_The Story of a Lover_
[Illustration]
_Boni and Liveright_
_New York_ _1919_
COPYRIGHT, 1919,
BY BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
_All rights reserved
including the Scandinavian_
_Printed in the U.S.A._
_The Story of a Lover_
_Chapter One_
I was thirty years old when I saw her for the first time. We did not
speak, we were not introduced, but I knew that I must meet her; I knew
that love which had hitherto been gnawing in my imagination and my
senses, had found an object. I fell in love at first sight. She did not
see me--and I sometimes think she has never seen me since, although we
are married and have lived together for fifteen years.
Life had prepared me to love. I was born sensitive and passionate, and
had acquired more emotion than I was endowed with. I had acquired it
partly through ill-health and ignorance as a lad, and partly through an
intense sex-imagination to which I habitually and gladly yielded. My
boyhood was filled with brooding, warm dreams, and partial experiences,
always unsatisfied, and leaving a nature more and more stirred, more
and more demanding the great adventure.
Then, in youth and early manhood,--as a student, a
traveler,--experiences came rich enough in number. The mysterious
beauty and terrible attraction that woman has for the adolescent was
not even relatively satisfied by my many adventures. Each left me more
unsatisfied than before. My hunger for profound relationship grew so
strong that all my ideas of beauty, in art, in life and in nature,
seemed to be a mere comment, a partial explanation, of that which was a
flame in my soul.
This explanation, this comment derived from art, while the ultimate
result was greater inflammation, so to speak, yet often temporarily
soothed. This was especially true of philosophy and reflective poetry.
I had no interest in metaphysics as such, but when, in the university,
the magnificent generalizations of philosophy first came to me, I
thought for a time that I had found rest.
Dear Wordsworth! How he cooled my fevered senses and soothed my heart
and mind; how he pleasingly introduced into every strong sensation
an hygienic element of thought which made the whole into warm
reflection rather than disturbing impulse! And dear Philosophy! Who,
when taught to see things from the viewpoint of eternity, could be
intensely unhappy about his own small Self and its imperfections? In
Plato, in Spinoza, in Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, I felt
the individual temperament struggling to free itself, as I had been
struggling to free myself, from too great an interest in Self through
the contemplation of what seemed to be the eternal and unvarying truth.
But then, with returning strength, there came metaphysical skepticism.
These great structures of philosophy seemed to me to be houses of
cards, toys for imaginative children. And at the same time there burst
upon me, with renewed intensity, the world of sensuous art, the direct,
disturbing force of Nature, the mysterious appeal of Woman. Philosophy
had prepared me for a greater absorption in life than would otherwise
have been possible. It helped to make me incapable of what men call
practical life, and made me attach values only to significant things.
And it lent to my most trivial relations with women the spiritual
quality of meaning. Even in the midst of transient sensuality, the
eternal flow of Nature, and the inherent significance of all sex life,
no matter how impersonal and unindividualized, gave a constant and
inevitable spirituality. It was a torturing, promising spirituality.
It beckoned to something beyond, dropped strangely disturbing hints
of what might be. In the midst of kaleidoscopic women, the Unknown
Woman was suggested, foreshadowed. These sensual-poetic experiences
were purifiers of the amorous temperament, rendering it at once more
passionate, more spiritual and more classic, less mixed with prejudice,
with the indecency of ignorance, with unclear as well as unclean
theological taboos. I went through every phase of so-called coarse
sexual experience, and thereby strengthened and purified my spiritual
demand for the Great Adventure. If I had not known women, I should
never have known woman; nor could I have loved Her so essentially, so
absolutely as I have.
With this past behind me--a past full of the pleasures of thought
and sense, of the pain of self-doubt, of strenuous struggle for
self-realization, for self-understanding--I met Her. In spite of my
thirty years, I was as youthful as a faun endowed with a mind and who
had recently partly escaped from a theological conception of life.
From the Present of Paganism I looked back to the sensual struggles of
escape from the secondary results of a defeated theology.
And she! How different her nature and her past from mine! She had
never struggled with herself. She did not need to, for herself did not
disturb her. Imperturbable, she struggled only with her work, with what
she was trying to form. She was an artist, and singularly unconscious
of herself. Keen to external beauty, she was not interested in the
subjective nature of her Soul, or its needs, or how it worked. In fact,
her soul seemed to have no needs. I often told her she had no soul, but
I was wrong, as we shall see.
Along one of the corridors of the world she passed me for a moment,
and I knew that I must love her. She was a thing of beauty! It was
not merely her lovely skin and hair: she was one of those rich, dark
blondes who seem to have absorbed the light and warmth of the sun and
to have given it a definite form which introduced the spiritual quality
of the brunette--blond in color, brunette in quality. There was nothing
bleached about her, nothing faint, nothing iridescent. Her color and
quality were that of saturation. It was as if in her skin and hair
warmth and color lay suspended, as it lies suspended in dropping summer
rain.
But I know it was not her skin and hair that I loved. What I loved I
feel now, though I did not analyze it then, was the integrity of her
physical and nervous nature. She was no self-conscious neurasthenic,
as I was! She was cool, unconscious, poised--cold, the ignorant would
call her. And the Silence which breathed from her when I first saw her
has been hers ever since. Never, even in agony, has she been noisy.
Her deep quiet comes as a disturbing thing, to most people, and it has
been often the cause of quarreling between us--for I, nervous, with
a volcanic past, frequently challenged this quiet soul, challenged
it morally and socially, succeeded, to my immense satisfaction, in
disturbing it once or twice, but being more often disturbed and
irritated myself!
I maneuvered a meeting, and many, many followed, and have been
following for fifteen years. Our first few meetings showed me that
she had no past! All that she could or can remember is that she had
worked--worked calmly and quietly, without excitement. Her life as a
child was as calm as that of a plant. I have a whole world of violent
emotions remembered, stretching along from my third or fourth year. She
has no remembered childhood. She grew too beautifully, too gradually,
too quietly, to have occur those cataclysmic things which one
remembers. And she still grows!
I suppose what drew us together was Wonder. I marveled at her strange
and beautiful integrity, the wholeness and calmness of her being. My
vivid nature, my tremulous needs, my spiritual restlessness, interested
her. I loved her, and for me she felt a deep amusement. The strangeness
I felt in her seemed beautiful; the strangeness she felt in me seemed
interesting and amusing. And for years the only word of approval I ever
heard from her was the word “amusing.” I can imagine Mona Lisa saying
the same word, in exactly the same spirit, meaning intellectually
entertaining.
“A thousand years old am I,” she would say. And I seemed so young to
her; amusingly young. I suppose all lovers are young, no matter how
many years they have. And yet it was I who had definite experience,
as the world commonly understands that word. And she had had none.
And yet she was old and I was young. She was not naïve, she was not
fresh. She was like the Sphinx, wonderful, old, with a beauty that to
me at times was terrible. And I charmed her because I was so pleasingly
social, so civilized, and had so many ideas derived from life, ideas
which pleased her mind and stirred her sense of poetry and humor. I
loved her for the essence of her being, and she liked me warmly for
what I was able to say and feel.
Especially for what I was able to say! How she would listen! I know
that if what I have said to her could be recorded, it would pass as
literature. I am proud only of that one thing: that to her I talked
well--really well--for years. I told her all--all of my life, and I
think it must have seemed to her like the life of some inhabitant of
Mars. Surely, there was in our relationship a deep unfamiliarity--I was
strange to her and she was infinitely strange to me. But I loved her
strangeness, and my strangeness only interested her. Being profoundly
kind, that interest finally awoke emotion in her--but it was not the
love of the real and mysterious spiritual form which is at the basis of
every human being. She felt æsthetically my qualities. She did not love
Me.
It was this which made me bitter, at times, during many years, and even
now comes to me like some essential pain. Quite unjustly so--and yet
inevitable. When I saw awaken in her, in later years, some such feeling
for other men as I had for her, a feeling not based on what they could
say or do or even feel, but on what her imagination told her they
deeply _were_, an indescribable rage would take possession of my soul.
Perhaps that rage was merely jealousy, that loathsome feeling based
on an incredible sense of possession, but I do not believe that.
After my genuine social thought began she might have had all manner
of relations with other men, without deep disturbance on my part; I
might have been unmoved, had she _seen_ me, once and forever! But as
I have said, she felt only my qualities, my gifts of the mind, heart,
and spirit. She did not have an immediate, temperamental understanding
and love for myself! And to have this feeling for some soul is a need
of all deep natures. When I saw this need in her--unsatisfied by
me--reaching out to others to whom she had no _coherent_ relation--only
the mysterious, temperamental, almost metaphysical one that we mean
when we say “in love”--it was then that the rage came upon me! Was
it jealousy? It was strong and terrible, whatever it was, capable of
overpowering all the acquired canons of civilization and making of me
an incarnate, miserable, bestial Demand!
I imagine that at least a part of this pain is derived, at any rate in
my case, from an egotistic sense of something deeply essential that is
lacking in oneself. If this deep woman, who admired and warmly liked
me in every nameable way, could not feel the temperamental stir, could
not feel me as distinguished from the sum of my qualities, what was the
matter with me? What did I deeply lack? I had no crude lack. Physically
and mentally I was competent. I could meet her desires in every obvious
way. Yes! But the Real Self is not obvious. That, to her, was lacking;
that most mysterious, and yet to the eye of the amorous imagination,
most real thing of all, which needs no expression to manifest itself,
_that_ she never saw! Perhaps that is lacking in me! This fear may
partly account for the pain I felt. What strenuous soul can endure
the thought that perhaps he is lacking in a way so deep that it is
unanalyzable?
Sometimes I would think that it was my partly-shattered nervous system.
How could this woman’s nature, with its sweet integrity, love anything
but that which had developed in the most beautiful way? I loved her
partly because she had grown without harm. I had not grown without
injury; and one perhaps cannot love æsthetically, temperamentally, the
injured. My very injuries accounted for my eloquence, my intensity
of feeling. This naturally would interest, but how could an æsthetic
soul love the shattered cause of even fine things? I have never known
a keenly expressive person who was nervously sound; and the nervously
unsound are not æsthetically beautiful, however productive they may
sometimes be of beautiful things. It shows a fine instinct in a woman
to love only what in itself is lovely, without materialistic or
sentimental regard for what that thing may do, say, or feel.
_Chapter II_
Well, as I have written, I met her in one of the corridors of the
world, and I loved her, and I insisted on her knowing me, or trying to
know me. She was working, and I was working, and in the evenings we
met in the cafés and restaurants and we talked, or rather I talked.
I talked about everything--literature, art, sex, wine, people,
life,--especially about life! He who does not know very definitely
what the indefinite word “life” means has no knowledge of what the
essential social relationship between a man and a woman is. A fine
woman cares for nothing else. She is not a specialist. And yet most
misguided busy men avoid talking life to their sweethearts and wives.
They leave the real themes to the unworthy--to rakes, artists, and
philosophers, to bohemians and outcasts, or to the very few respectable
and at the same time intellectual men who are living on their incomes.
And then they are surprised when their wives or sweethearts begin to
see with emotions somebody else! Men are for the most part extremely
naïve--especially good, sober, industrious, business American men.
They are becoming the Predestined ones of the earth, and that is no
proof of the infidelity of their wives and mistresses, for they who sow
must reap, and Nature will outlive the ethical remnants of an outworn
theology. There are one hundred thousand well-to-do wives in the United
States to-day who are deeply disturbed by life, and their husbands do
not know that anything but nerves is happening to them.
She liked my talk from the start. But to her it was not disturbing--not
then--as it would have been to a less composed soul. To her it was
merely contributive. It was one more cool channel to knowledge. From
the start I tried, tried hard, to disturb her. I felt that if I could
disturb her she would love me. In a sense I was more naïve than the
business man! I might have known that love for my words would not lead
to love of me, that through my talk she might love life more, not me;
her love of life, heightened, enhanced through me, might lead her to
see others, not necessarily me! I might easily act as an impassioned
medium to the Road of Life along which she might find beautiful forms
fit for love. I helped her, as a matter of fact, to see men, to feel
their quality, just as she helped me to see women. It is true that had
I not known women, I would not have known her; but it is also true that
knowledge of her gave me a deeper understanding and the possibility of
a more intimate approach to other women.
At that early time, however, I did not realize that at all. I did
not know that I was working for others as well as for myself. In a
deep sense there is a sort of impersonality, a lack of egotism, in
passion. It drives us on, even against our personal interests, or what
we narrowly regard as our personal interests. A mind and heart in love
with life is never merely personal. One of the intensest passions is to
give oneself to something which overpowers one’s personality.
Working! Yes, that is the word! I worked for her as I never worked for
money, for art, for fame, for duty. No one can know how I have worked
who does not know how I have loved. Nothing exhausts like emotion;
especially the higher forms of sex-emotion, mixed with temperament and
thought and a sense of value as all-embracing as religion. I imagine
that the few great artists and doers are they who are capable of this
great sex intensity but who through some kind of happy perversion put
this intensity into their art or deeds and so strike out great forms.
Only in white heat is a great thing created--a human being, or an art
form or a sublime social thought, or an act of transcendent meaning
for the race. Had I been carried by as inevitable a passion to make an
epic in art, or to live an epic in social struggle as I have been to
commune with a human temperament, I might well have been looked upon by
my fellow men as one of the great ones of the earth. But few of us who
have the necessary intensity are willing, even if we are able, to make
this sacrifice--for it is a sacrifice. We are impelled irresistibly
to exhaust ourselves on the proper object, as is the moth devoted to
the devouring flame. To withhold ourselves from the proper object of
passion is the perversity of heroic self-denial.
She married me at last without being more than deeply pleased. My
warmth and my impassioned ideas became a necessity to her. Life
without me would in some measure have lacked richness. It was after a
year of strenuous wooing on my part--a struggle which involved all my
mental, moral and emotional resources. Before she knew me she needed
nothing. I had taught her to need. This she realized when, in a moment
of exhausted despair, I left her and tried desperately to live without
her. After a time she wrote and I interpreted her letter as a recall.
I returned on the wing of desire, and there was a subtle difference
in her when we met. She was silent, but her large, mysterious-colored
eyes glowed with a half-questioning promise. She seemed to be wondering
whether she was destined, after all, to live with me.
We were never engaged to be married. She never passionately committed
herself. We grew into marriage. There came a time when she liked
to have me hold her in my arms, to kiss her long hours. It was her
education, sentimental, sensuous. It enhanced her nature, and it made
her nature demand. But it was tantalizingly impersonal. She liked
equally well to sit by the seashore and watch the waves and the line of
the sky. I have been driven from her arms, where I felt like a happy
stranger, by a sudden anguish which in extreme reaction would carry me
to the arms of some less-balanced stranger, whose nervous intensity
would reëstablish me momentarily into relative feelinglessness.
I remember, on one occasion, when I was in this mood, how I allowed
a girl to woo me. She was led to do so by my despair which, keeping
me spiritually away from her, provoked her ambition. She passionately
desired to overcome what had overcome me. I understood her and was
unhappy and brutal enough to allow her to try the impossible. She--the
only She--not this poor momentary girl--was never consciously brutal
to me, as I was to the other. And yet I constantly reproached her.
I said she had no soul. I said it repeatedly in all manner of ways.
I said it when she was warmly hidden in my arms. I said it as we
drank wine together across the table of the genial table-d’hôte. I
said it between the acts of the theater. I said it in the street-cars
and in the open country stretches where we walked. Did she marry me
partly because of a kindly desire to prove to me that I was wrong?
I did all I could to disturb, to wound, to arouse, to make her calm
soul discontented and unhappy; as well as to interest her vividly and
constantly. I think the truth is that she married me because she had
to. Like Nature I was always there and would not be denied. Water runs
down hill without any great desire to get to the bottom.
These things I said to her, of course, as I said all things to her.
She would smile one of those quiet smiles that go all through her
being, that are as spiritual as they are physical, that are neither
and both. Sometimes in her hinting way, she would quietly suggest that
if she should try to express herself to me I would run away. She would
amusedly call attention to the vanity and egotism in me that demanded
above everything else a sympathetic listener. It is beautifully true
that she holds all subjects in solution, that she broods over a theme
and does not try violently to assert her personality. With her always
is going on a process of incubation. With complete pregnancy of
thought-feeling and feeling-thought, she waits, waits, knowing that
things grow only in quiet. The gods approve the depth and not the
tumult of the soul, wrote Wordsworth, the deeply medicinal poet. It
is probable that the finest women are like this. Holding all things
together, brooding over life, the tumult of the soul is hateful to
their natures,--the tumult which sometimes has even a lovely place in
the make-up of a man who must have violent relations with an imperfect
world. And I do not think that it is only my vanity and egotism which
makes me feel so--my intense and morbid desire for temperamental
sympathy. That exists, it is true, but in this brooding nature there is
something impersonally beautiful, unexplained by my egotistic needs.
The seed as it bursts quietly in spring-warmed earth is beautiful,
not because it does not interrupt us in our feverish futilities, but
because in itself it is adequately and richly significant of the whole
urge of life.
It is evident that I need to defend myself against her charge, that if
she had been expressive, I would have become cold. The philosophy which
I have displayed may not be sufficient. What is significant, however,
and I think conclusive, is the fact that on the rare occasions when
she became expressive to me and to others, I did not tend to withdraw
from her; on the contrary, I felt nearer to her, nearer in a new way,
nearer through perceiving in her a slight touch of the weakness I knew
so well in myself.
Marriage had in me the typical and rightly typical result. It cured
me, for the time being, not of love, far from it, but of the diseases
of love. For a long time I had neglected the world for her. I could
not work, except perfunctorily. My best friends, whom I used to spend
long hours with, I found pale and uninteresting. Books were tedious,
had nothing to do with the truth of life. Relatives were well-meaning,
but boresome. Often I reflected how normal and right the hero of
d’Annunzio’s “Il Trionfo della Morte” was, when, separated even for
a week from his mistress, most poignant boredom would descend like
an active pall upon his soul! Formerly I had thought him diseased,
neurasthenic. But now he seemed gloriously normal; he had the rightness
of the Superman about him. It was only the other day I received a
letter from a lover whose sentiment came to me as something deeply
familiar. “This experience,” he wrote, “has made me even more impatient
than ever of stupids, bores and sillys. It has burned the inessential
out of me with regard to human commerce.”
“Burned the inessential out of me!” Yes, it does that. And it makes us
pathetically dependent on the essential. If we have not that, we have
nothing, when we are in love and without the possession of the desired
one.
But with possession, blessed state! comes again into our ken the
world with its varied interests, and all more wonderful than before!
When I felt secure in the possession of my beloved everything else
acquired fresh beauty in my eyes, and I could be without her and yet
happy and deeply interested in what I was doing and experiencing. My
friends became my friends again, my work my work, and it all had a glow
of added meaning. I was wiser, and happily wiser than before, and
understood more of the nature of the beautiful. The delicious creature
had made the universe more delicious to me than ever.
And the honeymoon! This wonderful time that makes happy and normal at
once--that gives color and joy and sensuous pleasure and at the same
time frees one from the too great intensity of an unsatisfied desire!
The wonderful, ornate honeymoon when the full beauty of your mistress
is revealed to you, but when this beauty has the cooling and pleasing
and caressing quality of Nature and no longer corrodes and harasses
and waylays and deeply troubles! The sleepless, wonderful nights, the
wonderful languid days following, the infinite noon embraces, the
infinite talks and hopes and plans; and the sensuous April quarrels,
the life-giving rain of them, the hot and liquid reconciliations! The
melting joy of it! The glorious health of it; the senses gloriously
stirred and gloriously satisfied!
_Chapter III_
Looking back on that honeymoon now, after a lapse of fifteen years, it
seems so simple, so naïve and so lyrical! It was before the beginning
of what seemed to me later the complexities of life, the intricacies
of human relations, those many-hued and contradictory threads which
render dangerous the love relation and threaten its duration, but at
the same time prevent its atrophy. And in spite of the danger there is
something that urges on every strenuous lover to dig deeper down into
the wonderful being he is living with. It is a sound instinct which
tells us that unless there is development there is death. We see in
all Nature the law that to keep the life we must build up the body,
whether it be the individual body or the body of a relationship.
And yet we, poet-lovers, struggle against the passing of the simple into
the complex! The lover passionately wills the continuing of the same,
but deeper than his will is his unconscious instinct which is preparing
the unknown addition, the fascinating new danger. I remember, as if
it were yesterday, her despair when she first knew she was to have a
child. It was not so much because she felt the impending change in our
relation--for, as I have written, I was not then and am not now sure
that she ever fully accepted that relation--as it was the intrusion
into her nature and life of something unknown and seemingly foreign.
She rebelled consciously against the breaking up of her integrity, of
that breathing wholeness of her being which made life, work and love
seem mere aspects of the same simple thing.
This child was thrust upon her as my love had been thrust upon her. It
was something she did not consciously welcome. And yet deeper than her
consciousness--and of this she was well aware at a later time--was the
need of that disturbing change. I know she wanted the child with a want
deeper than her will, and this conviction has often made me feel that
she wanted my love more than she knew. My love and the children that
resulted were the tools that Nature used whereby she might continue to
live, through change and development.
What obscure joy this pregnancy was to me! One early morning I awoke
and saw her lying asleep by my side, and on her belly were traced the
first lines of the new Life. As she lay there, with this plastic sign
of the coming child incarnate on her lovely body, I was filled with a
wild exultation, and I clasped her passionately in my arms.
How can I account for the intense joy I felt in what was to her at the
time a conscious burden? I did not reason about it. I could not have
explained it satisfactorily to myself. Why should I rejoice in the
discomfiture of the creature I loved? It was perhaps the unconscious
knowledge, the instinct for life which made me ecstatic--I knew without
thought that greater life had been meted out to her, to me, to all. I
was glad that she was to be destroyed, so that she might rise again
from the ashes of her old unconscious conservatism. “Each man kills the
thing he loves,” wrote the poet, but he also renders possible for the
beloved another and a larger life. Thus destruction and rebirth go hand
in hand, and so I could not find it in my heart to regret, as she lay
weeping in my arms.
Life is spiritual. The simple things are the great mysteries. What
must happen is the only beautiful. The accidental is never lovely. Her
first pregnancy was to me a source of never-ending wonder and delight.
The richness, the color, the quiet of it! The sensitive calmness that
pervaded her whole being! The lovely adjustment of what she had been
to what she was about to be. What poise at each step, what breathing,
expanding life! How she seemed in deep unconsciousness to brood like
a spirit over her wonderful body--the body that was as much a part of
her as her spirit. It was her spirit, as her spirit was her body,--both
were different aspects of the same.
It was a time of weeping sensibility. A slight intrusion of anything
not a part of her enlarging nature brought quick tears and seemed to
cast a shadow over the pervading sunlight of her condition. I remember,
as we sat one day under a pine tree, I threw at her in play a light
little cone which barely touched her life-breathing skin. But it was
enough to disturb the powers that were intent on their wonderful
purpose. And the tears that followed were a silent and unconscious
rebuke. I who should have guarded her against any unfriendly intrusion
was guilty of a deep offense. She did not say so, perhaps did not
think so, but her whole being knew so. The sin was greater because not
intended. I and the rest of external Nature were in duty bound to be
more sensitive. And, of course, she was profoundly right. The great
sins are unconscious and inevitable, due to the coarseness of the
Universe.
The throwing of the cone was symbolic of much of my relation to the
woman I loved. In moments of intensity I felt the spiritual meaning of
all Life, and at such times I could understand, at least, how to act
with sensibility towards her. But much of the time I was carelessly
throwing figurative cones, projecting acts and thoughts which were
intruders, which did not make a sweet part of the complex, the total
content of her nature, but were hostile to it. Perhaps it was this
which made our relation so often a troubled one, and which has left in
me a deep, lingering sense of doubt of her love for me. She has never
accepted my Form, my essential Self, as beautiful. Flashes in my acts,
thoughts and feelings have some approach to what is friendly to her
spirit, but the whole thing is not sensitized and intensified enough to
form the blue flame of perfection which her soul desires.
And my coarse conceptions and brutal acts were of far greater
dimensions than those of the cone. I demanded a continuity of emotion
and a constantly repeated experience. For me there must needs be
something significantly active; in me always was a restless reaching
out, a striving to connect myself with something foreign; in a vain,
unconscious hope of finding the rich peace that did not exist in my
own soul, I went out to every passing thing, seeking an unattainable
equilibrium. Only restlessly man realizes himself, wrote Goethe.
Only by connection with outside things does the male come to the
consciousness of himself, if he be a pure male, which is an ugly
misfortune. And the only way he rids himself of this undesirable purity
is by the disillusion bound up in his nameless, continuous superficial
acts. He ever approaches but never attains the brooding dignity and
sensitive peace of the pregnant woman.
The soul of every beautiful thing is quiet. Much of the time she was
so quiet and so unresponsive that there was no place for me in her
presence. Often I went away from her, irritated by her very perfection;
by her self-sufficiency and calm; went away from what I loved and what
I prized, to occupy myself with transient things, experiences and
strangers--with work, with women, and with boon companions!
These were the cones of more serious character that I threw into
the face of this womanly woman! And it is what many a man has done
before and since. In him it is the love of life and of play. In play,
he throws his cones, as the child gleefully tears from the butterfly
its gorgeous wings. In cruel play he seeks and seeks, seeking
self-realization wherever he can find it; going through his Pilgrim’s
Progress, hoping for the Impossible, finding the Illusion. And in
this play he is able to continue, to appear to go further, through
the unconscious help of the woman he loves! To live intimately with a
woman is to learn an instinctive subtlety of approach to all of life,
to work, to the understanding of art and of the problems of society, to
the more complete friendship with men and with other women.
Yes, with other women! This is not the truth as written down in the
sentimental storybooks of life. It is not what we teach our young men,
nor, for some obscure reason, is it what we desire to believe. It is
contrary to the fictions of Romance. If it has beauty, it is the
beauty of a grimmer Realism. It possesses the quality of deep irony,
that she should help her lover to Others! And that thereby Others
should receive more! But the real romance lies in the return to the
Beloved. Her errant Lover is a Retriever who brings rich gifts from the
world to lay at the feet of his Mistress.
As I went in and out of the unformed places of the world, in the
obscurities and half-lights of the cities of men and women, I gathered
up stray flashes and suggestions and carried them piously home to her,
as the child on the beach rushes to his mother with his latest find,
some delicately traced shell perhaps, for her to admire. If I went away
from her, irritated by her inexpressive calm, by the far-away brooding
of her soul, and feverishly sought a café-companion, whose abrupt and
fragmentary experiences combined into form through my eager sympathy, a
part of the pleasure and the impulse that drove me to it was to bring
it back to her.
To bring it back to her, to please, interest and disturb her! To
exhibit myself, my mental and imaginative resources, to arouse her
admiration, to stimulate her senses, to excite her amorousness, to
awaken and challenge her perfection! To contribute to her pregnancy,
not only of the body, but of the soul and mind, gave me a deep
excitement and a satisfaction that passes understanding.
And her brooding soul, the soul of the artist and the woman, working
on forms both physical and spiritual, took what came to her, both pain
and pleasure, and wove it insensibly into the harmony of her being.
At a later time, it was difficult, perhaps impossible, for her to
welcome all I tried to force upon her, but during the first years of
our married life, she took it all very much as she breathed, naturally,
tolerantly, with quiet understanding, never failing to remain herself,
but making room for the foreign things that came to her through me.
I wonder if it is not true that the most difficult art in the world
is the art of human relations. What we call art is mere child’s play
in comparison. And a human relationship is never finished, as long
as it remains alive. There is a never-ceasing, strenuous re-making,
re-creating. It tests everything there is in a man to live artistically
with a woman, and it calls out all the art of a woman to insist that
her relations with a man shall have essential form.
Patience is as necessary to the art of love as it is to any other art.
One may throw off fine sketches impulsively, nervously, but there is
a wide difference between the sketch and the finished thing. We find
painters and writers who have suggestive ideas but who never put enough
enduring intensity into their work to give it essential form. So, too,
in the art of love. The rule in love as in the minor arts--these minor
arts being poetry, painting, sculpture and music--the rule in love is
the sketch. Very few lovers go beyond the sketch. Few have the enduring
power, the artistic patience to build the relation into an essential
form. It is perhaps for this reason that love is not regarded as an art
at all. It is too difficult.
Men and women fall in love with one another. They catch glimpses of
that most beautiful thing--that unseen thing--the soul of the opposite
sex as incarnate in the body--and under the excitement of that
perception, they are in love. But a glimpse is a glimpse, and it passes
quickly, in a day, in a year. It passes if it remains thus simple: if
it remains merely that vision of beauty. For beauty grown familiar is
no longer beauty. It is tedium. It no longer enhances; it no longer
awakens, beckons, no longer leads one on.
So most lovers tire quickly. They know love’s sad satiety, but if
they are real lovers, though not artists in love, they must pass on
restlessly from one woman to another, from one man to another, seeking
an impossible satisfaction, restlessly, feverishly. They are the
sketch-makers. They who have the amorous insight, the love impulse, are
usually of this essentially restless kind. They are the minor artists
in love, not the great shapers, the patient formers of Life.
But to the artist-lover his Mistress is always unfamiliar. Into her
goes all his changing experience. She is remodeled in his eyes from
period to period. He sees in the One the incarnation of the Many.
Impatient perhaps, superficially, yet deeply he is patient, for he
builds his work of art, and is passionately content to build on, if it
takes an eternity.
Impatiently I threw at her all the cones I could gather along the
Road of Life. I restlessly strove to disturb her, in her ideas, in
her feelings; beyond all else I passionately wished to destroy her
aloofness, her quiet coolness; even in her pregnancy I would not
leave her alone. When I could no longer endure her endurance, when
her love of solitude and her almost uncanny quiet, aroused me into a
kind of unreasoning indignation, I would, as I have said, rush off and
precipitate myself into some sort of restless adventuring; then return
and give her the disturbing result of my experiences. But underneath
my restlessness and my conventional infidelities, there lay always the
deep passionate will for an enduring union, based upon her continuously
changing strangeness, the wonderful strangeness, the progressively
beautiful strangeness of her nature.
_Chapter IV_
In our little apartment, in one of the noisiest of New York streets,
she waited quietly for the coming of the child. The place had no
elevator and one of my clearest memories is the significant difficulty
with which she ascended the stairs! She moved with the dignified
slowness of unconscious Nature. We used to walk or rather vibrate
round the block together for her ominous exercise every evening, so
that the child might be well settled down into her womb. Then, after
the important task of climbing the stairs, and the less difficult, but
still laborious preparation for bed, she would lie back, seeking in
vain, complete comfort; full of quiet, full of a wonderful sufficiency,
but withal always uncomfortable, with a discomfort as quiet as her
pleasures! It was a strange, a beautiful, a laborious time!
Then, in the early evening, with her book and her cigarette, and her
quietly insistent burden, what place was there for me? To be with her
always at such times would have seemed shameful, even to me. I remember
how often I appeared to myself trivial and ridiculous, unkind and
superficial, because I wanted to be actively with her, because I wanted
her to be actively with me!--to follow my restless talk, to see the
pickpocket or the Yiddish poet as I saw them, to sympathize with my
quick sympathy for the drunk in the saloon, or the careless girl of my
acquaintance!
Even to me in my eagerness I felt the shameful impossibility of it. Big
with child, she seemed beautiful in a new way,--and what a way! The
inexpressive significance, the wonder of it! So when I went away from
her many evenings, leaving her as quiet as her burden would permit,
it was with a kind of humiliation. Often have I sallied forth into
what was then to me romantic to a degree,--the streets at night, with
all their fanciful possibilities of strange meetings, of mental and
sensuous suggestions, to meet some man in a café, to follow out the
fascinating track to what I hoped would be literature; to what filled
me with sketches, sketches of life, mainly unrecorded, but always
stimulating and exciting.
I wanted these experiences, but as I left her for them, I felt, as I
have said, a kind of shame and humiliation. I seemed to myself to be
engaged in trivialities. I could not help comparing myself, restlessly
looking into the back-alleys and by-streets of the town and of the
world of human nature, with her, lying, voluminous, portentous,
waiting, and quietly brooding. I was forced into the street, partly
through my nervous curiosity and fever for possible glimpses, partly
through my consciousness that she needed more to withdraw herself from
me, much of the time, than to be with me. And both these causes did not
feed my vanity nor increase my dignity in my own eyes. If I had not
been impelled to want these restless contacts, and had been able to be
an essential, integral part of her quiet building in a great process,
I should have been what my deeper imagination desired. I should have
been a part of Beauty itself! But I habitually fell away from my ideal,
was continuously thrown off into the amusing futilities of manifold
adventures. If I could only have been with child myself! If we could
have been with child together! That would have satisfied my deepest
instincts, would have made us one. But, limited by inexorable Nature, I
was forced to try to impregnate myself in a figurative sense, to wander
about the world, led on by the instinctive need of being suggested,
of being stimulated into mental and temperamental fruitfulness, into
giving birth to ideas!--pale consolations!
If I write sometimes in this narrative about the art of love, do not
imagine that I think I know anything about it; nor that in any way I
regard myself as successful in this great shaping process. But I have
had, and have, a passionate, never-failing desire to do this almost
impossible thing. I see my errors and am not sure of the final result.
Often I have stood on the brink of failure, and I do so at this moment,
filled with a kind of helpless dread, not knowing how to shape the clay
of life, to draw the line that is instinctively right, that gives the
vital equilibrium of art. I feel at times that this terrific longing
of mine is a criminal instinct. Is it not a crime for a man to want
to be pregnant? To want to be mutually pregnant? Does it not show a
passionate invasiveness, an almost incredible desire for violation
of another’s personality? Is it not terrible and ugly, rather than
beautiful? Perhaps it is both.
And is it not a terrible thing to be dependent on another human
being? When we find ourselves going in that direction, should we not
strenuously call ourselves to account, and tear the bondage from our
breasts? But the greater the need to do so, the more difficult it is;
it is really taken from our will and we are the prey of circumstance.
I am now writing many years after the present stage in the story, to
which I shall return. I am writing on the brink of the abyss, for
I am at a moment when, my love as strong as ever, I perceive with
peculiar intensity, the loneliness of our lives, the lack of contact,
the complete isolation in which her spirit dwells, and the kind of
shrinking that my approach causes in her. Oh, why do I need the
Impossible? Why, oh why? She so often tells me, and means it, for she
is as clear of guile and as candid as the sunlight, that we could live
a happy, pleasant, affectionate life together, if it were not for my
obscure, metaphysical needs, my unexplainable passions and the growing
restlessness which deprives her of the opportunity for spiritual
seclusion. She needs to be emotionally alone, most of the time. Why
cannot I endure it?
I can endure now even less than before; for my hope of disturbing her
into the need for me that I have for her is growing less, is almost
gone. And I am perhaps undergoing what may be called the change of life
in a man. There is no physical difference, as far as I can see, but
there is a poignant sadness and my vision of the world is changing. It
is all as beautiful as before, but now it is the beauty of terror. The
universe seemed so friendly, but now it seems to me that all Nature is
at war with man, and that we need to gather together and cheer and
protect and comfort one another against the external enemy to whom
ere long we must succumb. We are fighting a losing fight, and we need
sympathy and love and friendship.
It is perhaps that which makes my need of her almost fierce. When the
universe fails, the need of a personal relation becomes so intense
that all peace is lost. It is said that a woman who is passing through
the change of life often undergoes an exaggeration, a stimulation of
sexual desire. And perhaps with a man his need for an intense exclusive
relation grows painfully greater, as the fire flares up into a brighter
flame just before it is extinguished forever and passes into the
coldness of old age.
As I write these lines I know the truth does not fully appear. I have
an unquenchable desire to tell the truth but it is something that
quite surpasses my power of expression. The impression of blackness
that these last pages give is not wholly faithful. Blackness is only
one color in the compound. I see the whole thing as very beautiful,
even separation and death, but I also see the poignant sadness and the
quality of terror and tragedy.
As the time of her deliverance from the first born approached, a minor
note of quiet gayety modified the harsher noises of life. It was as if
the child, which long since had begun to move and stir in the womb,
had begun to prevail, and to insist upon a smiling interpretation
and a cheerful attitude. The atmosphere of children, in which our
relation has existed for an eternity, began to form before the first
of our four children was born. As we both together sometimes felt the
pulsations of the new life, and she the springing within and the urge
and the movement it was the faint suggestion as of a bouncing little
cherub playing with his blocks about the room or trying to dive through
the window pane! And we would smile together, she one of those long,
slow, tender smiles which went through her whole body and soul, and
completely satisfied her, and I would smile more quickly, a smile
tending to translate itself into a more strenuous expression and a
forbidden embrace!
And slowly and richly, like a well-filled argosy, she would sometimes
move with me to the café for dinner, and throughout our talk, or more
exactly my talk, the unborn would have its effect. It was not like the
old days of my pre-nuptial wooing when my words flowed in torrential
masses and the atmosphere was filled with the excitement of half ideas
and amorous hopes. Into these was introduced a subtle modification. The
shadow of the child was cast on the high lights like gray on a water
color, bringing in a transfused softening. And my male companions who
came alone or with their wives to our little apartment, underwent the
same influence, and there was not so much wine and whiskey consumed,
and not so much boisterous talk about it and about. The unseen deeper
meaning made its demand and insisted upon harmony in the surroundings.
Pregnancy came to seem to me such a normal, inevitable state that when
I saw slim girls in the street or young married women who had not yet
begun their process of completion, it was with a sort of pity. They
seemed so wanting, so forlorn and hoping. Where was the male with his
impregnating fierceness? Why should such wanting creatures go thinly
about the world?
So natural and beautiful did her condition seem to me that when her
pains began, they took me by surprise, though we had been expecting
them for many days. It was as if some strange eruption, some volcanic
accident had occurred, something quite contrary to the placid course
of Nature. It was as exciting and direful as a Revolution! Yet, as I
held her hands when the recurrent, ever-increasing pains returned, she
in a strange and marvelous way, maintained that calm, that breathing,
inexpressible quiet, at which I wonder and shall wonder until my dying
day, even though, at times, it has almost driven me mad!
And when, sternly driven by the doctor into the adjoining room, I
heard her low, unconscious moans, as the child came ripping from her
womb,--deep, suffering sounds which did not seem to come from her but
from the world in travail, from the body of Nature itself, sounds not
so much human as cosmic, even then there was no turmoil nor violence
nor nervousness. It seemed deeply impersonal,--the pain, the sound--to
come from the depths of life and death, from a great, a terrible
distance, and without petulance, too deep, too all-embracing to be
noisy.