Much of what we understand about romantic love comes, I think, from fiction. Parent-child love, a purer and more selfless emotion, doesn’t need explaining in the same way; most of us are lucky enough to have known it as our first experience. Love of friends, another somewhat under-valued feeling, generally comes young and spontaneously. Yet when people have to navigate their way through the straits of romantic/sexual love and its life-long domestic implications, I think that the lives of fictional characters often give them a star by which to steer.
You know about the importance of this feeling before you experience it, so you want to find out what’s in store; but real people – especially parents – are not good at putting such things into words. One can sympathise: no one likes to be cross-examined about personal matters only to find they have no verbal means with which to explain their life-changing emotions. The only reliable resource, therefore, is good novels, in which the inner lives of the characters are scrutinised.
We learn from the extreme actions of fictional lovers about the deranging power of the emotion
At the age of 16 I had no idea why Mr Brown next door had married Mrs Brown or if they had ever been ''in love’’; but I knew every shift of Paul Morel’s affections between Miriam and Clara. At the end of my first real-life love affair, some years later, I found no comfort in the ''relationships’’ of my friends or the marriages of older people, but I did know what Tess had felt for Angel in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, what Charley had felt for Rose in Henry Green’s wonderful novel Back, and it was some consolation.
A novelist may opt to describe love feelings head on – ''She felt as if…’’ – though the range of applicable words is not large and can lead to bathos. Elizabeth Bowen and Anita Brookner are among those who have found life in the available vocabulary. Or a writer can put emotions into dialogue. One thinks of Dobbin’s magnificent rejection of Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair: ''You couldn’t reach up to the height of the attachment which I bore you, and which a loftier soul than yours might have been proud to share.’’ This to the woman he has wasted his whole life loving! Or of the overbearing Mr Knightley in Emma at last brought to his knees by the heroine: ''If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.’’ Or the dying Catherine to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights: ''You have killed me – and thriven on it, I think.’’
Most writers, though, look for a way of making actions speak for their characters. Like Inman in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, they undertake long journeys and suffer deprivations; or they treasure meaningless keepsakes. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s great novel set in a TB sanatorium, we discover that the main character, Hans Castorp, has somehow acquired the lung X-ray of a fellow patient, the saucily named Madame Chauchat. At the time (before World War One), X-rays were new, invasive, frightening; a woman who had been so photographed might feel violated. And behind the blurred rib cage is her implacable heart.
We learn from the extreme actions of fictional lovers about the deranging power of the emotion; but we deduce also that we are not insane. Scott Spencer’s 1979 novel Endless Love, about an incendiary teenage affair, has an intensity that is disturbing, but reassuring. You think, as with Heathcliff and Catherine: this is not a feeling I want to share; my own lunacy is comparatively within bounds.
I suppose it is possible that the artistry of writers has led people astray. You can argue that novelists have done more than helpfully explore the emotion; they have exalted it to a place of primacy in human affairs that it’s not suited to hold. After all, love is an abstract – a passion, with an unpredictable lifespan. Yet it is the only emotion we treat as though it were a reason or a judgment.
No one makes the major decisions of their life on the basis of jealousy, anger or slight resentment; these are disparaged as low and passing things. But the majority of people set up house and order their life on the basis of the variable that is romantic love. And those who have not found their ideal ''other’’ are sometimes made to feel that they have failed. This ''love’’ thing is not only treated as a social regulator, it has a degree of snobbery within it: those who have been most monogamously passionate are viewed as the most admirable in society; we are asked to look up to them.
Did this enthronement of an emotion come about because love affairs and their slow unfolding have been such a gift to the novelist? I don’t know; but I’m sure that writers are not going to stop.
Good novels try to offer the reader a sense of transcendence – of this short, absurd life with its known, bathetic ending reordered into something more shapely, satisfactory and uplifting. And the only transcendent experience available to non-religious people is the life-giving power of love.
While with its ego and darkness, romantic love is not as pure as parent/child love, it has something family love does not: a sense that we have defeated the limits of life by finding a stranger who is already familiar to us; whose every blink of eye and fold of skin is deep in our memory, coded in our prehistoric DNA. And through his extraordinary feeling we sense that we can rise above death.
Iris Murdoch wrote about this aspect of love, of how all the co-ordinates of a life can change in a moment. Her best books, The Black Prince and The Bell, deal thrillingly with this among other ideas. The American writer Richard Yates is thought of as the laureate of marital despair for his novels, but his short stories, which are superior, have exquisite moments of love, as do the stories of his fellow-American Lorrie Moore and the novels of Anne Tyler.
One of the greatest writers on love is Edith Wharton. At the end of the The Age of Innocence, the 57-year-old Newland Archer sits beneath the Paris balcony of the woman who is the love of his life, but from whom events have separated him. He decides that she will be more real to him if she stays in his memory than if he goes up to visit her, knowing that she cannot be his. At that moment, a servant closes the shutters. ( telegraph.co.uk )
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