The Art of Intimacy (3 page)

The narrative now flips back to the story of Leopold’s mother, Karen. Engaged to marry a solid man named Ray, she falls in love instead with Max, the fiancé of her friend Naomi Fisher—yes, that same Miss Fisher who is now taking care of the children—and becomes pregnant by him, with Leopold. News of the affair comes out. Max is then manipulated and psychologically tormented by Madame Fisher, who is in love with him; he kills himself; Leopold is born and sent away to Italy; Karen marries Ray after all, but everyone’s life is ruined. As in
So Long, See You Tomorrow,
there is a melodrama folded into the center of the book: illicit love, heartbreak, passionate death.

In the last section of the book, we go back to the present, back to the moment when Karen has not arrived to meet Leopold. As with Maxwell, you have a melodrama wrapped up by something apparently much drier and more random, the afternoon of two latchkey kids essentially, and if Cletus and Maxwell’s narrator were ships, or shipwrecks, Henrietta and Leopold are basically passing trains. And, in fact, at one point Miss Fisher refers to this uncanny doll’s house as “a depôt for young people crossing Paris.” But the climactic scene of the book has nothing to do with the adult melodrama. Instead, it is a scene of Leopold crying because his mother hasn’t come—the most natural, ordinary, unremarkable thing that a ten-year-old boy might do. But what happens here has an extraordinary intensity. Bowen gives it two full pages of its own, and most important is the fact that it is perceived through the point of view, indeed through the very body, of Henrietta.

That’s the moment—the child Henrietta, like the narrator in the Maxwell book, imagines the other. She feels what he feels. She sees what he sees. She goes through the transformative door of the
if.
And once that happens, the book can be over. Which is to say, of course, that the exterior melodrama—and in both books this is long over, a done deal, it’s had its climactic moments—both is and isn’t the point. The point is the knowledge that comes through this empathic imagining, this
if,
and the corresponding idea that that knowledge is an essential part of growing up. Henrietta and Leopold, Cletus and Maxwell’s narrator can’t get out of the uncanny house of memory without it. In Bowen’s novel, ten-year-old Henrietta not only imagines the other, she imagines the horror of what it would be for that other, Leopold, a motherless boy as she is a mother less girl, to come to the “end of imagination”—for a writer, this is a kind of death. The “husk of silence” around Leopold is similar to the husk of silence around Cletus Smith—in these books, the other child, the one who wasn’t quite as close to the blast of the disaster, must pierce this silence, must imagine, must inhabit that silence even when, as in Maxwell, he or she feels that it may be unbearable, unsayable, nearly impossible.

The deepest and most powerful intimacy in both these extraordinary novels is an act of the imagination, explicitly, a critical embrace of the
what if,
the subjunctive, as a form of reparation: the reparation that is the book in Maxwell, the reparation that is seeing, though
seeing
is too small a word for it, from the other’s point of view in Bowen—one might better say
experiencing,
knowing in the fullest sense what a tree in a courtyard looks like to a ten-year-old boy after he has come to the end of imagining and, perhaps, most important, being able to bear that visceral, emotional knowledge in one’s own body and mind. Meeting in the
if,
in these two novels, disembodied as it is, provides a very powerful route to that knowledge.

That sort of visceral emotional knowledge, the pursuit of which is not valued as much as perhaps it once was on the crest of Freud, was also, of course, D. H. Lawrence’s great theme, or one of them, although his route was exactly the opposite: very much through the body. For this reason, among others, we think of him, more or less, as the sometimes purplish novelist of sex. Modern readers can have a tough time with Lawrence, not so much, perhaps, with the sex per se as with the seriousness, even the portentousness, with which Lawrence treats it. Things can get a little archetypal, thematically overinflated. But Lawrence’s basic belief that there is a special kind of knowledge to be gained from physical communion, and from emotions like love and desire, is worth reconsidering, not because of what it does or doesn’t tell us about sex, but because Lawrence seemed to believe that the poetics of primal drives could tell us something about how to be in the world. For Lawrence, intimacy—usually, though not always, sexual intimacy between men and women—is actually not so much a way in as a way out of the prison house of self, of place, of circumstance and into a larger, even a much larger, consciousness.

Transcendence is not what Lawrence’s people are endlessly seeking; it’s more like profound disturbance. His working-class characters, and sometimes his characters from other classes, use their bodies to break open their psyches, to know something, get somewhere that isn’t available to them by any other means. Intimacy, for Lawrence, is so serious because it is often the only boat out of a crushing psychological and cultural localness. On a philosophical level, there is not much difference between what it means to Maxwell’s narrator to imagine Cletus’s most private self, and to Lawrence’s grown-up men and women having sexual intercourse. The intimate and consequential boundary crossings are the same, though the physical means may be quite different, or even, in Maxwell’s case, when no physicality is involved at all.

With Lawrence, however, these crossings are not only personal or psychological. He suggests that, in a sort of inverse image of Courbet’s famous painting
The Origin of the World,
the knowledge yielded by the intimacy of sex actually shifts the characters’ openness to and knowledge not only of themselves and one or two other people, but also of the world itself—its difference, its disturbing otherness, its irrefutable and uncontrollable presence. It’s a lot for sex to bear, which may be the other reason modern readers bridle against Lawrence; can intimacy be loaded down with that much existential freight? It seems naive, a possibly tragicomic mismanagement of expectations. But at the very least, what this produces in Lawrence’s prose is fascinating. The Lawrence oeuvre is massive; here, I’m just going to talk about one brief section of Lawrence’s novel
The Rainbow.

In
The Rainbow,
we feel the impact of the lovers’ meeting not particularly, or even at all explicitly, in their bodies; rather, we feel it as it shifts their perceptions of the world around them. The world, here, is that space between, the register and ground of the characters’ primal intimacy.
The Rainbow
is the story of several generations of the working-class Brangwen family, in particular their love relationships and marriages. Throughout, it’s psychologically quite astute as it tracks the dynamics of intimate relationships. But the narrative primal scene of the book, the wellspring of the powerful and complicated emotions that suffuse the book, is the desperate, demiarticulate passion that twenty-eight-year-old Tom Brangwen, born and bred in rural Nottingham, feels for a woman who is very strange to him, Anna Lensky, a Polish widow six years his elder with one child who has immigrated, uneasily, to this small English village. Upon seeing Anna for the first time, he feels not lust, and not even lust behind a discreet fig leaf of overblown imagery, but this: “He felt as if he were walking again in a far world, not Cossethay, a far world, the fragile reality.” And a bit farther on: “It was to him a profound satisfaction that she was a foreigner.” Brangwen is as mesmerized by Anna’s foreignness as he is by her physical beauty or her personality; in her strange presence, he feels, paradoxically, more acutely himself for the first time in his life. “With her,” Lawrence writes, “he would be real.” The feeling is mutual, though not symmetrical—Anna is as drawn to him as he is to her, but she also fears him as someone who will require her to “find a new being, a new form.”

As they fall in love, Lawrence tracks the growing intimacy between them in tremendous emotional detail. He traces every psychic ripple in language that is remarkably mutual, that somehow, continually, not only voices both their perspectives at the same time, but also shows the effect that they are having on one another. In one extraordinary sentence, Lawrence writes, “A shiver, a sickness of new birth passed over her, the flame leaped up him, under his skin.” In fewer than twenty words, not only does the torch of perspective pass unremarked from her to him, but it is as if the substance of the emotion itself passes from her to him and changes form as it goes—that “shiver,” that chill, that “sickness of new birth” passes over her and, syntactically, sets him on fire from the inside out, under his skin—from cold to hot, from her to him, both of them transformed, differently, but in equal measure, as if love had alchemical properties that work on human beings. It’s as if there is something, some deep emotional grammar, underneath the exchange, some unimaginably primal zone where fire and ice are somehow the same, and can transmute seamlessly into one another.

In this remarkably physical image Lawrence shows the emotion communicating between them while at the same time retaining a fundamental doubleness—they are not feeling the same thing at the same time, they are not merging one into the other, they are not becoming one or even necessarily understanding one another especially well. One would not wish to be a fly on the wall during their dinner conversations. It’s something else that connects them, something that includes but is not limited to sex, that has to do with but is not limited to gender difference, something that renders them each both more real and more foreign to themselves in one another’s presence. They wouldn’t, couldn’t, be together if they weren’t so fundamentally other to one another, but it is in many ways more an otherness of the soul than of the body. There’s something about Anna that Tom can never quite fathom. Kissing her for the first time, he feels “something break in his brain.” Lawrence writes, “He could not bear to be near her, and know the utter foreignness between them, know how entirely they were strangers to each other.” Eventually, of course, he must marry her.

But in contact with that strangeness, an interesting change occurs in Tom’s understanding of his position in the world. He moves from a lower order of consciousness, strictly bounded by the local, to a much broader perspective. Once Tom falls in love with Anna, Lawrence writes, when he looks at the stars at night, he “knew he did not belong to himself. He must admit that he was only fragmentary, something incomplete and subject. There were the stars in the dark heaven travelling, the whole host passing by on some eternal voyage. So he sat small and submissive to the greater ordering.” The growing intimacy between Tom and Anna decenters Tom, moves him out of himself and into consciousness of a much wider world. He sees the familiar differently—not in a rosy glow of love, but reframed, recontextualized, by the always slightly unreachable consciousness of another.

Narratives of romantic love often invoke the idea of the “soul mate,” a kind of amplification and reflection of one’s deepest, most private self; but what Lawrence is suggesting here is that romantic love can be such a powerful experience of the other’s presence, his or her soul if you will, that it expands your soul, it opens your soul to a perhaps painful, and humbling, degree. For instance, here is Lawrence’s description of Anna, watching Tom come through her kitchen door to ask her to marry him: “She stood away, at his mercy, snatched out of herself. She did not know him, only she knew he was a man come for her.” This is intimacy, as I said before, as disturbance, a force that wakes you up, de-centers you, radically changes your perception of the world around you and your place in it. And notice that the impact is the same for the man and the woman—they are both changed deeply, though not in the same way, by encountering one another.

Whether or not one thinks that this is possible in real life, notice the impact it has on the page. These are two characters, to move to a prosaic, workmanlike plane, who can’t really talk to one another very well, barely know themselves, and actually aren’t having that much sex, which Lawrence, his reputation notwithstanding, doesn’t describe in graphic detail, anyway. (However, it is worth noting that
The Rainbow,
which was published in 1915, was found at a trial to be so obscene that all copies were seized and burnt. It’s hardly explicit or pornographic by today’s standards, but perhaps what was so distressing to the forces of censorship is that Lawrence pitched sex neither as sheer bodily urge nor as a kind of simple physical expression of the higher emotion of love; instead, he saw it as a powerful, serious force that makes its own path through people’s lives, like a river. His attitude toward sex isn’t titillating—indeed, it’s rather grave.)

So, in order for us to feel the weight and depth of an intimate connection that even the lovers themselves don’t understand all that well, Lawrence moves to the impact this connection is having on their perceptions—again, we understand from the change in their perceptions that it’s the inchoate emotion subtending the perceptions that’s the driving force here, but he doesn’t force his characters to be articulate about it. Instead, he finds the force of the intimacy in the delineation of a space between them literally, figuratively, and syntactically, a space that wells up that neither of them controls and that the reader understands not only as a register of the characters’ connection, but also on a visceral level, directly.

In
The Rainbow,
with its emphasis on foreignness, Lawrence explicitly renders that space between as the world. Intimacy redraws the characters’ map of the world and their place within it. Intimacy snatches you out of yourself, shows you how small you are in relation to the rest of the universe. Notice how different an idea this is from some of our modern clichés about love—that it should make you “feel good” about yourself, feel confident, feel attractive, feel accompanied, feel, in a sense, bigger. Here, intimacy causes the characters to feel uncertain, off-balance, strange, sometimes smaller, sometimes expanded in unexpected ways. Out walking one windy night, in love, Tom sees the world like this: “Big holes were blown into the sky, the moonlight blew about. Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges.” If we were going to ask Why does Tom love Anna? the answer would be: Because she makes him feel like this, like holes have been blown into the sky. I don’t know if
romantic
is exactly the word for this, but one certainly feels the exceptional force of the emotion between them.

Now, in talking about Lawrence, one can’t leave out actual sex. But when he does finally produce a scene of literal sexual intimacy, nearly everything that happens is told in the kind of double voice of the sentence I quoted before, the one that switches perspective in the middle. The lead-in to this scene is that Tom and Anna, now married and with a child of their own, have had a period of estrangement, they’ve been fighting, but then they reunite in a towering two-page sex scene, which is perhaps most notable for the fact that there are basically no bodies on the page at all. Instead, there are quite complex and somewhat abstract images of shifts of consciousness. Lawrence writes: “She was the doorway to him, he to her. At last they had thrown open the doors, each to the other, and had stood in the doorways facing each other.” It’s not very sexy, really. Though, like the extraordinary sentence I discussed earlier, it’s deeply concerned with rendering mutuality, with finding an image for a shared space of intimacy, a shared, kinetic interiority—here, these endless doors and doorways, this face to face that is not rendered in particularly physically intimate terms.

And yet we feel not only their closeness, their reconciliation, but also so much more: that moment just as the doors are thrown open, the mutual expectation, desire, and regard. We feel both the yearning and the possibility; interestingly, in a veiled but more explicit passage just before the passage about the doorways, Lawrence writes that Tom “pressed forward, nearer, nearer. . . . If really he could be destroyed, burnt away till he lit with her in one consummation, that were supreme, supreme.” But this more physical sentence is actually in the subjunctive—
if he could, if it were.
Nearer, but never quite there. I don’t think this is because of some post-Victorian modesty in Lawrence, some sense of wishing to avoid the textual money shot, even one draped in lots of early-twentieth-century overwriting. He’s choosing to locate the intimacy in the pressing, the seeking, the opening of the door, the shifting perceptions of the world around them.

Toward the end of this same sex scene, he writes, “The new world was discovered, it remained only to be explored.” Lawrence doesn’t mean the world within, or only the world within; he doesn’t mean the world of sex; he means the entire world. And, in fact, after they’ve had this towering sexual encounter and the marriage is healed, Lawrence writes, “They did not think of each other—why should they? Only when she touched him, he knew her instantly, that she was with him, near him, that she was the gateway and the way out, that she was beyond, and that he was travelling in her through the beyond.” United, and reunited, with Anna, Tom sees the world in a way that would otherwise not be possible for him. Intimacy brings a liberating knowledge of the foreign, the beyond, of the limits of the self in a much bigger universe. It’s almost frightening in its power, which may be another reason modern readers look askance at Lawrence. As domestic as this situation is—it is, after all, the story of the early days of a marriage—this Lawrentian kind of intimacy feels undomesticated, dangerous, radical. It changes things at the root, it destabilizes you, hurls you into the world. As with Bowen and Maxwell, it’s actually a lot to bear, and not for the faint of heart.