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
We are just now reaching the point where we can evaluate the relation of one to another one. And our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them.
Rainer Maria Rilke
So far, everything that has given color to existence still lacks a history: or, where could one find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, or of cruelty?…Have the experiences of living together been assembled?…Has the dialectic of marriage and friendship been presented as yet?
Friedrich Nietzsche
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
I.
For almost two hundred years, now, it has been customary to talk about marriage as an institution in crisis. Not only has divorce become virtually commonplace, but domestic arrangements and sexual practices that used to be scandalous no longer raise more than an eyebrow when they are mentioned in casual conversation. In the ocean of sex-drenched advertising, entertainment and fashion, pornography, perversion and the most sordid aspects of love have seeped into everyday culture—so much so that parents today worry not that their children’s generation won’t respect their marriages, but that their children’s friends and classmates might already be so saturated—so medicated, disaffected and overwhelmed—that they won’t even feel anything when they experiment early with sex. The hope that marriage might still have any sanctity has been so widely abandoned that our modern decline is measured against its decay.
And yet—in spite of these pervasive lamentations, hasn’t something been gained in our modern freedoms? We are free now because our ancestors wanted the freedom to make their attachments where they found them, and then to break them when they chafed, and then to make new attachments—we have just fulfilled what they seemed to want for themselves. If we have lost some cosmic or traditional belonging, we have also gained that freedom, and we can see some progress, from the old traditions to this new freedom, which seems to fulfill an ancient promise.
To our new modern eyes, the soul seems like a work yet to be made—and as modern individuals, we extend the soul’s promise into our relationships. If we believe that each soul’s fulfillment will be unprecedented, original and unique, then so should every relationship be a work of art, a unique collaboration in each partner’s fulfillment. In this view, marriage has just been another one more conventional form that will have to be reinvented, if modern people should ever perfect their freedom and individuality in a new or higher way. If parents and grandparents have complained about modern changes, young people have known since the beginning of the twentieth century at least that their ancestors’ pre-war marriages would never be sufficient to their new freedoms.
We are modern, we know too much: we know that love is a fleeting ripeness of the soul—we know that desire is a constant struggle of the self against the self, of the spirit against the body. We know that we need to see things for our own selves if we’re ever to trust them: we think that if we’re ever going to arrive at marriages like our grandparents’ generation’s —marriages we think of as noble life-works, grounded in shared faith—it will only be because we’ve found and tried faith of our own in a variety of experiences first.
So why shouldn’t a man take a wife, and also see other women on the side, as he seeks himself and his fulfillment? Why should a woman’s satisfactions be limited to the one man she has married, when there are sides of herself that will still always need to be expressed? And why shouldn’t partners allow each other this freedom, when each of them knows that the other’s possibilities exceed them? These are questions we each have to answer in our own fashion, but regardless of how we each solve them, our liberty itself persists in asking them, so even if we come to one solution today, the question will only be framed anew tomorrow, every time someone strikes a resonance with the promises we believe we carry, in our hearts and in our loins.
Most people, confronting these questions, recognize almost instinctively that erotic freedom is really an invitation to chaos and drama, fights, fits and ultimately loneliness and misery. If they grudge their peace and stability, they nevertheless keep to one spouse, as much as they can, and keep infidelity in reserve for desperate situations or rare opportunities. They keep to one spouse and they moralize, they relegate infidelity to the desperate people who can’t get enough affection, the children who aren’t mature enough yet, to handle the commitment. This is how traditional marriage persists: as a bias against the restless or immature people who can’t settle down with one spouse.
Nevertheless, we cannot escape the suspicion that individuality might be inhibited by marriage, and we wonder whether people in open relationships might not really be braver than the rest—as if freedom were ultimately a matter of courage, of irreverence and honesty, of rebelliousness. Ever since the Scarlet Letter and Madame Bovary were published in the 1850s—and then Anna Karenina in the 1870s—modern people have been drawn to adulterers: we look for the promised freedoms in their brave stories, and we shudder to see the consequences of knowledge gained outside marriage.
So soon as the early 1900s, though, it was not enough to read novels about erotic freedom and adultery. Restrictive conventions were dissolving, and even before the convulsive world wars, there was an air of permanent revolution in European culture, and bohemians and artists were beginning to experiment with new forms of love and relationship in addition to techniques of representation. Berlin, New York, Zurich and Montparnasse were beginning to be known as places where artists were drawing new lines for marriage. By the time Freud liberated sex from bourgeois restrictions—by the time the Great War turned love and sex into the last havens from all the horrors of modern industrial machines, affairs and unconventional marriage arrangements had become signs of artistic genuineness. By the time Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in 1928, infidelity had become the last sign of vitality, even the fulfillment of individuality—it was man’s—and equally woman’s—salvation against machine-deadness and decadence both.
Picassos and Hemingways had already made themselves famous for marrying and remarrying and remarrying, but D. H. Lawrence, and then the small group of artists who followed in his line, saw the love relationship itself as a new medium. After all the dislocations and disorientations that came with industrialism, love was the last art form, and its masterpiece had yet to be made. If people were going to seek the strong forces that moved them, the machine forces, productive and destructive alike—if people were going to claim and incorporate everything men had invented and changed in a hundred years—if people were going to balance the internal self against all of that newly-released power—they could only rely on a new kind of solidarity between partners. Marital fidelity was an obstacle, now, but if lovers were going to be true to themselves and each other, each individual had to reconcile himself not only to the reality of desire, but also to the reality of his partner’s desire: now desire itself was just a powerful raw material in the hands of people who felt brave enough to work with it. Now it was clear what power two lovers could harness, to make their love an unique work of art: the enterprising partners had only to find some way to balance love with the each partner’s fulfillment.
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 the story of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller from Google docs.
Contact me with questions or follow the discussion on the Love Lives blog.
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.
Contact me with questions or follow the discussion on the Love Lives blog.