10. Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.
11. The dismay that greater acquaintance with the beloved can bring is comparable to composing a symphony in one’s head and then hearing it played in a concert hall by a full orchestra. Though we are impressed to find so many of our ideas confirmed in performance, we cannot help but notice details that are not quite as we had intended them to be. Is one of the violinists not a little off key? Is the flute not a little late coming in? Is the percussion not a little loud? People we love at first sight are as free from conflicting tastes in shoes or literature as the unrehearsed symphony is free from off-key violins or late flutes. But as soon as the fantasy is played out, the angelic beings who floated through consciousness reveal themselves as material beings, laden with their own mental and physical history.
12. Chloe’s shoes were only one of a number of false notes that came to light in the early period of the relationship. Living day to day with her was like acclimatizing myself to a foreign country, and therefore feeling prey to occasional xenophobia at departures from my own traditions and expectations.
13. Threatening differences did not collect at the major points (nationality, gender, class, occupation), but rather at small junctures of taste and opinion. Why did Chloe insist on leaving the pasta to boil for a fatal extra few minutes? Why was I so attached to my current pair of glasses? Why did she have to do her gym exercises in the bedroom every morning? Why did I always need eight hours’ sleep? Why did she not have more time for opera? Why did I not have more time for Joni Mitchell? Why did she hate seafood so much? How could one explain my resistance to flowers and gardening? Or hers to trips on water? How come she liked to keep her options open about God (‘at least till the first cancer’)? But why was I so closed on the matter?
14. Anthropologists tell us that the group always comes before the individual, that to understand the latter one must pass through the former, be it nation, tribe, clan, or family. Chloe had no great fondness for her family, but when her parents invited us to spend Sunday with them at their home near Marlborough, in a spirit of scientific enquiry I urged her to take up the offer.
15. Everything about Gnarled Oak Cottage was a sign that Chloe had been born in one world, one galaxy almost, and I another. The living room was decorated in faux-Chippendale furniture, the carpet was a stained reddish brown, dusty bookcases with volumes of Trollope and Stubbs-esque paintings lined the walls, three salivai dogs were running in and out between the living room and the garden, and corpulent cobwebbed plants sagged in every corner. Chloe’s mother wore a thick purple pullover with holes in it, a flowery baggy skirt, and long grey hair scraped back without design. One half expected to find bits of straw on her, an aura of rural nonchalance reinforced by her repeated forgettings of my name (and her creative approach to finding me another). I thought of the difference between Chloe’s mother and my own, the contrasting introductions to the world that these two women had performed. However much Chloe had run away from all of this, to the big city, to her own values and friends, the family still represented a genetic and historical tradition to which she was indebted. I noticed a crossover between the generations: the mother preparing potatoes in the same way as Chloe, crushing a little garlic into the butter and grinding sea salt over them, or sharing her daughter’s enthusiasm for painting, or taste in Sunday papers. The father was a keen rambler, and Chloe loved walking too, often dragging me on weekends for a brisk tour of Hampstead Heath, proclaiming the benefits of fresh air in a way that her father had perhaps once done.
16. It was all so strange and new. The house in which she had grown up evoked a whole past on which I had missed out, and which I would have to take on board in order to understand her. The meal was largely spent on a question–answer volley between Chloe and her parents on various aspects of family folklore: Had the insurance paid for Granny’s hospital bills? Was the water tank mended? Had Carolyn heard from the estate agency yet? Was it true Lucy was going to study in the States? Had anyone read Aunt Sarah’s novel? Was Henry really going to marry Jemima? (All these characters who had entered Chloe’s life long before I had – and might, with the tenacity of everything familial, still be there when I was gone.)
17. It was intriguing to see how different the parents’ perception of Chloe could be from my own. Whereas I had known her to be both accommodating and generous, at home she was known to be bossy and demanding. As a child she had been thought of as miniature autocrat whom the parents had nicknamed Miss Pompadosso after the heroine of a children’s book. Whereas I had known Chloe to be level-headed about money and her career, the father remarked that his daughter ‘did not understand the first thing about how things work in the real world’, while the mother joked about her ‘bullying all her boyfriends into submission’. I was forced to add to my understanding of Chloe a whole section that had unfolded prior to my arrival, my vision of her colliding with that imposed by the initial family narrative.
18. In the afternoon, Chloe showed me around the house. She took me into the room at the top of the stairs into which she’d been afraid to go as a child, because her uncle had once told her a ghost lived inside the piano. We looked into her old bedroom that her mother now used as a studio, and she pointed out a hatch that she had used to get into the attic in order to escape with her elephant Guppy whenever she’d been miserable. We took a walk in the garden, past a still-bruised tree at the bottom of a slope into which the family car had ploughed when she had once dared her brother to release the handbrake. She showed me the neighbours’ house, whose blackberry bushes she had picked clean in the summers, and whose former owner’s son she had kissed on the way back from school. He had since died, added Chloe with curious indifference, ‘in an incident with a corn-thresher’.
19. Later in the afternoon, I took a walk in the garden with her father, a donnish man to whom thirty years of marriage had imparted some distinctive views on the subject.
‘I know my daughter and you are fond of one another. I’m no expert on love, but I’ll tell you something. In the end, I’ve found that it doesn’t really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won’t like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there’s always the chance you’ll end up thinking they’re all right.’
20. On the train back to London that evening, I felt exhausted, weary at all the differences between Chloe’s early world and mine. While the stories and settings of her past had enchanted me, they had also proved terrifying and bizarre, all these years and habits before I had known her, but that were as much a part of who she was as the shape of her nose or the colour of her eyes. I felt a primitive nostalgia for familiar surroundings, recognizing the disruption that every relationship entails – a whole new person to learn about, to suggest myself to, to acclimatize myself to. It was perhaps a moment of fear at the thought of all the differences I would find in Chloe, all the times she would be one thing, and I another, when our world views would be incapable of alignment. Staring out of the window at the Wiltshire countryside, I had a lost child’s longing for someone I could already wholly understand, the eccentricities of whose house, parents, and history I had already tamed.
8
Love or Liberalism
1. If I can return for a moment to Chloe’s shoes, it might be worth mentioning that their inauguration did not end with my negative yet privately formulated analysis of their virtues. I confess that it ended in the second greatest argument of our relationship, in tears, insults, shouting, and the right shoe crashing through a pane of glass onto the pavement of Denbigh Street. The sheer m
elodramatic intensity of the event aside, the matter sustains philosophical interest because it symbolizes a choice as radical in the personal sphere as in the political: a choice between love and liberalism.
2. The choice has often been missed in an optimistic equation of the two terms, with the former considered a handmaiden of the latter. But if the terms have been linked, it is always in an implausible marriage, for it seems impossible to talk of love and letting live, and if we are left to live, we are not usually loved. We may well ask why the viciousness witnessed between lovers would not be tolerated anywhere outside conditions of open enmity. Then, to build bridges between shoes and nations, we may ask why countries that have no language of community or citizenship usually leave their members isolated but unmolested and yet why countries that talk most of love, kinship, and brotherhood routinely end up slaughtering great swathes of their populations.
3. ‘How do you mean, did I keep the receipt?’ shouted Chloe.
‘I just mean if things go wrong with them.’
‘They’re not televisions.’
‘I don’t know, the heel might get stuck between two paving stones while you’re stepping out of a gondola. Or you might suddenly decide you hated them.’
‘Why not just tell me you hate them?’
‘I don’t hate them. (Pause.) I do hate them.’
‘You’re just jealous.’
‘I’ve always wanted to look like a pelican.’
‘And a bastard.’
‘I’m sorry, but I really don’t think they’re suitable for the party tonight.’
‘Why do you have to spoil everything?’
‘Because I care for you. Someone has to let you know the truth.’
‘Gemma said she liked them. And Leslie would definitely like them. And I can’t imagine Abigail having a problem with them either. So what’s wrong with you?’
‘Your girlfriends don’t love you. Not in the proper way. Not in the way that means you have to break bad news to someone even if it pains you terribly.’
‘You’re not upset.’
‘I am.’
‘You deserve to be.’
4. The reader can be spared the full melodrama, it suffices to say that moments later, the tempest that had been brewing reached a climax, Chloe took off one of the offensive shoes, supposedly so as to let me look at it, but more realistically, to murder me with it, I chose to duck the incoming projectile, it crashed through the window behind me and fell down to the street, where it impaled itself in the rubbish area in the remains of a neighbour’s chicken madras.
5. Our argument was peppered with the paradoxes of love and liberalism. What did it really matter what Chloe’s shoes were like? There were so many other wonderful sides to her, was it not spoiling the game to arrest my gaze on this detail? Why could I not have politely lied to her as I might have done to a friend? My only excuse lay in the claim that I loved her, that she was my ideal – save for the shoes – and that I therefore had to point out this blemish, something I would never have done with a friend whose departures from my ideal would have been too numerous to begin with, a friendship in which the concept of an ideal would never even have entered into my thinking. Because I loved her, I told her – therein lay my sole defence.
6. In our more expansive moments, we imagine romantic love to be akin to Christian love, an uncritical, expansive emotion that declares I will love you for everything that you are, a love that has no conditions, that draws no boundaries, that adores every last shoe, that is the embodiment of acceptance. But the arguments that hound lovers are a reminder that Christian love is not prone to survive a move into the bedroom. Its message seems more suited to the universal than the particular, to the love of all men for all women, to the love of two neighbours who will not hear each other snoring.
7. Though it was not always a matter for glaziers, illiberalism was never one sided. There were a thousand things about me that drove Chloe to distraction: Why was I so bored by the theatre? Why did I insist on wearing a coat that looked a century old? Why did I always knock the duvet off the bed in my sleep? Why did I think Saul Bellow was such a great writer? Why had I not yet learnt how to park a car without leaving most of the wheel on the pavement? Why did I constantly put my feet on the pillows? These were the ingredients of the domestic gulag, the daily attempts to tug each other closer to our ideals.
8. And what excuse was there for this? Nothing but the old line that parents and politicians will use before taking out their scalpels: I care about you, therefore I will upset you, I have honoured you with a vision of how you should be, therefore I will hurt you.
9. Chloe and I would never have been as brutal to our friends as we were to one another. But we equated intimacy with a form of ownership and licence. We may have been kind, yet we were no longer polite. When we started arguing one night about the films of Eric Rohmer (she hated them, I loved them), we forgot there was a chance Rohmer’s films could be both good and bad depending on who was watching them. She degenerated into calling me ‘a stuffy over-intellectual turd’, I reciprocated by judging her ‘a degenerate product of modern capitalism’ (proving her accusation in the process).
10. Politics seems an incongruous field to link to love, but can we not read, in the bloodstained histories of the French, Fascist, or Communist revolutions, something of the same coercive structure, the same impatience with diverging views fuelled by passionate ideals? Amorous politics begins its infamous history with the French Revolution, when it was first proposed (with all the choice of a rape) that the state would not just govern but also love its citizens, who would respond likewise or face the guillotine. The beginning of revolutions is psychologically strikingly akin to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover’s paranoia and the creation of a secret police).
11. But if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends are often equally bloody. We’re familiar with political love that ends in tyranny, where a ruler’s firm conviction that he has the true interests of his nation at heart ends up lending him the confidence to murder without qualms (and ‘for their own good’) all who disagree with him. Romantic lovers are similarly inclined to vent their frustration on dissenters and heretics.
12. A few days after the shoe incident, I went to the newsagent to pick up a paper and a carton of milk. Mr Paul told me he’d just run out of the semi-skimmed variety, but that if I could wait a moment, he’d get another crate in from the storeroom. Watching him walk out towards the back of the shop, I noticed that Mr Paul was wearing a pair of thick grey socks and brown leather sandals. They were awe-inspiringly ugly, but curiously enough, wholly inoffensive. Why could I not remain similarly composed in the face of Chloe’s shoes? Why could I not enjoy the same cordiality with the woman I loved as with the newsagent who sold me my daily rations?
13. The wish to replace the butcher–butchered relationship with a newsagent–customer one has long dominated political thinking. Why could rulers not act politely towards their citizens, tolerating sandals, dissent, and divergence? The answer from liberal thinkers is that cordiality can arise only once rulers give up talk of governing for the love of their citizens, and concentrate instead on ensuring sensible, minimal governance. Liberal politics finds its greatest apologist in John Stuart Mill, who in 1859 published a classic defence of loveless liberalism, On Liberty, a ringing plea that citizens should be left alone by governments, however well meaning they were, and not be told how to lead their personal lives, what gods to worship or books to read. Mill argued that though kingdoms and tyrannies felt themselves entitled to hold ‘a deep interest in the whole bodily and mental discipline of every one of its citizens’, the modern state should as far as possible stand back and let people govern themselves. Like a harassed partner in a relationship who begs simply to be given space, Mill ventured:
The only freedom which deserves t
he name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it . . . The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized society against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.1
14. The wisdom of Mill’s thesis is such that one might want to see it applied to relationships as much as to governments. However, on reflection, applied to the former, it seems to lose much of its appeal. It evokes certain marriages, where love has evaporated long ago, where couples sleep in separate bedrooms, exchanging the occasional word when they meet in the kitchen before work, where both partners have long ago given up hope of mutual understanding, settling instead for a tepid friendship based on controlled misunderstanding, politeness while they get through the evening’s shepherd’s pie, 3 a.m. bitterness at the emotional failure that surrounds them.
Essays In Love Page 5