chap5

The great artist is he who conquers the romantic in himself.

—Henry Miller, Black Spring

He loved the trees he had played under as a boy as if they were living creatures; that was on the romantic side of his nature. Merely looking at them as representing so many pounds sterling, he had esteemed them highly, and had had, until now, no opinion of another by which to correct his own judgment. So these words of the valuers cut him sharp, although he affected to disbelieve them, and tried to persuade himself that he did so. But, after all, these cares and disappointments did not touch the root of his deep resentment against Osborne. There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger. And the squire believed that Osborne and his advisers had been making calculations, based upon his own death. He hated the idea so much—it made him so miserable—that he would not face it, and define it, and meet it with full inquiry and investigation.

—Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters

It comes as a surprise to remember that each of us witnesses small-scale tragedies every day. The colleague I once had, who drank himself into an early grave, who knew exactly what was happening, but could do nothing to stop it, just as we—his friends, his family, his beautiful and intelligent young wife—could do nothing to save him. The battered wife who conceals her injuries and her humiliations and all those around her who go along with the deception. The gifted musician who cannot find the audience that might appreciate her gifts, watching television as “stars” are created instantly on screen via a combination of audiovisual trickery, clever makeup, and public relations. Or simply the grinding down of our parents by an industrial society—something I recall now, forty years after the event, so fiercely that it still smarts.

We have become accustomed to tolerating such things—and yet, if these were not enough, we also allow our hearts to be broken, now and then, by a shred of fiction, or a passing incident in what, for others, is an altogether different tale. My first memory of this self-betrayal comes from a Sunday afternoon in the 1960s, when I first saw the film Lawrence of Arabia, an account that I knew was not altogether “historically accurate.” What got to me most wasn’t even an important event; it was a passing moment in the scene where Peter O’Toole, as T. E. Lawrence, comes into the officer’s club with a young Arab boy and the Englishmen are shocked and offended because he’s brought a bloody native into their holy place. They are, in fact, on the point of throwing both these interlopers out when O’Toole says, with pride and defiance: “We have taken Aqaba.” However, what I wanted to know was: what happened next? something I couldn’t know, because the director cut away here and left me guessing. Did David Lean not know that I—or somebody in the audience, at least—didn’t care about Aqaba, that I only cared about what happened to the boy? Did that brave child get his glass of ice water? Or did the staff force him out, while Lawrence stayed on to tell his larger story? I had a hero-complex about Lawrence, even then, because I believed that people like him knew, as I knew, that you can win any battle you like, but you still can’t be in the club. It’s not about talent, it’s not about worth. It’s about who is allowed to be in the club and who isn’t. As it happens, you don’t want to be in the club, you even despise the club, but you also can’t stand it that the people who belong to the club get to control everything. You rally thousands of men to your cause, you take Aqaba and the other tactical prizes, and then, after all the promises you have made, in good faith, the people in the club turn up where the real business gets done (in London, in Paris, in Versailles) and betray every decent principle the warrior class is supposed to uphold—the first and foremost being honor. And the Arab boy probably doesn’t get his glass of ice water, either.

Somewhere between the fictional sources of grief and the societal, lies the domain where husbands and wives take the field. Each comes armed with a fantasy of what marriage could be and, for one partner, if not for the other, a sense of what can and should be settled for. One of the most poignant passages in Henry Miller’s writing is this one, from The World of Sex, in which he pictures an alliance of two souls in wedlock that he himself never achieves, but goes on hoping for, at some level, into his final years:

Once I saw a picture of Rubens as he looked when he married his young wife. They were portrayed together, he standing beside or behind her as she sat for the portrait. I shall never forget the emotion it inspired in me. I had one long deep look into the world of contentment, a world of mutual understanding, of love, of mature bliss. I felt the vigor of Rubens, then in the prime of his life; I felt the confidence which he breathed in the presence of his very young wife. I felt that some great event had occurred and had been fixed on canvas for eternity. I do not know the story of his life, whether he lived happily ever afterwards with her or not. I don’t care what happened subsequently. I care about that moment which was true and inspiring. I saw it only a few seconds, but it will remain with me, imperishable.1 (my italics)

We can, of course, argue that this is a dream, an image from a work of art. But is it really so? For a moment, a man who married five times had a vision of what marriage could be. The only difference between that vision and the lived reality is time. We, who live in this world, consider a marriage a failure if it does not last: if it ends after five years, seven years, even twenty. It is supposed to be happy ever after. We know that’s an absurd notion, and yet we choose to live with the cognitive dissonance. Yet what if we reversed the whole “vision” and called any marriage happy, if it achieved just one moment like the one Rubens and his young wife are enjoying in the picture? If, when the couple parts, five, or seven, or twenty years later, it can pride itself on this fleeting moment—and the others that were like it? Rainer Maria Rilke has a poem, Ehe (Marriage) in which he talks of a not entirely unrelated vision of married love:

Hundertmal in deiner dumpfen Gier

warst du ihr Vergeuder und Vergifter;

aber daß du einmal wie ein Stifter

still und dunkel knietest neben ihr

macht dich männlich und geht aus von dir.

(A hundred times, in your dull greed

you have squandered and poisoned her;

but once, you knelt alongside her,

dark and silent, like a donor

this makes you manly, and goes out from you.)2

With that coupling of Vergeuder and Vergifter, this is an astonishing, harsh passage (and it demands a more detailed reading than there is space for here), but that moment of true manliness at the close, in which the male becomes dark and silent, a kneeling donor honoring what is good in both partners, may just be the counter to the false ideas of manliness that Miller’s generation—and mine, in somewhat altered form—grew up with. Is it possible, however, for a man to rise to this condition of “donor,” and, if so, can that condition survive the woe that is in marriage?

There is a passage in The Colossus of Maroussi that has haunted, and troubled, me ever since I first read it, decades ago. It is a passing moment, no more, a few lines to describe a fleeting vision of a young girl on a street in Athens, but it stuck in my mind then, and, returning to it today, I am struck by its beauty, and by how disturbing I still find it:

How can I ever forget the young girl whom we passed one day at the foot of the Acropolis? Perhaps she was ten, perhaps she was fourteen years of age; her hair was reddish gold, her features as noble, as grave and austere as those of the caryatids on the Erectheum. She was playing with some comrades in a little clearing before a clump of ramshackle shanties which had somehow escaped the general demolition. Anyone who has read Death in Venice will appreciate my sincerity when I say that no woman, not even the loveliest woman I have ever seen, is or was capable of arousing in me such a feeling of adoration as this young girl elicited. If Fate were to put her in my path again I know not what folly I might commit. She was child, virgin, angel, seductress, priestess, harlot, prophetess all in one.3 (my italics)

What is Miller saying here? Could he write such a passage now? Would he? And is there a real moral question to be raised with regard to its content or is everything permitted to the imagination?

Two things about this passage make it seriously problematic: first, that it is not fiction, and second, that, while it is a hymn to beauty in its nearly perfect human form, a spiritual pronouncement reminiscent of Dante, Thomas Mann, and others, it is also, in some real measure, sexual. In short, it is a confession of desire for a girl who could be as young as ten. True, this is neither Humbert Humbert drooling over some nymphet, nor Lewis Carroll at the seaside with his pocketful of safety pins (he used them to strike up “friendships” with young girls who wanted to paddle in the waves but were encumbered by their long skirts). Nevertheless, it is unsettling to read. But why? Beatrice was only twelve years old when Dante first saw her, so whatever evil motive we might ascribe to Miller we must also ascribe to Dante. Either that, or we have to concede that there is no such thing as “spiritual love.”

At the same time, the figure Miller is describing is not the forbidden love from the days of his youth (that is, not the girl with the violet eyes he remembers, both from his own, and also from Rimbaud’s youth) because, in truth, it is more abstract and, at the same time, more real, than “something with a girl in summer,” as Robert Lowell puts it. This could sound dismissive, but Lowell knows, as Miller knows, that she exists, always and everywhere, as a potential presence—and every other lover is an instance, more or less, of an approximation of that impossible ideal. She cannot be held, she cannot be married, she cannot stay—for, as beautiful as she is, she is also a near-cousin to death, your death, personal death. If you see her on the street, and follow her, she will evade you, at least for a time; if you persist, she will take the dark stairway that leads down to the river, where who knows what might step out to greet you—and if you think cousin death is the worst of the possibilities, then this is clearly your first time at the dark end of the fair. She is perfect, and she is impossible—and the only thing you know for sure is that, if you see her out walking on a moonlit night, you do well to stop and watch her pass.

On rare occasions when two people meet and each recognizes in the other this extreme romantic temperament, they proceed to make an exquisite game of the encounter, a game in which anything is possible, even touch. It goes without saying, however, that the outcome of this play cannot be predicted: it may end in exquisite pain or exquisite beauty, but the one imperative is that it remain a game, for as long as it lasts. Any attempt to make it last beyond its natural span, any attempt to incorporate it into everyday life, any attempt to cling, to hold on, will reduce it to an unbearable banality. The great romantic learns that one must reject anything that is societally possible and pledge oneself to the impossible—and it may seem perverse to say so, but is it not possible that this passage finally blows Miller’s cover and reveals him, not as the sly pornographer, or as the Frank Harris wannabe, but as one of the great romantics? No doubt the jury is still out on that, but I like the thought of leaving it there and remembering that, while there is still breath, there is still hope—even for husbands and wives. All we need do is forget the societal standard for what makes a successful marriage and celebrate the many forms of success that couples achieve, on their way from one life stage to another. It’s a fine thing to imagine: the divorce party, where friends and former loves raise a glass to send the parting spouses on their way, without bitterness and with no sense of “failure” (and no wrangling about who “gets” what), to the next adventure in the search for one more instance of the impossible.