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Life and reading intersect
Aug. 18th, 2009 12:27 pmI just last night finished a very interesting book, titled Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910 - 1939. The book is a series of chapter-length portraits of a relationship (or, more honestly, relationships) that occurred among the so-called Bloomsbury set, bohemian writers who flaunted their unconventional living arrangements and tried to change society and expectations. The players are people like H.G. Wells, Vanessa Bell (sister of Virginia Woolf), Vera Brittain (author of Testament of Youth) and other famous writers, artists, or socialites of the day - some straight, some gay, none of them easily pigeonholed. The author of the book, Katie Roiphe, wryly notes that this sort of examination of a marriage, or of a love-affair, is not exactly maintaining an observational distance from your subject and that it's considered, once you get into grad school, to be unsophisticated: "This is a trick that we were taught to use on narcissistic young students to rope them in: to let them milk a text for what personal understanding they could, to ask greedily, What does it mean to me?" But, she explains, there is a reason people are fascinated by these intimate stories of strangers, and looking at them closely to see why these things were happening at this point in time (and why they continue to happen in certain instances) is worthwhile.
The book helped me articulate a lot of things I was noticing in my reading of 1930s plays and literature. This makes it sound like I've read a lot, but the tropes are so present that you only have to read a few before you start wondering about them. This was a time of massive changes in the social order, where new ideas of love, marriage, and gender were starting to play out. What I had been most struck by, and what is discussed in the book at several points, is the strangely contradictory feeling that emotion should and could be ruled by rationality, but that being "honest" and following one's emotional or erotic needs couldn't be stifled. In other words, a wife shouldn't be jealous of her husband's affairs, as long as he was following an emotional imperative and was honest with the wife about them, but she should be able to quash her jealousy over the matter - or at least find her own happiness in her own love affairs. This ideally should be the case if you reverse the genders...but doesn't seem to have happened quite as often.
There are a lot of interesting themes throughout the book: the role of husband and wife, and who gets to play those roles, the idea that people who are throwing off conventional structures do seem to return to them over and over again. There is a thread of the erratic genius, who longs to follow his or her own path (which results in great art of some form or another) but who needs a stable force at home, making sure that the children get bathed and put to bed, and that a hot meal is on the table. And there is the idea that the children contained within any of these family structures should not be taken into account - breaking off an unhealthy relationship for the sake of the children never, ever happens. After all, they can be sent off to boarding school, raised by nannies, or pawned off on friends, but nobody seemed to understand that the sort of domestic tumult that frequently is described would cause a child to grown up any differently than they would have in a home with less upheaval. (You may be able to tell that this attitude is one of the hardest for me to grasp, and to accept.) One also has to note that these are stories of people who were by and large wealthier than most, due to family money (although some did make their living from their writing), and that this money in many cases permitted them to operate outside the social norm. If you were wealthy enough, you could be a part of a lesbian trio in grand Paris society without fear of being evicted from your boarding house. And yet, the need for somebody to be at home, providing a stable domestic environment, seems to be a constant need across economic levels.
What I found interesting is that so much of this still goes on today. Roles within a marriage are still in flux. And relationships between intellectuals and artists and creative types can still contain the sort of turmoil that any of the people described in the book would recognize. In an article about the photographer Annie Leibovitz and her overwhelming financial crisis, a description of her relationship with author Susan Sontag could have been included in this book, although a gap of fifty years between the time periods has occurred.
The book helped me articulate a lot of things I was noticing in my reading of 1930s plays and literature. This makes it sound like I've read a lot, but the tropes are so present that you only have to read a few before you start wondering about them. This was a time of massive changes in the social order, where new ideas of love, marriage, and gender were starting to play out. What I had been most struck by, and what is discussed in the book at several points, is the strangely contradictory feeling that emotion should and could be ruled by rationality, but that being "honest" and following one's emotional or erotic needs couldn't be stifled. In other words, a wife shouldn't be jealous of her husband's affairs, as long as he was following an emotional imperative and was honest with the wife about them, but she should be able to quash her jealousy over the matter - or at least find her own happiness in her own love affairs. This ideally should be the case if you reverse the genders...but doesn't seem to have happened quite as often.
There are a lot of interesting themes throughout the book: the role of husband and wife, and who gets to play those roles, the idea that people who are throwing off conventional structures do seem to return to them over and over again. There is a thread of the erratic genius, who longs to follow his or her own path (which results in great art of some form or another) but who needs a stable force at home, making sure that the children get bathed and put to bed, and that a hot meal is on the table. And there is the idea that the children contained within any of these family structures should not be taken into account - breaking off an unhealthy relationship for the sake of the children never, ever happens. After all, they can be sent off to boarding school, raised by nannies, or pawned off on friends, but nobody seemed to understand that the sort of domestic tumult that frequently is described would cause a child to grown up any differently than they would have in a home with less upheaval. (You may be able to tell that this attitude is one of the hardest for me to grasp, and to accept.) One also has to note that these are stories of people who were by and large wealthier than most, due to family money (although some did make their living from their writing), and that this money in many cases permitted them to operate outside the social norm. If you were wealthy enough, you could be a part of a lesbian trio in grand Paris society without fear of being evicted from your boarding house. And yet, the need for somebody to be at home, providing a stable domestic environment, seems to be a constant need across economic levels.
What I found interesting is that so much of this still goes on today. Roles within a marriage are still in flux. And relationships between intellectuals and artists and creative types can still contain the sort of turmoil that any of the people described in the book would recognize. In an article about the photographer Annie Leibovitz and her overwhelming financial crisis, a description of her relationship with author Susan Sontag could have been included in this book, although a gap of fifty years between the time periods has occurred.
