Part 2
And the honeymoon! This wonderful time that makes happy and normal at once--that gives color and joy and sensuous pleasure and at the same time frees one from the too great intensity of an unsatisfied desire! The wonderful, ornate honeymoon when the full beauty of your mistress is revealed to you, but when this beauty has the cooling and pleasing and caressing quality of Nature and no longer corrodes and harasses and waylays and deeply troubles! The sleepless, wonderful nights, the wonderful languid days following, the infinite noon embraces, the infinite talks and hopes and plans; and the sensuous April quarrels, the life-giving rain of them, the hot and liquid reconciliations! The melting joy of it! The glorious health of it; the senses gloriously stirred and gloriously satisfied!
_Chapter III_
Looking back on that honeymoon now, after a lapse of fifteen years, it seems so simple, so naïve and so lyrical! It was before the beginning of what seemed to me later the complexities of life, the intricacies of human relations, those many-hued and contradictory threads which render dangerous the love relation and threaten its duration, but at the same time prevent its atrophy. And in spite of the danger there is something that urges on every strenuous lover to dig deeper down into the wonderful being he is living with. It is a sound instinct which tells us that unless there is development there is death. We see in all Nature the law that to keep the life we must build up the body, whether it be the individual body or the body of a relationship.
And yet we, poet-lovers, struggle against the passing of the simple into the complex! The lover passionately wills the continuing of the same, but deeper than his will is his unconscious instinct which is preparing the unknown addition, the fascinating new danger. I remember, as if it were yesterday, her despair when she first knew she was to have a child. It was not so much because she felt the impending change in our relation--for, as I have written, I was not then and am not now sure that she ever fully accepted that relation--as it was the intrusion into her nature and life of something unknown and seemingly foreign. She rebelled consciously against the breaking up of her integrity, of that breathing wholeness of her being which made life, work and love seem mere aspects of the same simple thing.
This child was thrust upon her as my love had been thrust upon her. It was something she did not consciously welcome. And yet deeper than her consciousness--and of this she was well aware at a later time--was the need of that disturbing change. I know she wanted the child with a want deeper than her will, and this conviction has often made me feel that she wanted my love more than she knew. My love and the children that resulted were the tools that Nature used whereby she might continue to live, through change and development.
What obscure joy this pregnancy was to me! One early morning I awoke and saw her lying asleep by my side, and on her belly were traced the first lines of the new Life. As she lay there, with this plastic sign of the coming child incarnate on her lovely body, I was filled with a wild exultation, and I clasped her passionately in my arms.
How can I account for the intense joy I felt in what was to her at the time a conscious burden? I did not reason about it. I could not have explained it satisfactorily to myself. Why should I rejoice in the discomfiture of the creature I loved? It was perhaps the unconscious knowledge, the instinct for life which made me ecstatic--I knew without thought that greater life had been meted out to her, to me, to all. I was glad that she was to be destroyed, so that she might rise again from the ashes of her old unconscious conservatism. “Each man kills the thing he loves,” wrote the poet, but he also renders possible for the beloved another and a larger life. Thus destruction and rebirth go hand in hand, and so I could not find it in my heart to regret, as she lay weeping in my arms.
Life is spiritual. The simple things are the great mysteries. What must happen is the only beautiful. The accidental is never lovely. Her first pregnancy was to me a source of never-ending wonder and delight. The richness, the color, the quiet of it! The sensitive calmness that pervaded her whole being! The lovely adjustment of what she had been to what she was about to be. What poise at each step, what breathing, expanding life! How she seemed in deep unconsciousness to brood like a spirit over her wonderful body--the body that was as much a part of her as her spirit. It was her spirit, as her spirit was her body,--both were different aspects of the same.
It was a time of weeping sensibility. A slight intrusion of anything not a part of her enlarging nature brought quick tears and seemed to cast a shadow over the pervading sunlight of her condition. I remember, as we sat one day under a pine tree, I threw at her in play a light little cone which barely touched her life-breathing skin. But it was enough to disturb the powers that were intent on their wonderful purpose. And the tears that followed were a silent and unconscious rebuke. I who should have guarded her against any unfriendly intrusion was guilty of a deep offense. She did not say so, perhaps did not think so, but her whole being knew so. The sin was greater because not intended. I and the rest of external Nature were in duty bound to be more sensitive. And, of course, she was profoundly right. The great sins are unconscious and inevitable, due to the coarseness of the Universe.
The throwing of the cone was symbolic of much of my relation to the woman I loved. In moments of intensity I felt the spiritual meaning of all Life, and at such times I could understand, at least, how to act with sensibility towards her. But much of the time I was carelessly throwing figurative cones, projecting acts and thoughts which were intruders, which did not make a sweet part of the complex, the total content of her nature, but were hostile to it. Perhaps it was this which made our relation so often a troubled one, and which has left in me a deep, lingering sense of doubt of her love for me. She has never accepted my Form, my essential Self, as beautiful. Flashes in my acts, thoughts and feelings have some approach to what is friendly to her spirit, but the whole thing is not sensitized and intensified enough to form the blue flame of perfection which her soul desires.
And my coarse conceptions and brutal acts were of far greater dimensions than those of the cone. I demanded a continuity of emotion and a constantly repeated experience. For me there must needs be something significantly active; in me always was a restless reaching out, a striving to connect myself with something foreign; in a vain, unconscious hope of finding the rich peace that did not exist in my own soul, I went out to every passing thing, seeking an unattainable equilibrium. Only restlessly man realizes himself, wrote Goethe. Only by connection with outside things does the male come to the consciousness of himself, if he be a pure male, which is an ugly misfortune. And the only way he rids himself of this undesirable purity is by the disillusion bound up in his nameless, continuous superficial acts. He ever approaches but never attains the brooding dignity and sensitive peace of the pregnant woman.
The soul of every beautiful thing is quiet. Much of the time she was so quiet and so unresponsive that there was no place for me in her presence. Often I went away from her, irritated by her very perfection; by her self-sufficiency and calm; went away from what I loved and what I prized, to occupy myself with transient things, experiences and strangers--with work, with women, and with boon companions!
These were the cones of more serious character that I threw into the face of this womanly woman! And it is what many a man has done before and since. In him it is the love of life and of play. In play, he throws his cones, as the child gleefully tears from the butterfly its gorgeous wings. In cruel play he seeks and seeks, seeking self-realization wherever he can find it; going through his Pilgrim’s Progress, hoping for the Impossible, finding the Illusion. And in this play he is able to continue, to appear to go further, through the unconscious help of the woman he loves! To live intimately with a woman is to learn an instinctive subtlety of approach to all of life, to work, to the understanding of art and of the problems of society, to the more complete friendship with men and with other women.
Yes, with other women! This is not the truth as written down in the sentimental storybooks of life. It is not what we teach our young men, nor, for some obscure reason, is it what we desire to believe. It is contrary to the fictions of Romance. If it has beauty, it is the beauty of a grimmer Realism. It possesses the quality of deep irony, that she should help her lover to Others! And that thereby Others should receive more! But the real romance lies in the return to the Beloved. Her errant Lover is a Retriever who brings rich gifts from the world to lay at the feet of his Mistress.
As I went in and out of the unformed places of the world, in the obscurities and half-lights of the cities of men and women, I gathered up stray flashes and suggestions and carried them piously home to her, as the child on the beach rushes to his mother with his latest find, some delicately traced shell perhaps, for her to admire. If I went away from her, irritated by her inexpressive calm, by the far-away brooding of her soul, and feverishly sought a café-companion, whose abrupt and fragmentary experiences combined into form through my eager sympathy, a part of the pleasure and the impulse that drove me to it was to bring it back to her.
To bring it back to her, to please, interest and disturb her! To exhibit myself, my mental and imaginative resources, to arouse her admiration, to stimulate her senses, to excite her amorousness, to awaken and challenge her perfection! To contribute to her pregnancy, not only of the body, but of the soul and mind, gave me a deep excitement and a satisfaction that passes understanding.
And her brooding soul, the soul of the artist and the woman, working on forms both physical and spiritual, took what came to her, both pain and pleasure, and wove it insensibly into the harmony of her being. At a later time, it was difficult, perhaps impossible, for her to welcome all I tried to force upon her, but during the first years of our married life, she took it all very much as she breathed, naturally, tolerantly, with quiet understanding, never failing to remain herself, but making room for the foreign things that came to her through me.
I wonder if it is not true that the most difficult art in the world is the art of human relations. What we call art is mere child’s play in comparison. And a human relationship is never finished, as long as it remains alive. There is a never-ceasing, strenuous re-making, re-creating. It tests everything there is in a man to live artistically with a woman, and it calls out all the art of a woman to insist that her relations with a man shall have essential form.
Patience is as necessary to the art of love as it is to any other art. One may throw off fine sketches impulsively, nervously, but there is a wide difference between the sketch and the finished thing. We find painters and writers who have suggestive ideas but who never put enough enduring intensity into their work to give it essential form. So, too, in the art of love. The rule in love as in the minor arts--these minor arts being poetry, painting, sculpture and music--the rule in love is the sketch. Very few lovers go beyond the sketch. Few have the enduring power, the artistic patience to build the relation into an essential form. It is perhaps for this reason that love is not regarded as an art at all. It is too difficult.
Men and women fall in love with one another. They catch glimpses of that most beautiful thing--that unseen thing--the soul of the opposite sex as incarnate in the body--and under the excitement of that perception, they are in love. But a glimpse is a glimpse, and it passes quickly, in a day, in a year. It passes if it remains thus simple: if it remains merely that vision of beauty. For beauty grown familiar is no longer beauty. It is tedium. It no longer enhances; it no longer awakens, beckons, no longer leads one on.
So most lovers tire quickly. They know love’s sad satiety, but if they are real lovers, though not artists in love, they must pass on restlessly from one woman to another, from one man to another, seeking an impossible satisfaction, restlessly, feverishly. They are the sketch-makers. They who have the amorous insight, the love impulse, are usually of this essentially restless kind. They are the minor artists in love, not the great shapers, the patient formers of Life.
But to the artist-lover his Mistress is always unfamiliar. Into her goes all his changing experience. She is remodeled in his eyes from period to period. He sees in the One the incarnation of the Many. Impatient perhaps, superficially, yet deeply he is patient, for he builds his work of art, and is passionately content to build on, if it takes an eternity.
Impatiently I threw at her all the cones I could gather along the Road of Life. I restlessly strove to disturb her, in her ideas, in her feelings; beyond all else I passionately wished to destroy her aloofness, her quiet coolness; even in her pregnancy I would not leave her alone. When I could no longer endure her endurance, when her love of solitude and her almost uncanny quiet, aroused me into a kind of unreasoning indignation, I would, as I have said, rush off and precipitate myself into some sort of restless adventuring; then return and give her the disturbing result of my experiences. But underneath my restlessness and my conventional infidelities, there lay always the deep passionate will for an enduring union, based upon her continuously changing strangeness, the wonderful strangeness, the progressively beautiful strangeness of her nature.
_Chapter IV_
In our little apartment, in one of the noisiest of New York streets, she waited quietly for the coming of the child. The place had no elevator and one of my clearest memories is the significant difficulty with which she ascended the stairs! She moved with the dignified slowness of unconscious Nature. We used to walk or rather vibrate round the block together for her ominous exercise every evening, so that the child might be well settled down into her womb. Then, after the important task of climbing the stairs, and the less difficult, but still laborious preparation for bed, she would lie back, seeking in vain, complete comfort; full of quiet, full of a wonderful sufficiency, but withal always uncomfortable, with a discomfort as quiet as her pleasures! It was a strange, a beautiful, a laborious time!
Then, in the early evening, with her book and her cigarette, and her quietly insistent burden, what place was there for me? To be with her always at such times would have seemed shameful, even to me. I remember how often I appeared to myself trivial and ridiculous, unkind and superficial, because I wanted to be actively with her, because I wanted her to be actively with me!--to follow my restless talk, to see the pickpocket or the Yiddish poet as I saw them, to sympathize with my quick sympathy for the drunk in the saloon, or the careless girl of my acquaintance!
Even to me in my eagerness I felt the shameful impossibility of it. Big with child, she seemed beautiful in a new way,--and what a way! The inexpressive significance, the wonder of it! So when I went away from her many evenings, leaving her as quiet as her burden would permit, it was with a kind of humiliation. Often have I sallied forth into what was then to me romantic to a degree,--the streets at night, with all their fanciful possibilities of strange meetings, of mental and sensuous suggestions, to meet some man in a café, to follow out the fascinating track to what I hoped would be literature; to what filled me with sketches, sketches of life, mainly unrecorded, but always stimulating and exciting.
I wanted these experiences, but as I left her for them, I felt, as I have said, a kind of shame and humiliation. I seemed to myself to be engaged in trivialities. I could not help comparing myself, restlessly looking into the back-alleys and by-streets of the town and of the world of human nature, with her, lying, voluminous, portentous, waiting, and quietly brooding. I was forced into the street, partly through my nervous curiosity and fever for possible glimpses, partly through my consciousness that she needed more to withdraw herself from me, much of the time, than to be with me. And both these causes did not feed my vanity nor increase my dignity in my own eyes. If I had not been impelled to want these restless contacts, and had been able to be an essential, integral part of her quiet building in a great process, I should have been what my deeper imagination desired. I should have been a part of Beauty itself! But I habitually fell away from my ideal, was continuously thrown off into the amusing futilities of manifold adventures. If I could only have been with child myself! If we could have been with child together! That would have satisfied my deepest instincts, would have made us one. But, limited by inexorable Nature, I was forced to try to impregnate myself in a figurative sense, to wander about the world, led on by the instinctive need of being suggested, of being stimulated into mental and temperamental fruitfulness, into giving birth to ideas!--pale consolations!
If I write sometimes in this narrative about the art of love, do not imagine that I think I know anything about it; nor that in any way I regard myself as successful in this great shaping process. But I have had, and have, a passionate, never-failing desire to do this almost impossible thing. I see my errors and am not sure of the final result. Often I have stood on the brink of failure, and I do so at this moment, filled with a kind of helpless dread, not knowing how to shape the clay of life, to draw the line that is instinctively right, that gives the vital equilibrium of art. I feel at times that this terrific longing of mine is a criminal instinct. Is it not a crime for a man to want to be pregnant? To want to be mutually pregnant? Does it not show a passionate invasiveness, an almost incredible desire for violation of another’s personality? Is it not terrible and ugly, rather than beautiful? Perhaps it is both.
And is it not a terrible thing to be dependent on another human being? When we find ourselves going in that direction, should we not strenuously call ourselves to account, and tear the bondage from our breasts? But the greater the need to do so, the more difficult it is; it is really taken from our will and we are the prey of circumstance.
I am now writing many years after the present stage in the story, to which I shall return. I am writing on the brink of the abyss, for I am at a moment when, my love as strong as ever, I perceive with peculiar intensity, the loneliness of our lives, the lack of contact, the complete isolation in which her spirit dwells, and the kind of shrinking that my approach causes in her. Oh, why do I need the Impossible? Why, oh why? She so often tells me, and means it, for she is as clear of guile and as candid as the sunlight, that we could live a happy, pleasant, affectionate life together, if it were not for my obscure, metaphysical needs, my unexplainable passions and the growing restlessness which deprives her of the opportunity for spiritual seclusion. She needs to be emotionally alone, most of the time. Why cannot I endure it?
I can endure now even less than before; for my hope of disturbing her into the need for me that I have for her is growing less, is almost gone. And I am perhaps undergoing what may be called the change of life in a man. There is no physical difference, as far as I can see, but there is a poignant sadness and my vision of the world is changing. It is all as beautiful as before, but now it is the beauty of terror. The universe seemed so friendly, but now it seems to me that all Nature is at war with man, and that we need to gather together and cheer and protect and comfort one another against the external enemy to whom ere long we must succumb. We are fighting a losing fight, and we need sympathy and love and friendship.
It is perhaps that which makes my need of her almost fierce. When the universe fails, the need of a personal relation becomes so intense that all peace is lost. It is said that a woman who is passing through the change of life often undergoes an exaggeration, a stimulation of sexual desire. And perhaps with a man his need for an intense exclusive relation grows painfully greater, as the fire flares up into a brighter flame just before it is extinguished forever and passes into the coldness of old age.
As I write these lines I know the truth does not fully appear. I have an unquenchable desire to tell the truth but it is something that quite surpasses my power of expression. The impression of blackness that these last pages give is not wholly faithful. Blackness is only one color in the compound. I see the whole thing as very beautiful, even separation and death, but I also see the poignant sadness and the quality of terror and tragedy.
As the time of her deliverance from the first born approached, a minor note of quiet gayety modified the harsher noises of life. It was as if the child, which long since had begun to move and stir in the womb, had begun to prevail, and to insist upon a smiling interpretation and a cheerful attitude. The atmosphere of children, in which our relation has existed for an eternity, began to form before the first of our four children was born. As we both together sometimes felt the pulsations of the new life, and she the springing within and the urge and the movement it was the faint suggestion as of a bouncing little cherub playing with his blocks about the room or trying to dive through the window pane! And we would smile together, she one of those long, slow, tender smiles which went through her whole body and soul, and completely satisfied her, and I would smile more quickly, a smile tending to translate itself into a more strenuous expression and a forbidden embrace!
And slowly and richly, like a well-filled argosy, she would sometimes move with me to the café for dinner, and throughout our talk, or more exactly my talk, the unborn would have its effect. It was not like the old days of my pre-nuptial wooing when my words flowed in torrential masses and the atmosphere was filled with the excitement of half ideas and amorous hopes. Into these was introduced a subtle modification. The shadow of the child was cast on the high lights like gray on a water color, bringing in a transfused softening. And my male companions who came alone or with their wives to our little apartment, underwent the same influence, and there was not so much wine and whiskey consumed, and not so much boisterous talk about it and about. The unseen deeper meaning made its demand and insisted upon harmony in the surroundings.
Pregnancy came to seem to me such a normal, inevitable state that when I saw slim girls in the street or young married women who had not yet begun their process of completion, it was with a sort of pity. They seemed so wanting, so forlorn and hoping. Where was the male with his impregnating fierceness? Why should such wanting creatures go thinly about the world?