All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (24 page)

Wells’s idiom of love and eventual marriage includes desire from both sexes as well as equality, that important element of talk, and sexual honesty: it gives a primary place to individual fulfilment. If Ann Veronica–like Lawrence’s heroines–finds in herself a new talent for submission once passion comes into the love equation, this, too, is part of the dawning century’s understanding. Unlike their Victorian sisters, women now share in desire and can express it, though it may make them dependent: the male’s new power includes awakening that desire and giving sexual satisfaction. The language of duty and protection has been displaced. If this is still largely the case only for the social vanguard, it will soon enough percolate through society as a whole.

Whether the new model of love and marriage brought the satisfactions it seemed to promise remains open to question: each subsequent generation has questioned the values of the parental ethos. But what is clear is that the patriarchal marriage of the Victorians with its distinct roles for male and female and a power balance largely in favour of the first has rarely since held with no questions asked, even amongst immigrants to the West from more traditional communities.

Wells in his own life marked the shift, never unproblematic, from the Victorian to a version of the ‘modern’ marriage. The youngest son of a struggling shopkeeper and a mother who returned to domestic service after her husband’s early death, Wells was at first unhappily apprenticed to a draper, then a chemist, then another draper. His mother harboured lower-middle-class ambitions for her sons. He battled against her to return to school. His intellectual abilities won him a place in a national science teachers’ training scheme at what was to become Imperial College. Here, under the Darwinian T.H. Huxley, he at first excelled, then grew bored and devoted himself to student politics and journalism. He taught at various schools and in 1891, his first major article on the marvels of the natural world having been published in the
Fortnightly Review
, he married his cousin Isabel.

A year later, now twenty-seven, Wells fell in love with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he dubbed ‘Jane’, ‘a fine and valiant little being’ who was also intelligent, educated and beautiful. The illicit couple lived together in a modest flat, where the bedroom was separated from the rest of the living space by folding doors. Like Ann Veronica and Capes, neither of them was particularly eager to engage in the institution of marriage. However, in 1895, when Wells’s divorce came through, they wed, largely to escape the perpetual annoyance of prurient neighbours and landladies. Jane remained Wells’s wife all her life, acting as secretary, business manager, hostess to an increasing array of friends as his books began to win him fame and fortune, and importantly, a still, secure, ever understanding centre of unconditional love.

The only problem was sex. In Wells’s words, his ‘delicate’ Jane ‘regarded my sexual imaginativeness as a sort of constitutional disease; she stood by me patiently waiting for it to subside’. Wells engaged in a series of passionate affairs with extraordinary women, the writers Elizabeth von Arnim and, famously, the feminist Rebecca West amongst them. What marked his and Jane’s marriage out as different from the Victorian model was that a regime of frankness prevailed. They were allies, he later noted in his
Experiment in Autobiography
, rather than lovers. He told her of his affairs, which she referred to as ‘passades’–the assumption being that he would always, and in fact always did, return to her.

This honesty at home, whatever the attendant unhappiness, was linked with the emphatically modern sense that not to act on passionate interests was itself a moral betrayal, an ethical imperative he shared with Rebecca West. In a 1911 article in the
Fortnightly Review
, penned after attacks on
Ann Veronica
, Wells wrote: ‘We are going to write of wasted opportunities and latent beauties until a thousand new ways of living open to men and women.’ Sex was now part of a new terrain, to be explored in writing as well as through a lived visionary politics. In a society which was still largely conventional, a host of problems attended both the project of an open marriage and open passionate affairs, but, like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir some twenty years later, Wells and his various partners were convinced that only revolutionary experiments in living could shift prevailing double standards.

Yet the tangles of Victorian values in the sphere of love and marriage were too deeply internalized to shed easily. Indeed, they would enmesh several successive generations, making one wonder whether they are so engrained in family patterns that they hover like vengeful ghosts through all our couplings.

In her subtle portrait of Wells and Jane’s marriage in
Uncommon Arrangements
, Katie Roiphe shows how Jane, despite her grace and surface unflappability, despite her apparent understanding that Wells needed the unconstrained embrace of purportedly more passionate women, suffered through his affairs and worried with each subsequent one whether this was the one that would rupture the marriage. Well before Virginia Woolf wrote
A Room of One’s Own
, Jane kept one in Bloomsbury, a space never visited by Wells and a signal of her independent need for something other than the domesticity to which her marriage, at once shrine and prison, had confined her. More revealingly, Jane’s own stories describe a woman rather different from the one Wells had idealized into his own pure Jane, who so beautifully kept his children and Easton Glebe, the idyllic home and garden his own parents could never attain. Rosalind, the vivacious heroine of Jane’s ‘Walled Garden’, shares many of the attributes and circumstances of her creator. The wedding night she has so eagerly awaited with her beloved Bray brings little of the anticipated fulfilment: ‘Bray made love to her delicately and reverently, and Rosalind, after the interval of puzzled discovery, settled down to her married life with a feeling of faint disappointment which she could hardly justify.’ If this is any indication of the prevailing condition of Jane’s marriage to Wells, it suggests a woman who, far from finding Wells’s sexuality rampant and ‘waiting for it to subside’, had passionate cravings of her own which he, in his need to assume her delicate purity, was unable to meet.

This picture of the Wellses’ marriage, for all its unconventional honesties and openness, thrusts one forcefully back to Freud’s ‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love’ (1910, 1912). Here Freud unravelled what he understood as our civilization’s universal tendency to split love into the sacred and the profane. Whether his ‘universal’ extends beyond his historical and geographical moment to our own is, of course, open to question, but it is worth keeping in mind, as are so many of the templates of love which seem to bracket a lived experience at least in part impervious to historical forces.

‘Psychical impotence’, Freud notes, is the most widespread complaint met in the consulting room. It affects men of ‘strongly libidinous natures’ who find themselves unable to make love when they wish to with women they may love. Some feature of the sexual object seems to give rise to an inhibition of their potency. The man may have ‘the feeling of an obstacle inside him, the sensation of a counter will which successfully interferes with his conscious intention’. Freud argues that a split between ‘the affectionate and the sensual current’ has occurred here. The two have failed to combine, usually as a result of the young man’s sensuality being unconsciously tied to incestuous objects–in other words, mother and sisters. Though initially desired, the child gradually realizes, mothers are for affection, for pure love. Forced to avoid the ‘affectionate current’, that is, women who in some subliminal way remind him of the mother–or whom in time he makes into ‘mother’ and thus can only avoid–the man seeks out for sexual satisfaction women whom he can in some way despise, or debase in order to despise. Only here can his sexuality be fully expressed.

‘Psychical impotence’ haunts not only those who make their way into the analytic chamber. Most, after all, have a childhood shaped by the incest barrier and are in some measure fixated on their first love object, the mother or mother surrogate, and undergo some sexual frustration in the years after puberty. Thus in various gradations, psychical impotence affects everyone who manages to perform the sexual act but takes little pleasure from it.

Hence, Freud drily notes, the unhappy condition of modern men: ‘Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love.’

Women are hardly immune from this psychical impotence. It can manifest itself as frigidity, often present only with their ‘lawful’ spouses, though absent in secret or forbidden encounters. Prohibition plays the role for women that debasement does for men. Since women, in Freud’s day at least, tended to stay pure until marriage, which came long after sexual awakening, their sensuality lingered far longer in secret phantasy. Thus, for women, forbiddenness itself becomes sexualized: only in secret or dangerous encounters do their passions find freedom. The need for secrecy may indeed also in certain respects underpin the need for ‘a room of one’s own’.

Freud puts his hopes with the sexual reformers–though, with his usual wry pessimism, he notes that his research ‘cannot predict whether other institutions may not result in other, and perhaps graver, sacrifices’. For instance, he argues, if sexual freedom is unrestricted from the outset, that does not result in full satisfaction either, since ‘an obstacle is required in order to heighten libido’. Where there have been few natural resistances to satisfaction, as during the decline of the ancient civilizations, love became worthless and life empty; so, Freud concludes, men have ever erected barriers of convention so as to be able to enjoy love.

For all of Wells’s and other reformers’ conscious intentions when engaging in sexual revolution, the unconscious return of that dividing line between the ‘sensual and the affective currents’ haunts their relationships. Jane Wells remains forever pure and perfect in Wells’s imaginings, while the women who ‘fulfil’ his sexual needs are, certainly in his fantasy, either wild and disreputable like Rebecca West, married like Elizabeth von Arnim (and thus defiled by the very fact of adultery), or in some other way excessive or unstable, like the poor Hedwig Verena Gatternigg, the translator who pursued him to the point of attempting suicide.

As for Jane Wells, if she didn’t quite escape the role of angel in the house, to which Wells, whatever his fictional derision of it, had confined her, she made the best she could both of the house and her enshrined status. Easton Glebe, with its gardens, grounds and tennis court, graciously welcomed a host of writers, politicians and glitterati. It had an aura of perfection. Meanwhile, the heroines of the stories she wrote in that Bloomsbury room that was her own suffer from frustrations and a sense of anxiety and abandonment that might well also have been hers.

If marital and sexual happiness for both partners was not within the early sexual reformers’ reach–or indeed, of many since–it nevertheless insistently became the ideal for what heterosexual love should be. The Victorians had kept sex wrapped in veils of silence; and bodies, as well as any reminiscent parts, cloaked in ample swathes of textile, velvet and brocade. The post-war period lifted the veils and the cloaks. A new age of permissiveness and sexual candour dawned. That twosome of love and marriage was partially uncoupled. Where it held, it now openly included at least the desire for sexual satisfaction for both husband and wife.

Post-War

Permissiveness came hand in hand with a new self-styled, increasingly noisy and important social category: youth. Across Europe and America, the young, since the turn of the century, had become rebellious and vocal. They defied the rules and the authority of the fathers, who were no longer called upon to sanction love and marriage. They advocated change, political, social; and sexual reform or revolution. In Germany, the youth movement, the
Wandervögel
sang the values of nature–and sometimes free love–while deriding the materialism that industrialization and a coercive centralized government had brought in their train.
Jugend–
youth–gave its name to a magazine and an artistic style. In France, research questionnaires using the language of generation showed how distant the young had become from their rationalist and relativist teachers and parents. In Russia, revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai attacked the traditional marriage and family for an oppressive legacy intimately linked to property rights. They called for free love, that is, love untyrannized by the link to material values: sexuality was proclaimed a human instinct as natural as hunger or thirst. In Italy,
la giovinezza
–youth–became a rallying cry: Giovanni Papini in 1913 summed up the feverish feelings of his cohort, amongst whom were the Futurists, when he wrote of the need to cast aside ‘the cloaks of religion, the cassocks of philosophy, the shirts of prejudice, the ties of ideals, the shoes of logic, and the underwear of morality’ in order to become nude like Adam before the Fall.

Though it was the ‘fathers’ who had entered into that long agony which was the Great War, the zest with which the young threw themselves into the patriotic fray spoke of their desire for radical change. It came at a heavy cost. The toll of four years of war and an approximate total of 5.7 million dead for the Allies and four million for the Central Powers, alongside many more wounded, most of them young, finally unseated the old morality and the old hypocrisies. The brute proximity of death, of maimed male bodies an everyday sight for young female nurses, had loosened the hold of old conventions. Couplings, courtships, marriages had all been speeded up during the war years, and patriarchal authority was at an ebb: in the shadow of death, the young wanted to live, and live fully.