Either we are going to renounce all that our civilization has stood for thus far, and attempt to build afresh, or we are going to destroy it with our own hands. When the poet stands at the nadir the world must be indeed be upside down. If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.
Henry Miller
The struggle against your own inclinations (self destructive or others) is the very stuff we live on and work with.
Anaïs Nin
The old ideals are dead as nails—nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman—sort of ultimate marriage and there isn’t anything else.
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
What do we wish to know of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the history of [love]?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(from the last section)
There no longer seems to be a common culture for us to revitalize with our artwork or relationships: Sartre and Beauvoir could inspire a civilization with their relationship, but we could not thrust our private lives into the tv-blue vacuum with everyone else. Love would have to be its own work, its own society, its own legacy. Art as these artists practiced it is no longer possible, when individuality itself has become an art form. Our faith in the art of our daily decisions and personal relationships is hardly the same as their faith in art as religion, as politics, as philosophy. They were still playing the public role of artist—but we have to judge our lives—and works—by different terms now. We do not enjoy the same privacy: we hide from ourselves at our peril—our motives are too visible in the age of analysis, self-cultivation and relentless self-surveillance.
In the decades since the 1960s, our conventions have so deteriorated that poetry—and life itself—seem to be the only arts left to us. Living in the world with other people seems to have become an art in its own right, even if we ourselves and small circles of friends are the only audience for it. Artwork is no longer the highest form of work: we cannot imagine sacrificing life or love to it, the same way these artists did. If we suspect that love itself is the highest art—we know that love cannot ask us to sacrifice livingness, not without inflicting a deep guilt. The emotional brutality these artists bore together—inflicting it on each other and on their lovers—is no longer appropriate to our loves, if our loves should be sacred. Or the power to inflict and to suffer a certain brutality may be just as necessary as ever—and each individual may still need to acquire the power for himself—but the love relationship no longer seems to be an appropriate place for exercising it. If we are going to live together, now, love itself should be protected: the violence should be channeled into the market, or otherwise outward.
Seen in this light, the emotional turmoil of the open relationship seems like it might have been just a preparatory stage for the possibility of the truer love, which might only now be dawning. Not of a free love or an open love—not a polyamory or non-monogamy, and not a repudiation of individuality—but a new fidelity, a new recognition that the intimacy, the life-in-common two people build together, requires a deep and artful honesty. We have already begun to suspect that love is jeopardized by the too-elaborate fulfillment of either individual. We have only begun to perceive that individual self-fulfillments might have become luxuries, superfluities which we might have to relinquish for the sake of what we love. We have already dreamt that we might have been wrong to serve our individual fulfillments, when we might pursue instead the transcendent self-reliance that ripens when people expand into each other and agree to live by laws they define in common. The story of that transcendent self’s self-reliance—the sacrifices it demands and the offerings it will accept, the stories of the culture it might create—these stories have yet to be written. We are only barely imagining them now, in our own lives and in our loves.
Excerpts from Love Lives
An excerpt from the introduction is below on the left. A five-page excerpt from the story of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe is on the right.Click here to download an early introduction to Love Lives, which retains, I think, a certain force in spite of its youthful idealism.
Click here to download the story of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller from Google docs.
Please contact me with feedback and comments about the chapters.
From the Introduction
From chapter three:
Stieglitz and O'Keeffe
Stieglitz and O'Keeffe
I believe it was the work that kept me with him, though I loved him as a human being. I could see his strengths and weaknesses. I put up with what seemed to me a good deal of contradictory nonsense because of what seemed clear and bright and wonderful.Georgia O’Keeffe
You ask what my attitude is. Man can’t you figure it out for yourself. I am trying to sustain life at its highest—to sustain a living standard. To let every moment actually live without any ism or any fashion or cult attached to it…Don’t you know I hate the very idea of what’s called a Picture…I chose my road years ago—& my road has become a jealous guardian of me. That’s all there is to it.
Alfred Stieglitz to Ansel Adams, 1933
The relationship was really very good, because it was based on something more than just emotional needs. Each of us was really interested in what the other was doing. Of course, you do your best to destroy each other without knowing it.
Georgia O'Keeffe
On New Year’s Day 1916, Georgia O’Keeffe’s art school friend Anita Pollitzer showed up at Alfred Stieglitz’ gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, with O’Keeffe’s drawings in a tube under her arm. O’Keeffe had sent her friend the drawings from Columbia, South Carolina, where, at twenty-nine years old, she was teaching art to girls. O’Keeffe had not suggested that Pollitzer should ask Stieglitz for his opinion of the drawings. She only told her that she wanted to be rid of them: she said that she had expressed something so personal that she could not look at them any more.
The abstract charcoals of seething, elemental forms marked the end of a season of crisis for O’Keeffe. She had left her friends and the New York art world behind her to take the job in South Carolina, but she did not see herself as launching her career as a teacher. She had only taken the job because it would pay her enough to get by and still leave her time to paint, but all fall she had been isolated, full of dread that she might never make anything that would distinguish her as an artist.
O’Keeffe had been working hard at her paintings that term, but she had also been hoping that a man would give her some of the support and approval that would make her feel at home in the world, both as a woman and as an artist. She had taken a liking to Columbia University political science professor Arthur Macmahon over the summer of 1915, but even after she had spent four days in his arms over Thanksgiving, she told Pollitzer that she was unclear about where the relationship was heading—and even that she was becoming wary of love:
"I dont love him—I don’t pretend to—sometimes when Im very tired I used to want him because he is restful—I probably will again—though—I doubt it.
He is nice to let go—and nice to keep—so I will do both—because he doesn’t want to—go—We will always be friends
I almost want to say—don’t mention loving anyone to me
It is a curious thing—don’t let it get you Anita if you value your peace of mind—it will eat you up and swallow you whole."
While she was—“nearer being in love with [Macmahon] than I wanted to be,” she had begun a flirtation with Columbia College (South Carolina) sociologist Marcus Lee Hansen, as well, but she told Pollitzer that Hansen was another “man I don’t know what to do with. If he were less fine—I would drop him like a hot cake—but he is too fine to drop—and too fine to keep—and he doesn’t know how fine he is.”
When Hansen did not make her choices any clearer—he only gave her another option not to choose—O’Keeffe put aside the oil paints she had been working with, and she stopped working with color altogether. In frustration and disappointment, she laid her drawing paper directly on the floor, and made a series of abstract charcoal drawings that gave form to the overflowing feelings which none of her relationships had crystallized. Muscular and feminine, the swirling shapes suggest the internal state of desire, and express an in-folding, feminine place, with fountains and phallus-shaped figures that suggest either a seething vacancy or the forms that might give it fulfillment.
These drawings were partly inspired by the modern art O’Keeffe had seen in Alfred Stieglitz’ gallery, and in Camera Work, the journal Stieglitz edited. Stieglitz had made a name for himself as a photographer in the 1890s, but when he started to exhibit European Modernism at his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, he had made a name for himself as an ardent promoter of new art and of yet-undiscovered artists, as well. He was known to take artists under his wing, giving them shows at 291, and helping to cultivate audiences and buyers for their works. If O’Keeffe had never explicitly asked her friend to show her work to Stieglitz, she had nonetheless written to Pollitzer, in the fall of 1915,
"I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something I had done—than anyone else I know of—I have always thought that—if ever I do anything that satisfies me ever so little—I am going to show it to him to find out if its any good—Don’t you often wish you could make something he might like?"
Pollitzer found Stieglitz at 291, and told him that she had some drawings she thought he might like to see. Recounting the New Year’s scene to O’Keeffe, she wrote that Stieglitz “looked…he thoroughly absorbed & got them—he looked again—the room was quiet—One small light…It was a long time before his lips opened—‘Finally, a woman on paper’—he said.” O’Keeffe had arrived: she had communicated a genuine and unique experience through her art—and Stieglitz had discovered an unknown woman artist.
Alfred Stieglitz was always looking for talented new American artists—and a female artist would be especially good for business—but Stieglitz was also looking for a lover. He was separated from his wife, who had never shared his passion for photography and art, and he had recently concluded an affair with another young painter, Katherine Rhoades, who had been twenty-six to his forty-five when they had started seeing each other in 1912. Rhoades broke with Stieglitz in 1915, after he exhibited her work—she destroyed her paintings and left New York—and now, on New Years 1916, his fifty-second birthday, Stieglitz had an eye out for another lover who would be sympathetic to his artistic ideas and lifestyle.
After she read Pollitzer's account of Stieglitz' reaction to her drawings, O’Keeffe herself wrote to ask him for his impressions, and she and Stieglitz began a correspondence in which O’Keeffe tried to describe her work and Stieglitz encouraged her to keep making more of it. As they corresponded over the following months, Stieglitz was more and more impressed with both her personality and her work, and they became lovers after he gave her a show at 291 in May, 1917. She returned to Texas again after the show, and they continued to reveal themselves in letters, but this time, O’Keeffe was corresponding much more passionately with Stieglitz’ assistant, photographer Paul Strand, who was only three years younger than her. She would not commit herself to either man—and she even started to go around with one of her students—but when she fell ill in the winter of 1917-1918, it was Stieglitz, not Strand, who had the power to offer her a studio in New York and support while she recuperated. Stieglitz himself had been depressed about the war and its effect on the art business, and he had closed 291 that winter, but now, from the distance of New York, he began to see O’Keeffe’s youth and her Midwestern directness—in addition to her willingness to organize her life around her art and the fineness of her drawings—as embodiments of his values. By the spring of 1918, Stieglitz wrote to Strand that O’Keeffe herself was the “spirit of 291—Not I.”
O’Keeffe had practically offered herself to this abstraction. Ever since her family had begun to drift toward poverty in 1899, she had lost creative years to illness and making money, but she had never made commitments that tied her down, either to jobs or to lovers. She had staked all her hopes on art, and when she finally accepted Stieglitz’ offer of a studio in New York, she chose Stieglitz over the younger man to whom she felt a stronger physical and even a stronger artistic connection. When she took Stieglitz as her lover, it was her artwork she was ultimately securing a place for. Likewise was Stieglitz motivated by his art when he moved in with O’Keeffe two months after her arrival in New York: she was not only the new, up-and-coming artist for his gallery, but she became his model and his collaborator as well.
Stieglitz had already spent years promoting the idea that art was a transcendent experience that lifted people beyond their particular lives. But if he and O’Keeffe were sympathetic to each other’s art, they were still nearly twenty-four years apart in age, and they were profoundly different in their backgrounds and in their temperaments. They had very different ideas about how to spend their days, and the abstracting language of artistic vision would not always reconcile—or even conceal—their real differences.
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