them. To prevent this, Zeus cut them in two. As a result, human life is fuelled by a yearning to make good our fractured, lonely incompleteness, to find the ‘lost’ half of whichever gender, with whom we can fuse. The desire and pursuit of that other who will make us whole, restore us to our original nature and make us happy and blessed, is one aspect of what
The Symposium
calls love.

Sex, in Aristophanes’ speech, comes into being because Zeus, taking pity on his poor, fractured Humpty Dumpties, adroitly repositioned their organs and made them capable of congress. Not that all sex acts result in a transcendental sense of unity, or heal our narcissistic wounds or knit together the ruptures of a fragmented world. But love can, and the all-embracing love that poets and pop lyricists sing does, echoing the ancient notion that lover and beloved are one soul in two bodies.

That Romantic Feeling

Romance may be only one imaginative elaboration of physical cravings, but it has been with us as long as stories have been told. And far from being the women-only terrain contemporary gender discourses assign it to, it has long also been male: from Sir Galahad to
The Great Gatsby
, men have wooed and pined, made over their lives, tempted death, to win a Guinevere or a radiant Daisy, designated as the missing half that will make them whole. What we think of as the self is goaded into being by love, which also promises the self’s realization.

One day during the Great War a young woman who has happened on a job as a librarian in Carstairs, a small Canadian town, receives a letter from a man she doesn’t know, but who identifies himself as Jack Agnew. He is a soldier at the Front. He tells her what books he read in her library, what a change for the better her arrival made to the place and how grateful he was to her. She can’t put a face to him, but she answers his letter. She is lonely.

In his next letter, he remembers how one day, having been caught in the rain, she took the pins out of her hair and brushed it out. She hadn’t seen him there, but when she did, they exchanged a smile.

The correspondence continues. She sends him a photograph of herself. Her interest in the war and her surroundings mounts. The world takes on a new depth. He asks her if she has a sweetheart. She hasn’t. He tells her he doesn’t think they will ever meet again, but he loves her. He thinks of her up on a stool in the library reaching to put a book away and he comes to lift her down. She turns in his arms, and it is as if they have agreed on everything.

There is no further letter. When the war ends, she scans the papers daily to see if he appears on a list of the dead, and finally sees his name on a list of those coming home. In a frenzy and despite the raging flu of 1918, she keeps the library open, she searches for him, is ill herself and still waits. Then one day, she reads a wedding announcement in the paper. Jack has indeed come back, but he has married someone else, a girl he was engaged to before he went overseas. She learns this from a scrappy note he leaves for her in the library. She has still never seen him. She gives herself to a passing salesman.