All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (2 page)

Where does one start in writing a book about love? It’s an emotion or state that casts a bright light on all of life or shadows it by its lack. North, south, east, west, love is both essential and conflictual. It transforms and it destroys. It seems to matter because life matters. Yet seen from the outside, it’s also plain silly or simply mad. Subject of countless myths, lyrics and stories, as well as philosophical and sociological interrogations, embedded in our ways of thinking and seeing the world, love’s manifestations are not only as various as the individuals who experience them, but are different at different points in our lives. Intensely personal, unpredictable, love often seems allergic to generalizations, yet its continuities through history and its commonality also make these inevitable and ubiquitous. So the only place to begin in unravelling some of love’s riddles seems to be with the self. And the only point in doing so may be to grow a little wiser in love’s ways.

I don’t know exactly how old I was when I first became aware of love. Aware enough so that it stirred an emotion sufficiently significant to become memorable, even though its meanings were confusing. Aware of it as a word that stood in for a host of feelings.

I was probably around seven and the memory is linked to a French song. French was my first clearly
spoken
language amidst all those others that floated through my parents’ immigrant trajectory, which brought its own traditions of love in train. Like all immigrants they felt alternately ambivalent about these traditions and idealized them, subliminally communicating this to us. In the way of most songs heard or learned by children, the lyrics were only half grasped, but the refrain of this one stayed with me…

A translation might read:

Maybe what imprinted the song within me was the mysterious arc of the refrain: it moved from a past of love through the present and abruptly into a future where, though love is lost, memory and longing are for ever. Maybe it was also the collective embarrassment of raising our children’s voices into the palpably intimate, a region hovering on the forbidden. I clearly recall musing over what it might all mean. Loving, it seemed, stretched back into the mists of a time past and was so significant it continued for ever, tumbling into a vague future of the imagination.

It must also have been the song’s melody, replete with a tender yearning, which fixed the refrain in my mind, alongside the jaunty, oft-repeated ads for toothpaste, instant coffee and that oily tiger in everyone’s tank.

The rest of the song, entitled ‘À la claire fontaine’, tells a sentimental tale of a man coming across a fountain during a walk. It’s so enticing, he is tempted to bathe. At first I thought it was the fountain he was in love with, so important did the place itself seem to be. While he dries himself off, he tells us he lost his mistress because he wouldn’t give her the bouquet of roses she desired. Now, oh how he wishes they were together again! Love, it seemed, though so significant, was also evanescent and prone to hazard.

Not exactly scintillating lyrics, one might say. Yet a half-century later, the song still brings tears to my eyes. And its template of love as a brief moment of presence between a paradise lost of bliss and a future of yearning still carries descriptive, and, yes, emotive power.

In the many interviews I carried out while working on this book, most people mentioned songs as introductions or spurs or accompaniments to love–from Elvis to the Beatles to Dylan, Leonard Cohen, The Smiths, Nick Cave, Amy Winehouse and a score of others. This is hardly surprising. Music wraps emotion into itself and plays on the body. If pop music has love in all its manifestations–from longing to joy to pain and regret–as its principal lyrical theme, so, too, does the classical literary canon. In Marcel Proust’s formidable analysis of love, memory and society,
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
, a little haunting phrase from his fictional composer Vinteuil’s sonata becomes both triggering motif and transposed essence of the philandering aesthete Swann’s love for Odette, the unsuitable object of all his desires whom fate finds him married to, but only once he has discovered he is no longer in love with her. Passion’s disappearance may be no barrier to marriage.

The word ‘love’ wove itself into my childhood in other equally, or perhaps more, perplexing ways.

I grew up amidst several cultures. One was French and Catholic, adept in the language of the sins of the flesh, of confession, repentance and salvation. The other was English and Protestant, versed in Puritanism and unspoken guilts. Both had been transplanted into the newish world of Quebec, a province of Canada and also of its influential neighbour to the south, the United States of film, television and pop music. My family were immigrants of Jewish lineage from central Europe, which added a potent ingredient of world-weariness and oft-humorous pessimism to the cultural brew.

My brother was seven years older than me. He had a habit of assuming a severe paternal role. Often enough it came with shouts, raised hands and disciplinary threat from which I would flee, to cower in the bathroom behind the only locked door in the house and there await my working parents’ return.

‘But he loves you,’ my mother would say when I wept my version of events to her. ‘He really does.’

So love was also being locked in a lavatory, one’s will brutally impeded by what felt very like a version of hate. Love brought a series of power relations in its train. The one time I remember my father taking off his belt and administering a number of thwacks across my bottom, it turned out that this punishment for a now forgotten crime was also carried out in the name of love.

My mother, like me, had an older brother, but her love for him had no fear in it and took an altogether different form. Her brother was a handsome uniformed picture: the man it represented had been lost, had vanished during the war. There were lots of dead relatives in my family and few living ones. Mostly they weren’t spoken of. But this beloved and heroic brother was the subject of countless tales, lyrically recounted. My mother also saw him here, there and everywhere–though it never turned out to be him. So this storytelling and ghostly spotting was also love, fraternal love. My father, on the other hand, had a brother who had lived in New York ever since my father was a babe. He had eagerly gone off to see him twice or thrice during my Canadian childhood, and the brother had once visited us. Then, he too vanished, though there was no picture of him to be seen anywhere in the house. Nor was he ever spoken of again. It seemed the word ‘brother’ didn’t have to be attached to love, after all.

Growing up into love, let alone understanding its contours, was hardly a straightforward business.

For instance, my mother and father presumably loved each other. We all somehow knew that love and marriage went together like a horse and carriage. The princesses in fairy-tales all got married and lived happily ever after. Yet my mother and father rowed regularly and vociferously.

Once, too, I caught my mother in the long hall of our house, clasped in embrace by a family friend I inevitably didn’t like. I had only ever seen that kind of passionate clasp on the film posters of
Gone with the Wind
. I knew, in the way children always know by the sheer intensity that hiding brings into play, that what they were up to was forbidden and secret. I also knew that it was loathsome, as all adult sexuality is to children. For some reason, in those ever fluid associations that memory brings, that illicit moment is caught up for me with the lyrics of that 1950s American song ‘I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus’.

I hadn’t actually seen
Gone with the Wind
yet. We Quebec children were rather deprived of cinema in the fifties and early sixties, officially because of a fire that had taken many lives back in 1927. The dominant reason, however, was that the then ever vigilant Catholic Church which ruled the morals of the province with a heavy hand didn’t want us to see Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, or anyone else, clasped in embrace. When I asked my mother why, she said it was because they thought love stories were bad for children. Dangerous. The confusion over that was compounded by the fact that we were allowed to see special screenings of cartoons and Disney films.
Cinderella
and
Snow White
were two of my favourites, and here love and its shadow side, hate, featured large. Cinderella’s struggle to escape the envious clutches of her wicked stepmother and sisters ended with a kiss and the promised bliss of marriage, while Snow White was woken from poisoned sleep by one and the same. So maybe it was animation that made kisses and love OK, their unreality somehow confounding the danger of the ‘real’.

Other influences came to shape my growing and ever more mysterious picture of love. In the small Québécois town where I spent a part of my childhood, stories of who was in love with whom circulated freely. Love was gossip–a private, but publicly titillating, matter. I don’t think I paid much heed. These were stories about adults, after all, who inhabited a different world. But stock characters remain in my memory, I imagine because of their repeated visits in these stories. Then, too, a mystery attended their roles, rife ground for childhood misunderstanding. There was the
coq du village
–a phrase my mother loved, which apparently designated the man–rooster who fancied he ruled over all the chicks in the village. I would watch these local Lotharios carefully when they appeared, in the hope that I might catch a glimpse of their chickens, before I realized they were meant to be women.

Another stock character was the ardent, swooning, ever desirous male who, in my beautiful and much desired mother’s lore, figured as a plus or a pest, whatever his suffering. There was also a rather gaga version of this: the aged, besotted swain and his too young mistress, both figures of ridicule. A ‘cheat’ was part of the panoply, too. Usually this one figured as female, and came with a derogatory description of too much lipstick and too many flounces. Finally, there was the forlorn female, disappointed in love, who was always approached with a halting cheer admingled with awe and a slight fear, so it wasn’t quite clear whether she was ill and contagious or on a plinth built out of suffering.

Sometimes these love stories hurdled across the child–parent divide and love acquired another adjectival usage to produce a love-child. The one that remains in my mind, perhaps because of the intensity of the whispered gossip, had to do with a customer in my parents’ local store, where often enough I spent my after-school hours tucked, half hidden, behind the till counter doing homework or drawing. The customer was a blowsy teenager who transfixed me by coming in one day with no teeth, then the following week with a gleaming set. The transformation was almost as potent as Cinderella’s: teeth and slippers, both in their different ways attached to the body, seemed to have magical properties somehow related to love. Anyway, rumour amongst the sales assistants had it that this young woman was bearing a love-child by–wide-eyed murmuring–one of the priests in the seminary, right next door to the convent school I attended.

So love was also something to do with the making of children, a secret activity it seemed; though children could hardly be secret since I knew lots of them.

I had no idea back then how children were, in fact, made. There were storks, of course. (Birds seem to flutter in to confuse the sexual picture in myths, fairy-tales, poetry and kitchen talk, forever displacing it into flight and the possibility of human transformation.) Storks dangled babes from their beaks in whiter-than-white bundles on the picture greeting-cards. But there were no storks in Canada–yet there were certainly babies. According to one tale, I had grown in my mother’s tum because she had eaten a great many pears, which she continued to delight in though they now produced no little siblings. In other parental versions, babies came when a man and woman slept with one another. I grew terrified of sleeping in the same bed as my brother in case a swaddled shape materialized in the night between us.

The provenance of babies did finally figure in the sex education classes my–by then English-language, Montreal–school laid on when we were about twelve. But the process the projected diagrams illustrated on the school screen remained more than a little opaque. Nor was the word ‘love’ ever uttered. The atmosphere in which the teaching took place–girls segregated from boys presumably so we could talk about frightening blood and menstruation, the teacher wielding a punitive pointer, the use of clinical words I don’t think I had ever heard–had more to do with warning and prohibition than anything good.

When, afterwards, the boys in the playground made a circle with thumb and forefinger and inserted the index finger of the other hand into it, I had no idea what the gesture meant, nor why it should be accompanied by sniggers and that other four-letter word, f**k, rarely heard when and where I grew up, and all the more potent as an expletive. I wasn’t the only ignoramus. None of my girlfriends altogether understood, and I’m not even sure the boys did. If an atmosphere of sexuality and excitement accompanied it all, we were still largely ignorant of the facts–not that even those would have helped much without some tangible experience. Children may be sexual beings in the sense that their bodies can give them pleasure, but there is a deficit in the knowledge that comes from adult experience. In that sense they are innocents: they only glimpse, and often enough faultily, what their bodies may know. And biological facts remain opaque until lived reality arrives to join up the dots.

In a famous set of observations about the sexual enlightenment of children, Freud notes that a child’s intellectual interest in the riddles of sex, his desire for sexual knowledge, leads to delightful hypotheses about the origins of babies. The Freudian child, long before puberty, is capable of all the psychical manifestations of love–tenderness, devotion, jealousy, which are often enough associated with physical sensations–so that he has a sense that the two may be related. If questions lead only to misleading parental explanations or a prohibitive silencing, the child’s curiosity is stymied and the result may be inhibition of both a sexual and an intellectual kind accompanied by later difficulties. Differentiating between the anatomy of boys and girls, Freud also hypothesizes, may as one of its effects induce in boys a fear of castration and in girls an envy of the visible phallus and, by metaphorical extension, of its powerful owners.