Love in literature

Tessa Hadley

Fri 6 May 2011

'Love-language has been pulled differently in different eras

between the great generalising symbols – the heart, the rose,
the fixed star.'

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.
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 fiancée Sophie von Kühn 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.