hemorrhage which so often accompanies the first child-birth had nearly
carried her into the unknown. She realized it at the time, felt herself
going, going, but there was no alarm or uneasiness. It was like fading
away into her elements, passing into something almost as much herself
as what she knew, into something familiar, friendly; going out, but
not going out into the cold; perhaps into the cool, the moist, the
colorful, pleasing half-light, half-life, which lacks nervousness
and pain--the elementary, the elemental, the Cosmic, lacking the
meaningless stridency of civilization, possessing the long, quiet line
of primitiveness! She was so civilized that she could easily dispense
with civilization, so sophisticated that she could quietly welcome the
approach of the uttermost simple, the dissolving into the elements of
existence!
How I loved her, how I admired her! Beyond everything else how I
_liked_ her! She pleased my taste so utterly. She thrilled me with
excited pleasure even at the moment when I feared for her life! As
I heard the sharp cry of the new-born, like a clear figure in the
foreground against the deep meaning of the mother’s impersonal silence,
and rushing into the room, saw the strange struggling baby brandished
aloft by the doctor, and the pale face of the woman in the bed, the
danger of it all, the beauty of it all, almost overpowered me.
And then for days and days I rushed about, doing meaningless but
necessary things; prodding the strangely stupid nurse, fiercely
demanding of her punctuality and carefulness; alert, restless, awake,
watchful, untiring, but always with a deep impatience, always feeling
myself inessential, trivial, doing these necessary errands, but
withheld from her, not able to commune with her, not able to be a part
of her; having no longer any relation with her, a mere spectator of her
importance, not an integral part of it!
I wonder if I have not been a mere spectator all my life!--a
super-heated observer? Have I ever been a part of her real life? Is not
my recurrent feeling of almost intolerable loneliness an index, a sign
of her remoteness? In her arms only have I been able to feel united
with something not myself, bigger than myself, a part of something
not myself, my larger self. Under the illusion of the senses and the
amorous fancy I have felt a real bond. Was it, after all, merely an
illusion? Who knows? Perhaps it was a real union, a real oneness, but
with difficulty maintained, impossible to maintain; continuously,
inevitably falling apart, slipping back again into tragic, hopeless
separateness.
_Chapter V_
I have written something of the art of love and of its difficulty. One
aspect of love, what is called the sensual side, is much neglected
by almost all men, especially men of our race and civilization. To
exploit the possibilities of a physical relation is supposed to be
indelicate or indecent. Reticence and unwillingness is confounded with
chastity and purity. Our early sex relations are as a rule hasty and
unloving, with no subtlety or sensuousness, merely violent, nervous
and egotistic. Sexual life seems therefore to most inexperienced
women, even when they live with a man they love, incomprehensible and
unpleasant. They often pass years without the specific reaction, the
complete relaxation and sensuous-spiritual satisfaction without which
the sexual embrace has little æsthetic meaning.
So that women often live with a man for many years and have several
children and yet know little or nothing of the physical side of love.
And if the physical could be separated from the material and the
spiritual this would be of little importance. But words represent
merely abstractions from experience, which is a complex flux of all
things, held in solution. To the sensitively developed human being a
merely sensual relation is impossible; it is inextricably connected
with emotion, thought and imagination, with what we call the spiritual.
And neither relation is possible to the full unless the other is at the
full, too.
A beautiful love relation therefore is impossible without a delicate
sexual adjustment. It is the basis, the superstructure upon which
fine architectural forms are reared. And it is not an easy thing for
a civilized man and woman to have an adequate sensual relation. Each
human being is a peculiar, irreproducible instrument, different from
all other instruments, capable of giving out music of an original
quality but needing the right touch, the right player, who understands
the particular instrument upon which he is playing. If he plays
artistically, beautiful spiritual harmony results, beautiful relations,
beautiful children, and a beautiful attitude to Nature and Society.
Art is long, and we do not at once make the best connection with our
lovers. When I first met her, I was not at all conscious of any sensual
desire. My relations with women had been casual, fragmentary and
nervous, and I had not learned to associate physical intercourse with
spiritual emotion. So that, at first, our relations were lyrical and
light on the sensual side, playful and athletic, smiling, and to her a
little foolish and unmeaning. They were not brutal, but to her they
did not seem to have any particular appeal. She did not feel the sad,
colorful need of full self-and-sex expression and in her eyes was not
the longing left by long nights of mutual giving-up. It was in large
measure because I had not learned to be patient and quiet, to study her
needs and to care more for her pleasure and emotion than for my own,
not realizing that the two were inextricably dependent, one upon the
other.
It is probable that women instinctively know more than men of the art
of love on the physical side. They know that without the quietness
of the soul it is nothing. The deep quiet woman with whom I lived
unconsciously shaped my sex relation with her. She taught me the
subtlety of the approach, the constancy and the continuation of it, and
she herself continually grew in sensuous knowledge. After the birth of
the first child, when she had recovered her health, how her sensuous
beauty and her sensuous knowledge seemed almost more than I could
bear! How brilliant and sensual her skin, how wonderful her instinctive
art, and yet it was not then the full efflorescence, not yet what she
was destined to realize, when our relations grew more complex and more
distressful, and when she had become aroused by other men; then the
whole rich consciousness developed and I was the gainer as well as the
sufferer.
The first child deepened her nature, and each successive child added to
the content of her consciousness. Although it is getting ahead of my
story I cannot refrain from picturing the singular enhancement, sensual
and imaginative, that came after the birth of the third child, a little
girl born in wonderful Italy. The light and color of her skin seemed to
come from some central sun within and to give her the rich, destructive
look of a glorious fallen Magdalene, which corresponded to the deeper
knowledge within her, of life, of sensuousness and of human character.
Her beauty was then to me no pleasure in the charming, lyrical sense.
There was no light, buoyant love in it, but a biting, harassing
insistency, a serious, necessary yearning which was as inexorable
as the sea and deprived me utterly of all hope of peace and of all
desire for peace. I fiercely demanded sensual misery and unutterable
impossible longing, and contentment seemed triviality, meant only for
superficial souls. And when I saw the look of uncontrollable desire in
the faces of other men, and her quick and welcoming consciousness of
it, I cannot describe the kind of torturing pleasure it gave me, as if
I were permitted glimpses into the terrible truth, which perhaps was
destined to shatter me.
How different all this was from those April days of the honeymoon! It
seemed as if thousands of years had intervened, and that just because
we had been in part successful in the art of love, had mutually given
and taken and partly destroyed one another and accepted from and
given to others, and loved children and art and literature, and taken
as fully as we could what came to us from life, just because of all
that richness, our relation had become one that meant the constant
possibility and at times the actuality of almost unbearable pain!
It seems to me at times that all I really care for is sensuality and
ideas, and to me these are never unmixed--there never come to me ideas
without sensuality, nor sensuality without ideas. My mind seems to have
the warmth of my senses and to my senses are lent a hue of meaning
given by the constructing intelligence. It was this mixed field on
which she and I really met. Emotionally we were often far apart, but
always was this keen interest together in the coloring of thought
and the meaning of the sensual. So that we have been close together
without sentimentality and without what is called romance.
And our relation has thus had at least one of the results that is
highly desirable. It has helped us to express ourselves impersonally,
has helped our writing, our understanding, our culture and our human
connections, our appreciation of children and of Nature. It has
done more. It has helped us to an understanding of the struggle of
mankind, and has given us social sympathy. Indeed it is frequently
true of thoughtful human beings capable of the rounded experience
that is called culture, that as the youthful passions--which are
the slighter passions--subside, as our cruder interest in women,
in boon-companionship, in verses and in art-for-art’s sake, falls
away or dies, we turn to the deeper personal relation, to social
morality, to God. Men of forty who when younger sought women and gold
and distinction now try to dig deeper into one relation, fight with
insistency for an abstract idea, for a social panacea, or for a
religion.
It was not a mere coincidence that after the coming of the first child,
my relations to other things than her, to my friends, and to my work
began to undergo if not a change, at least a deepening. I saw much more
in my chance café companions, in the peddler or the poet of the Ghetto,
in the pickpocket and in the submerged generally than ever before.
My interest in my work, which was formerly light and suggestive, a
kind of playfulness, became more serious. The psychology of the thief
and of the revolutionary immigrant formerly amused me as something
exotic and unfamiliar. The boon companions and the girls excited my
senses and satisfied my love of pleasure. But now all these things
came to mean more to me, to connect themselves with my real life.
My intimacy with her, the fact that I was having an ever-deepening
relationship with her, made it impossible for me to approach anything
else with free lightness, with superficial playfulness. Once for all,
the deeper harmonies were touched and they permeated more and more
all my interests and undertakings. As serious intimacy ever developed
between her and me, it developed between me and everything else. I saw
something in work more significant than art. Writing became for me a
human occupation, not a matter of art, nor of business. A thief was a
human being, not a thief; a drunkard became a fine soul in distress,
not a drunkard. An abandoned woman became a figure about whom to
construct a better society, not a prostitute.
My love for my wife, deepened, satisfied and exasperated with
experience, enabled me to approach crime in a passionate and a
profoundly æsthetic way. It led me step by step into what is called
radicalism, into an infidelity to the conventions of my class. To have
one purely passionate relation extends the impulse to be pure, that
is passionate, in all things. The one love leads one to the love of
all, and the love of all re-acts on the love of one, heightening and
intensifying it. I saw everything in terms of the intimate seriousness
my relation with her had developed in my soul.
Our first trip to Italy when the boy was a year and a half old was a
strange and lovely blending of what had been with what was to be. The
honeymoon quality was still there, but it was more sensuous and more
significant, and for the time being it was not troubled. It was in the
charming hill country where the climate is semi-tropical and everything
invites to relaxation. The many hills are capped with beautiful old
towns deserted largely of their inhabitants and as pure in form and
color as shells on the beach. It represents a lovely death, and over
these hills and through these valleys we loved to walk. More often I
went alone, but alone only after being with her, in her arms always
except on the walks. The embrace was as constant as before our marriage
and far deeper and more voluptuous. It seemed to me in that lovely,
languishing, liquid place there were only two realities, her embrace
and the hills with their swoon-inducing atmospheric mantle.
My feeling for those hills and that relaxing, impregnated air, was
indistinguishable from my feeling for her. It seems to me that it was
the result of it, that it could not have been without it. Without the
satisfaction and relaxation after the embrace, I could not have had
that glorious passiveness, that sensuous receptivity in which Nature
came to me as nothing foreign, but as part of my blood and bone, as
a feeling from within. Already my intimacy with her was giving to
external nature a new quality never felt by me before. How I returned
to her from these walks and how I went to these walks from her! How
she sent me forth and how they brought me back! O, the deep, relaxing
sensuousness of it! The long, languid afternoons, the quiet warm
nights! And in and out of it all was the little boy breaking in on
our luxuries with his clear charm, interrupting and diverting his
parents who were caught in a continuous moment of almost impersonal
amorousness, so connected did it seem with the old town, the sky and
the semi-tropical atmosphere!
As I write these memories of a lover I realize that the woman is hardly
more than a shadow to the reader. Or rather, perhaps, she is what
each reader makes her; each lover--and this book means nothing except
to the lover--will see in her the particular woman about whom he has
built his spiritual life--the woman who has realized for him the great
adventure. I know if I can tell the inner truth to me it will be the
inner truth to every lover. To him the doubt, the pleasure; to him
the hope, the disillusion, the pain and joy, as to me--the certainty
of her love for him, the certainty of her indifference. To him, as to
me, the beloved seems one thing at one moment, another at the next, but
always wonderful, always incomprehensible, and beyond all else perhaps,
strange--foreign, giving glimpses always of magic casements opening
on “faery seas,” sometimes forlorn or terrible, sometimes warming and
infinitely consoling.
The inevitable is the deepest mystery; and the naturalness of her
second pregnancy beginning in these languorous Italian hills did not
take from its wonder; rather the contrary. This time to her the new
life was from the first a welcome thing. Perhaps by now her nature had
become adjusted to this intrusion, so that it was no longer intrusion
but completion. Then, too, the first born had become a thing beloved
and the little fellow had been rather lonely and bored in this to
him unexciting quiet, and she foresaw for him a play-fellow. So this
second pregnancy fitted in harmoniously with what she felt in the warm
surroundings and what she hoped for in the colorful future.
But these no doubt are superficial explanations. Who can tell or
know why she breathed in, so to speak, this second pregnancy as she
breathed in the caressing air of this semi-tropical place? Perhaps she
had become a more unconscious part of Nature which does not question
why the seed bursts and grows in the rich, moist earth. And her skin,
giving light and warmth, and suggesting the rich material within from
which life springs was like the sun-bathed fields telling of the damp
pregnancies underneath!
But a terrible disturbance again awaited this quietly brooding soul.
Into her expectant state our daily interests wove themselves with
tranquil ease; our literary work, and talks, our pleasant times with
friends and all the little things and momentary values which relieve
and put in bold relief the vital things of life. This deep disturbance
was not this time due to me. I threw no cone at her in her second
period of travail; nor did I irritate her sensibility. She did not weep
because of me.
There came a bolt from the void--a cable-gram from America telling of
the sudden violent death of her beloved father. I remember I brought
her the message, fearing for her and for the unborn child, for I knew
what that romantic man meant to her. But she took it in the quiet, deep
way with which she takes all serious things. She said no word, she did
not weep, but it went through her whole being and as we both now think
affected deeply the temperament and character and life of the child
that was to be. I have always felt that it was a deeper blow to her
than if she had expressed it more violently. She took it--as she takes
everything--did not throw it off by successive paroxysms, but wove it
into her complete existence, thereby coloring herself and the child,
introducing somber elements into what her nature insisted should always
be harmonious.
_Chapter VI_
We left the sensuous charm of Italy and went back to nervous New York
and its detailed and relatively meaningless activities, and I again
attempted, as I have attempted periodically all through my life, to
become a part of the machinery of practical existence. But the big
deceptive generalizations of philosophy, which I needed in my youth, as
I have explained, to attain equilibrium, and my subsequent absorption
in the deep pathos of love, stood always in my way when I honestly
tried to be interested in what the world calls practical and necessary.
But to all things I invariably tended to apply the measure of eternity,
and eternity spoke to me through the impulses of philosophy and of
love. So that the spur of practical need, which was keen and constant
enough to have chained most men to the wheel of necessary routine,
acted on me mainly as an irritant, leading me into situations,
positions, jobs as they are lugubriously called, but never strong
enough to hold me there. I was continually thrown off onto the bosom
of the Eternal, where only I found significant excitement and troubled
peace.
When our second boy was born I was exceedingly active in journalism and
in other futilities, called important by the best people, and a great
deal was happening to me, in the ordinary way. But these important
events have left no strong impression on my memory. They are vague and
shadowy and have not the quality of value. I know they happened mainly
because from time to time I come across some record of them. Otherwise
they would have been entirely forgotten; have taken their proper place
in general oblivion.
But what I do remember as intensely as though it were happening to me
at this moment is the look of the second child as he came with a flash
of noise into the world. As the doctor waved him in the air to help
him take his first breath in this amazing place, he seemed to me older
than anything I had ever seen or imagined. When I first met Her she
had seemed older and more beautiful and more terrible than the Sphinx,
but he seemed to go back beyond all human expression and to go forward
beyond it all, too, and to represent the suffering essence of Life
itself! He was neither animal nor human, but the something from which
they both come and to which they both go!
What a contrast he was then and has always been to his brother! When
the first child came, he was a baby, a human baby, and at each stage,
up to his early teens, where he now is, he has been the child, the boy,
perfectly and typically the happy, playful child, the romantic active
boy--so much the boy that as yet there has been little else--he has the
boy quality taken to the nth degree!--a beautiful thing, a ridiculous
thing, a baffling, incomprehensible thing, a delightful, innocent
thing, with open joyful eyes, keen to the color of events, unseeing the
unseen harmonies and discords.
To his brother, however, are the unseen harmonies and discords; the
child of the sensuous Italian hills, the child who formed its unborn
life about the spiritual woe of the mother, the child of sensuousness,
the child of disturbance! I have sometimes felt that the blow that
struck her in the midst of rich peace and joy must have come from some
cold, inhuman artist who saw the tragic form--some smiling sculptor who
brutally modeled without regard to human good and evil, thinking only
of the line, of the possibilities inherent in the clay of life.
Whatever the cause--and our causes are all of the fancy; we know no
other--this second child has been strangely sensitive to all things
outside of him. They have filled him with disease and pain, but he has
seen their form--their discord and their harmony. He does not live in
the romantic world of the pure child. He does not become a Sir Lancelot
or a cowboy. He lives in his perceptions of reality, and his instincts
to construct. He is always building, building, indefatigably, even in
the moment of physical pain and weakness. His mood is changed by the
sunlight, by the dampness, and he sensitively understands the emotional
situation of those near him; and it is on the basis of the way this
wonderful, tragic world affects him that he builds, builds.
I am aware that most people love the joyous and the happy; the robust,
the cheerful and the pleasant, the adequate and efficient ones, and
these are indeed a part of the strange rhythm of life that holds us
all, but to me there has always been a peculiar beauty in those who
suffer--not those who merely bear, but those on whom all of life
impinges, on whom rush the quality of all things, rendering them
painfully conscious and sensitive of the beauty and the horror; those
who are affected by the hidden meaning of every event and every form
and whose structure, whose being, is therefore always in imminent
danger, the meaning forced upon them being so constantly great and
unrelenting.
So a part of my love for her--my ever deepening and increasing love
for her--were these successive pregnancies, these material signs of
sensibility to the spirit of life itself; this, her capacity to receive
and to be affected by the germinating seeds of existence, to have her
being threatened and developed at the same time, to be struck and to
expand, and to give birth to little children, through whom existence
passes and who respond constructively to it.
Why do we all struggle for that impossible ideal we call consistency?
I do not know unless it is because we are unable to attain it, and
our strenuous souls desire the unattainable. I loved in her this
insistent sensitiveness, loved to see her receive and use whatever came
to her, and I feverishly brought all I could to her. I passionately
sought for her the widest experience, used my restlessness and my
sociability to bring to her all I knew and loved and enjoyed. I wanted
for her the fullest life, and yet when she responded to the charm and
power of other men, my emotions were not those of unalloyed joy and
satisfaction! I wanted that set of impulses, those spurs to life, to
come through me alone!