PARE one another we never did; each struggled to realize his own individuality, his egotistic need. Neither of us was considerate to the other. Those pale renunciations which hold many couples together in fragile relations neither of us would accept. In spite of the manifold connections of a life of work, children and responsibility shared, the deeper relation between us was founded not on compromise, but on attraction and repulsion, on a kind of interesting warfare. In the midst of the complexities of our common life, each of us has stood fiercely for the individual soul and its personal needs. Sometimes she has conquered and killed me, but I have never really yielded, and children, work and impinging society have at times overcome her and forced her warmly from her well of damp, withdrawing comfort; but never with her soul’s consent; never merely to be considerate or thoughtful of others. Our relation has been divinely lacking in sentimentality and in that kind of morality which takes the salt out of life. We both passionately demanded that our union should add to, not take from, abundance. So that whenever we have found an adjustment it has been a real one, based on unconscious necessity and not on the minor efforts of the deliberate will.
I have been more of a mother, more of a housekeeper than the great majority of men. This was due in large measure to my indifference to the usual ambitions of the male, to business, to conventional art and literature and to the standards of society; and to my practical lack and inabilities, as well as to her limitations in domestic and wifely qualities. And she has been more of a father than the great majority of women—she has gone out to the larger world in her thought, her imagination and her work, and has helped to make up for my deficiencies. So that though we never tried to compromise, each has departed in some degree from the conventional sphere and has contributed in the other’s fields. Or, more truly, neither of us has felt any limitation of sex, except the fundamental one, and we have worked out our common life as if there were no conventional career for either man or woman. It has been difficult and painful, but it has seemed to us the larger thing to do, the more exciting, the more amusing, procedure.
Amusing! That is the word she has taught me to use in her instinctively Gallic sense. Mentally, emotionally and temperamentally interesting is what she means by amusing, and to insist as we did upon our egotistic personalities as elements in every situation was invariably amusing, no matter how painful it might be. Sometimes the pain seemed almost to break the relation and separate us inevitably, but that which brought us back with a fuller emotion was the impersonal pleasure of contemplation, which to some extent enabled us to see ourselves as if we were others and to be pleased and amused by the spectacle. Art is a significant amusement, and as I have written, there was in each of us, an unconscious attempt to see life as art, impersonally though warmly. That is why we both disliked the sentimental and why we passionately rejected the considerate and the decent attitude toward each other, which was not good enough for our high instinctive resolve.
The deeper disturbance of our mutual life, there from the beginning as undertones, became more definite as time went on, grew into clear motifs in the symphony of our relation. The essential discord was strengthened, making the harmony more difficult but when maintained rendering it deeper; as it does in the operas of Strauss and Debussy.
About six years after the honeymoon we went, with our two children, to the Middle West where we passed an important year. To make clear the threatening new elements which came into our lives I need to refer to my deepening interest in what is called the labor movement of our day. This interest had grown out of my work as a journalist in New York, and had helped to bring out my natural love for what is called the under-dog. It was a love that had no need of a remoter charm. It had no relation to kindness or philanthropy. It had no pity or morality in it. It was a simple love for the unfamiliar, and for those instincts and basic ideas newly germinating which to my imagination seemed to hold out the promise of a more exciting and interesting and therefore a juster and better society. I was deeply tired of historical, platitudinous conventions and moralities in living and in art, and whenever I found the consciously or unconsciously rebellious I was strangely and pleasurably moved. It was for me an enjoyment second only in intensity to my love for the Woman, and, at bottom, these passions were connected. An intense temperamental element in the love for a woman is the exhilaration of a close relation with the primitive, the instinctive, and the ideal at once. He who has never desired a re-valuation of all values, who in his deeper emotions is not a revolutionist, has never fully loved a woman, for in the closest personal relation there lies a challenge and a threat to all that is meaningless or lifeless in organized society.
I have never been able to learn much from books; or from any other record of human experience. Only when I come in contact with men and women do I seem to myself to think. I then feel the strange inner excitement which is analogous to the thrill of the love adventure. What seems a new conception arouses me as does the kiss of the beloved! My life among the rebellious victims of the industrial system gave me some vital ideas which for a time played an unwarrantably important part in my life and have left a definitely sound and permanent effect. And these ideas deeply disturbed my relation with Her, and, as I now think, enriched and stimulated our lives both together and as individuals.
I saw how deep and all-embracing, and really how destructive of our conventions and minor moralities, the philosophy of the proletarian really is; how it strips society to the essential! It destroys the values we put on personal property as it points out with intensity the enslaving function of possessions. A conception of a social order whose morality, law, art and conventions are formed about the economic advantage of a dominant few startles the mind and the imagination and turns the strenuous soul to an analysis of the fundamentals. It puts him in a mood where respectability and all its institutions seem a higher form of injustice and robbery and makes him see the criminal, the outcast and the disinherited with a new and wondering sympathy; not a sympathy which expresses itself in benevolence and effort toward reform, but a mental and imaginative sympathy which sees in revolution the hope of a more vital art and literature, a deeper justice and a richer human existence; a sympathy which is in its character æsthetic—the sympathy of the social artist, not of the mere reformer or of the narrow labor agitator.
For a year I was deeply absorbed in these ideas and feelings, new and disturbing and enriching to me. And I, of course, brought them home to her, as I brought everything home to her. I took to her my feelings and my impressions, unbalanced and hot from their source; and she met the men and women who were the incarnations of these disturbing conceptions.
Ideas of marriage and the love relation in general were affected like everything else by this far-reaching proletarian philosophy. To free love from convention and from the economic incubus seemed a profoundly moral need. The fear that the love of one’s mistress was the indirect result of commercial necessity aroused a new variety of jealousy! In some strenuous lovers a strange passion was aroused—to break down all sex conventions in order to purify and strengthen the essential spiritual bond!
I met men and women who, with the energy of poets and idealists, attempted to free themselves from that jealousy which is founded on physical possession. They longed to have so strong a spiritual bond that it would be independent of any material event or any mere physical happening. They tried to rid themselves of all pain due to the physical infidelities of their lovers or mistresses!—believing that love is of the soul, and is pure and intense only when freed from the gross superstitions of the past. And one of the gross superstitions seemed to them the almost instinctive belief that a sexual episode or experience with any other except the beloved is of necessity a moral or spiritual infidelity. They traced this feeling to old theology and to the sense of ownership extended until it includes the body of the loved one!
They highly demanded that the love relation should be free and independent, that it should be one in which proud and individual equals commune and communicate, and give to each other rich gifts, but make no demands and accept no sacrifices, and claim no tangible possession in the personality of the other. Only so could each bring to the other his best, something racy and strange because his own, something so personal that it stimulated the other, though it might waylay, disturb and exasperate. Their voice was that of strenuous and idealistic youth bearing the burden of a general historical disillusionment.
A burden indeed it is! To accept well marked out conceptions of morality and norms of beauty is the easier way. To try to reconstruct the basis on which our feelings express themselves is a task indeed for the gods. And since men and women are not unlimited, these idealists among them fell frequently and bit the dust of humiliation and despair. Old tradition and old instinct proved stronger than they and, filled with commonplace jealousy, a new pain was added to the old—they were not only crudely and madly jealous but they also hated themselves for being so! Theirs was a new, deep pain indeed! They were no longer comforted by the conviction of being wronged, of their honor outraged, of being soldiers, though unhappy, in the cause of morality. They suffered and condemned themselves for suffering. They did not have even the consolation of thinking themselves justified!
These subtly-interrelated ideas connected with the whole field of the philosophy of total reconstruction with which I came in personal contact through association with expressive personalities among the industrial victims of conventionalized society, had a great and for a time an unbalancing influence on me, and, with my customary need for giving all I had, bad and good, I delivered to her my new passionate perceptions, my disturbing ideals and my fragmentary and idealistic hopes of a superior race of men and women—men and women capable of maintaining beautiful and intense relations and at the same time being superior to the time-worn and, as I thought, outworn tests of virtue and fidelity.
To try the impossible is the function of the idealist and of the fool. And I have certainly at times been a fool if not an idealist in my demands on myself and on her. She took these my new and excited feelings as she tended to take everything in her moral environment, to make it a part of her as far as she could harmonize it with what she already possessed, with what had gone before. And so she began to make experiments which had been in part instigated by me, but which, after all, was only the following out of her deeper nature, a nature more unconventional than mine, and less theoretical. She tended more than I to put into thorough practice what she had once mentally accepted. The ease and calmness with which she could take a mental proposition filled me with uneasiness. I felt that if she loved me she would have more in her instincts to overcome.
I encouraged her to have intimate friendships with other men; to be alone with my friends and with hers; but when I saw in her an eager readiness to take advantage of my initiative, the old racial feeling of jealousy would stir within me. When I saw that other men excited her, and that she often preferred their society to mine, deep pain would take possession of me! One day she coolly told me not to come home to luncheon as she wanted that time alone with one of my friends!
That was the occasion of a violent quarrel between us. When I expressed my dislike at being excluded she accused me of hopeless inconsistency.
Inconsistent I was, but not in the way she meant. My inconsistency lay in demanding from her what her nature could not give, even when I knew she could not give it! Perhaps a part of my love for her was this inability of hers to give herself to me, but I always have struggled desperately to secure from her that absolute devotion in passion of which she is incapable—at least to me.
It was not that she lunched alone with another man who was beginning with excitement to see her. It was not that that disturbed me. It was not so crude as that, though she ironically and contemptuously characterized it so. I loved to have her like other men, as I loved to have her like all of life. To taste and to enjoy and to be stimulated to greater thought and understanding and to more comprehensive emotion, I loved to feel that this was for her. It gave me a vicarious excitement, a warm secondary pleasure, and it fed my illusion, an illusion recognized by me as an illusion, of what she might one day be capable of with me.
And to have her know other men intimately, just as I continually wished to know other women 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 common life together. Whenever she showed an interest in other men I saw in it what I call the live line; it was to me an exciting sign of imaginative vitality—I saw the life spirit in her!
Yes, but what filled me at the same time with unutterable passionate misery was her tendency at such moments to reject me! That she wanted to see other men alone and intimately squared with my conscious ideals and even with my emotional impulses and with my need of pleasurable excitement. But that this new experience should make the distance between her and me still greater, this was to me the unendurable. For her to tell me she did not want me to be with her and him, when I wanted to be there, this was an intolerable exclusion, and reopened the old periodic wounds.
I dwell upon this seemingly trivial occasion of the luncheon because of its symbolic character. It was typical of much that had happened between us continually. The thing in her which all my instincts as well as all my philosophy and thought rejects is her inability to feel for me at the moment she feels for another! This is the eternal jar, the perception which takes from the harmony of life, from the unity of the universe. As I have written, all through life I have instinctively and consciously struggled to hold all the essential elements of my life together,—not to drop anything out of what has once been seen as beautiful. In this painful effort to maintain our deeper memory, what we call the soul is born.
This demand for an extended harmony is what made the youthful Weininger so bitter towards womankind, in whom he saw an essential limitation of memory, and therefore a limitation of soul. His personal, unhappy fate made him err in making of this truth a merely sexual matter. It is not only the woman but the man, too, whose intensity and concentration is not sufficient to hold enough together on the basis of which the triumphant soul emerges.
I imagine that at the root of every real love is this almost metaphysical passion—this deep emotional insistency on unity. So that when I saw, as I often did in her, transparent forgetfulness, a dry ability to put herself entirely into the interest of the moment, losing the harmonizing fringe of consciousness in which the values of the past are held, it almost seemed to me as if her soul was damned or had never been born, and my whole being wept at the temporary destruction of my Ideal, at the confutation of my philosophy, at the negation of my deepest instinct.
But how often did I try to be as at such times she seemed to me to be! In a kind of metaphysical despair how often did I try to rid myself of underlying memory! to be a rebel to the soul itself, to live in the dry, hard moment, without fringe or atmosphere!—trailing on with me none of the long reaches of the past! And how often has my unconscious demand for unity kept me from realizing my deliberate desire to kill the soul.
In the arms of other women I have attempted to deny the soul. I have longed to live as if I had no essential memory; as if there were no deep instinct in me to build my life of values about a central principle. When I failed—as I always have—I have sometimes wept bitter tears, tears falling because of my inability to break up my own integrity. I have been with women whom I liked and admired, with whom I wanted to have an absolute and refreshing intimacy. I have sometimes felt that my salvation depended on being able to give myself completely to another woman, and I have at times tried desperately to do so, but She always stood between, invisible, silent, representing for me the eternal principle of continuity in emotion, insisting on the Memory-Soul, demanding, without intending to, a monogamy deeper than that based on convention or law.
Demanding this deeper monogamy, not only without intending to, but even without understanding the nature of monogamy when it concerns the spirit. She made the deeper monogamy necessary for me, but she did not understand its nature! How often did she wonder at the character of my love for her! Her large, frank, mysterious eyes glowed with a kind of contemplative examination. I was a curious and interesting phenomenon—sometimes beautiful and attractive to her, sometimes irritating and unpleasant—but always incomprehensible was the nature of my love, perhaps the nature of Love itself!
If she had at any one moment understood this inevitable bondage of my spirit, a bondage which was independent of any of the conventional expressions of fidelity, a bondage bound up with my feeling about myself and all of life, she would have understood the reason for my jealousy.
I was jealous because she was not bound in the same deep, independent way! independent of conventions, bound by the essential law of the spirit. It would have been easy for me to endure what is called infidelity had the real, unconscious infidelity not been so transparently present. A warm friendship with another man involving sexual relationship would have met my growing social rebelliousness, and would have been eventually recognized by me as not inconsistent with our relation, had that relation ever been securely established.
To see in her eyes a temperamental forgetfulness of me and a vague imaginative hope of relationship with an impossibly charming uninjured masculine expression of God brought me back with an indescribable pang to my own inherent weaknesses, my lack of nervous integrity and to the impossibility of attaining that spiritual unity in sex which to me my relation to her had always idealistically meant.
I wonder if every lover does not clearly understand me! Am I not here writing the autobiography of every man as concerns his love relation? I think these memoirs are no more true of me than of any one who has felt the full possibility of a human relation with a being of the opposite sex.