All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (23 page)

Few did more in Britain than the writer and social reformer Edward Carpenter to attempt to normalize homosexual arrangements. Despite the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act outlawing sexual relations between men, Carpenter in the 1890s began to live openly with his lover, George Merrill, a working-class man from the slums of Sheffield. The relationship was a lifelong one. In his book
The Intermediate Sex
(1908), Carpenter noted: ‘Eros is a great leveller. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society.’ Both D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster were deeply influenced by Carpenter. Lawrence translated Carpenter and Merrill’s relationship into a heterosexual register (merging it with Lady Ottoline Morrell’s affair with a mason on her estate) in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
; while Forster was inspired by it to write his early novel
Maurice
, not published until 1971, after his death, by which time homosexuality had at last been legalized in Britain.

In
Howards End
(1910) E.M. Forster gave his heroine the phrase which summed up the new ethos: ‘Only connect.’ The understanding of the good life had shifted. The personal, the relational, the passionate–which also permitted congress across class and even gender lines–now weighed more heavily in the human balance than tradition and social convention. Given that in the division of labour which was the Victorian marriage, the emotions had long fallen predominantly into the woman’s sphere, it is perhaps unsurprising that the growing forces for change in woman’s condition should run concomitantly with a cultural shift which prioritized feeling–and also, on occasion, allowed women to pursue their own desires.

D.H. Lawrence met the redoubtable Frieda (von Richthofen) Weekley in Nottingham in 1912. From the ranks of the German aristocracy, she was certainly ‘estranged’ from Lawrence by ‘class and caste’. She was also married and a mother of three. Soon after their first encounter, Lawrence and Frieda eloped to Germany, leaving her children behind. Divorce from Ernest Weekley, an academic at Nottingham University who also taught the evening classes that young Lawrence had attended, soon followed. In Germany, Frieda’s sister Elsa, another free spirit, one of the first women there to do a doctorate in economics, was part of a circle which included Max Weber, with whom she had an affair. The circle also extended to the radical psychoanalyst Otto Gross, with whom Frieda had a brief affair. Gross, a proponent of free love, was involved in various of the pre-war quasi-anarchist, neo-pagan communities in Switzerland–lifestyle laboratories where love threw off the shackles of bourgeois convention.

In France during the
belle époque
, amongst a Bohemia that mingled with the upper class, a looser sexual morality prevailed than in England. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette’s largely autobiographical writings, spanning the first half of the twentieth century, provide an insight into the kind of adventurous intimacies that could be lived. They also chart a course which led Colette through all the permutations of a woman’s life, taking us from provincial Burgundy into the inner precincts of the exclusive and all-male Académie Française. An early marriage with the gallivanting literary and theatrical entrepreneur Willy, a
papa-mari
twenty-four years older than her, had Colette chained in sexual-emotional bondage and living power relations that are echoed in many unions between older, experienced men and younger women–though undoubtedly hers have their own particular
belle époque
flavour. Colette depicts all this clearly in the
Claudine
novels which Willy forced her to write, then shamelessly signed himself. They became hugely popular bestsellers, re-enacted on the stage.

In the course of writing the
Claudine
books Colette engages in her first lesbian affairs, which are shared with Willy. She describes both her pleasures and her jealousy. Scandalous material, perhaps, though Zola had already described the lesbian
demi-monde
: nor did
belle époque
husbands bother to rank lesbian loves as adultery. When Colette left Willy, to take up life as a music-hall performer, she created a furore by kissing her then lover, the Marquise de Belbeuf, on stage.

There was a host of affairs with men, too, and a second marriage to a leading political journalist. In
La Vagabonde
, published in France in 1911 when she was thirty-eight, Colette calls love ‘that hairshirt which sticks to the skin where love is born and tightens its grip as it grows’. The greatest obstacle to her escape from its torture, ‘a hundred times more dangerous than the greedy beast [of lust,] is the abandoned child who trembles inside of me, weak, nervous, ready to stretch out her arms and beg: “
Don’t leave me alone!
”’ Throughout her life, her biographer Judith Thurman writes, Colette yearned to love and to believe in love. The two rarely coincided, though she engaged in many of the possible permutations. She had her first child in 1913 at the age of forty, went off to report from the front line during the Great War; and at forty-seven engaged in a passionate affair with her stepson before embarking on another marriage with a man seventeen years younger than her, the most peaceful of her long, bold and ardent life.

In Britain, differently inflected experiments in loving similarly engaged the young in the pre-and immediately post-war period. Within the intellectual elite that was the extended Bloomsbury circle, love’s preferred form was the serially lived triangle, both homo-and hetero-erotic. As the journalist Kingsley Martin quipped, ‘In Bloomsbury all the couples are triangles and live in squares.’ To take just one of many examples, Lytton Strachey had a variety of homosexual lovers, briefly proposed to Virginia Woolf, took up in 1917 with the painter Dora Carrington, who was pursued by the artist Mark Gertler but was passionately in love with Lytton. Dora and Lytton lived together until his death some seventeen years later. In the meantime Ralph Partridge, with whom Lytton was in love, wooed Dora, whom he married, though she carried on living with Lytton, who remained homosexual.

All this is known from multifarious books and films documenting Bloomsbury lives. What is clear is that although Bloomsbury forms of coupling were not widespread, their influence, given the prominence of Bloomsbury ideas in the media, on the loosening of conventions in Britain in the aftermath of that vast shaking-up of hierarchies that the First World War produced, was hardly minimal. The new emphasis on ‘feeling’, on a desire for self-fulfilment, crucially by women as well as men, abutted against older strictures and gradually dismantled the rigid edifice of dutiful marriage, though its idealized ghost remained, ever to be reinvoked by politicians intent on ‘family values’.

Already in 1909 H.G. Wells’s novel
Ann Veronica
, his portrait of the new emancipated woman, had created a stir by breaching old moral taboos. Denounced as a ‘sex-problem’ novel, targeted by the
Spectator
in a campaign against ‘poisonous literature’ and banned from the circulating libraries which ensured a writer’s income, the novel was prescient. Based on Wells’s own affairs, the fiction lived out a future in which ‘feeling’ came first. Wells’s vivid heroine tapped into the changing times and gave her name to countless other Ann Veronicas, satirized and censured in the press for their independent aspirations and their attempts to define a new kind of love and marriage.

Lively, pretty, intelligent, Ann Veronica is the daughter of an old-fashioned Victorian father who thinks that women are either angels or fallen (if secretly desirable) creatures. He would palpably prefer to keep his daughter by his side. Ann Veronica is both told that love and marriage are the paths open to her and made to feel that it is immoral to show too much interest in them.

When Ann Veronica determines to further her education instead, her father makes it clear that studious pursuits ‘unsex’ a woman; and that befriending art students and going to fancy-dress parties is something he will not tolerate. ‘The world, she discovered, with these matters barred had no particular place for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a functionless existence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels, walks, and dusting in her father’s house.’

The headstrong, studious and rebellious Ann refuses the advances of a suitor, the older and conventional civil servant, Mr Manning. She runs away from home determined to make her own way in the world. But, despite attempts to find a job in London, no work that will support her is open to her. Through the friendship of Miss Miniver, a suffragette and follower of the socialists and Fabians, she attends lectures and discussion groups. She is both enticed by and sceptical of what she hears, which runs along the lines of ‘While we were minding the children they stole our rights and liberties. The children made us slaves, and the men took advantage of it.’

When she sees the idolizing and romantic Mr Manning again, he tells her he too is a socialist but in the manner of Mr Ruskin: he would make the country a ‘collective monarchy’ and all women ‘Queens’. In fact, since he has two votes, he is also happy to vote for her. Ann Veronica rejects his marriage proposal: given the example of her elder sisters, she thinks of the married as ‘insects who have lost their wings’. Her brother Roddy, in colloquial idiom, tries to convince her to follow the straight and narrow for pragmatic reasons: ‘Providence, I mean–HAS arranged it so that men will keep you, more or less. He made the universe on those lines. You’ve got to take what you can get… Babies and females have got to keep hold of somebody or go under–anyhow, for the next few generations. You go home and wait a century, Vee, and then try again. Then you may have a bit of a chance.’

Ann Veronica resists, but she is getting desperate. Her money is running out. Enter a neighbour of her father’s, Mr Ramage, a broad-minded businessman who is enticed by her and loans her £40. Ann has no idea that the loan carries a sexual IOU. She is altogether intent on paying back the funds. Then, too, she likes Mr Ramage, likes talking to him over delectable dinners. With the new funds, she pursues her interest in science and enrols at Imperial College. Here she gradually and without quite realizing it falls in love with one of her teachers, Capes, who pays her little special attention. She learns on the rumour circuit that he is married, though estranged from his wife.

Perversely, it is Ramage who makes her realize that ‘the problem of a woman’s life is love’. One night he takes her to the opera. In the midst of the swooning music of Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde
, he declares his passion for her. The following night in a private and locked restaurant room, he makes a more aggressive pass. As the ‘dozen shynesses and intellectual barriers’ that have been built up in her dissipate, she recognizes his loan for what it is. She resists him and flees. In despair, she realizes she can’t pay him back. Agonized by her state, she joins the suffragettes and in an action on Parliament is arrested. She spends two months in jail, during which she has ample time to think. She has been cruel to her father and aunt, she realizes. Selfishness has guided all her behaviour. She will change.

The change takes her home to her father and into an engagement with the adoring Mr Manning. He is happy for her to continue her studies. But her feelings for Capes grow: she can talk to him about anything. He makes her feel alive. With Manning, she reflects, as the engagement progresses, it is just the reverse.

Ann Veronica’s sentimental education thrusts her into the love idiom of modernity. Capes, unlike Manning, sees her not as an abstraction of idealized femininity but as herself, sees her in the particular: ‘Capes looked at one and not over one, spoke to one, treated one as a visible concrete fact. Capes saw her, felt for her, cared for her greatly, even if he did not love her. Anyhow, he did not sentimentalize her.’

But Capes does love her. He has simply been trying to protect her from the kind of scandal a relationship with him would unleash. He cannot marry her in his present legal state, yet he desires her in a way good girls flee. Ann Veronica is not afraid. A new sexual frankness is the order of post-Victorian times. The two go off to Switzerland together and on their return set up house. Roll on the years to the last scene of the book, and we see them at home and finally married. Veronica is pregnant.