Modern Love, or at least Early 20th Century.

Posted on by The Love Scholar

It can be very difficult as an historian to access a person’s more intimate experiences. By writing the biography of a relationship rather than an individual, precisely those nuanced internal landscapes tend to emerge. This is partly my fascination with exploring the history of love, to understand the internal as well as the relational. Furthermore, studying love relationships can enrich our understanding of how women historically have both compromised and asserted themselves, not just by marching in the streets, but in the murky corners of domestic life. There is so much texture and so many important pearls of understanding in the quotidian details of the day to day. In a way, it’s easy to march in the street and much harder for women to negotiate a fertile place for themselves in the context of home and family.

Here is the story of three men who considered themselves modern and progressive lovers in early 20th century Greenwich Village. In exploring the story of their love relationships we see both their preoccupation with and their ultimate failure to redefine the scope of possibility for equitable partnership in marriage and in love. But what do these stories actually reveal?

The three men: Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, and Hutchins Hapgood were all well known writers, and became heavily influenced by the work of Swedish essayist, Ellen Key. Key argued for an ideal that lovers should achieve both mutual sexual satisfaction and cultivate an intimacy in social interests and inner thoughts. For all three of these men love relationships were central to their own autobiographies, essays and novels. What is uncovered through their stories is fascinating. In an attempt to achieve both a psychological and sexual bond in marriage, all three men end up with a male-centered interpretation of feminism that at its core turned into the desire for the adulation of their own egos. All three men chose for their first wives (Hapgood has the only lasting relationship) women who were intellectual, talented, independent, and/or feminists. These men desired someone to “both talk to and kiss.”

Max Eastman, a committed feminist in his early years, made nationwide tours as a popular speaker for suffrage. He first married, Ida Rauh, a socialist (Emma Goldman was a serious figure in Greenwich Village at the time as well) feminist, actress, and artist. Eastman and Rauh were able to consummate their marriage, but Eastman soon found himself sexually attracted to much younger women, women that did not necessarily inspire him intellectually and flew against his ideal. Because the ideal of intimacy required that Eastman tell Rauh of his feelings, their marriage became very troubled when his interests turned into all out affairs. Eventually Max left Ida calling her his “friend and slender-bodied mother.” (The mother theme is omnipresent in nearly all of these stories). Eastman’s next marriage with the beautiful actress Florence Deshon ended in tragedy. Their intense on again and off again relationship, sprinkled with affairs on both sides (she left Charlie Chaplin for Eastman only to have him flee immediately) finally ended when Florence committed suicide. Eastman’s consistent self-involvement reveals itself in his terse conclusion to the suicide: “Florence’s death had liberated me to myself.”

In his third marriage, Eastman finally found his ideal match. Eliena Krylenko, the sister of Lenin’s first Minister of Justice, a dancer,
painter, poet, and linguist who also loved to cook, keep house, and garden. Krylenko made no demands on Eastman and dedicated herself to his welfare. Eastman told his Russian wife of his past wives, “Those loves were not helpful to my work, to my egotism, which is the real force in me. With you it is just the opposite. You gave my self to me as I never possessed it before.” There is no concern for him of what he provides for her. Furthermore, Eastman writes, “There was so large an admixture of the all-giving mother in Eliena’s love for me (emphasis my own)- she stood so firmly and without visible effort by our compact of independence- that I felt free to be adolescently romantic about other girls I liked.” Early in their relationship Eliena’s promise to Eastman was to be, “anything you want me to be – sister, sweetheart, secretary, slave – I’ll be your mother if that is what you want.” Eliena continued to pursue art, but only as a hobby.

Floyd Dell also married a woman he found to be an intellectual and emotional companion; however, she did not also engage him sexually. Soon, he too was having affairs. Dell wrote:
“My private life became a bewildered and inconsistent one. I fell in love, and very seriously; and my wife, however hurt, was kind and generous, and willing to end our marriage. It was I who refused to give up our marriage, and after desperate attempts to eat my cake and have it upon one theory or another, I gave up my love affairs to keep my marriage- only, against my will to fall in love with another girl, and give up that love; and then with a third, giving her up in turn.” 

Dell and his wife eventually separated. After a myriad of affairs including serious relationships with photographer, Marjorie Jones, and iconic American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dell began to completely reverse his previous thinking about the importance of shared intellectual or artistic interests:
“I felt quite sure now that I did not want to be married to a girl artist. I wanted to be married to a girl who would not put her career before children- or even before me, hideously reactionary as the thought would have seemed a few years ago. One artist in the family, I was convinced, was enough.”  
Soon Dell married a young Midwesterner, B. Marie Gage and retired into a suburban family life – a huge departure from his active involvement with leftist journalism and the intellectual and artistic community of Greenwich Village. Gage too, had been a socialist and feminist, marching as a suffragist at University of Wisconsin and even being arrested, tried and acquitted for pacifist organizing in California during WWI. After marrying Dell at twenty-three, she abandoned her political work to settle down and
become a housewife and mother.

Hutchins Hapgood and his wife, Neith Boyce were exceptional writers that ruminated and then wrote extensively on relationships and marriage, specifically their own. This dual-writing provides a highly nuanced and balanced picture of their lives as intellectuals and artists in the newly modern world.


Hutchins Hapgood (1869-1944), similar to the Beats several decades later, was interested and wrote about people outside of America’s mainstream, people he encountered in “the ghetto, the saloons, the ethnic restaurants and among immigrants, radicals, prostitutes, and ex-convicts.” He describes feeling most alive among these people and published several sympathetic human-interest stories about them. Later in life he published two autobiographies, The Story of a Lover (1919) and A Victorian in the Modern World (1939). These books dealt explicitly with his relationship with Boyce.
She too, though primarily a novelist and playwright, wrote autobiographically within her fictionalized work. Boyce, desiring to offer more realistic representations of modern life, dealt extensively with marriages and relationships. Often her stories, though dealing with
conflict, never resolve in either the romantic or tragic denouement that is so common.


Neith Boyce – pictured above (1872-1951), aloof, independent, introverted, and beautiful worked as the only woman reporter on the Commercial Advertiser. At age twenty-seven, she moved out of her family home into a hotel in Washington Square. Even as a teenager, Neith preferred the idea of a career and independence over marriage. Yet, she fell in love with “Hutch,” and he with her. The two were married in 1899 with the understanding
that she would retain both her name and her writing career. Over the course of their marriage, the couple had four children and both pursued intellectual careers, as well as being founding members of the Prophetstown Players. To the outside world, they seemed to embody the modern ideal of love, but their own writing tells a more complicated story.

Hapgood was not a feminist activist in the same vein as Eastman or Dell. He was, however, very interested in a relationship that could combine love and sex with intellectual companionship. Hutch, charming and outgoing, soon had affairs outside the marriage. His desire for complete intimacy with Neith caused him to discuss all of his affairs at length with her, and further, encourage her to experiment with other men as well.

“To have her know other men intimately was with me a genuine desire. I saw in this one of the conditions of greater social relations between her and me, of a richer material for conversation and for a common life together.”

Not surprisingly, when this desire was put into practice, Hapgood was not so open-minded. At some point, in response to the pain she felt at Hutch’s continued affairs, she contemplated an affair of her own with one of his old college friends. The distress that this caused Hapgood led Neith to eventually break off the relationship with the other man and in turn, have a nervous breakdown. During her recovery, Hutch tended to her devotedly and she began to reveal more of her actual pain than she ever had before. His response indicates ambivalence about whether or not the level of intimacy he had always sought after was truly a prize: “She talked to me as if to her own soul. Never can I forget the terrible, the utter frankness of it. I had longed so for expression from her – longed our life together, but when it came under those circumstances, it was painful indeed.” 
His statement explains that what Hapgood actually desired from Boyce was an increased interest in him, not the revelation of her own deep feelings (aka intimacy), particularly if such feelings were critical. 

In Hapgood’s autobiographical Story of a Lover, Neith is presented as strong, yet aloof, cold, and unemotional. In this book, as well as in Hutch’s
letters to his wife from this time, complaints and criticisms of her failure to meet his needs abound. No doubt, the lack of parental attention and affection in Boyce’s childhood led her to become more independent and emotionally self-reliant than most women of her time. However, Boyce’s letters to Hutch reveal a woman who cared deeply for him, rarely criticized him, and seemed afraid of losing his love.

“If his book demonstrates his overpowering ego, her letters evidence an increasing negation of self.” writes historian Ellen Trimberger.

 
In a play called Enemies, written jointly (Boyce writing the wife’s lines and
Hapgood, the husband’s) Neith wrote for her very authentic character:


“You, on account of your love for me, have tyrannized over me, bothered me, badgered me, nagged me, for fifteen years. You have interfered with me, taken my time and strength, and prevented me from accomplishing great works for the good of humanity. You have crushed my soul, which longs for serenity and peace, with your perpetual complaining…You have wanted to treat our relation, and me, as clay, and model it into the form you saw in your imagination.”

Neith also tried with great courage to adapt to Hutch’s views on sexuality, though suffering tremendously in the process. In a letter to him in 1907 she writes: “I have an abiding love for you- the deepest thing in me. But in a way I hate your interest in sex, because I suffered from it. I assure you that I can never think of your physical passions for other women without pain-even though my reason doesn’t find fault with you. But it’s instinct and it hurts. The whole thing is sad and terrible, yet we all joke about it every day.”

Writing to him again in 1916 she admits that her own aloofness, which became Hapgood’s constant criticism of her, was a self-protective response to that pain. After the tragic death of their oldest son, Hapgood ceased his affairs with other women, but in so doing lost his passion for life. He wrote, “Here I am in at middle life living with the one woman I want to live with, hopeful for my fine children, interested in a work I have chosen and which was not forced on me, rich in friends, in good health… and yet, in spite of all passionately unsatisfied.” Neith Boyce became more of a maternal figure to him and the two stayed together until Hapgood’s death in 1944.

My academic work deals primarily with women of great capacity, creativity, talent, and/or ambition and the ways that they navigated their own self-realization in the context of tightly managed gender expectations.  Neith Boyce is a great example of that struggle. Through exploration of stories such as these, an understanding emerges of how monolithic cultural paradigms work for men and for women in very different ways.  These men were allowed a kind of total self obsession. They were free to change course, to indulge, to transgress, to demand. How did women and how can women compromise or assert themselves in their quest for both intimacy and for themselves?   

Quotes in this post are primarily from the exceptional article: Ellen Kay Trimberger “Feminism, Men, and Modern Love” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality Ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 131-152. 

 

Joseph Campbell and The Way Love Shaped the West

Posted on by The Love Scholar

Joseph Campbell is known in large part for the dizzying scope of his knowledge.  He spent his life immersed in the study of myths across cultures, across geographical areas, across time periods, in multiple ancient and modern languages and produced a body of scholarship unrivaled in its breadth.  However, the notable aspect of Campbell’s work is not so much its exhaustive scope, but its synthesis of common themes, archetypes, fundamental questions and aspects of the human condition that seem to transverse all humanity. The scope of his study bears witness to what is shared among us and to that which the psychologist, Carl Jung, would say resides in the collective unconscious. Due to this broad study Campbell is able to speak to both these impressive elements of sameness as well as to the treasures unique to particular locations, people, and times.

So, what does this have to do with love?  When asked where to begin a conversation about love in Western culture, Campbell usually points to the troubadours of 12th century Provence.  In Germany, as the troubadour culture began to spread around Europe, they became known as the Minnesingers, the singers of love. The arrival of the troubadours marks the first time that love entered the world as a person-to-person relationship, the way we most commonly think of it now.  Prior to this birth and blossoming in the 12th century, love was experienced as either “eros” or “agape.” Both eros and agape are impersonal ways of loving.  Eros is made manifest in sexual desire, as Campbell says, “a zeal of the organs for each other.” Agape is love thy neighbor as thyself, spiritual love.  It is compassion, the opening of the heart, but it is not individuated.  So here in the 12th century enters Amor!  The troubadours recognized Amor as the highest spiritual experience, an experience that awakens from the meeting of the eyes.  Campbell goes on to suggest that this transformation of love, toward a personal and individual experience becomes essentially THE defining aspect of the West.  The courage to love became the courage to affirm a personal spiritual experience.

Campbell illuminates the idea that in affirming one’s own personal experience there was an outlet to defy tradition.  To give validity to the individuals’ experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, directly bucked the oppressive heavy-handed medieval church and gave rise to this new power.  Campbell delights in the synchronicity of AMOR being ROMA spelled backwards, as Rome (Roma in Italian) was (and is) the seat of the Papacy, the heart of the corrupt medieval church.

In traditional cultures, marriage itself was a family arrangement and still is in many parts of the world.  These were the kind of marriages that were sanctified by the medieval church – purely political and social in nature. To go against this tradition was not only heresy but according to the church a kind of spiritual adultery, and the stakes were high – namely eternal damnation. These church sanctified marriages were opposite to the spiritual union named by the troubadours that begins with the meeting of the eyes, and this movement validating individual choice in the face of great danger is the underpinning of Campbell’s well-known dictum, “follow your bliss.”

Campbell uses the story of Tristan and Isolde to illustrate the danger and pain of this new kind of love. Toward the end of the story Isolde’s nurse realizes that Tristan and Isolde have both drunk a love potion meant for Isolde and King Mark (whom Isolde is meant to marry, but has never met). The nurse goes to Tristan and says, “You have drunk your death.”  Tristan, deeply in love with Isolde, responds by saying, “If by my death you mean this agony of love, that is my life. If by my death you mean the punishment we are to suffer if discovered, I accept that.  And if by my death you mean eternal punishment in the fires of hell, I accept that too.” The significance of this statement, Campbell explains, is that Tristan is saying that his love is bigger even than death and pain, than anything.  It is an affirmation of the pain of life.  And that in following your bliss, choosing a career path, etc., decisions should be made with that same sense, that no one can frighten you off from this path, no matter what happens it is the validation of life.

In this way, love, the way the troubadours understood it in the 12th century, can never be a sin no matter what the church (outer authority) says, love is the meaning of life and its highest point.  Tristan and Isolde, William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Dante’s meeting with Francesca and Paolo in hell:  the point of all of these pioneers in love is that they decide to be the author and means of their own self-fulfillment, their own self-realization, and that realization is that what you love is your noblest work, and that wisdom comes from individual experience and not from dogma, politics, or society. For Campbell, the best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity, and this recognition stems first from the way the troubadours imagined a new way to love.

So what were the rules of courtly love? First, to achieve the love of the woman, expressed in whatever form she chose, there was one essential requirement, and that was that one must have a gentle heart, a heart capable of love (not simply of lust).  Campbell defines this quality as a heart capable of compassion.  Compassion means suffering with.  “Passion” is suffering and “com-” is with. The idea was to discover whether or not a man would suffer for love.  In many ways the idea of this “test” remains in our modern day love-culture.  If a woman was considered too ruthless, for example asking her lover to risk death she was called “sauvage” or “savage.”  Furthermore, a woman who gave her love without testing enough was also called “savage.”  Again, we see these boundaries placed on the behavior of women in the modern day as well.  It’s important to note however that the troubadours were not aiming for carnal intercourse or to dissolve marriages, rather as Campbell writes, “they celebrated life directly in the experience of love as a refining, sublimating force, opening the heart to the sad bittersweet melody of being through love, one’s own anguish and one’s own joy.” The idea was to “sublimate life into a spiritual plane of experiences.” What the troubadours ultimately discovered was individual experience and individual commitment to experience.

The Grail legends fit into this schema in very beautiful ways as well.  Campbell reveals that in the Grail legends, The Grail becomes that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. “The Grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that is lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, that carries itself between the pairs of opposites of good and evil, light and dark.”  The impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not the rules coming from an authority. In this sense, what happened in the 12th century was one of the most important mutations of human feeling and spiritual consciousness to occur in the West, that a new way of experiencing love came into expression, a way of experiencing love that was in opposition to ecclesiastical despotism over the heart.   “Love was a divine visitation.”

Lastly, the link between love and pain weaves its way through this understanding as well.  The German theologian, Meister Eckhart said, “Love knows no pain,” and strangely this is also what Tristan meant when he said, “I’m willing to accept the pains of hell for my love.”  There is nothing above it. This, however, does not preclude suffering.  Campbell says, “The pain of love is not the other kind of pain, it is the pain of life.  Where your pain is, there is your life… Love itself is the pain of being truly alive.” To me this means that the search for what you love authentically is endlessly worth whatever suffering occurs along the way, for that is your life’s work, to commit to love and to your own individual experience of where you discover it and where it discovers you.

* Joseph Campbell writes beautifully about Love in many of books; for this post I primarily used his chapter “Tales of Love and Marriage” in The Power of Myth, and “The Mythology of Love” in Myths to Live By.

First blog post

Posted on by The Love Scholar

This project originally began last Fall, 2016 as the date above suggests.  Toward the end of last summer I labored to design the website, wrote a few posts, and planned my future wanderings through the forest of Love, excited to illuminate as many of the forest’s inhabitants and histories as possible.  In due time, the November election hit – like a ton of bricks, and suddenly my enthusiasm for the project waned significantly.  Something about posting my thoughts on books and ideas seemed terribly self-indulgent. Even as I wrote and studied I chose not to share. Then, as time went on “Love” became a significant part of our new civic conversation. The word appeared often as a response to some of the more shocking and disastrous political developments that occurred in the wake of the inauguration. “Love Trumps Hate” for example, became a slogan of the resistance.  At times its use seemed frustratingly vague. How do we actually practice that love in our individual lives and communities?  What does love look like when it confronts its excruciating opposite?  Taken to its infinitude: what does love even mean? These questions bear down on us, and while this blog/project (bloject?) is not intended to be explicitly political perhaps some of the ideas and insights on love can be useful to the ongoing human project of inclusivity and the building of a beloved community.

E. L. Doctorow has a famous quote about writing being like driving a car at night, you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.  I have a road map for the first few blog posts and from there the “Love Scholar” trip will continue on.  My first post is about Joseph Campbell and his Mythologies of Love.  Next I’ll be periodically posting the stories from my dissertation/book research regarding the lives of creative/intelligent/ambitious women who managed love relationships with more famous and renowned partners.  History is an endless well spring of great stories and insights and I will share the best of both here. I have a couple of book reviews on tap as well as a couple of posts about expressions of love in music and how to travel as a lover.  Various philosophies of Love are on board as well.  If there is an aspect of Love that you are particularly interested in or would like me to cover please let me know!