|
Notes
on Love Story
This sequence emerged over a period of about five years.
It displays one of the cavalier attitudes to ‘love’ which was
around in the late 1950s, escalated in the ’60s, and seems today’s
norm. The heroine or victim
is a fictional composite from my own encounters.
The masculine speaker is fairly complex but he doesn’t emerge
with honour, being that familiar type in the love game, a shit.
I’ll not try to condemn or exonerate, however.
From the 1960s onwards even the girls knew that sex did not bring
responsibility, beyond avoiding medical unpleasantness, like having a
baby or getting the pox. It
was fun and if it came too late for Larkin it wasn’t too late for many
of his generation. Providing penetration wasn’t always the aim, there was
plenty of guiltless activity, sometimes called free love, even before
the pill. The kind of idle,
opulent pleasure depicted here is similar to that in Sleep,
Silhouette but without the mystery.
I’d like to point out that I invented a new sonnet form for
this sequence, twenty lines long, starting its contrast on line
fourteen. There are four
beats to each line. No foot
has more than two slack syllables. The rhyme-scheme is:
aa/bb/cc/dd/ee/ff/g || hij / jih / g
One of the pleasures of
poetry derives from pattern.
(back)
1:
First Encounter: Country The
lady, as I say, is a composite of encounters.
In places I did have certain young women in mind.
For instance, vis-à-vis this first section, I might suggest the
following scenario.
A casual summer rendezvous
arises when a young man stops his
Lambretta by the wide paving in the Guildhall Square, Portsmouth.
A few yards away stands a girl, obviously waiting for someone.
A smile from Jack-the-Lad on the motor scooter, a few words and
she is on the pillion seat. They
head off for a country walk beyond the South Downs, find a comfortable
patch of grass near a wood, and have a heavy petting session, as it used
to be called. He drives her
back and they never meet again.
In a later version of the story the scooter becomes a Hillman Imp
car. Today, in the early 21st
century, girls don’t so often, I guess, allow themselves to be whisked
off to the countryside for ‘picnic[s] of carefree sex’ with
strangers. Too many
murders.
(back)
2: Second Encounter:
Town ‘Love is a
doomed edifice’? Well,
love in the restricted sense of sex-snacking doesn’t last.
Pleasurable lust is equated with ‘downfall’: the lovers dive
in and the affair is not expected to last.
If
love is a doomed edifice
with
cellars where the thick moss lingers
why
should we not with festive fingers
pull
it down like a warm hood
about
our ears? Downfall is good
at
keeping the heat in as it crumbles.
For this second section imagine the speaker picking up a girl in
the Kings Road, Chelsea. Perhaps it is late afternoon.
She has just left another lover and is not satisfied. This
new young man might be better. They
have a coffee perhaps and play the game of gouging one another’s arms
with their fingernails. It seems like a deliciously dangerous lark, in view of
everyone, but when they have repaired to his room in Smith Street and
sort of satisfied each other, they both know that there is more game
than danger in what they have done.
No judgment or doom awaits them.
But
blandly met we are very far
from
smelling danger in this rose,
your
oyster rose, your little flame.
Its
fragrance (another’s would be the same)
conduces
to one night’s repose,
informs
of no ineluctable star
dooming
the sleepy hand that fumbles.
(back)
3:
Old Hands Although the
experiences behind Love Story as a whole are taken from devious
personal sources, the story purports to narrate the experience of one
young woman. The man
controls:
Crush
day’s argument, precious gloom,
and,
dear dunce, blink. It amazes me
how
your stupid eyes can still blissfully
illuminate,
vulgarian,
this
dim bed, sticky aquarium
I
wallow in. I wallow in it!
The
fact that he calls her ‘dear dunce’ and a ‘vulgarian’, amazed
that her ‘stupid eyes’ can blissfully illuminate the bed they wallow
in, should not be ignored. She
is also a ‘little rich girl’ whom he patronises because she is more
devoted to him than he to her. In
the scenarios for Parts 1 and 2, I offered the types of encounter which
could have sourced those sections.
Here is a good point to dwell on the whole as one story.
Reflect on the history of love poetry: how much of it is about
men lamenting that their love is not requited!
When we get to the 1960s here am I, depicting a woman not having
her love returned. And I’m being honest about the nature of male grazing.
To him, freebooting infidelity is amusing.
I
like it all, all, down to the swim
to
those skilled-as-if-oiled hands that dowse
so
well in me. The hands are
all!
An
hour more, then the other thing.
(back)
4:
Conscience The young
man is talking to himself, addressing the bawd, pander, go-between, in
his own heart. Pandare was
the character in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde who procured
Criseyde for Troilus. Our male character is aware of the this superbly ironic 14th
century verse novel, even quoting from it:
‘This
that thou dost, call it gentilesse,
Compassioun,
felawship, and trist,’
smiling
as fairly as Judas kissed...
To the procurer in the modern heart, ‘gentilesse’ (courtesy
and high breeding), compassion, fellowship and trust are as foreign as
they were to the Chaucerian lover. He admits to ‘kissing [his] way through a social fraud’,
using his wits to satisfy his curiosity about the rich, and to assist
his own mobility. Nothing
new there. Whether with
disgust or relish, he calls his ‘heart’s bawd’ a
‘whore-monger’, though he can’t expect anyone to believe he is
truly castigating the Hyde in himself he makes no effort to control.
He is jealous of the status of the women he toys with, and there
is more than a suggestion that having and discarding the daughters of
the rich is how a lower-class Jack-the-Lad gets his own back for past
feelings of obscurity or humiliation.
The rape in the last lines is, one assumes, figurative, iconic.
There is a moving away from the sensual pleasures of the early
sections to a harsh confession that the girl in Love Story has
been used, and that there are many like her.
But
who are these women with broken necks
that
lie in rape at the foot of the stairs
divested
of their expensive pearls?
The section finishes with
a mock warning.
O
golden lads, more golden girls,
see
what the heart does unawares
with
its ‘welcome’ chalked on the house of sex.
Who
more duped than these? Who more warned?
(back)
5:
Promise She now wants a
promise that they’ll always be happy.
He says the symbol of their bond is a glass bird from a
gift-shop, a tiny item of kitsch bought for fun:
We’ll
say it sings for love of the thing;
though
I cannot promise it will always sing.…
His
conscience bugs him but he makes no effort to be decent.
Could anything be crueller than that last line?
Apostasy: recantation.
(back)
6:
Love, Perhaps? ‘Perhaps
I loved,’ he says. He
values the memory of particulars, like the timbre of her voice.
Putti: cherubs. Disingenuously,
now he has dumped her, he brags that she deserves to be surrounded by
praise, wherein the hills are:
but
apologetic orchestra
for
her, their scraggy nymph, to stir
with
her gifted hand, to the breath of the choirs
of
angelic putti that clasp her round.
(back)
7: She
This gets at the pain of the one who has loved the more.
His goodbye note recalls their pact:
‘ ... Eat people with your hand,
your
delicate lust, your dirty soul,
and
then forget them.’
There are a few fanciful twiddles of sound and then the
conclusion, from her:
I
cried and went out shakily
to
be eaten again, to find volunteers.
Alan
Marshfield
(back)
top
of page
to beginning of Love Story |
