In a kind of metaphysical despair how often did I try to rid myself of
underlying memory! to be a rebel to the soul itself, to live in the
dry, hard moment, without fringe or atmosphere!--trailing on with me
none of the long reaches of the past! And how often has my unconscious
demand for unity kept me from realizing my deliberate desire to kill
the soul.
In the arms of other women I have attempted to deny the soul. I have
longed to live as if I had no essential memory; as if there were
no deep instinct in me to build my life of values about a central
principle. When I failed--as I always have--I have sometimes wept
bitter tears, tears falling because of my inability to break up my
own integrity. I have been with women whom I liked and admired, with
whom I wanted to have an absolute and refreshing intimacy. I have
sometimes felt that my salvation depended on being able to give myself
completely to another woman, and I have at times tried desperately to
do so, but She always stood between, invisible, silent, representing
for me the eternal principle of continuity in emotion, insisting on the
Memory-Soul, demanding, without intending to, a monogamy deeper than
that based on convention or law.
Demanding this deeper monogamy, not only without intending to, but
even without understanding the nature of monogamy when it concerns the
spirit. She made the deeper monogamy necessary for me, but she did
not understand its nature! How often did she wonder at the character
of my love for her! Her large, frank, mysterious eyes glowed with a
kind of contemplative examination. I was a curious and interesting
phenomenon--sometimes beautiful and attractive to her, sometimes
irritating and unpleasant--but always incomprehensible was the nature
of my love, perhaps the nature of Love itself!
If she had at any one moment understood this inevitable bondage of my
spirit, a bondage which was independent of any of the conventional
expressions of fidelity, a bondage bound up with my feeling about
myself and all of life, she would have understood the reason for my
jealousy.
I was jealous because she was not bound in the same deep, independent
way! independent of conventions, bound by the essential law of
the spirit. It would have been easy for me to endure what is
called infidelity had the real, unconscious infidelity not been so
transparently present. A warm friendship with another man involving
sexual relationship would have met my growing social rebelliousness,
and would have been eventually recognized by me as not inconsistent
with our relation, had that relation ever been securely established.
To see in her eyes a temperamental forgetfulness of me and a vague
imaginative hope of relationship with an impossibly charming uninjured
masculine expression of God brought me back with an indescribable pang
to my own inherent weaknesses, my lack of nervous integrity and to the
impossibility of attaining that spiritual unity in sex which to me my
relation to her had always idealistically meant.
I wonder if every lover does not clearly understand me! Am I not here
writing the autobiography of every man as concerns his love relation? I
think these memoirs are no more true of me than of any one who has felt
the full possibility of a human relation with a being of the opposite
sex.
_Chapter VIII_
Our second child, the child of her greatest pain, the child bound up
with the sensuous Italian hills, was seriously ill at this period.
Almost every moment since that time he has been struggling between
the dissolution of his being and its regeneration. The full beauty of
Her would never have been fully revealed had it not been for the full
pain of this sensitive child! He with his precarious and tremulous
marvelousness was a product of her unconscious richness. I have now
fully known the hopeless superficiality of the lover who looks to joy
as the distinctive fruit of his relation; and of him who thinks himself
nearer his childless mistress than to the mother of his children. Every
new link of the beloved with the wider life gives her greater beauty
and meaning, and the perception of her interrelation with all of Nature
lends to her original appeal a deep structural power that becomes
identified with the total love of life.
Things grew constantly more complex for us. Practical difficulties and
trying illness, my growing relations with the rebels whose philosophy
became a disturbing factor in our union, and its consequent effect on
her, these weavings and developments seemed to carry us to a point, an
infinity of moral distance from the simple sensuous honeymoon!--giving,
however, to that simple sensuousness a new exasperation and intensity.
Especially was this true with her. Her temperamental coolness at times
quite vanished in the midst of her deep woe and her growing excitement
of life. The possibility of an unknown lover and the tragedy of
childhood woke her now to an occasional amorous expression in which
she gave herself with the last, sad, wonderful giving!
And thus I reaped the painful joy as well as the pleasurable pain of
the new stirrings of her nature toward others! And as those stirrings
brought more strenuous disturbance between us, so strenuous that they
might have burst asunder the relation, the new additions, the children,
the practical difficulties, the growing, deepening relations and
experiences brought in a counteracting intimacy which prevented the
break between us.
If our relation had remained simple it might not have endured. It
could not have endured had it not developed, changed, and taken into
it the richness of the outside world. It grew to be so manifold, so
connected with all else, that the disturbances of egotistic strife
were gathered up, controlled and harmonized by the total structure of
our existences--as a sound which may be a harsh discord in a simple
harmony is a beautiful part of a more complex symphony.
At the most intense point of my absorption in the rebellious victims of
the industrial despotism of our day and in their resulting philosophy
of life, she and the two children were away for several months, leaving
me excitedly living with my new friends. It was the first time we had
been separated for more than a day or two, and in my feeling we were
not separated then, for I poured out to her in letters the emotional
meaning of my life among the social rebels. These letters were full
of an exalted excitement, of a vivid hope for an extended fruitful
liberty revivifying and regenerating society, and of a direct appeal
and challenge to her, demanding a continuance of the Great Adventure,
and exhorting her to live freely and to love me all the more!
With me this time of separation was one of mental excitement and
imaginative adventure, adventure with ideas, and with men and women.
There was no deep relation, physical or otherwise, with any woman, but
I touched and experimented and wondered and glimpsed the human and
social vistas that were opened to me. And I passed on my impulsive
suggestions to her!
And then, just before I went to her and the children again, a letter
came telling of how she had met a man who moved her in a strong,
primitive way. He had a root-like, sensual charm for her, she wrote;
there was a something in him which needed of her and made her need
of him; he was lonely and unsocial and graceless, remote and bad,
excitingly, refreshingly bad, and me she accused of being good and that
was rather stale and dull, and touched with life’s too-refined food and
not with the stimulating salt of the earth. In him was the stimulating
salt of the earth!
Again, more strongly than ever, there came in me the deep
reverberations of a nameless jealousy! How weak were my ideas when my
fundamental feelings were aroused! Nameless it was, for we have as yet
no name for a jealousy which doubts and despises itself, a jealousy
mixed with elation and approval of its cause! In the grip of the pang
I tried to justify myself. Oh, why need she reject me at every new
out-going? Why compare me unfavorably? Again came to me the old deep
wound; she had never seen me! never had liked my real self. Again the
intolerable pain of seeing that she had never really given herself to
me!
She met me at the railroad station. As she came quietly, calmly and
cordially towards me, how wonderful, how strong and self-sufficient she
seemed! A new life, which perhaps came from the sense of having a new
lover, breathed through her, and lent an enhanced vitality; and to have
the new without eliminating the old, this was a fructifying hope in
her, a hope I should have welcomed, for it was of the bone of my theory
and of my new ideal for civilization. I had the grace at any rate to
see her as wonderful. A fresh intensity of liking was added to my love,
and for weeks I devoted myself to her with a devouring passion that
knew no bounds.
It was a passion full of disturbance and moral agony. Her cool ability
to compare him with me, the new with the old, as if we stood on an
equality in her feeling, this drove me almost insane!
By nature she was beautifully, cruelly frank; and I with an idealistic
instinct for self-torture encouraged and fostered this tendency natural
to her. It was an unconscious cruelty, due to that seclusion of her
spirit which shut her from a quick, alert knowledge of the state of
feeling in the other person. I demanded from her on this occasion an
entire, detailed account of her relation with the other man, and
she, to my indescribable pain, responded with a lucid exactness which
had its fascination, too. Indeed, she never was more desirable to me
than when she seemed, through some excluding instinct for another,
infinitely remote. I might hate her, but she appeared then as a
resplendent being.
I saw from what she coolly told me that she was prepared to give him
whatever he needed or asked. Just because of her aloofness she was
capable of a rich though cool sympathy which saw him as beautiful
partly because he needed--a strong being who needed--who seemed to need
her. I felt the beauty of her attitude. To be ready always to meet a
need is beautiful. Theoretically and even emotionally I subscribed,
but why, oh, why, had she through all these long years never met
my completer need with an absoluteness which would have calmed and
controlled and rendered for me quite harmless her relations with
others?
So I felt the beauty and the limitation at once--the beauty of her
feeling for him, and the terrible emotional forgetfulness of me! How
the temperamental memory dropped out or had never been for the intenser
values of our life together! Before my fierce, uncontrolled reproaches
she scornfully called attention to my inconsistency--that made me think
and desire in one direction and passionately act in the opposite. She
cast up to me my physical relations with women and expressed with cool
completeness her temporary contempt for me. He seemed so noble in
comparison, for the lover in a much more simple relation, always has
the advantage in apparent nobility, over the husband.
And I retorted with what I think was not entire hypocrisy. Despairingly
and passionately I insisted that she had as yet shown herself incapable
of giving to others without taking from the relation with me that my
soul demanded. Never, I repeated, had I been able to forget, even for
a moment, even in the arms of another woman, my bond with her; even
when I desired to forget it, this spiritual love, stronger than death,
was unshaken; its strength was even more conscious to me at such times.
I was then more aware of it, of its indestructibility, than ever.
But with her it was different, I insisted. Had she ever loved me in
that strange, temperamental way, had she ever had that passionate
liking for my real self, independent of my qualities, she would have
been incapable of spiritual infidelity; no matter what her friendly
actions had been, no matter how technically and conventionally
unfaithful she had been, in moments of inevitable sexual movements.
Over and over again I vehemently asserted the difference between the
conventions of her sex and of mine, conventions that I hated and
wished undone and obliterated from society; but which nevertheless
existed and which were a painful element in every human relation. I
pointed out how difficult it is for a woman to give herself without
the deeper infidelity, for she is told by society that unless she
loves when she gives herself, she is evil and unworthy, abandoned; and
that that terrible and ugly convention is a corrosive reality even
to strong-minded, humorous and emancipated women. I had hoped she,
the woman I loved, could rise above this crassly physical measure of
virtue, but whenever it came to the test I had seen that when she began
to be intimate, or to think of intimacy with another man, she tended
to forget her spiritual bond with me. Was it because of this damnable
social convention, or because she had never felt that bond? Between
these alternatives I passionately vacillated, self-torturing, helpless,
morally unattractive, undignified, the ugly incarnation of an extreme
unsatisfied need!
One day she asked me, as she had asked me before, not to come home that
evening until late. She wanted to spend it alone with him. She wanted
a relation in which I could be no part, which could not be if I were
there, something excluding me! Dumb rage took possession of me, but at
the same time I longed to take the strong and independent attitude, the
attitude that might win myself for myself, that might win the greater
Her for me--the Her for me that I had never had!
So I went away and dined and spent the evening in a gathering of men
and women who lightly talked of love and freedom and society. As I
looked on these faces and heard not what they said, I wondered if they
felt as I felt, if their lives were as mine, and I knew instinctively
that they were; I knew that all lovers understand and that this book is
a universal book, that all human beings who feel at all must feel as I
feel. In my mind and senses, in my conscious self and in the clearness
of my definite thoughts, I was with her and him--not with these my
talking brothers and sisters whose faces only I saw, for their faces,
not their words, mirrored my soul. Did her being remember me? Doubt of
her and doubt of myself came with alternating violence and when I went
home I was completely exhausted.
I found her proud and silent, instinct with that torturing and amazing
recessional remoteness which was of her inner being, of the inner being
of all things. She looked at me with quiet, searching questionings, as
if she were looking deep into my nature and wondering if there were any
consistency there, anything that remained and endured, anything that
was necessary, after all that was conventional and accidental and vain
and merely respectable had passed. She was deeply serious and it was
with a certain quiet anxiety that she met me.
But her quiet passed into silent reproach as I nervously demanded talk
from her. She withdrew into that infinity of distance that I knew and
hated, and refused to answer my violent demand to tell me all that had
happened between her and him. The strong part for me to have taken was
dignified trust, an obvious confidence that the best existed between us
and was inalienable. But I did not have that trust. That confidence was
lacking in me and I was not strong and clever enough to assume it.
So she with clear disappointment was obstinately silent, and this in
spite of my growing excitement and violence. And suddenly something
happened which had never happened before and never since, although
in after years even more acute crises arose; without premeditation I
took her by the throat! I did not know I was doing it until I caught
myself in the act. Never had the possibility of using physical violence
occurred to me. In my consciousness it was incredible--but here it
happened without consciousness! The underlying brute in me terrified
me, even in the act itself! At that moment I understood murder, and
knew that assassination might become inevitable for any one at any
moment.
Terror at myself was followed by surprise at the way she took it.
She made no resistance, but in a deep quiet whisper she breathed my
name. Her eyes grew big and a profound wonder was in that silent sound
that seemed to come from all of her. I think the perception that I
was capable of absolute unreason appealed in some primitive way to
her imagination. Me she had always regarded as a finally civilized
creature, analytical, seeking reason and sophistication. The passion
which was me she had perhaps never so clearly felt. At any rate I
sensed with a kind of shameful pride that she was gazing at me as at an
interesting stranger. Not the slightest touch of fear was in her look,
but a wonderful quiet excitement dominated her.
Why was it that, in after years, when the waves of passion came on
me perhaps even more strongly, I never again resorted to physical
violence? It may be the shock to myself when I felt what I was capable
of; perhaps it was the contempt that must be ours when we use the
uttermost weapon without reserve. To lose all possible control is the
final degradation of the soul. And she, too, never again used her final
weapon--impenetrable silence to the same terrible degree. Her silence
was with her as unreasonable, as much a part of primitive instinct,
as was my violence. And she had on that occasion indulged her form of
unreasonable violence to the limit. And my violence had been born of
hers. I think at that moment a new fear of ourselves was born in each,
and that although we did not then know it we were nearer together than
ever before.
At that moment we felt the degree of savageness which each could show
the other; and the first symbolic response was a wild, fierce embrace,
mordant, painful, without limit, sad with passion, born of the new
element of recognized mutual strangeness that had been excitingly
revealed to us. And in the languid, unnervous reconciliation that
followed, the wonderful complete peace, she quietly and fully told me
what I had so fiercely needed to know; and I remember how ashamed I was
of my relief when I knew that she had been unable to give herself to
him, and at the same time of a certain vague disappointment; perhaps
because she was still finally untested and doubt of the inalienable
bond continued its periodic possession.
_Chapter IX_
Then there came three years abroad. Economic necessity was removed
to a point where we felt we could devote ourselves for a time to
contemplative work--I to those psychological studies of temperament
which were so fascinating to me, she to the forming of her experience
into stories of human life. Dwelling as we both did in our writing on
intimate nervous relations undoubtedly helped to make us more fully
conscious of our own relation: and what added still farther to this
awareness of our bond was my almost constant presence in the family.
This had and has always been so with me, with some brief interruptions.
Men who go regularly to their office and are only with their wives
and children in the evenings and on holidays do not fully taste the
domestic reality nor is made the full test of the personal relation.
My being with her and the children was irregular but frequent and
extended. All day and all night for weeks and weeks and months
and months, then in the house all day and away most of the night;
writing, she and I at the same time, I taking my share in care of the
children, in teaching them, and in the thousand details of the domestic
situation. It was a close partnership, full of variation from the
usual, interesting, irritating, and replete with meaning and color.
It was soon after the crisis that we sailed; we were both very tired
emotionally, but I think she felt as I did the charm of going off
into the unknown together. We had left nothing behind us, not even
furniture, and we were taking with us all we possessed, contained in
three trunks, with no idea of the future except the decision not to
live in hotels and pensions, but to keep house wherever we went. This
we always did, no matter how short our stay in a place; we insisted on
tasting the life as lived around us, and my domestic partnership with
her helped us to get settled as well as unsettled very quickly. That
we could bear nothing except keeping house had an inevitable meaning,
no matter how exasperating those cares were at times to both of us. We
were forced to live together in the external conditions of existence,
as in the spiritual bond: it was strong, very strong, whatever it was.
On the steamer we were, I remember, unusually quiet. But I felt in her
a new freer interest in other things. She, apparently, thought very
little of the lover she had left, but because of him she saw the casual
stranger in a warmer, more human light. Her feeling of companionship
with me seemed stronger because of the recent experience; the element
of additional strangeness added to the color of our common life,
although I often relapsed into unreasoning pathos and pain. We were on
the whole, however, calmly waiting for the future. We were on a broader
base than ever, and, resting on our temperamental oars, there was
something that whispered to us of exciting, adventurous things to come,
for which we were instinctively saving our strength. I saw but not
always with pain the fuller appreciation in her glance at other men as
they swung freely and picturesquely along the deck. And on my part was
unconsciously forming itself the resolution to attain emotional freedom
from her by deeper intimacy with other women. Whenever I felt the full
pain of my dependency on her, as I did whenever I fully realized her
indestructible aloofness from me, I had an access of hope of attaining
aloofness for myself through relations with other women--a hope,
however, that has never been realized.
Never, however, even for a moment, have I ever felt any diminution
of love for her. Indeed, as time went on and our relations grew more
complex, more serious, and at times more painful, that love has seemed
more profound, more all-embracing, and to be in a way a symbol of my
love for beauty, for Nature, for Life itself.
And now, again in Italy, came another period of wonderful pleasure in
her. In the beautiful intensity of an Italian spring and summer we
realized ourselves to the joyous full, and for a time with no element
of interwoven pain. The pleasures of the senses and of the mind,
with civilized companions gracefully and indolently living out their
unstrenuous lives, dining with them out-of-doors in the long wonderful
evenings, and combining the serious languor of passionate Italy with
the nervous charm of an epigrammatic Gallic civilization--these
pleasures were of a broader, and more intellectualized but not less
sensuous honeymoon, rendered all the more poignant by the recent
crisis, hinting always of the possibility of volcanic happenings.
Now again began to stir within her the strange unconscious life, and
she was pregnant for the third time. At the period of conception
we were reveling in a beautiful, full translation into French of
the Arabian Nights. Devoted to the sensuous unmoral charm of these
gorgeous, colorful tales we lived a life quite out of harmony with
Puritanical ideas. The sentimental and the narrowly ethical were far
away and this child was started and was born in an atmosphere of mature
sensuousness, in a complete acceptance of what is called the Pagan
point of view. The tremulous, early lyricism of young love had given
place to a rich decided determination to take in full measure the goods
the Gods provide!
She was born--this sensitive little girl--on the Arno, on the banks of
the stream that runs through Fiorenze, the Flowering City of Tuscany!
And her mother this time felt the exhilaration of child-birth, the
athletic triumph in the midst of pain, the accomplishment of the
impossible with its resultant triumph. And soon afterwards came that
full physical beauty, that springing of the blood and of the body, that
intense enhancement of color and swelling of contour which gave her
the look of a gorgeous Magdalene; more delicate in quality than Rubens
or Titian, but suggesting both, richer and more voluptuous than the
early Florentine painters, yet having the recessional purity of the
Giottesque or Siennese madonna! No virgin could equal her full beauty.
No lover could so richly love a maiden were it not for the unconscious
purpose of this ultimate fruition!