by Kirsty Gunn
So Evan Gordonston, though he doesn’t know this is what he is doing, is following the grand tradition of courtly love, established as a code of habits, actions and beliefs predicated on the very idea of the revered love object who stands off at a distance, in his desire to have Nin ‘make it all come together’ as he says to her on p. 26 and repeatedly through the various sections of Caroline’s Bikini.
Emily Stuart herself similarly acts within the tradition by agreeing to be Evan’s scribe or ‘amanuensis’ as she puts it to him on the first page – although that term pertains to the writing of Paradise Lost by John Milton, an altogether different, and anyway much later project than the one first established by troubadours of the early middle ages and then by Dante and Petrarch in their extended poems. Stuart, by recording, interviewing, and, at times, also transcribing Evan’s own notes from his original journals and papers, follows the role of various scribes from the medieval and early Renaissance monasteries, some of whom might have been responsible for the versions of Dante and Petrarch we now have to peruse and wonder at in our grand libraries and research institutions.
This issue of making ‘real’ something that has otherwise gone unobserved or unrequited through expression in language – emotion turned into words – is at the very heart of Caroline’s Bikini and informs it on all levels. The relationships both of Gordonston and Beresford, and of Gordonston and Stuart, are enacted, bodily brought forth into being, if you like, in these pages. As Petrarch has it:
It was that very day on which the sun
in pity for his maker dimmed the ray,
when I was captured, with my guard astray,
for your bright eyes, my lady, bound me then. Canzoniere, Part One, 3*
Thus, the capture of love in words on a page – not action itself – is the driving force behind the entire project the friends have generated together, and Stuart is quite right, when she protests over and over again that there is nothing about the ‘novel’ in any of the matters and actions under discussion for there is quite simply ‘not enough going on’ for it to fulfil that particular remit. ‘Novel’ she calls it, quite deliberately always retaining those quote marks around it, but novel … That is another thing altogether, and readers will judge for themselves whether Caroline’s Bikini might work for them in that particular way. On the other hand this drive to create on the page a situation that a reader might engage with, feel emotionally attached to, might care about, even … This sits at the base of the project like a device, if not an engine, a complicated and powerful little mechanism that might set the whole prose work in motion.
‘Make it new,’ said the modernist poet Ezra Pound in his outline of the poetic project; well, then, so might Caroline’s Bikini be, to paraphrase another poet, Wallace Stevens, no representation of an event, but the event itself, as Stevens put it: ‘The cry of its own creation.’
Courtly Love
So much of Caroline’s Bikini is structured around and reflective of the medieval and early Renaissance tradition of a particular kind of romantic sensibility based on containment, formality and and an engraved and highly wrought form of communication and literature that was generated by ideas of concealment, ardour and unrequited love.
Courtly love began as an early medieval European literary conception of love that emphasised nobility and chivalry. Literature of that period is filled with examples of knights setting out on adventures and performing various services for ladies because of their love for them, a love, however, that exists not in the humanist and romantic terms that we understand and know, but in a particular set of conventions and practices that meant the beloved stayed distant, a figure that could never be possessed or fully understood because he or she is absent from the scene. Note: I say ‘he’, because it is this writer’s belief that, much later, the essayist Montaigne followed in the same tradition with his Meditations; only in that case the object of affection was a dear friend who died tragically at a young age, and was sorely missed by the writer who then wrote him into being, as it were, with his various interventions created in his famous lonely tower. More of that later, perhaps. In general, it is true, the tradition of courtly love is that of a knight for his lady and from here on I shall refer to the object of affection as a ‘she’ for that reason.
Courtly love and the literary artefacts that were created around it was originally a sensibility understood only by the nobility. Knights, castles, ladies in towers … This is the entertainment about and for kings and queens and princesses and is still the basis for much of the literature that we give little girls in particular, at birthdays and Christmases, bound between the hard covers of a book of Fairy Tales and sprinkled liberally with glitter.
Yet, though the courtly love tradition began that way, as an entertainment for a particular few, time passed and the same ideas developed and changed to attract a larger audience. In the high middle ages, a ‘game of love’ developed around ideas of withholding love as a set of social practices: ‘loving nobly’ was considered to be an enriching and improving code of manners that would add finesse and grace to the individual and society as a whole.
If the tradition of courtly love began in palaces, by the end of the eleventh century it was more widespread and part of a fuller literary expression, finally creating a firm and nourishing base from which much of what we generally know to be our canon of literature in English and Scots was grown. In essence, the experience it described, caught between erotic desire and spiritual attainment, ‘a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent,’ according to scholar Francis Newman in his book, The Meaning of Courtly Love, could be said to have generated the content of so much western literature where the same ideas play out in a range of guises.
The term, generally, it has to be said, has a wide variety of definitions and uses that brings us right up to the present day – as is evidenced by the very existence of Caroline’s Bikini, which in itself is a description of a code of practice and beliefs that may have relevance and application today: ‘And then that smile of hers’, we read at the end of the third section of that novel, in ‘Evan’s […] folk-music style of poetry’: ‘that smile of hers that made my life begin.’
Other references in the novel, apart from repeated iterations of Dante’s poetic project, that point to a similar sensibility might include the character of Beryl in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘At the Bay’ as well as a range of modernist texts such as Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s Fiesta.
Traditions
Caroline’s Bikini follows the tradition of marking the passage of unrequited love in a series of texts or documents which, taken together, form one uninterrupted testament of the lover’s feelings for the beloved, and his changing circumstances and thoughts as he charts the passage of his desire in sentences and paragraphs that attempt to achieve the high status of art.
In Evan Gordonston’s case, this ‘art’ was never much in place but for a few moments when, in his journals and writings, he attempts a form of prose that is rather more highly wrought and formal than his usual jottings; sometimes these musings too take on the colours and heightened reality and imaginations of fiction.
In his practice, his amanuensis notes his debt to Dante and Petrarch in his ‘first sighting’ of Caroline Beresford at the front door of her home in Richmond that then gave way to months and months of private unspoken passion, with not a word spoken by Gordonston to the object of his desire about his feelings or thoughts about the nature and generation of his desire.
In this he follows almost exactly the story of Dante, whose Beatrice was significantly younger, of course, than the glamorous middle-aged Beresford, who underwent the same physical and emotional conversion as the West London banker. Dante claimed he first met Beatrice Portinari when she was nine years old, and claimed to have fallen in love with her ‘at first sight’, apparently without even talking with her. He saw
her in the following years often, and might exchange some greetings with her in the street, but never knew her well. We might say, then, that his was the first sustained example of socalled courtly love in an extended literary context, that until then had been an idea rather than a reality, a poem rather than the biography of a poet.
Dante’s love for Beatrice (as Petrarch would show for Laura somewhat differently) would be his reason for poetry and for living, together with political interests and writing. In many of his poems, she is depicted as half goddess, watching over him constantly and providing spiritual instruction, sometimes rather firmly. When Beatrice died in 1290, Dante sought refuge in Latin literature. He went ‘into himself’ in much the same way Evan Gordonston retreats from the world of society, internationalism and high finance, finding solace only in the dark recesses of various West London pubs with his dearest, oldest friend Emily ‘Nin’ Stuart as his guide. Note: certain questioning and doubtful readers of both Dante’s Purgatorio and Inferno may see strange similarities in the roles taken up by Nin and Beatrice, in this matter of guide to dark places – an issue that may trouble those who are more literal-minded in their interpretation of the roles played out in Caroline’s Bikini – for if Gordonston is the lover and Beresford the beloved, then who is this Stuart who might guide the former, Beatrice-like, through the depths of despair?
The Canzoniere by Petrarch, though, is the more active underlying theme of Caroline’s Bikini, its inspiration and ‘engine’ as it has been referred to earlier in these notes. It is a work of detail and imagination that effects reality: making into an object that could be held in one’s hands as a text or book a love that was otherwise unobserved and unrequited, that had no currency in the world. Instead here it exists as a living reality: a piece of art, a ‘machine of words’ that can be possessed.
Petrarch saw his Laura, glimpsed her even, a fourteen-year-old girl coming out of church in Avignon on Easter Monday – and fell in love with her at once. His entire life thereafter was spent thinking about her, planning a future with her, imagining her and her impress upon him in all its detail … A work of the mind and of his art that resulted in the long and ornate sonnet sequence we have today.
Fully in love with someone he had never met, never even said hello to, and who he would never, in his long life, ever see again … This was Francesco Petrarch. Emily Stuart thinks of him from the moment Evan Gordonston reports that from the first moment he saw Caroline Beresford he fell deeply, irreparably in love: this on pp. 24–5 of Caroline’s Bikini as follows: ‘Caroline came right up behind him and extended her hand. “Hi, I’m Caroline,” she’d said. And – BANG.’ And ‘Evan walked in the front door of the house in Richmond and, well, I’m writing it down now, it was there in his own writing, in some of the early notes, his “life changed”.’
Petrarch recounts that on 26 April 1336, with his brother and two servants, he climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux, a feat which he undertook for recreation rather than necessity, carrying with him a copy of St Augustine’s Confessions. Standing on the summit of the mountain he took the volume from his pocket and as it fell open his eyes were immediately drawn to the following words:
‘And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.’
His response at that moment was to turn from the outer world of nature to the inner world of ‘soul’:
‘I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myself, and from that time not a syllable fell from my lips until we reached the bottom again.’
The next line that he wrote is significant for close readers of Caroline’s Bikini:
‘We look about us for what is to be found only within and close by … How many times, think you, did I turn back that day, to glance at the summit of the mountain which seemed scarcely a cubit high compared with the range of human contemplation.’
He spent the later part of his years in that mood of contemplation and introversion and that was when he started work on the Canzoniere, marking his great love for Laura, the subject of his devotion and imagination, in a poetic series that followed in content and attitude the provisions and standards of courtly love, while writing it ‘new’ through his private imagination and sense of personal art.
Unrequited Love as a Creative Act
What we have, then, is reference to a central decision, made at a certain point in the artist’s life, to fashion events and circumstances into art: to make of a glimpse of a girl in church, not only a set of poems in response to that glimpse, but from that set of poems create another, more fulsome text that might not only reflect the writer’s feelings and hopes but educate him in them, and so help lead him to a future life of bliss.
Such is the creative engine fuelling a project – or ‘report’ or ‘novel’ – based around absence, that is at the heart of both the Canzoniere and Caroline’s Bikini. Where love may not be realised or actualised, a text can be. Where a woman cannot be brought into the life of the writer as a lover and companion, a set of pages formed into a book may take her place. The love is abstract and unrealised; the words are real.
If any writer today looking for a subject or theme for a work and who is unable to find it may be so inspired by the vacancy that is at the heart of Caroline’s Bikini to create his or her own response, then so, too, the project of Evan Gordonston and Emily ‘Nin’ Stuart will not have been in vain. Art needs a sense of lack to bring about its own effects; where there is no feeling of need to make up a shortfall, there will be no work.
Creativity and Desire
As scholar Anthony Mortimer writes:
The Laura that wakes the lyricism of Petrarch is rarely present to his physical eye; she is evoked from the past, projected into the future, recreated in absence, always transformed into a literary and aesthetic object … The real Laura … is less compelling than the poetic vision she enables, the sum of essentially literary memories that she evokes … The moving, breathing creature can only truly be loved when she is immobilized by the memory and made available for contemplation in the fragile stasis of art.†
This modus operandi could be applied almost word for word to the way in which Evan Gordonston goes about setting Caroline Beresford into a permanent situation within her home in Richmond. In meetings with his friend Emily Stuart, and the conversations about Caroline that ensue in those meetings, and in the notes and journals he keeps about her, he, too, like the Italian poet, is setting down the beloved in a context to which he may return, over and over, and so revere and honour her continually through time. The ‘real’ Caroline Beresford, to use the phrase of Mortimer above, is not so much ‘less compelling’ as the version set down jointly by Stuart and Gordonston on paper, but she is the Caroline we have and know. To that extent, the Caroline of Stuart and Gordonston’s creation, like the Laura of Petrarch, is fashioned from words, outlined in fact. Perhaps, yes, but enabled by the imagination. That much is equally true.
The construction, too, of Caroline’s Bikini has about it something of a formal schedule that we see in much more established texts – following certain rules and practices that bring the piece of work into being.
Mortimer writes (and he could be referring to Gordonston and Stuart here): ‘Petrarch often seems to write with the calendar at his elbow … The insistence on chronology, on time that passes without bringing change, underlines the poet’s trapped condition as he oscillates between aesthetic contemplation and elegiac introspection, a prey to both spiritual paralysis and chronic emotional instability.’ (p. xxii, ibid)
Much of Petrarch’s structure rests on his much-imitated so-ca
lled antithetical style, best reflected in the most imitated sonnet of all in the Canzoniere – no. 132, ‘If this should not be love’:
If this should not be love, what is it then?
But if it is love, God, what can love be?
If good, why mortal bitterness to me?
If ill, why is it sweetness that torments?
If willingly I burn, why these laments?
If not my will, what use can weeping be?
O living death, delightful agony,
How can you do so much without consent?
And if I do consent, wrongly I grieve.
By such cross winds my fragile bark is blown
I drift unsteered upon the open seas,
In vision light, with error so weighed down
That I myself know not the thing I crave,
And burn in winter, and in summer freeze.
Though this is an ornate and highly formally ‘made’ representation of Laura by the poet, does it not remind us, just a little, of some of those strange artificialities in Gordonston’s own writing, sections of which are referred to by his friend Emily Stuart as ‘bad folk’? In other words, this desire to create an effect of the feeling of love on the page often results in text that is somewhat hectic and overwrought, a straining for emotional charge brought about by some literary device or other, either, as we see above, in the linking of opposites, or in the case of Evan’s journal, the influence of certain kinds of folk songs or, more particularly, the lyrics of Bob Dylan poorly copied by Gordonston in lines like ‘She’s the “smile”’ or in other places ‘“Good Morning” that makes my day begin’ and so on.