Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant to let a good day depart or still bitching about a bad one. Different currents run through our spells of unconsciousness. Every so often I find myself catapulted out of bed with fear of time and death, panic at the approaching void; feet on the floor, head in hands, I shout a useless (and disappointingly uneloquent) ‘No, no, no’ as I wake. Then she has to stroke the horror away from me, like sluicing down a dog that’s come barking from a dirty river.
Less often, it’s her sleep that’s broken by a scream, and my turn to move across her in a sweat of protectiveness. I am starkly awake, and she delivers to me through sleepy lips the cause of her outcry. ‘A very large beetle,’ she will say, as if she wouldn’t have bothered me about a smaller one; or ‘The steps were slippery’; or merely (which strikes me as cryptic to the point of tautology), ‘Something nasty.’ Then, having expelled this damp toad, this handful of gutter-muck from her system, she sighs and returns to a purged sleep. I lie awake, clutching a slimy amphibian, shifting a handful of sodden detritus from hand to hand, alarmed and admiring. (I’m not claiming grander dreams, by the way. Sleep democratizes fear. The terror of a lost shoe or a missed train is as great here as that of guerrilla attack or nuclear war.) I admire her because she’s got this job of sleeping that we all have to do, every night, ceaselessly, until we die, much better worked out than I have. She handles it like a sophisticated traveller unthreatened by a new airport. Whereas I lie there in the night with an expired passport, pushing a baggage trolley with a squeaking wheel across to the wrong carousel.
Anyway … she’s asleep, turned away from me on her side. The usual stratagems and repositionings have failed to induce narcosis in me, so I decide to settle myself against the soft zigzag of her body. As I move and start to nestle my shin against a calf whose muscles are loosened by sleep, she senses what I’m doing, and without waking reaches up with her left hand and pulls the hair off her shoulders on to the top of her head, leaving me her bare nape to nestle in. Each time she does this I feel a shudder of love at the exactness of this sleeping courtesy. My eyes prickle with tears, and I have to stop myself from waking her up to remind her of my love. At that moment, unconsciously, she’s touched some secret fulcrum of my feelings for her. She doesn’t know, of course; I’ve never told her of this tiny, precise pleasure of the night. Though I’m telling her now, I suppose …
You think she’s really awake when she does it? I suppose it could sound like a conscious courtesy – an agreeable gesture, but hardly one denoting that love has roots below the gum of consciousness. You’re right to be sceptical: we should be indulgent only to a certain point with lovers, whose vanities rival those of politicians. Still, I can offer further proof. Her hair falls, you see, to her shoulders. But a few years ago, when they promised us the summer heat would last for months, she had it cut short. Her nape was bare for kissing all day long. And in the dark, when we lay beneath a single sheet and I gave off a Calabrian sweat, when the middle stretch of the night was shorter but still hard to get through – then, as I turned towards that loose S beside me, she would, with a soft murmur, try to lift the lost hair from the back of her neck.
‘I love you,’ I whisper into that sleeping nape, ‘I love you.’ All novelists know their art proceeds by indirection. When tempted by didacticism, the writer should imagine a spruce sea-captain eyeing the storm ahead, bustling from instrument to instrument in a Catherine wheel of gold braid, expelling crisp orders down the speaking tube. But there is nobody below decks; the engine-room was never installed, and the rudder broke off centuries ago. The captain may put on a very good act, convincing not just himself but even some of the passengers; though whether their floating world will come through depends not on him but on the mad winds and sullen tides, the icebergs and the sudden crusts of reef.
Still, it’s natural for the novelist sometimes to fret at the obliquities of fiction. In the lower half of El Greco’s ‘Burial of the Count of Orgaz’ in Toledo there is a line-up of angular, ruffed mourners. They gaze this way and that in stagey grief. Only one of them looks directly out of the picture, and he holds us with a gloomy, ironical eye – an unflattered eye, as well, we can’t help noticing. Tradition claims that the figure is El Greco himself. I did this, he says. I painted this. I am responsible, and so I face towards you.
Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’ (when I say ‘I’ you will want to know within a paragraph or two whether I mean Julian Barnes or someone invented; a poet can shimmy between the two, getting credit for both deep feeling and objectivity). Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.
And they write this stuff called love poetry. It’s collected into books called The Great Lovers’ Valentine World Anthology of Love Poetry or whatever. Then there are love letters; these are collected into The Golden Quill Treasury of Love Letters (available by mail order). But there is no genre that answers to the name of love prose. It sounds awkward, almost self-contradictory. Love Prose: A Plodder’s Handbook. Look for it in the carpentry section.
The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant put it like this: ‘The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true mystery left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature – or for love, for that matter.’ When I first read this, I gave it in the margin the chess marking ‘!?’ indicating a move which, though possibly brilliant, is probably unsound. But increasingly the view convinces, and the marking is changed to ‘!!’
‘What will survive of us is love.’ This is the cautiously approached conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’. The line surprises us, for much of the poet’s work was a squeezed flannel of disenchantment. We are ready to be cheered; but we should first give a prosey scowl and ask of this poetic flourish, Is it true? Is love what will survive of us? It would be nice to think so. It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths. Early television sets, when you turned them off, used to leave a blob of light in the middle of the screen, which slowly diminished from the size of a florin to an expiring speck. As a boy I would watch this process each evening, vaguely wanting to hold it back (and seeing it, with adolescent melancholy, as the pinpoint of human existence fading inexorably in a black universe). Is love meant to glow on like this for a while after the set has been switched off? I can’t see it myself. When the survivor of a loving couple dies, love dies too. If anything survives of us it will probably be something else. What will survive of Larkin is not his love but his poetry: that’s obvious. And whenever I read the end of ‘An Arundel Tomb’ I’m reminded of William Huskisson. He was a politician and a financier, well-known in his time; but we remember him today because on the 15th of September 1830, at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, he became the first person to be run down and killed by a train (that’s what he became, was turned into). And did William Huskisson love? And did his love last? We don’t know. All that has survived of him is his moment of final carelessness; death froze him as an instructive cameo about the nature of progress.
‘I love you.’ For a start, we’d better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in the bank. We shouldn’t leave them lying around the house like a tube of vitamin C. If the words come too easily to hand, we’ll use them without thought; we won’t be able to resist. Oh, we say we won’t, but we will. We’ll get drunk, or lonely, or – likeliest of all – plain damn hopeful, and there are the words gone, used up, grubbied. We think we might be in love and w
e’re trying out the words to see if they’re appropriate? How can we know what we think till we hear what we say? Come off it; that won’t wash. These are grand words; we must make sure we deserve them. Listen to them again: ‘I love you.’ Subject, verb, object: the unadorned, impregnable sentence. The subject is a short word, implying the self-effacement of the lover. The verb is longer but unambiguous, a demonstrative moment as the tongue flicks anxiously away from the palate to release the vowel. The object, like the subject, has no consonants, and is attained by pushing the lips forward as if for a kiss. ‘I love you.’ How serious, how weighted, how freighted it sounds.
I imagine a phonic conspiracy between the world’s languages. They make a conference decision that the phrase must always sound like something to be earned, to be striven for, to be worthy of. Ich liebe dich: a late-night, cigarette-voiced whisper, with that happy rhyme of subject and object. Je t’aime: a different procedure, with the subject and object being got out of the way first, so that the long vowel of adoration can be savoured to the full. (The grammar is also one of reassurance: with the object positioned second, the beloved isn’t suddenly going to turn out to be someone different.) Ya tebya lyublyu: the object once more in consoling second position, but this time – despite the hinting rhyme of subject and object – an implication of difficulty, obstacles to be overcome. Ti amo: it sounds perhaps a bit too much like an apéritif, but is full of structural conviction with subject and verb, the doer and the deed, enclosed in the same word.
Forgive the amateur approach. I’ll happily hand the project over to some philanthropic foundation devoted to expanding the sum of human knowledge. Let them commission a research team to examine the phrase in all the languages of the world, to see how it varies, to discover what its sounds denote to those who hear them, to find out if the measure of happiness changes according to the richness of the phrasing. A question from the floor: are there tribes whose lexicon lacks the words I love you? Or have they all died out?
We must keep these words in their box behind glass. And when we take them out we must be careful with them. Men will say ‘I love you’ to get women into bed with them; women will say ‘I love you’ to get men into marriage with them; both will say ‘I love you’ to keep fear at bay, to convince themselves of the deed by the word, to assure themselves that the promised condition has arrived, to deceive themselves that it hasn’t yet gone away. We must beware of such uses. I love you shouldn’t go out into the world, become a currency, a traded share, make profits for us. It will do that if we let it. But keep this biddable phrase for whispering into a nape from which the absent hair has just been swept.
I’m away from her at the moment; perhaps you guessed. The transatlantic telephone gives off a mocking, heard-it-all-before echo. ‘I love you,’ and before she can answer I hear my metallic other self respond, ‘I love you.’ This isn’t satisfactory; the echoing words have gone public. I try again, with the same result. I love you I love you – it’s become some trilling song popular for a lurid month and then dismissed to the club circuit where pudgy rockers with grease in their hair and yearning in their voice will use it to unfrock the lolling front-row girls. I love you I love you while the lead guitar giggles and the drummer’s tongue lies wetly in his opened mouth.
We must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death. Should love be taught in school? First term: friendship; second term: tenderness; third term: passion. Why not? They teach kids how to cook and mend cars and fuck one another without getting pregnant; and the kids are, we assume, much better at all of this than we were, but what use is any of that to them if they don’t know about love? They’re expected to muddle through by themselves. Nature is supposed to take over, like the automatic pilot on an aeroplane. Yet Nature, on to whom we pitch responsibility for all we cannot understand, isn’t very good when set to automatic. Trusting virgins drafted into marriage never found Nature had all the answers when they turned out the light. Trusting virgins were told that love was the promised land, an ark on which two might escape the Flood. It may be an ark, but one on which anthropophagy is rife; an ark skippered by some crazy greybeard who beats you round the head with his gopher-wood stave, and might pitch you overboard at any moment.
Let’s start at the beginning. Love makes you happy? No. Love makes the person you love happy? No. Love makes everything all right? Indeed no. I used to believe all this, of course. Who hasn’t (who doesn’t still, somewhere below decks in the psyche)? It’s in all our books, our films; it’s the sunset of a thousand stories. What would love be for if it didn’t solve everything? Surely we can deduce from the very strength of our aspiration that love, once achieved, eases the daily ache, works some effortless analgesia?
A couple love each other, but they aren’t happy. What do we conclude? That one of them doesn’t really love the other; that they love one another a certain amount but not enough? I dispute that really; I dispute that enough. I’ve loved twice in my life (which seems quite a lot to me), once happily, once unhappily. It was the unhappy love that taught me most about love’s nature – though not at the time, not until years later. Dates and details – fill them in as you like. But I was in love, and loved, for a long time, many years. At first I was brazenly happy, bullish with solipsistic joy; yet most of the time I was puzzlingly, naggingly unhappy. Didn’t I love her enough? I knew I did – and put off half my future for her. Didn’t she love me enough? I knew she did – and gave up half her past for me. We lived side by side for many years, fretting at what was wrong with the equation we had invented. Mutual love did not add up to happiness. Stubbornly, we insisted that it did.
And later I decided what it was I believed about love. We think of it as an active force. My love makes her happy; her love makes me happy: how could this be wrong? It is wrong; it evokes a false conceptual model. It implies that love is a transforming wand, one that unlooses the ravelled knot, fills the top hat with handkerchiefs, sprays the air with doves. But the model isn’t from magic but particle physics. My love does not, cannot make her happy; my love can only release in her the capacity to be happy. And now things seem more understandable. How come I can’t make her happy, how come she can’t make me happy? Simple: the atomic reaction you expect isn’t taking place, the beam with which you are bombarding the particles is on the wrong wavelength.
But love isn’t an atomic bomb, so let’s take a homelier comparison. I’m writing this at the home of a friend in Michigan. It’s a normal American house with all the gadgets technology can dream (except a gadget for making happiness). He drove me here from the Detroit airport yesterday. As we turned into the driveway he reached into the glove pocket for a remote-control device; at a masterful touch, the garage doors rolled up and away. This is the model I propose. You are arriving home – or think you are – and as you approach the garage you try to work your routine magic. Nothing happens; the doors remain closed. You do it again. Again nothing. At first puzzled, then anxious, then furious with disbelief, you sit in the driveway with the engine running; you sit there for weeks, months, for years, waiting for the doors to open. But you are in the wrong car, in front of the wrong garage, waiting outside the wrong house. One of the troubles is this: the heart isn’t heart-shaped.
‘We must love one another or die,’ wrote W. H. Auden, bringing from E. M. Forster the declaration: ‘Because he once wrote “We must love one another or die,” he can command me to follow him.’ Auden, however, was dissatisfied with this famous line from ‘September 1, 1939.’ ‘That’s a damned lie!’ he commented. ‘We must die anyway.’ So when reprinting the poem he altered the line to the more logical ‘We must love one another and die.’ Later he suppressed it altogether.
This shift from or to and is one of poetry’s most famous emendations. When I first came across it, I applauded the honest rigour with which Auden the critic revised Auden the poet. If a line sounds ringingly good but isn’t true,
out with it – such an approach is bracingly free of writerly self-infatuation. Now I am not so sure. We must love one another and die certainly has logic on its side; it’s also about as interesting on the subject of the human condition, and as striking, as We must listen to the radio and die or We must remember to defrost the fridge and die. Auden was rightly suspicious of his own rhetoric; but to say that the line We must love one another or die is untrue because we die anyway (or because those who do not love do not instantly expire) is to take a narrow or forgetful view. There are equally logical, and more persuasive, ways of reading the or line. The first, obvious one is this: we must love one another because if we don’t we are liable to end up killing one another. The second is: we must love one another because if we don’t, if love doesn’t fuel our lives, then we might as well be dead. This, surely, is no ‘damned lie’, to claim that those who get their deepest satisfactions from other things are living empty lives, are posturing crabs who swagger the sea-bed in borrowed shells.
This is difficult territory. We must be precise, and we mustn’t become sentimental. If we are to oppose love to such wily, muscled concepts as power, money, history and death, then we mustn’t retreat into self-celebration or snobby vagueness. Love’s enemies profit from its unspecific claims, its grand capacity for isolationism. So where do we start? Love may or may not produce happiness; whether or not it does in the end, its primary effect is to energize. Have you ever talked so well, needed less sleep, returned to sex so eagerly, as when you were first in love? The anaemic begin to glow, while the normally healthy become intolerable. Next, it gives spine-stretching confidence. You feel you are standing up straight for the first time in your life; you can do anything while this feeling lasts, you can take on the world. (Shall we make this distinction: that love enhances the confidence, whereas sexual conquest merely develops the ego?) Then again, it gives clarity of vision: it’s a windscreen wiper across the eyeball. Have you ever seen things so clearly as when you were first in love?