The language of unrequited love - Steven Conte
Posted by: Steven Conte
3 December 2008
In my late teens, with writing in mind, I began to read with half an eye on the mechanics of plot and style, but for the most part I still read overwhelmingly for pleasure, and with an egoistic need to understand my own place in the world. Increasingly, this became a need to understand where I stood with girls, and in particular where I stood in relation to a girl I’d fallen catastrophically in love with at the age of 17. Let’s call her Beatrice.
Beatrice was a smart, precocious and talented girl who, doubtlessly for sound emotional reasons, preferred to keep me as a friend while she went with other boys. The effect on my ego was naturally painful, and in my reading I turned to a series of novels about unrequited love, discovering a veritable sub-genre in which a young male protagonist falls under the spell of a compelling and always beautiful woman, often with tragic consequences, usually for the woman. It would be easy for me now to mock these books, or to subject them to searing feminist critiques, but lost or unrequited love is one of the great themes of literature, and some of the books I read at this time are profound works of art. Even those of less literary merit continue to mean a lot to me. The following is a list of the most memorable:
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The Girl in a Swing – Richard Adams
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Diana – R.F. Delderfield
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The Summer of Katya – Trevanian
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Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
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Justine – Lawrence Durrell
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The Garden of the Finzi-Continis – Giorgio Bassani
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The Magus – John Fowles
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Le Grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier
On 9 October 1987 Beatrice was killed in a head-on collision on the New England Highway ten kilometres south of Tamworth. She was 18 year-old. To this day I can’t think of her without a gust of grief, and the word I detest most in the English language is “closure”.
At the time of Beatrice’s death I was already aware of the problematic way in which some of the aforementioned novels effectively silence their female characters with admiration, and when I came to write a first novel, set in Tasmania during the Franklin Dam dispute and inspired by Beatrice, I tried to confront this problem by making it an explicit theme. I’d like to think that the finished book has some good things going for it, but I was still new to the craft of writing and probably still too close to the events that had inspired the novel. Maybe I’ll return to it someday.
“Dante and Beatrice” (1883) by Henry Holiday.
December 4, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Now, that sounds more like an enticement than a warning, Steven!
December 3, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Christi, your mention of love triangles has made me think of Alan Hollinghurst’s second novel, The Folding Star, whose narrator is an English teacher of English in a provincial Belgian city. The novel is an interesting variation on the love triangle, because for much of the novel the narrator finds himself on the outside of a love triangle that includes the boy he’s obsessed with. Be warned though: this is Hollinghurst’s most sexually explicit novel.
Steven
December 3, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Blimey, that’s awful. And the parallel with Alain-Fournier is so acute.
Was fortunate to read ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ in French at school, with a teacher who adored it. It is greatly loved in France I believe.
December 3, 2008 at 1:01 pm
This is quite an experience to have such speedy feedback to something you’ve written. Thanks everyone for your comments. I started this post with the idea of trying to point out which are the better books among those I listed, but they all have something special about them. “Diana” is probably the most commercial of them. “Le Grand Meaules” (also known as “The Wanderer”) has a poignant back story: its young author was later vaporised by an exploding shell on the western front at the age of 27, one of no doubtless countless writers whose future work was eliminated by the wars of the 20th century. “Sophie’s Choice” is an interesting case, I think (this is quite a week, isn’t it, for literary Sophies). I’ve just read it for the third time and concluded that it comes within an ace of being one of the great masterpieces. It’s humane, capacious, deeply moving and (something that’s never mentioned about it) frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Its only shortcoming, as I see it, is Styron’s partial failure to sympathise with the pre-pill predicament of the various women who refuse to go all the way with his 22-year-old hero. Still, when I heard Geraldine Brooks describe how she discovered that Styron happened to be a neighbour of hers (he died in 2006), I was most impressed.
December 3, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I must be at the same exciting point in “Zookeeper’s War” Christi and not sure which is the strongest urge - to disappear out of the office to sit in the sun during lunch time to get a little further along in the story or delay reaching any of the possible closures looming. Thank you Christi for not putting in any spoilers. I do however, having come this far in the book, know like you that us ‘readers’ are in very capable hands. Thanks Steven and your Beatrice story is so very sad.
December 3, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Oh my goodness. Oh Steven - that is so sad. As someone who met her partner at 16 and ended up marrying him, I can only really read about unrequited love with a romantic view - not really understanding the pain that comes with it. Thank you so much for sharing that with us.
I also haven’t read any of those titles. I’m also off to the library catalogue.
December 3, 2008 at 10:50 am
Wow, what a powerful post Steven. I can hardly find words.
I can relate to being like Beatrice and also being like you. For me it was always the bizarre love triangle, not-so coincidently one of my favorite songs of that time. I yearned for the boy who only wanted to be friends with me, while the boy who actually wanted me was treated more like a must loved lap-dog. I have to say these days I feel a great sense of shame and yearning for the one who was the lap-dog as he was actually the most compatible male I have ever met. Ah, the benefit of hindsight. We still nostalgically chat on Facebook occasionally. As for the object of my affections, he married recently and I felt a little hurt, after 17 years, I mean really (I am married with three kids here. I hate “closure” too. It would obliterate all great literature and art if people really practised it.)
As for the novels of unrequited love, I haven’t read any of your selections so I am furiously checking the library catalogue for them. Mine were stories of violent destructive love like “Wuthering Heights” (which I re-read recently and was appalled at Heathcliff, but it was quite a different matter when I was 17), and lots of Jane Austen, where sometimes they got it right and sometimes not. Many of my English Lit books from that time were on the theme - I guess it always appeals to teenagers - “Romeo and Juliet”, “The Great Gatsby” and “Great Expectations”. I’m getting to a very exciting point in “Zookeeper’s War”, I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t read it yet. But I am glad I’m in the capable hands of an author who so entirely appreciates unrequited or impossible love!
December 3, 2008 at 10:32 am
This is a beautiful, beautiful post. Thanks, Steven.