All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Other influences came to shape my growing and ever more mysterious picture of love. In the small Québécois town where I spent a part of my childhood, stories of who was in love with whom circulated freely. Love was gossip–a private, but publicly titillating, matter. I don’t think I paid much heed. These were stories about adults, after all, who inhabited a different world. But stock characters remain in my memory, I imagine because of their repeated visits in these stories. Then, too, a mystery attended their roles, rife ground for childhood misunderstanding. There was the coq du village–a phrase my mother loved, which apparently designated the man–rooster who fancied he ruled over all the chicks in the village. I would watch these local Lotharios carefully when they appeared, in the hope that I might catch a glimpse of their chickens, before I realized they were meant to be women.

  Another stock character was the ardent, swooning, ever desirous male who, in my beautiful and much desired mother’s lore, figured as a plus or a pest, whatever his suffering. There was also a rather gaga version of this: the aged, besotted swain and his too young mistress, both figures of ridicule. A ‘cheat’ was part of the panoply, too. Usually this one figured as female, and came with a derogatory description of too much lipstick and too many flounces. Finally, there was the forlorn female, disappointed in love, who was always approached with a halting cheer admingled with awe and a slight fear, so it wasn’t quite clear whether she was ill and contagious or on a plinth built out of suffering.

  Sometimes these love stories hurdled across the child–parent divide and love acquired another adjectival usage to produce a love-child. The one that remains in my mind, perhaps because of the intensity of the whispered gossip, had to do with a customer in my parents’ local store, where often enough I spent my after-school hours tucked, half hidden, behind the till counter doing homework or drawing. The customer was a blowsy teenager who transfixed me by coming in one day with no teeth, then the following week with a gleaming set. The transformation was almost as potent as Cinderella’s: teeth and slippers, both in their different ways attached to the body, seemed to have magical properties somehow related to love. Anyway, rumour amongst the sales assistants had it that this young woman was bearing a love-child by–wide-eyed murmuring–one of the priests in the seminary, right next door to the convent school I attended.

  So love was also something to do with the making of children, a secret activity it seemed; though children could hardly be secret since I knew lots of them.

  I had no idea back then how children were, in fact, made. There were storks, of course. (Birds seem to flutter in to confuse the sexual picture in myths, fairy-tales, poetry and kitchen talk, forever displacing it into flight and the possibility of human transformation.) Storks dangled babes from their beaks in whiter-than-white bundles on the picture greeting-cards. But there were no storks in Canada–yet there were certainly babies. According to one tale, I had grown in my mother’s tum because she had eaten a great many pears, which she continued to delight in though they now produced no little siblings. In other parental versions, babies came when a man and woman slept with one another. I grew terrified of sleeping in the same bed as my brother in case a swaddled shape materialized in the night between us.

  The provenance of babies did finally figure in the sex education classes my–by then English-language, Montreal–school laid on when we were about twelve. But the process the projected diagrams illustrated on the school screen remained more than a little opaque. Nor was the word ‘love’ ever uttered. The atmosphere in which the teaching took place–girls segregated from boys presumably so we could talk about frightening blood and menstruation, the teacher wielding a punitive pointer, the use of clinical words I don’t think I had ever heard–had more to do with warning and prohibition than anything good.

  When, afterwards, the boys in the playground made a circle with thumb and forefinger and inserted the index finger of the other hand into it, I had no idea what the gesture meant, nor why it should be accompanied by sniggers and that other four-letter word, f**k, rarely heard when and where I grew up, and all the more potent as an expletive. I wasn’t the only ignoramus. None of my girlfriends altogether understood, and I’m not even sure the boys did. If an atmosphere of sexuality and excitement accompanied it all, we were still largely ignorant of the facts–not that even those would have helped much without some tangible experience. Children may be sexual beings in the sense that their bodies can give them pleasure, but there is a deficit in the knowledge that comes from adult experience. In that sense they are innocents: they only glimpse, and often enough faultily, what their bodies may know. And biological facts remain opaque until lived reality arrives to join up the dots.

  In a famous set of observations about the sexual enlightenment of children, Freud notes that a child’s intellectual interest in the riddles of sex, his desire for sexual knowledge, leads to delightful hypotheses about the origins of babies. The Freudian child, long before puberty, is capable of all the psychical manifestations of love–tenderness, devotion, jealousy, which are often enough associated with physical sensations–so that he has a sense that the two may be related. If questions lead only to misleading parental explanations or a prohibitive silencing, the child’s curiosity is stymied and the result may be inhibition of both a sexual and an intellectual kind accompanied by later difficulties. Differentiating between the anatomy of boys and girls, Freud also hypothesizes, may as one of its effects induce in boys a fear of castration and in girls an envy of the visible phallus and, by metaphorical extension, of its powerful owners.

  Penises were familiar enough to me from my utterly non-puritanical home where doors were often open and the occasional nudity hardly remarkable. I don’t think the sight of my father’s or brother’s penis stimulated a sense of envy or of my own lack, though such matters or their symbolic afterlife rarely produced a conscious rumble. But when penises erupted in strange places, they could be frightening. The perennial flasher might be giggled at when we girls were in a group, but took on fearful moment if one was alone.

  On one confusing occasion when I was made aware of a man’s erect penis, I made a scene, which is probably why the event can still be recalled. I must have been about ten or eleven, that prepubescent Lolita moment that so fascinated Vladimir Nabokov. It could only have been a Sunday, since we were off into the Laurentian Mountains for a family outing, this time accompanied by some friends of my parents. The car was crowded and my place was on a pair of bony male knees. Let’s call him Bill kept hugging me to him, purportedly for safety’s sake, and occasionally rocking me as if I were a tiny tot who needed calming. This did little to put me in a sunny mood. At some point during the long drive, the rocking took on too regular a rhythm and something that felt like a third bony knee wedged against my bottom. I don’t know what came over me, but I hollered that I was going to puke and demanded that the car be stopped. I ran out and away alongside the highway until my angry father caught up with me and forced me back. But I just wouldn’t take my place on those knees again. I think I must have felt a sense of disgust–why else say I was on the point of being sick? Nor was I to be consoled. I was finally persuaded back into the car only when I was allowed to squeeze into the front seat next to my mother.

  I couldn’t tell my parents what had happened. I couldn’t tell myself either, since I didn’t know. This was secret matter. Only much later and with fuller knowledge did it take on a kind of sense. I didn’t speak to Bill for ages and was severely reprimanded for my lack of politeness. Bill wasn’t a bad man and I now imagine he must have been rather shamefaced. Such things happen to most children in a more emphatic or a lesser way, sometimes forgotten, sometimes recalled. They’re just part of growing up into love and its regular enough stalking partner, sex. To the child, they’re part of a puzzle in which the pieces only slowly, if ever, fall into place.

  My older brother presented a riddle, too. Having arrived at young manhood while I was still an innocent, he would often be ente
rtaining young women I wasn’t allowed to meet in the basement of the family home. This was also the place where I listened to my Elvis Presley records. Going all gooey when Elvis crooned ‘Love me Tender’ certainly had something to do with love, as far as I was concerned. I loved Elvis with all the passion that collectively shared idols awaken in the pubescent young, at that moment when the body puts cravings for one doesn’t know quite what into motion and rampant fantasies focus on actor or pop star to provide a ready object.

  It didn’t need a great leap of the imagination to link that vague gooey Elvis-shaped longing with whatever it was my brother was up to on those occasions when the basement door was kept securely locked. Our dog, who served as his guardian, barked effusively if anyone tried to enter, or even knocked. The dog certainly knew more than I did. He might even have understood why it was that Elvis’s voice could make me go soppy with love, while any approach from an embodied male of the local species made me gag with disgust. When at some point during his young virile manhood–he must have been about nineteen–my mother declared that my brother was in love, I knew it was obscurely linked to the locked basement door and its secrets. The word ‘love’ on this occasion was uttered in a dirge-like tone that evoked doom rather than promise.

  My brother’s chosen love was a slender brunette I had only glimpsed in passing. I knew, however, from the family rows that she was a French-speaking Québécoise, and therefore Catholic. My brother’s refrain that she came from a Communist family, which meant she had no religion at all, just like us more or less, cut little ice. The arguments went on and on until the two sets of parents met. They were polite enough as far as I could tell from the eavesdropping position I took up in the kitchen until I was caught out. But after that meeting, the girlfriend disappeared and my desolate brother was whisked away on some summer jaunt.

  I hadn’t read Romeo and Juliet yet, though their names came up. Nor had I seen West Side Story with its evocation of star-crossed lovers trying to bridge a social divide. But the lyrics were everywhere and I had the LP. Ever after, this moment in my brother’s life was caught up with the realization that love, far from being ‘a many-splendored thing’, was also an occasion for stiff-lipped parents from ill-matched or warring social groups to come together in judgement: love was a disturbing force which had to be battened down, so that its ill, certainly tumultuous, winds didn’t wreck the good ship Family. I later realized that love was also that first trembling step we take into the wider world of the polis, the world of others who bear no relationship to us except that created by the bond of ‘I’ and ‘you’. Without that bond, we would be poor creatures, forever mired in our limits.

  By that time I had started to read books other than Nancy Drew and Anne of Green Gables. In fact, through these teenage years I was becoming a rather bookish sort and would read anything that came to hand from the school or small home library, from friends, or the local drug store’s swivelling racks. So many of these books found a primary theme in love. Like those Australian children who know from books a great deal about English seasons, fauna and flora, though none of them exist in Australia, I learned a great deal about passion without ever having experienced it.

  When I look back at that reading, it seems to fall largely into two basic templates, at least in so far as love is concerned. The first kind of love came out of English literature. Jane Austen was key, as were all her progeny in countless tales of girl meets boy (or nurse meets doctor), overcomes pitfalls, vaults hurdles of both inner blindness and outer difficulty to arrive at that glorious end-point, which is also a promise, where love and marriage meet.

  The other strand came out of continental literature. Here love had little to do with marriage, which was always a backdrop of convenience or misery. Instead, it had everything to do with secret desire and the grand illicit passion of adultery. Enter Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina with their transgressive desires and suicidal fate. Meanwhile, heroes like Balzac’s Rastignac and Stendhal’s Julien Sorel climbed the social ladder through the scaling of each step by seductive acts of love, often with older women.

  I never paused then to reflect on the contradictions embedded in these two models: the happily ever after of one and the miserably ever after of the other. After all, each in its own way played out the patterns that had already been laid down by the family stories and fairy-tales I’d been told or read earlier. Nor did it seem strange to me that at one and the same time I could be pining away for Darcy or his rather uncouth equivalent spied at school, and singing, with great clanging brio, ‘I never will marry, I’ll be no man’s wife. I intend to live single, all the days of my life.’

  In that flux of emotions and hormones which is adolescence, contradictions live side by side. It’s only later that we think we have to settle for an either/or, and all the while wish wistfully that an ‘and’ were still possible. Meanwhile, all these stories, tragic or comic, had a common point. Love conferred meaning, filled life with significance. If it entailed suffering, had a dark side, it was also a school in sensibility: without it we would never know the sublime heights and perfidious lows of others–or ourselves.

  If I anatomize all this as preamble, it is because love always carries an individual story, whatever its universal weight as an emotion or condition and whatever discourses of love our culture has conferred on us. The childhood instances I post here were unique to me and inflected the way in which I grew into an understanding of love. What is common to all children, however, is that the little four-letter word accrues so many contradictory meanings that it emerges as a consummate mystery, one trailing importance, yet hardly easy to decipher or live.

  Well before I’d actually been to bed with a man or used the word about my emotions, well before I’d experienced that obsessive madness of passion that links the lover to the lunatic and the poet, I already carried within myself a host of oft-conflicting templates of love, habits of mind and body, wishes, expectations, fears, let alone those fluttering ghosts of those of my sibling and parents–all born out of a brew of family life, cultural and bodily forces. These were rekindled, tugged at and pulled into varying shapes, whenever I later ‘fell in love’ or simply loved. And each new accretion came into play the next time round.

  Love shows little heed of physical age, much as we may try to constrain it into age-appropriate form. Which is why grown women may find themselves on occasion as needily dependent as a crying toddler, or a grandfather may be as obsessed as he was as a young man by a pretty young thing. In the film Moonstruck an ageing, philandering lecturer, rebuked by a mature woman with the words, ‘You’re too old for her’, aptly replies: ‘I’m too old for me.’

  Now, as I grow older, I rarely think of love as divine or carnal rapture. Rather, I think of those ties that bind me to my children, somehow the most important people in the world, as idealizable and as irritating, each in turn, as the long-term partner with whom I share my days, my ups and downs and that necessary tedium in between. Or I think of my mother’s distorted face staring at my father’s dead body, a man she was prone to criticize, but whose life she had shared through thick and thin for over forty years. I think of the numerous couples I know, estranged by the turmoil of life, coming back together in times of extreme need or illness, to share pain and difficulties, the old enmities laid aside. All that, too, is love.

  Why write about love? It’s just a four-letter word, after all, one often casually used. It can feel empty and platitudinous or bring with it a queasy embarrassment or a contemptuous sneer of dismissal. Its yuck factor is high. Over the last decades, love has been scoffed at as sentimental goo, derided as a myth to keep the masses enslaved, exposed as a mental malady and inveighed against as a power-monger in romantic garb bent on oppressing women in particular.

  Yet love bears within it a world of promise, a blissful state removed from the disciplines of work, the struggle for survival and even the rule of law and custom. The promise coexists with the knowledge that love can bring with it agonizin
g pain, turmoil, hate and madness–and in its married state, confinement, boredom, repetition.

  Indeed, love carries a freight of experience that takes us from cradle to grave. It frolics amongst the daffodils, dances to the secret tunes of perversity and transgression, drives some mad and others insanely happy. Its object can be long dead and exist only as a picture in a frame enlarged by imagination, or an all but naked man hanging on a wall, or a pop idol. It can be the subject of laughter or insufferable longing and often both at the same time. It can exist as an unbreachable attachment between couples of whatever sex, who seem on the surface to despise each other or engage in tortuous power games. It can play itself out intensely between fathers and daughters or mothers and sons–sometimes with deadly outcomes, at others happily enough. It often comes accompanied with the intense pain of jealousy or rejection.

  The Ancients split love apart into Eros and Agape, desire and affection, or benevolence. They tellingly gave Eros or Cupid, a sometime god, a physical embodiment: that playful, rambunctious, charming winged toddler who grows into a fetching nubile youth. In some versions Eros is passionate about other youths, but in his longest narrative he falls in love with the imaginative Psyche, or soul, she who can love in the dark, sparked by stories whispered into her ear. Son of the beautiful Aphrodite (Venus) and warring Mars, Cupid creates both havoc and pleasure. His arrows land in unexpected places, urban alleyways and romantic vales, and show little respect for gender or the status of their object.