This Thing Called Love

by BERGEN EVANS

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WHAT is this thing called love, so indispensable to best-sellers? What is it the myriad purchasers desire so ardently to see portrayed?

Plainly — as the books show it — it is the sole end of life, the obsession of every mind. The hero of older popular novels always gained the heroine’s hand, as it was then modestly worded, after an adventurous career. The altar awaited him in the last chapter but there was an intervening respite amid fire and flames which is not granted to his successor. The modern hero is allowed a vocation to keep him occupied during the day, but it is sternly understood that this is merely an interlude in his service to, or servicing of, the various ladies in the book. Love of power, pride in work, the dread of poverty, the lust for or fear of vengeance, and all the other impulses that move actual men are denied him. He is indeed love’s slave.

Modern fictional lovers, however, have some advantages over their predecessors: they have means of attracting attention, for example, hitherto unknown. The men have what Nancy Bruff calls “a strong male effluvia” and the women have “sex magnetism.” Miss Winsor’s heroine has “a blatant quality of sexual allure” and Mrs. Marshall’s “an indescribable aura of seduction.” The male lure is usually “emitted,” the female “radiated” or “diffused.” “You just put it out on the air,” a doctor informs Miss Camille Oaks, in Steinbeck’s Wayward Bus. “I don’t know how, but you do it. Some women are like that.” And his diagnosis is confirmed by the astonishing behavior of every male in the book. Even the Bübchen Pimples “ felt the electricity or whatever it was she had,” though, curiously enough, Miss Oaks herself is unconscious of it and — the one rational person in the story — is as wearied as many readers with the attentions it procures her.

“Loveliness” was formerly the great attribute of heroines, but loveliness has a number of drawbacks. In the first place it requires the author at least to try to make his heroine lovely, and in the second place it makes it difficult for the great horde of middle-aged female readers to identify themselves with her. Sex magnetism is better. It confers “an illusion of beauty more seductive than actual symmetry,” says Miss Anya Seton, and such a gift must be most welcome to a group of ladies who, it is likely, have long ago lost their actual symmetry.

The heroine must, of course, have some outward manifestation of inward grace. Formerly she had “golden” or “raven” tresses, rosy lips, bright eyes, “pearly” teeth, and other indications of youth and health. Some were endowed with small hands and feet. Some were decorated with dimples and some made enticing by a glimpse of a “well-turned” or “ neat ” ankle. The hair line went up and down with the fashion; Chaucer liked them with a high forehead, Henry James with a low. Some authors, desperate for a distinction, even risked a mild disfigurement: Fielding had poor Amelia kicked in the face by a horse, an expedient of which Dr. Johnson strongly disapproved.

Today this has all been simplified through standardization. Acting, perhaps, upon the suggestion of the “pneumatic” girls in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, popular authors concentrate almost entirely upon the breasts. It’s the greatest time-saver since the elimination of the villain. All the writer has to do is to vary the size and the angle of inclination.

The act of love itself, which in full clinical detail fills so large a part of these novels, is an extraordinary proceeding, being more often an act of vengeance or humiliation than one of tenderness or union. Sex is seemingly conceived as pre-eminently an expression of hostility and its pleasure as three parts pain to one of delight. Miss Bruff gloats over “the agonizing satisfactions of violence.” Amber finds happiness only in a lover who can combine “experience, energy [and] controlled violence.” But most contemporary heroines prefer the violence uncontrolled and, if possible, spiced with revulsion. When, for example, Jabez and Piety Folger, in The Manatee, discover with advancing years that the ardor of their youthful antipathy is waning they sicken, “rudderless without their long habit of aversion,” and die. “The intense, almost exalted delight” that a hero and heroine of James M. Cain’s take in each other is based on the perception of “something ferretlike” about them, a quality which they find too deliciously repulsive to resist.

True love, by the way, is frequently signalized in Mr. Cain’s characters by outbursts of repugnance. “Then a throb went through my mouth,” writes the hero of Past All Dishonor, “and I knew she liked how I looked. I picked her up, carried her inside, and pushed my face against hers. It was hot and couldn’t lie to me about what it wanted. She didn’t lie. She just fought me, bit me, kicked me, and threw me out.” The inexperienced might regard this as an indication of the lady’s aversion, but those habituated to Mr. Cain’s world would perceive it at once for what it was, an admission of love, the unguarded and revealing gesture of a simple-hearted girl.

Beyond brutality lies the even more exquisite pleasure of hate. It was because he loved her “as an act of scorn” that the uncouth Roark was so dear to Dominique, the fastidious heroine of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. “One gesture of tenderness from him,” the author assures us, “and she would have remained cold.” The “rapture” that she wanted could be had only by his “taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her.”

Roark, for his part, is moved by disdain. The more she loathes him, the more he wants her. Her hatred is his chief delight. Her simplest acts of nastiness fill him with joy and when she has finally accomplished his ruin he is ecstatic. “I hate you,” she tells him in one of their fervid encounters; “I’m going to fight you — and I’m going to destroy you — I will fight to block every step you take. I will fight to tear every chance you want away from you . . . I will fight to starve you, to strangle you.” It is too much for Roark’s habitual self-restraint. Desire engulfs him. “Take your clothes off,” he gasps.

Adultery is so taken for granted that the authors are put to it to make it in any way interesting. The injured party is sometimes permitted a little impatience, as a revelation of simplicity, but a sophisticate is always at hand to give a more worldly estimate. Thus when Piety Folger finds out that her husband is sleeping with their colored maid, or, as Miss Bruff puts it, “when she knew that Shrine’s fragrant body and Jabez’s brown cage of bones were together every night,” she takes the maid to task. But Shrine is unabashed: she had assumed that she was merely relieving her mistress of an onerous chore—a piece of “simple pagan reasoning” that would have left the mistress “disarmed and helpless” had she not remembered that Shrine was also neglecting the dusting!

Where the adultery is committed with a loved one it is a virtuous act, since, as one of Miss Seton’s heroines reflects, “a great love must be bigger than moral law.” But where, as is most often the case, it is a mere diversion or a means to some material advantage, it is decontaminated by a sort of spiritual abstraction that leaves it chemically pure desire. The heroines frequently have their “senses” stirred while their “hearts” remain true to their loves. The rule seems to be that so long as the relationship is free from affection it doesn’t count. Cynara has learned to be true after her fashion, too!

The great desideratum is irresponsibility, crime without passion. Vic Norman, in The Hucksters, is glad to see Marguerite go. He had called her only “out of hunger” and, the hunger appeased, found her tiresome. “All night,” he decides, “is a long time to spend with an old friend.” He finds Connie “more desirable” than Jean Ogilvie because Jean had “caused him considerable worry” since their last tryst by assuming that he was fond of her. Whereas Connie was “like a man” (though obviously like some other man than Vic): “If she wanted to go to bed, she went to bed and then forgot about it. No problems, no dealing in futures, no regrets.”

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SEXUAL freedom being thus taken for granted, immorality, ever the spice of amorous adventuring, can be furnished only by brushing against the more serious taboos. But here the writers are either inexperienced, unimaginative, or timid. At any rate they stick close to the one primrose path and all deviations are mere feints. Earl Radclyffe, for example, is driven “down a hundred strange pathways of lust” by his unique inability to obtain “complete physical possession” of Amber, but Miss Winsor denies the curious reader so much as a peep down a single pathway. The central figures of The Fountainhead would seem to be abnormal, but aside from being infatuated with hatred instead of love they are indistinguishable from Darby and Joan.

It is perhaps captious when one is given so much to wish for more, but the old-fashioned reader is likely to feel in these books a certain deficiency of style. Mr. Cain assures us that writing “is a genital process” and that “all of its stages are intraabdominal.” Himself the leader of what might be called the grit, guts, and gore school of intraabdominalization, he has furnished us with a wealth of illustration of his dictum. It is difficult to select any one passage as pre-eminent, but the concluding scene of Mildred Pierce in which Bert and Mildred stifle their parental affection for their selfish daughter Veda who had turned on them repeatedly “with tooth and fang” will do. “To hell with her,” says Bert, in “masterful fashion.” Mildred sobs. “But Bert took hold of her and shook her. ‘I said, to hell with her!’

“Through the tears, the woe, Mildred seemed to sense what he meant. What it cost her to swallow back her sobs, look at him, squint, and draw the knife across an umbilical cord, God alone knows. But she did it . . . ‘O.K., Bert. To hell with her!’

“Goddam it, that’s what I want to hear! Come on, we got each other, haven’t we? Let’s get stinko.’

“‘Yes — let’s get stinko.’”

Never were broken hearts more nakedly laid bare, never nepenthe more poignantly urged!

Each genre, of course, has its own excellences. The quality of style the popular novels — or at least their dust jackets — boast of is “saltiness,” by which, apparently, is meant force and gusto and a brave disregard of prudery. And even if this is not always achieved it cannot be denied that it is strenuously sought. Thus the dashing hero of Duchess Hotspur drives his women “two abreast” and the appearance of a “middle-aged but still fertile” matron in The Manatee is always announced by “the sucking noises” of the twins she is nourishing.

Pathos fares little better. “Don’t think I’m wanton, Vic Darling. Please don’t think I’m wanton,” Connie Linger “whispered madly” as, after declining to play anagrams, she climbs into Vic Norman’s berth aboard the Super Chief. Though just what else, under the circumstances, Mr. Norman was at liberty to think is kept from us.

To constant readers of these sagas of inconstancy such objections will possibly seem trivial. The subscribers to the book clubs are plainly not finicky folk who must have polished phrases to sugar their fare. The advertisements tell us that these stories are intended for “red-blooded” or “hot-blooded” people, such as are likely to be more concerned with action than speech. They are eager, virile, and nobly impatient. They do not like to be kept waiting, and no writer who seeks to please them can afford to let his characters dawdle between amatory intention and execution. Even the authors themselves seem bewildered at times by the impetuosity of their creations. “How did they get to Alma’s room on the third floor? How did they get into bed so quickly?” gasps Mrs. Marshall, laboring with her notebook up the stairs behind her ardent lovers — though something restrained her from expressing, with a few of her readers, the further query: “And why?”

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THE publishers frequently, in their advertisements, compare these novels to Restoration comedies and to Defoe’s Moll Flanders, with the implication that their authors are returning to, rather than departing from, literary tradition. But this comparison is a little puzzling to those who have read the older works. Restoration comedy, it is true, relied heavily on bawdry and the flouting of convention, but there the comparison ends. The Restoration wits did not take sex seriously. It was, to them, an instrument of machination, the highroad to fortune, a booby trap, and a source of much merriment. But it was the plot, the money, the danger, and the gaiety that interested them. Whereas the works which claim kinship with them approach sex with fantastic seriousness and could not dream of being merry at its expense.

Moll Flanders’s quest is for security, not for sexual intercourse. She is the Robinson Crusoe of the streets and far too shrewd to scorn morality. Vice, she says sadly, came into her life “always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.” “I understood too well, by the want of it,” she adds, “what the value of a settled life was, to do anything to forfeit the felicity of it.” Her ambition was to be a “faithful and true wife” to “a sober good husband,” and although it took her some time to become even a semblance of this, she obtained no delight from the substitutions forced upon her. It is true that she frequently left the path of rectitude but an Abbess could not have been more sparing of details. “I need say no more” and “It went on to what I expected” are about the raciest phrases in the whole book. “I found by just observation,” she sighs, “that the brightest men came upon the dullest errand.”

Perhaps one difference lies in the fact that the Restoration comedies and Defoe’s novels were written primarily for men; whereas most contemporary best-sellers are written for women — a fact borne out by the vast attention given to the heroine’s dress and coiffure. But this is only a surface indication. There are profounder effects of the female audience, one of which is a reversal of certain established moral values.

Two hundred years ago when women of the middle classes were beginning to read they wished to be assured that the conditions of their lives would produce happiness. They wanted to be told that devotion — which was all most of them had to offer — would lead to domestic security and that marriage vows offered a protection that more than compensated for the restrictions they imposed. Pamela’s virtue was rewarded by her becoming Lady B——; while Becky Sharp ended in poverty, gin-soaked and miserable.

But the popular novelist of today has to limn daydreams for a different group of women living under different circumstances. They long to be told that escape from dullness is possible and one of the main avenues of escape—there’s no use blinking it — is untrue love. With the appalling increase of marriageable women over marriageable men, true love dooms hundreds of thousands of women to sterile and loveless lives, the unsexed drudges of our lonely hives. If every woman is to have even a chance at a man today, there will have to be a lot of untrue love — though, no doubt, each dreamer hopes that the untrue lover will become steadfast after he has settled his affections on her.

For one of the pathetic paradoxes of the popular novels is that the women who move so promiscuously through them all believe in true love. They have looked on tempests and are not shaken. They are as common as hotels, but they are devoted to one man and the ideal of love which he embodies. He commonly has a heart of marble and the disposition of Bill Sykes, but he has the face of a god and the loins of a stag and he alone can move them. From others they coldly receive wealth and homage. For him they gladly perform the most menial services. His feet are of clay but they wash them with their tears, sticky with sentimentality. All other bedmates are mere facsimiles forced on them by impatience or other circumstances beyond their willingness to control. They despise all others. From him alone comes the bliss of being despised.

If these novels reflect the psyches of their readers, as to a considerable extent they must, their most disturbing feature is their aggressiveness. It’s not that the heroines are out to get their men, in the plural. That sort of aggressiveness, in many guises, has long been a staple of literature. But that they should regard the getting as a triumph not merely over other women but over the men as well! “Conquest” is an old term for love attained, but it was always assumed that a treaty of amity was drawn up at the cessation of hostilities, and l he good characters were limited to a bag of one conquest each.

Not so today. Love, in the novels at least, exists to give the woman a chance to “get her own back.” It is, apparently, the one means thought to be at her disposal for humiliating men and “putting them in their place.” The heroine of one current best-seller carves the initials of every man who goes to bed with her on the handle of her fan, just as the bad men in the old-time westerns carved notches in the handles of their guns whenever another “varmint” bit the dust!

It’s absurd. But it is sad and disturbing that these frustrate and vindictive imaginings are so greatly, as the trade term has it, “in demand.”