Illustration by Rosie Creighton
“Oh, to be in love / And never get out again” Kate Bush beseeches wistfully. Trapped confoundedly, bested by love—love in fiction, especially of the old kind, the happy-ending kind, is not bound by finitude. Fictional love never seems to end. Caged in the grotto of love, once the pages have run out, the last page delivered to the silent raptures of encore, our most favourite book characters stay limboed. When we set down a book we bury the characters within it, but of course they revel in their own mutinous exuberance – for they have escaped us, we awful readers who hungrily pursued them (We ‘expect to have every character in a tale laid bare before them as on a psychological dissecting table, and demonstrated minutely.’ [The Critical Heritage, Charles Dickens, pg. 292 – [John Forster], from an unsigned review, Examiner, 8 October 1853]), and triumphantly they have outlived us, outwitted us. Released briefly like a cloud of hummingbirds into our world, we gawk and gape at our fictional lovers for a time, then snap our books shut and catch the fine, gauzy mesh of their wings beneath the pages. They are lovers forever, and perhaps a little bit of us is captivated by that. But their agency is staged— we, speculating from the periphery of the page—we are lovers rarely infinitely, but we can thrill ourselves with flights of choice and self-actualisation.
I wonder if you have read a love story that stuck with you. More hopefully, perhaps you have lived a love story that you carry with you, a chirping hatchling brushed beneath the feathers of your wing. For whatever reason, I would wager that the little nutshell of your heart has – at one time or another – come close to being pecked open, and the bounty from within gorged and consumed. I want to talk with you about a few texts that deal with love in a way that is at once indissolubly beautiful and emphatically enduring – I am afraid I will only mention ‘classic’ literature, however. (Confessedly, I think we both, you and I, know that I will likely end up talking about Jane Austen. The only person who I think does not like Jane Austen is Charlotte Bronte, but in all fairness she wrote about love so well and adroitly herself that I suppose she simply had no need for Austen.)
The ‘Oxford novel’ beckons to us to begin our foraging, wandering trail of literary love. I hope it is a good place to start. (By the ‘Oxford novel’, I mean none other than Evelyn Waugh’s – graduate of Hertford College and alum of The Isis magazine – seminal Brideshead Revisited.) The early portions of the book, its first soaring overtures, reveal and speak of a life that has been eclipsed even to us as Oxford students one hundred years (to the year!) since the two protagonists, Charles and Sebastian, matriculated. (Hang on – I am going to leaf through the novel now, as I write.) You can open this book to any single page, I should think, and happen upon something hauntingly gorgeous. It is a reservoir, at times still, at other times its tranquillity besmirched by a skittering pondskater, or the disturbance of an unfolding lilypad, and then, at the uncurling of a fist, the fingers flexing openward, the water’s surface sliced into by a launched stone or pebble. Waugh takes his time with his words, he will not stand to be rushed. Arranged like mille-feuille, he plates morsels of dry truth, hungrily-whetted mouthfuls of discovery, and moments of human fragility as light and small as slumbering fairies: precious and injurable—tread carefully—as a heap of crepe dresses and stitched rose-petals and transparent cobwebbed wings. The premise of the book is this – one uncertain boy of eighteen begins at Oxford, blithely unaware of himself and his own desires, and is suddenly waltzed into a great enactment of love and vision by the hands of Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian is a listless, yet mesmerizingly beautiful and unthinkably wealthy young gladiator amongst the pearly amphitheatre of love and boisterous youth. “I am not I: thou art not he or she / they are not they,” Waugh promises us readers in his author’s note, we try to believe him without protest, but catch a hangnail on an inkling of disbelief—you do not need to trawl far in a biography of Waugh to unearth Brideshead’s parallels with his own life. It is this recounted, replaited sadness and memory that helps form the spectral threads of this haunting tapestry of love.
The first year at Oxford in Brideshead Revisited, which Waugh chronicles as the days of “Arcadia”, is a time when the narrator Charles admits that “I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognised apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.” In that garden he unearths the changeling Sebastian, replete with that “epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.” They are both, then, busily, raveningly, truffling like pigs for love – and looking for that secret glade wherein they can love without witness. All these things that make up our loves: we cannot make them neat enough for other people to see. Never tidy, never so proper as it ought be; unruled.
We cannot acknowledge this novel’s later tragedy without due deference being paid to its being about what Lord Alfred Douglas called “the love that dare not speak its name.” Waugh does not quite kill our darlings, but he guts their love on the floor of the barn, leaving Sebastian broken and estranged, and Charles with the admission rammed between his gums on the first page of the book – unusually structured so that the book begins with the characters at their oldest and wisest selves – that for him, “[h]ere love had died.” By the end of the novel, no one is, actively, in love with anyone romantically. Of course, the strings of love that bound together our characters will never really slacken, and it is not to say that love disappears and chars when people are pushed to reconfigure their wants and needs – when we give up a person in exchange for something else, for something else which we view to be redemptive. But, either way, if we are waiting with baited breath for a happy ending punctuated by wedding bells and the breathed devotion of one soul to another, in perpetuity, then the ending of Brideshead is a little lonelier than this.
Somebody else might think to keep love alive and aflame a little longer than Waugh does-? Or rather – with our next author, the Stuart poet John Donne, child of the metaphysical school, follows love with loyalty to the grave. In his famously striking poem The Relique, Donne writes:
“When my grave is broke up again
Some second ghest to entertaine,
(For graves have learn’d that woman-head
To be to more than one a Bed)
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone…”
That token of love, that fibrous promise of the bracelet made of hair, curls itself sympathetically round the cold wrist like a loving cat, and surrenders to eternal sleep; eternal closeness. “All women shall adore us, and some men,” Donne vaunts teasingly, idly trailing the standard of his love in the ribbons of wind. He checks himself at length, and resolves instead, somewhat nervous now about his language, about the fitness of his tongue – or the claims of his scrawling hand – to depict his lover: “These miracles wee did; but now alas, / All measures, and all language, I should passe, / Should I tell what a miracle shee was.” Timidly, Donne with a bowed head surrenders to her. There is, however, what I am going to describe as ‘the elephant in the poem.’ Donne chastises us with a little, quippy condemnation of women, thinking we might not notice it if he surreptitiously tidies it away into a convenient pair of parentheses. Can we make allowances for such things? Have we walked in on a scene that in its iconography – the gift of hair as a bracelet to keep for life, or as long as materially it lasted – appears to be in praise of love, but is, in reality, a scene of the shock of cuckoldry?
You may draw your own conclusions. I will opt to give Donne the benefit of the doubt. In The Dampe, Donne is equally vigilant of his love’s prospective hopes for the afterlife – “When I am dead, and Doctors know not why,” he begins cheerily, “And my friends curiositie / Will have me cut up to survay each part, / When they shall finde your Picture in my heart, / You thinke a sodaine dampe of love / Will through all their senses move, / And worke on them as mee, and so preferre / Your murder, to the name of Massacre.” I asked you at the start of this article to believe obediently in the longevity of the love of fictional characters – the way they live and live in love longer than we, embalmed in the real world, do. Writers and poets are permitted entry into the graveyard, where they sit beside the strewn and wilting flowers and think about what death would look like for their yet undying characters – pulling, yanking, love into foreverness. Part of what we obsess about in the realm of fictional love is its shrugging, flippant resistance to our own time constraints. Reading and digesting a novel from 1850 about two lovers might as well be equivalent to reading a novel about two lovers from 2022. Either way, no matter the creeping anachronisms of dress or diction, they are, unbelievably, still in love, still unchanged, still as they were.
We will remain clinging to poetry, lingering to hear what she has to say. One of Frank O’Hara’s most celebrated poems, Having a Coke With You, deals with love effortlessly, pragmatically. O’Hara does not have designs of transcendence like Donne does – how, then, does he invite us to fall in love with—well—his love? It feels so effortlessly easy to gush about this poem. Startled into the cool, deceptively casual tongue of modernity, O’Hara writes so lightly that it might be the glimmer of conversation, but yet with such—I search for something better than antithesis of description—weightedness that it has that mental demand of residence – open up, let me in! – characteristic yet of poetry.
“I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world / except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick / which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time” the flood-gates are open, the importunate little hang-ups of punctuation discarded. Here we are. Can you imagine yourself here yet? Brushing against the tactility of more modern writing on love in a way which we can understand, without having to deliberate over past contexts and histories that do not always resemble our own. Here we can get lost because O’Hara has made love easy for us. He’s let love into the mundane, which is a relief for the vast majority of us, since it is otherwise difficult to find the time to live out the poetic – to find the time for the intricacies of observation, thrice-processed and refined meditations on the hallmarks of love – how much more quick we are to describe a man as prosaic, than poetic? But O’Hara knows we all have time for a Coke.
Briefly O’Hara considers his inheritance as an artist, and thinks of the Impressionists. The lovers they must have had. Shaking his head and sighing, he writes instead that: “it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience / which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it.”
For some of us, we want a bit more though. You can have a Coke with a Hinge date. Give me something with a bit more panache. Pre-empting the sweet nothings of a Coke date, and the yearning for something just that bit more theatrical, I think Emily Bronte had the melodramatic among us in mind when she wrote Wuthering Heights, specifically when Heathcliff, maddened with love and want for his poor dead Cathy, digs up her body with the intention to lie with her, beside her – whatever – just to be close to her. Having not had the poetic foresight, and having omitted to lace her wrist with his own hair-bracelet, Heathcliff has to physically make the effort to reconnect with Cathy’s mouldering corpse. Hyperbole, exaggeration, theatrics – all of the above, yes. Bronte lets us play with ridiculous displays of love, lets us know through Heathcliff what this kind of deranged affection would look like. Perhaps as a contrast to our own comfortable loves – whether these be romantic, platonic, familial – those safe, secure relationships that so many of us are so lucky to have. Much as his behaviour is compelling, how sad it is that there will be no Coke (not with “you”, not with anyone) for Heathcliff.
I said we would. Here we are: we round off with Austen. Like little whispering benedictions, you may have come across Austen quotations floating around the internet, tiny addresses to love. Or perhaps you have had contact with an Austen(-esque) period drama. Either way, she is, and I think rightfully, the laureate of love. She never needs to fall back on convoluted, dramatic plots to give the love of her characters any degree of significance—her romances do not need to be justified, made too loud and noisome. She is conscious of this, too, conscious always in that satirising way — which is always cast off in the moments of greatest gentleness — I often think of that line from Northanger Abbey, uttered by the narrator. “‘What are you reading, Miss—?’ ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. —‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;’ or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” This doesn’t directly address love, but as a testimony for the novel form—so often inexorably wrapped up in love’s mantle—I think it is a good one.
It is very easy to try to compensate for books written on love, as though they were either a dereliction of duty from the author—how immoral!—not quite intellectual enough, feeding us only a small and unchallenging world-view, a forbidden manna, too unscrupulous by far. I think Austen does a great job of keeping her works always clear, and free of apologia. Why else is it always she and her words?—incalculable copies of Austen quotations circulate the internet, whether Mr Knightley’s famous confession scene from Emma: ‘If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.’ or regurgitated fangirling gushes over the shy and blushing Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice—I won’t speak about it here, but Austen is the very founder of that just-for-fun sect of fictional criticism chronicling men who were ‘written by a woman’, men who idealistically live out the female gaze.
What I have tried to get at is messy, and probably asks for a thesis over an article. I think there is both something in the very definitive physical form of a text (a book that is 250 pages long, say, will look like it is only 250 pages long: it has a physical end we can touch and see) — but its content slyly storms past these ends and conclusions, lingering long in the skies and our consciousnesses. You can read the last page of a book, but there are so many more words, unwritten, and unrecorded—your readerly voyeurism is over—about the characters’ lives we followed and invested our time into. It is only that we see as much as the book personally wishes to relate to us, and never any more; the eternity of a book character laughs at our fixed efforts of printing and publishing, as though that were the final exposition on anything or anyone. Moreover, the stakes are only as high as we choose them to be. Dunk your brain in cold water and come to your senses for these characters are fiction. Only as real as you want them to be. At any rate, you will never run into them in a lecture, or crying in the library. That being said, no one will stop you from fully submerging yourself into the story, gathering the speed and pace and tensions of the novel or poem, lifted by a knightly lover’s hand and drawn up onto his steed, and cantering far, far away.