by Laurie Lee
Love, that slick fever, strange convulsion of nerves at the physical presence of another; that incautious involvement sparked off by a trick of the light, chance propinquity, or a favourable arrangement of temperatures; that sudden release of tensions and sense of magical freewheeling through a world of new and unimaginable harmonies, set in motion by no more than a curve of a lip, posture, or tone of voice – such shaky beginnings are all that most of us need to say yes, to give ourselves up, to join another’s life, without measure or doubt, and start founding careers and families.
But if we have chosen to live in the private grip of love – and it seems that most of us have – (and remembering at the same time that there are worse masters in the world) – perhaps we might ask what such love should be.
Not the seeking of ourselves in others, certainly, which can lead later to mutual rejection, but in acknowledging the uniqueness of the sexes, their tongue-and-groove opposites, which provides love with its natural adhesive. ‘We are so much alike’ is the fatal phrase, suggesting a cloudy affair with a mirror, when the real balance that binds us is the polar difference of sex and the magnetic forces that grapple between.
Perhaps the most useful service we can offer love is to respect that primitive gulf, which is a psychic need, like sleep and darkness, and the deepest store of emotional nourishment. This may not be so easy, in the general mix-up of today, with the enforced blurring of sexual identities; but man still should be man, and woman as female as she is able, so that both may know the best of their natures, and not be compelled to inhabit some neutral no-sex-land in which each is a displaced person.
Love should be an act of will, of passionate patience, flexible, cunning, constant; proof against roasting and freezing, drought and flood, and the shifting climates of mood and age. In order to make it succeed one must lose all preconceptions, including a reliance on milk and honey, and fashion something that can blanket the whole range of experience from ecstasy to decay.
Most of all it must be built on truth, not dream, the knowledge of what we are, rather than what we think it is the fashion to be. For no pair of lovers, no pair of leaves, was ever built to an identical programme. So beware of the norm, for no one is normal, and least of all sexually, and if this is assumed, through self-censorship or ignorance, it may only lead to intolerance, shock and outrage.
If love be true, love always consents (providing one is honest and reasonably lucky) and never attempts to emasculate or straight jacket a passion simply because it fails to fit the conventional posture. In sexual love there is no one rule that demands what love should be, only – ideally – the dovetailing of oddities which love welcomes and combines.
Some of course are the possessors, and some the possessed; some placid, or deeply devious – seeking in the arms of the other their mother-daughter brides, or fathers, heroes, gods. Some need the spirit only, vessels for adoration, for comfort, peace and calm; while others must be taken physically with tooth and claw and can only be damaged by misplaced mercy.
All such is right, if love is right, and the anarchy is shared, and neither person is used simply as the other’s victim but as one whose needs should also be cherished. Love approves, allows and liberates, and is not a course of moral correction, nor a penitential brainwash or a psychiatrist’s couch, but a warm-blooded acceptance of what one is.
At the same time modern love offers another liberation which few societies can have known in the past: the union of two people exchanging equal rights, rather than the coerced mating of man and chattel. For the first time it is possible to imagine it even-handed, a true duality, freed from ancient divisions, when custom, superstition, poverty and fear set the sexes obscurely apart.
Here could lie the foundations of a new serenity, a new level of sexual pride; the girl knowing she was chosen for herself alone and so able to expand through all the versatilities of love, the man able to respond knowing that his choice was a woman and not a share in a flock of goats. The comforts of science, the release from animal drudgery, frees us if we wish it almost to make an art of love, giving us time to explore and balance our pleasures with a nice adjustment between passion and boredom.
The sum of love is that it should be a meeting place, an interlocking of nerves and senses, a series of constant surprises and renewals of each other’s moods, a sharing of the gods of bliss and silence – best of all, a steady building, from the inside out, from the cosy centre of love’s indulgencies, to extend its regions to admit a larger world where children can live and breathe.
This seems promising ground. Yet the hard fact remains that love today fails more often than it succeeds – a failure surely less due to original sin than to a tragic fault of the times. Or more likely to a combination of faults; the decay of instinct, a misunderstanding of love’s basic nature, over-sophistication and loss of innocence, but chiefly the intolerable pressure of the age.
Love needs to seed in a certain space and quiet – and even marriage requires some single-mindedness. The present machine-jigged world allows little for this, having lost the magic and mystery of distance, being shrunk, overcrowded, filled with the racket of voices, never still, never leaving man alone. Even worse, it provides us with all too much – inflation of experience and fragmentation of desire – stuffing our senses each day with so much more than we need that natural hunger is reduced to impotence.
Frantic mobility, mass-communications, the drug-fix of pop music (with its electronically erected virility) often keeps the lover at such a pitch of second-hand fever that normal flesh-and-blood contact palls. In the calm empty spaces of other times, a boy made good with the girl next door; now the crowded campus and swarming life of the city sees him half-paralysed by proliferation of choice. In Jane Austen’s day the world was the parish and a pair of lovers could stand alone in the landscape; now, they share it with some thousand other eligible acquaintances in a dementia of equal temptation. Taking up, putting down, unable to decide or hold, constantly deluded by sight and surface – such conditioning, of course, is also the fracture of marriage, with the switching of partners like automobiles, a modern compulsion with little to show for the exchange save the junk-heaps on the edge of life.
We are all the victims of this; but perhaps the main cause of failure still lies in our attitude to love itself – that it is good only so long as it pleases, and that as soon as it drops one degree below the level of self-satisfaction it is somehow improper to attempt to preserve it.
This is but a natural expression of that contemporary fallacy – the divine right to personal happiness, the rule of self-love, to be enjoyed without effort, at no matter what cost to others. Whoever gave us this right to be merely happy and what makes us think it such an enlightened idea? In claiming the sanction to withdraw from any relationship the moment our happiness appears less than perfect, we are acting out a delusion which results in the denial of everything but the most trivial kind of love. Worse still, it makes a paper house of marriage, flimsily built for instant collapse, haunted by rootless children whose sense of incipient desertion already dooms them to an emotional wasteland. Indeed, the interpretation of rights that allows the jettisoning of children in furtherance of their parents’ right to happiness, not only cancels that happiness but makes more than reasonably certain that the next generation shall be denied it too.
Of all the pressures that threaten the wholeness of modern man, the fissures in love are the most foreboding. There is not less of love but less continuity in it, shallower grounds for its survival. Love must be deeper to adapt to the shifting sands of the world; able to withstand disaffections and occasional betrayals; be sufficiently constant, in the centre of orgy and bedlam, to create its own area of sacred quiet; and also be strong enough to take marriage, its toughest test, and to sink the best of its virtues in it, so that its children may be heirs of its proper kingdom rather than the frail castaways of its self-absorption.
Some readjustment of attitudes may be necessary of course. S
uch as the abdication of the need for power. And the giving up of the prize-fight relationship, which particularly in marriage consists of scoring points and knocking one another down. Also in no longer thinking of the woman as substitute mother or hostage, nor of the man as haltered stud-bull or mug, but in recognizing each as an extension of the other’s honour where the impoverishment of one is a loss to both.
For love still has intimations of immortality to offer us, if we are willing to pay it tribute. If we can learn to forget the old clichés of jealousy and pride (which are just as hammy as the demand for happiness) and not be afraid to stand guard, protect, acquiesce, forgive, and even serve. Love is not merely the indulgence of one’s personal taste-buds; it is also the delight in indulging another’s. Also in remembering the lost beauties, perhaps briefly glimpsed in adolescence, of such simplicities as tenderness and care, in feeling able to charm without suffering loss of status, in taking some pleasure in the act of adoring, and in being content now and then to lie by one’s sleeping love and to shield her eyes from the sun.
Appetite
One of the major pleasures in life is appetite, and one of our major duties should be to preserve it. Appetite is the keenness of living; it is one of the senses that tells you that you are still curious to exist, that you still have an edge on your longings and want to bite into the world and taste its multitudinous flavours and juices.
By appetite, of course, I don’t mean just the lust for food, but any condition of unsatisfied desire, any burning in the blood that proves you want more than you’ve got, and that you haven’t yet used up your life. Wilde said he felt sorry for those who never got their heart’s desire, but sorrier still for those who did. I got mine once only, and it nearly killed me, and I’ve always preferred wanting to having since.
For appetite, to me, is this state of wanting, which keeps one’s expectations alive. I remember learning this lesson long ago as a child, when treats and orgies were few, and when I discovered that the greatest pitch of happiness was not in actually eating a toffee but in gazing at it beforehand. True, the first bite was delicious, but once the toffee was gone one was left with nothing, neither toffee nor lust. Besides, the whole toffeeness of toffees was imperceptibly diminished by the gross act of having eaten it. No, the best was in wanting it, in sitting and looking at it, when one tasted an inexhaustible treasure-house of flavours.
So, for me, one of the keenest pleasures of appetite remains in the wanting, not the satisfaction. In wanting a peach, or a whisky, or a particular texture or sound, or to be with a particular friend. For in this condition, of course, I know that the object of desire is always at its most flawlessly perfect. Which is why I would carry the preservation of appetite to the extent of deliberate fasting, simply because I think that appetite is too good to lose, too precious to be bludgeoned into insensibility by satiation and over-doing it.
For that matter, I don’t really want three square meals a day – I want one huge, delicious, orgiastic, table-groaning blow-out, say every four days, and then not be too sure where the next one is coming from. A day of fasting is not for me just a puritanical device for denying oneself a pleasure, but rather a way of anticipating a rarer moment of supreme indulgence.
Fasting is an act of homage to the majesty of appetite. So I think we should arrange to give up our pleasures regularly – our food, our friends, our lovers – in order to preserve their intensity, and the moment of coming back to them. For this is the moment that renews and refreshes both oneself and the thing one loves. Sailors and travellers enjoyed this once, and so did hunters, I suppose. Part of the weariness of modern life may be that we live too much on top of each other, and are entertained and fed too regularly. Once we were separated by hunger both from our food and families, and then we learned to value both. The men went off hunting, and the dogs went with them; the women and children waved goodbye. The cave was empty of men for days on end; nobody ate, or knew what to do. The women crouched by the fire, the wet smoke in their eyes; the children wailed; everybody was hungry. Then one night there were shouts and the barking of dogs from the hills, and the men came back loaded with meat. This was the great reunion, and everybody gorged themselves silly, and appetite came into its own; the long-awaited meal became a feast to remember and an almost sacred celebration of life. Now we go off to the office and come home in the evenings to cheap chicken and frozen peas. Very nice, but too much of it, too easy and regular, served up without effort or wanting. We eat, we are lucky, our faces are shining with fat, but we don’t know the pleasure of being hungry any more.
Too much of anything – too much music, entertainment, happy snacks, or time spent with one’s friends, creates a kind of impotence of living by which one can no longer hear, or taste, or see, or love, or remember. Life is short and precious, and appetite is one of its guardians, and loss of appetite is a sort of death. So if we are to enjoy this short life we should respect the divinity of appetite, and keep it eager and not too much blunted.
It is a long time now since I knew that acute moment of bliss that comes from putting parched lips to a cup of cold water. The springs are still there to be enjoyed – all one needs is the original thirst.
Charm
Charm is the ultimate weapon, the supreme seduction, against which there are few defences. If you’ve got it, you need almost nothing else, neither money, looks, nor pedigree. It’s a gift, only given to give away, and the more used the more there is. It is also a climate of behaviour set for perpetual summer and thermostatically controlled by taste and tact.
True charm is an aura, an invisible musk in the air; if you see it working, the spell is broken. At its worst, it is the charm of the charity duchess, like being struck in the face with a bunch of tulips; at its best, it is a smooth and painless injection which raises the blood to a genial fever. Most powerful of all, it is obsessive, direct, person-to-person, forsaking all others. Never attempt to ask for whom the charm-bells ring; if they toll for anyone, they must toll for you.
As to the ingredients of charm, there is no fixed formula; they vary intuitively between man and woman. A whole range of mysteries goes into the cauldron, but the magic remains the same. In some cases, perhaps, the hand of the charmer is lighter, more discreet, less overwhelming, but the experience it offers must be absolute – one cannot be ‘almost’ or ‘partly’ charmed.
Charm in a woman is probably more exacting than in a man, requiring a wider array of subtleties. It is a light in the face, a receptive stance, an air of exclusive welcome, an almost impossibly sustained note of satisfaction in one’s company, and regret without fuss at parting. A woman with charm finds no man dull, doesn’t have to pretend to ignore his dullness; indeed, in her presence he becomes not just a different person but the person he most wants to be. Such a woman gives life to his deep-held fantasies and suddenly makes them possible, not so much by flattering him as adding the necessary conviction to his long suspicion that he is king.
Of those women who have most successfully charmed me in the past, I remember chiefly their eyes and voices. That swimming way of looking, as though they were crushing wine, their tone of voice, and their silences. The magic of that look showed no distraction, nor any wish to be with anyone else. Their voices were furred with comfort, like plumped-up cushions, intimate and enveloping. Then the listening eyes, supreme charm in a woman, betraying no concern with any other world than this, warmly wrapping one round with total attention and turning one’s lightest words to gold. Looking back, I don’t pretend that I was in any way responsible; theirs was a charm to charm all men, and must have continued to exist, like the flower in the desert, when there was nobody there to see it.
A woman’s charm needn’t always cater to such extremes of indulgence – though no man will complain if it does. At the least, she spreads round her that particular glow of well-being for which any man will want to seek her out, and by making full use of her nature, celebrates the fact of his maleness and so gives him an extra
shot of life. Her charm lies also in that air of timeless maternalism, that calm and pacifying presence, which can dispel a man’s moments of frustration and anger and salvage his failures of will.
Charm in a man, I suppose, is his ability to capture the complicity of a woman by a single-minded acknowledgment of her uniqueness. Here again it is a question of being totally absorbed, of forgetting that anyone else exists – but really forgetting, for nothing more fatally betrays than the suggestion of a wandering eye. Silent devotion is fine, but seldom enough; it is what a man says that counts, the bold declarations, the flights of fancy, the uncovering of secret virtues. Praise can be a jewel, but the gift must be personal, the only one of its kind in the world; while flattery itself will never be thought excessive so long as there’s no suspicion that it’s been said before.
A man’s charm strikes deepest when a woman’s imagination is engaged, with herself as the starting point; when she is made a part of some divine extravaganza, or mystic debauch, in which she feels herself both the inspirer and ravished victim. A man is charmed through his eyes, a woman by what she hears, so no man need be too anxious about his age. As wizened Voltaire once said: ‘Give me a few minutes to talk away my face and I can seduce the Queen of France.’
No man, even so, will wish to talk a woman to death; there is also room for the confessional priest, a role of unstinted patience and dedication to the cause, together with a modest suspension of judgment. ‘You may have sinned, but you couldn’t help it, you were made for love … You have been wronged, you have suffered too much …’ If a man has this quality, it is as much a solace to a woman as his power to dilate her with praise and passion.
But charm, after all, isn’t exclusively sexual, it comes in a variety of cooler flavours. Most children have it – till they are told they have it – and so do old people with nothing to lose; animals, too, of course, and a few outdoor insects, and certain sea-creatures if they can claim to be mammals – seals, whales, and dolphins, but not egg-laying fish (you never saw a fish in a circus). With children and smaller animals it is often in the shape of the head and in the chaste unaccusing stare; with young girls and ponies, a certain stumbling awkwardness, a leggy inability to control their bodies. The sullen narcissism of adolescents, product of over-anxiety, can also offer a ponderous kind of charm. But all these are passive, and appeal to the emotions simply by capturing one’s protective instincts.