Burning Men

On bad relationships in literature

I’ve been thinking about bad literary relationships lately. Partly because I read Frances Wilson’s Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence - a passionately written biography which is unsparingly detailed on Lawrence’s strengths and flaws, and recounts his turbulent bonds with most of the people in his life.

In Lawrence’s defence, he suffered from tuberculosis - which almost killed him every winter - and was torturously closeted. This made it challenging both to be him, and to be in a relationship with him. Yet women continually supported Lawrence, were muses for the female characters in his work, and followed him from country to country. I often wondered why he inspired such devotion. In his worst moods, Lawrence had the kind of spite that prompted him to write to Katherine Mansfield as she was dying from TB, which he probably passed on to her: ‘You revolt me stewing in your consumption.’ [Wilson, p. 196]. By the time I reached this exchange between Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, and the poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), I was ready to give up on the wisdom of poets:

Frieda went on to confide [to H.D.] that ‘Lawrence does not really care for women. He only cares for men. Hilda, you have no idea what he is like.’ […] But H.D., her self-absorption having long perverted her judgment, understood Frieda to be encouraging rather than discouraging an affair between herself and Lawrence

[p. 133]

[Facepalm].

In case you’re wondering, this is what H.D. looked like:

H.D., a stone-cold fox

Wilson’s wry, knowing, distanced view of Lawrence’s life makes it difficult to see why H.D. was drawn to him. Though Wilson loves Lawrence’s work, she is able to stand back from him as a man, somewhat critically. She is not infatuated with her subject. In this sense, she offers a truer kind of love.

Last week I also came across this incredible letter from Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera, in which she writes of Rivera’s many affairs:

Let’s not fool ourselves, Diego, I gave you everything that is humanly possible to offer and we both know that. But still, how the hell do you manage to seduce so many women when you’re such an ugly son of a bitch?

[…] If there is anything I’d enjoy before I die, it’d be not having to see your fucking horrible bastard face wandering around my garden.

well that’s just rude

Yet, the letter concludes: ‘Good bye from somebody who is crazy and vehemently in love with you, Your Frida’.

Kahlo was writing to Diego as she was about to go into surgery to have her leg amputated. Easier to lose a leg, she implies, than it is to get rid of love once it’s there.

Simultaneously, I was teaching Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept (1945), a cult classic inspired by one of the maddest relationships in the history of literature. In short: Canadian author Elizabeth Smart read George Barker’s poetry in a London bookshop and decided, based on his poetry alone, that he was the love of her life. When she discovered that Barker was married, this did little to dissuade her. She made contact with him in Japan - where he had been invited to teach in March 1940, just before Japan entered the Second World War - and offered to fly him to America to escape the spreading conflict. The affair between them lasted many years, and produced four children and By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept. Their romantic history overshadows and frames the book: ‘Elizabeth Smart’s passionate fictional account of her intense love-affair with the poet George Barker’ appears in the first lines of the blurb on my edition [Flamingo, 1992].

Yet, on opening the text, Smart is most infatuated with language itself, and we should be aware that the main character is a literary creation. Her style is purple, wildly inventive, sometimes warped, with an edge of chaotic laughter. The man in the love triangle is only fleetingly described. Instead, Smart focusses on the voice of a woman, much alone, embracing love as a religion, creating her own solitary doomsday cult. Though it initially appears to be relegated to the background, the Second World War colours the entire narrative. The narrator views herself as doomed to love, in a world that is going up in flames. Coolly regarding her own fate, she writes, ‘I am as detached as the statistician is when he lists his thousands dead’ [p. 21]. At various points, she imagines that her love can actually redeem the war:

When I saw a horde of cats gathering at a railway terminus to feed on a fish-head thrown near the tracks, I felt, It is the lavishness of my feelings that feeds even the waifs and strays. There are not too many bereaved or wounded but I can comfort them, and those 5,000,000 who never stop dragging their feet and bundles and babies with bloated bellies across Europe, are not too many or too benighted for me to say, Here’s a world of hope, I can spare a whole world for each and every one, like a rich lady dispensing bags of candy at a poor children’s Christmas feast. [p. 43]

Like the horde of cats making a feast out of a fish-head, Smart’s narrator has a pervasive delusion of reference in which the entire world feasts on her feelings. Her love can regenerate everything she touches. She has made herself into a god. Yet she also knows that this is delusional, and compares her desires to the hubris of warmongers: ‘I am delirious with power and invulnerability’. [p. 43]

If I open By Grand Central Station sometimes chuckling at its sheer excess, by the end, I can no longer laugh. Smart takes me inside the mind of a woman who is regarded suspiciously by everyone she meets, being unmarried, pregnant and alone, at what feels very much like the end of the world. ‘Lay aside the weapons, love, for all battles are lost.’ [p. 111]

By Grand Central Station remains discomfiting and polarising to read. It is shocking to make a love affair into an allegory for the Second World War, to make the personal so manically political (in much the same way that Sylvia Plath’s comparison of herself to a holocaust victim in her poem ‘Daddy’ is fundamentally crass). Consequently, cracks run all the way through the book. On the final page, a more objective voice emerges, and there’s something quietly heartbreaking about the book’s conclusion:

Well, it’s too late now to complain, my honey-dove. Yes, it’s all over. No regrets. No postmortems. You must adjust yourself to conditions as they are, that’s all. You have to learn to be adaptable. [p. 112]

Our age is not quite like Smart’s, but bad relationships are still popular in fiction. Novels by Sally Rooney (Conversations With Friends), Raven Leilani (Luster), Sheena Patel (I’m A Fan) and beyond focus on uneven affairs, often between younger women and older, married men. While admiring these books, I’ve often been perplexed by the exact appeal of the relationships in the first place. The men in these novels offer so little, creating a vortex of loneliness and frustration that gives the story its prevailing energy. The lovers do not really seem to like each other, and can act out of sublimated aggression more than love as such. They rarely, if ever, make each other laugh. Rather than being centred on the relationship itself, these novels are really about the female protagonist, circling the extent to which personal impulses can be explained by broader social forces. E.g. in I’m A Fan, an obsessive fan’s pursuit of a minor celebrity parodies and parallels the hunt for validation and status through social media. Patel’s narrator is funny and self-aware:

there is a sick thrill in conjoining all our ancient animal parts and knowingly ruining my life and doing it with reckless abandon. He would ask, did you come, and I would say, no, because I have never come with him, I’ve never felt safe enough to. [I’m A Fan, Granta, 2023, p. 203]

I laughed, but also thought he doesn’t even make you come? with fascinated horror. In this sense alone, the current spate of affair novels have something in common with Elizabeth Smart’s work. They show lonesome protagonists riding for a feeling – any feeling – in the mess of the world. Yet with the exception perhaps of Sally Rooney’s Frances, these new protagonists are not in love, and do not present their desire as a love story. Intimacy is held at a wary and skeptical distance. Something else, another motivating force or tangle of forces, stands in love’s place. I feel it’s there, but it stays just out of view, like a monster in a horror film. I still couldn’t tell you what it is.