Great Writers Great Loves: the reinvention of love in the 20th Century
Ann-Marie Priest
Black Inc., Melbourne 2006
Reviewer: Liz Huf
This is an exhilarating book about the passions, the love -lives, the suicidal depressions of some of my favourite authors – heroes actually of my growing-up years - Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, D.H.Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Charmian Clift, and Dylan Thomas. I feel desperate to now read Ann-Marie Priest’s two final authors, Frank O’Hara and Vita Sackville-West: both extraordinary, both leading the way in their bohemian lifestyles and their literature. In the twentieth century, writes Priest (in her introduction), expectations of romantic relationships were the highest they had ever been. “For the first time in human history, men and women sought in their marriage partner a soul mate with whom they could experience emotional Great Writers Great Loves: the reinvention of love in the twentieth century Ann-Marie Priest Black Inc., Melbourne 2006 101 intimacy, sexual fulfilment and lasting happiness”. It was a time when people were more idealistic about love than ever, the author argues. Artists and writers were encountering a new complexity in their relationships, with changing social conditions, divorce starting to lose its stigma, women voting, studying and leading professional lives. “We became more interested in psychology, the workings of our own hearts and minds.” (pp.1-2).
Priest backs these thought–provoking assumptions with Stephanie Coontz’s history of marriage and sets the scene for an exploration of the open relationships lived by Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West, and Frank O’Hara, together with the passionate partnerships built by Charmian Clift and George Johnson (Australian literary giants of 1960s). The love affairs of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murray and the alcohol–fuelled marriage between Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and Caitlin Macnamara are extravagant, threaded with romanticism, fidelity, infidelity and idealisation.
As Diana Stubbings notes in her Canberra Times review, Priest lets the lives of these writers speak for themselves, bringing a ‘freshness’ to the notions of sexuality and gender, flexible marriage, both heterosexual and homosexual, the effect of turbulent relationships on their professional work as portrayed by the author’s protagonists.
For example, Virginia Woolfe’s romantic and sexually fulfilling passion shared with Vita Sackville-West significantly informs her novels Orlando and To the Lighthouse. Sylvia Plath’s ‘burgeoning burdened love’ (p10 ) with Ted Hughes (her black marauder) created some of her best poetry, while Charmian Clift’s fulfilling marriage to journalist and author George Johnson underpins a powerful working relationship, immortalised in Johnson’s My Brother Jack trilogy. Where New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, pioneer of the modern short story, reveals the struggle of women to achieve true equality within a loving relationship in the 1910s, we find Charmian Clift fighting with many of the same issues in the more conservative social climate of the 1950s, according to the author. Clift’s solution was to make a spectacular sea change and live on a primitive Greek island with her husband and their children (pp. 6-7).
“For the first time in my life I found time to do my own writing, I found time for social life, I found time to look after my family properly. Days are very long…life’s very easy, very wonderful.” (Charmian Clift, p172).
Priest’s work is an important examination of writers and cultural icons who made a tremendous impact on their century, but also influenced us on our thinking about love in the twenty first century. “They reflect us”, writes Priest. It seems ironic that many would have had little idea of their impact on society. “All died before 1970… three committed suicide, two died of tuberculosis, one was killed in a freak accident and one is generally considered to have drunk himself to death” (pp.9-10). Although these stories have a dark side, the author claims they are not tragic, they celebrate the ideal of deep companionship, mutual love and reciprocal passion in unconventional ways.
This is a fascinating, highly intelligent study of love, open marriage, separate lives conjoined in temporary passions – but beneath each story, I do believe there is a common thread pointing to the unequal distribution of time and freedom to write by women, compared with their men, which I find very interesting. While each was a genuine pioneer of personal independence within loving relationships, reviewer Joanna Murray-Smith argues that for Mansfield, Plath and Clift, all drawn to literary men and shackled by impecunity, this intense difference ‘created insufferable and profound resentment’.
Despite her long love affair with writer John Murray, Katherine Mansfield encouraged her best friend Ida to abandon her own life to serve Mansfield as house-keeper, - ‘encapsulating the writer’s desperate and ego-driven willingness to accept love where it was useful’. “I do love you and want you for my wife” says Mansfield (p.162). (What female writer doesn’t need a wife,? Notes Murray- Smith.) Finally, for these eight authors, love and sex has been a force of apparelled comfort, reassurance and, conversely, enduring pain and destructiveness. Always present in their working lives, love is what they write about, what they write out of, what they write into, In a sense what they create, says Priest (p9). They have tested conventional relational categories and helped to redefine marriage. Priest argues that nothing has more power, more importance or more creative influence in their lives. Where Virginia Woolf is portrayed with almost revolutionary significance with her passion for another woman, D.H.Lawrence’s fiction, focussing on the sexual power of women, has had immense influence on sexual social mores of his and future generations. I rather agree with Christopher Bantick’s summing up in his review for The Australian. “These eight loves coalesce into Priest’s summation of the influence and place of love in the lives of writers, and thereby our own”. Bantick suggests 1960s Liverpool poet Adrian Henri comes close to the ‘distillation of contemporary ideas of love’ in his poem “Love is”:
Love is feeling cold in the back of vans
Love is a fan club with only two fans.
Love is.
Notes: Christopher Bantick, “Love Stories”, The Australian, 29 April 2006. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, New York,Viking 2005. Joanna Murray-Smith, Review “Literary lovers paved the way for passion”, The Sunday Age 21 May 2006 pp10-06 Ann-Marie Priest, Great Writers Great Loves:the reinvention of love in the twentieth century (pp 2-8, 10, 172) Diane Stubbings, Review “Sex and Scribes: power of passion on the pen”, The Canberra Times, 22 April 2006.
