in the moment we lose our self to another person. Men avoid this paradox, because love must develop into a relationship – a negotiation of give and take, autonomy and dependency – and faced with such a prospect we have traditionally retreated and recouped some of our solitude. Intimacy changes the boundaries of our self and we become ambivalent about who we are and what we want, and in this equivocation lies apprehension. We are unsure how to respond. Masculinity – an identity rooted in the language of work and public life – has left men unskilled in the necessary words of feeling, empathy and love.
Love is a fugacious word. Rounded and comfortable, it lifts the tongue and fills the back of the throat, before slipping beyond reach as the sound is exhaled from the mouth. Yet the word eludes meaning. Love teeters on the edge of the unknown beyond which it becomes almost impossible to speak. It moves us beyond words. We speak about love when we define our longing and desire and yet we fall into silence when we attempt to speak about it in the present. I fumble for words, my mind’s eye searching for that thought or that feeling to which I can attach the right sound, make it sound right, let it appear to emanate from inside myself. I attempt to speak about love in the way many men can about politics or sport, with passion and intensity. But in times of trouble the words just buckle and fold and disappear, and I am thrown back on foolish clichés which slide across my palate. While I may have everything to say, I say nothing or I say very little.
We use words to represent our feelings and to communicate them to others. What we feel and think about ourselves is subject to available vocabularies. But supposing the vocabularies I need are not there. Suppose I want to talk about certain feelings I have – for example, the disquiet I experience in my dependency on others. The words might not be there for me to use, yet I know the feeling is real. There is something more, an excess of world over word. Perhaps this is the case for men. Our feelings can be enacted, lived, dreamed and embodied. We attempt to represent them in music, in literature and in art, but they remain always just beyond our understanding. When I began writing this book I tried to recall all the films I’d watched, the art I’d seen and the books I’d read about men in love. I went to galleries and bookshops and leafed through novels and biographies. I wrote down lists of famous writers. I wanted to know what other men had written about love, and how they had expressed themselves.
I have watched John Huston’s film adaptation of Joyce’s story The Dead several times. I watched it again for the final scene. Greta and Gabriel have entered a Dublin hotel room. They are spending the night in the city after celebrating New Year’s Eve with Gabriel’s aunts and a circle of friends. Greta is melancholy and her husband asks her what is wrong: ‘Tell me, I think I know what the matter is. Do I know?’ She tells him that a song sung that evening by a member of their party had reminded her of a boy she had known when she was a young girl living with her grandmother in Galway. His name was Billy Furey. ‘He was very delicate; such eyes, big dark eyes.’ Gabriel is momentarily gripped by jealousy. But his wife explains that Billy Furey died when he was only seventeen. ‘What was it he died of?’ he asks. She begins to cry. ‘I think he died from me.’ She had been leaving her grandmother’s house for a convent school in Dublin. The boy had been ill for a number of months. She wrote and told him of her departure and the night before she left, while she was packing. Billy Furey left his sick bed to visit her. He threw gravel up to her window. She slipped out of the house and found the boy, poorly dressed, shivering in the rain. She implored him to go home before he caught his death. He refused to leave and told her he had no wish to live without her. Eventually he relented and returned home. A week after her arrival in Dublin he died.
Overcome with the grief of this memory, Greta collapses onto the bed, sobbing. She buries her face in a pillow and falls asleep. Gabriel sits beside her. He tentatively strokes his wife’s hair. At a loss to know what to do or feel, he crosses to the window and looks outside. It is snowing. He thinks to himself: ‘How poor a part I’ve played in your life. It’s almost as though I’m not your husband and we’ve never lived together as man and wife.’ He recalls their evening spent with his elderly aunt, Julia. He feels momentarily the proximity of Julia’s death and imagines his own mourning; his ‘casting around for words of consolation only to find lame and useless ones’. He is shaken by the depth of his wife’s lament for Billy Furey, and by the actions of the boy who did not wish to live without her. He knows that this is love and it is something that he has never felt for a woman. There is something in the world that he is unable to speak of, and soon death will come for him and his time will be over.
I have a battered copy of Dubliners, James Joyce’s short stories. Opening it I saw my brother’s name on the inside cover. It was his school text book and he had written his name in red biro across the spine, but the first and the last letters of his surname were in blue and they have faded – UTHERFOR. I read James Joyce’s original story and compare it to the film. It differs to an important degree. Gabriel contemplates his wife’s sleeping form and he is drawn to the vast hosts of the dead. His thoughts turn to his mortality, he looks inside himself and he sees the ethereal quality of his love reaching across the landscape of Ireland, falling with the snow, as vast and as amorphous as the dark night he looks out on. Tears gather in his eyes. He finds solace in the thought of death, and in the transmutation of his body into the impalpable world of nothingness. There is something religious in the way Gabriel loves. He uses words to distance himself from his feelings and his body. I am reminded of the asceticism of Christ, his male body martyred in the name of his love, his pain an erotic depiction of the union of ecstasy and death. Gabriel cannot express himself to his wife; instead he casts his love like a mantle across the world. It enhances everything, but no one in particular.
Men have frequently expressed their love in these abstracted terms, loving humanity and life in general. Or they have fallen in love with the idea of love, imbuing women with the transcendent qualities of beauty and innocence. Men have loved in chivalrous oblation to their chosen one and, as in the decrees of knightly courtship, have sacrificed themselves in the name of love. When a man worships his beloved there is no relationship. She remains a figment of his imagination. In love, women are annulled by men. The philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote: ‘Sexual love makes of the loved person an object of appetite; as soon as the appetite has been stilled the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry.’ A man might sacrifice his life for his country, merge himself with the transcendental symbols of race and nation, but he will not easily give his emotions to a lover. We remain reluctant to give away too much of ourselves to women.
The more I read men writing on love, the greater the sense I have of their plight. When men write about love they communicate a state of bereavement. They preserve their solitariness. Shelley’s ‘Dedication’ at the beginning of his epic poem, The Revolt of Islam, is addressed to Mary Shelley, his lifelong companion and lover. It expresses his loneliness, his longing for a friend and lover and his gratitude. ‘Aught but a lifeless clod, until revived by thee’. He measures his love by her absence. She is the bearer of his life and love, and without her he is nothing. The language of romantic love and relationships belongs to women. In the intimate life of the emotions and the body, women frequently speak on behalf of men: wives for husbands, mothers for sons, girlfriends for boyfriends. Men doubt their ability to love. I used to read W. H. Auden when I was younger and remember his poem ‘Lullaby’ and the poignant lines, ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm.’ They reveal a scepticism about the poet’s own capacity to love. It is as if the one he holds contains all the feelings of goodness and empathy and concern that he – ‘faithless’ – lacks. It is this lack that propels men’s need of women. Marcel Proust, compelled by the death of his mother to write Remembrance of Things Past, began his voyage into memory with the sentence: ‘For a long time I used to go to bed early.’ Here he lies, a small, remorseful child anticipating the goodnight kiss of his mother. Neither asleep nor awake, he longs for her to remain with him through the coming ‘sad hours of darkness’. Proust longed for maternal love. The nineteenth-century French novelist Stendhal longed for sexual love. He wrote his famous treatise Love out of unrequited passion for Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski. She neither loved nor understood him, but he persisted, humiliating himself in his attempts to win her affections.
