To have and to hold. To let go and to leave.

...to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer... but nevermind, I think I can do all this from afar.

The world has no use for this sort of paradox I know; but it seemed to me then that Nessim knew and accepted her in a way impossible to explain to someone for whom love is still entangled with the qualities of possessiveness.

[Lawrence Durrell, Justine (1957), p. 33. Via Internet Archive]

Oh.

What I know of the writer Lawrence Durrell mostly comes from Josh O’Connor’s portrayal of him in ITV’s The Durrells (2016-2019). Think flapping linen shirts, the salt-spray of Corfu wind, tousled waves (hair and sea), thumbed pages of lascivious lines of poetry and temperamental type-writters; think iron bedsteads, patchwork quilts laundered with the musk of human scent and lemons, stray pelicans tripping about and lolloping rabbits in the kitchen, smudged love-letters and grave telegrams, Greek-speaking widows in trailing black lace—Mediterranean Miss Havishams, the honk of 1930s motorcycles and sunglasses on foreheads pinning back hair, a painter’s skies divided between warmongering factions of tangerine and turquoise, and glasses of Merlot upset and upended in a novelist’s distress when—mid-manuscript, no less—he realises what he has been writing will never never never be published.

What I know of Lawrence Durrell comes also from his reputation. Sometimes risky books—books which are provocative somehow—must be engaged in a prolonged game of cat-and-mouse. Hissing, scratching, hostility: ears flattened, chests puffed out, paws swiping, and fur bristling, standing up on end. This is before they finally win us over and pin us down, pocketing their revolvers and sheathing their gilt-hilted rapiers, and have us read them hungrily, and are so excessively well-mannered as to forgo gloating over their success.

All of this is extraneous. I leafed through a hardback copy of Justine in a second-hand bookshop the other day, couldn’t afford it, stole home and combed through the Internet to find a freeborn edition of it online to read instead. I find I am having to read it so slowly; sometimes even having to read pages twice over. This is an experience I have not had since I last read Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbevilles or George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda or Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.

On the page previous, an agapeic antecedent, Durrell writes:

Her love was like a skin in which he lay sewn like the infant Heracles; and her efforts to achieve herself had led her always towards, and not away from him. (Durrell; p. 32)

It seems to be an impossible thing which Durrell has captured. Perhaps because he writes fiction we let him off where we might otherwise scorn and sneer. Even so, it may seem to the cynics embedded among us that Durrell waxes his most fantastical here. He writes of a woman, Justine, who has found a husband, Nessim, who loves her unconditionally and yet also permits her to have free rein of her life. She may do as she pleases—run freely without a curfew, without any sense of duty owed to him. Justine is married, bound to a man, and yet irreconcilably, appears entirely, dauntlessly free. This isn’t a comment on gender relations, by the way. It would be similarly extraordinary for a man to have a wife so willing to relinquish control over him, to let him be and do whatever he so pleases to establish himself. Of course, there are many examples of men seeming to have it all, something veering scarily near to self-actualisation: a career, a wife, and a sleazy little bit on the side (a mistress—or a harem of them), but how many of their wives resent them this independence? Behind how many Henry VIIIs was there a brooding Anne Boleyn, say? Rather in Durrell’s novel, Justine’s husband seems almost pleased by Justine’s wild freedom, because it makes her need him more—and thus love him more:

“I went ahead of her—I anticipated every lapse; she found me already there, at every point where she fell down, ready to help her to her feet and show her that it did not matter.” (Durrell; p. 33)

With an almost preternatural ability, Nessim knew that Justine would make mistakes and fall. He knew that her whims of independence—and granting her the ecstasy of executing these whims—would invite as many occasions for her to mess up as they would for her to feel ungovernable and free. In this way, Nessim’s love seems mimetic of the way God loves us as inherently sinful beings. God chooses to give us free will, and what do we do? We use that free will to commit sin. One might expect that this would logically dissever us from God. This would be, in corresponding mortal terms, the final damning signature on a divorce paper, consigning the relationship to cinders, ending it forevermore. Not so. For the sin which ought to have made God despise us actually drives us back towards God, triggering an outpouring of love from Him. When we are greatly beside ourselves, heaving with tears and feeling like the worst creatures ever to have existed, then it is in this moment of brokenness and abjection that He is able to reach in and love us and—stupefyingly—forgive us. Because we surrender before Him in our weakness, leaning on His strength, we are bound indissolubly to Him.

How else but through a broken heart

May Lord Christ enter in?

[Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1897), Via Poetry Foundation]

Justine is utterly free and utterly loved. Or, no: Justine is utterly free because she is utterly loved. Or—third time lucky: Justine is utterly free because she is utterly loved. However you configure it, this impossible-seeming weighting of freedom and love seems to have been negotiated rather winningly by Durrell.

In tandem I have also been reading D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I haven’t got so very far yet but I know enough for the purpose of writing this, and for bringing you up to speed if necessary, reader. In the book, the young and energetic Constance Chatterley is married to Lord Clifford Chatterley, who was maimed in the First World War and now uses a wheelchair. He has also been rendered infertile. This alters the quality of their marriage—if nothing else, it precludes his having a biological heir unto which he can bequeath his estate. Nevertheless Constance looks after him devotedly—but, as Lawrence is at pains to point out, she turns outward to romantic affairs in order to satisfy herself. One day Clifford comments that he would like a child. Knowing said child cannot be begot by the usual order of things, he suggests that Constance sleep around a bit, and return to him with another man’s child. He reasons that there would be no danger in this. He is convinced—in quite an affecting testimony of faith—that her being married to him means their mutual devotion is all-surpassing.

"It seems to me that it isn't these little acts and little connections we make in our lives that matter so very much. They pass away, and where are they? Where.... Where are the snows of yesteryear?... It's what endures through one's life that matters; my own life matters to me, in its long continuance and development. […] It's the life-long companionship that matters. It's the living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of each other.”

[D. H. Lawrence. Chapter V, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Via Project Gutenberg]

What do you think? For my own part, I can’t tell if this is liberating or entrapping?

On the one hand there is armistice. To feel the rest of being loved unconditionally. No more striving, no more of the galling overwork of trying to make yourself presentable enough or fit enough to be adored.

On the other hand, would you perhaps—and I do mean you, yourself, rather than a fluid and generalised you—feel beholden to that person, that place, that situation, because of the tethers of this particular love. Caged, set down squatly where you are, your little kingdom strictly demarcated. However comfortable it is, this kingdom which you have been granted, it is a frontier from you are not to move beyond. Are you trapped? Do you feel trapped?

This aporia, my inability to make a judgement here, may betray my inadequacy as a literary critic. But thankfully I’m not a critic anyhow, or I am one only insofar as a guest at a masquerade inhabits their character for the evening. I’m just someone interested in and wrapped up (almost mummified) in literature and love (and a sizeable part of me wishes I could shake off these preoccupations; a racehorse champing at the bit and eyeing up the wildflower meadows).

When is it comforting to have a love which you know will hold you—every shape and phase of you—and when is it stifling?

Perhaps it all depends on your natural disposition. Or your age? Maybe it is annoying to feel unconditionally loved at twenty-one. You wonder whether it will interrupt your plans to travel or prevent you from being deliciously and tantalisingly experimental. Will it mean you have to make decisions you are not ready to? Commitment? Everything too premature. Conversely, does the idea of such a love become comforting at thirty, or forty—or only after the sudden frailness of eighty?

It seems so wrong to think of a feeling as good and sweet as love as something which can feel suffocating to a person. But it can. How lying prostrate before someone, giving up the fight entirely—the beaten, winded, and injured hare before the kingly fox which hunted it—how this could suddenly feel overwhelming, confining? It is love you have been handed, not a death-sentence. The prognosis should be one of happiness. Not one of dread; you should not feel as though you must run away. No matter. I let you go anyway, if going is what you need to do.

I guess these days—these modern days—a lot of us reach the same conclusions through different processes of reasoning. The individual who trusts in manifestation and the jagged assembly of crystals arranged atop their dresser reaches the same conclusion as the pious Christian: if something is meant for you, written for you, it will come to you. So I do, in fact, relinquish control. Though I remain loving, I become passive. I have no claims on the person I love, and my loving them is neither their fault nor their business. He is gone not because I graciously let him go—for he would be gone even if I did not. Regardless, I choose (even if only latterly) to let him go. My bids towards control are as nothing. Atomically they do not even register.

Through deductions like the above—the idea that what is meant for us will find us—I get by. This is pacification. I prorogue the bickering parliament of my mind by tossing it the crumbs of these meditations. Yes, my little mental parliament which begs me to do something awful like text him is silenced sometimes only through this sort of remembrance, this willed belief in predestination.

Learning to let go feels like one of those unpalatable lessons you learn as you grow into adulthood—those things you learn to do because they are smart and beneficial and not because they are immediately enjoyable.

I can’t help being the girl that I am. When I swept the kitchen floor this morning, I wished I were doing it for him. I don’t even know what that means? How could he possibly benefit from my doing a chore, and not even necessarily doing it especially well? (For certainly a sweeping done by one distracted by thoughts of an ex is not the most efficacious sweeping.) I suppose, logically, you derive that my woman’s mind meant that we might have shared a dwelling someplace, sometime, and that I swept a floor which his precious feet would walk over; his own threshold, his own dear home. I can’t help it. Correcting myself with the lacerating whip of a Victorian schoolma’am, I try to sweep the floor for my mother instead.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

[W. B. Yeats, He Wishes for the Cloth of Heaven (1899), Via The Poetry Society

Every letter I have written him I have not sent, although I reached for the stamps. Envelopes bulge with the unsaid. The seamed spines of my notebooks sag exhaustedly under the burden of forced silence. There are no texts, no phone calls, no beckonings from across the room—stepping outside to have a word, to talk. Unwillingly though obediently, I leave him alone.

When it comes to love, having someone and letting them go is the very same thing. Well, not literally. The dynamics are different; the implications for your life are different. With the former, you get to keep the person you adore and look after them, have them woven and wefted into your life. With the latter, you lose them physically—you stop talking, certainly kissing. But, practicalities aside, they are the same. Both having someone and letting them go is love; it is all love.

Edward Burne-Jones, Love Among the Ruins (detail) (1873)