In literary London, attempts at more perfect unions
Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939
By Katie Roiphe
Dial, 343 pp., illustrated, $26
Katherine Mansfield was awfully annoyed at the Princess Bibesco, an Englishwoman who'd poached a Romanian title by marrying it. The poaching that irked Mansfield, though, concerned her soft candle of a husband, the literary dabbler John Middleton Murry, whose hard, gemlike flame could be counted upon to gutter in a waxy melt.
"Dear Princess Bibesco," she wrote, "I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world."
But it was, as Katie Roiphe notes in a lively start to "Uncommon Arrangements." That is, it was and it was not. Her portrait of the restless marital experimenting in the English literary world, running from the Edwardian era through the 1930s, comes up with a mix of bold devices and uneasy compunctions, and a whole variety of attempts to get them to mesh.
Roiphe advances two reasons for combing letters, diaries, and the accounts of contemporaries to flesh out the stories of seven writers' marriages and the outside attachments they wove into them, not at all smoothly. One is that, as threshed out in an endless succession of books and articles, questions are as alive today as they were generations ago about how to accommodate "the need for settled life with the eternal desire for freshness." And, more grittily, individual fulfillment, equality, and freedom with the necessary constraints of a relationship. Or, as in the Frenchman's question about revolutions, "who will empty the chamber pots?" (e.g., lower the toilet seat).
The other question, winningly put: "Marriage is perpetually interesting; it is the novel that most of us are living in." And if Roiphe's first reason is spelled out sensibly, though sometimes at windy length, the second, with its examples, is often irresistible.
H. G. Wells, crammed so tight with self-approval that some of it cried to be shared with a succession of mistresses, depended absolutely on the efficient care and indulgence of his wife. Amy Catherine was her name, but he renamed her Jane, as fitter for the unassuming role he assigned her. Young Rebecca West, as smart and glittering as he, came along to take him by storm. Two liberated modern temperaments, unconcerned with conventions.
But when she got pregnant he sent her off to a secluded village and, though he declared her his soulmate, decided she was too untidy and erratic to provide him his comforts. (Jane, only outwardly docile, cattily sent a housekeeper to tidy her up.) Eventually West decided that to win out sexually was to lose out. She took a wealthy and comforts-providing husband, and wrote with scarred shrewdness: "Since men don't love us nearly as much as we love them that leaves them much more spare energy to be wonderful with."
Mansfield and the airily sublime Murry seem to have loved each other, though his was "a vegetable love" like that of Gilbert and Sullivan's Bunthorne. Early on he declined sleeping with her so as not to spoil things; later he did, a little, though repelled by her tubercular cough, and was more comfortable with Bibesco and others. Their marriage, Roiphe writes, was a series of long separations and rapturous brief reunions. Mansfield called their relationship "a nothingness shot through with gleams of what might be."
There is a touching portrait of the lavish and decidedly odd-looking artistic hostess Ottoline Morrell. She comforted herself thinking that her husband Philip's sparse sexual attention stemmed from a lack of interest in women. She was devastated when he confessed to two mistresses. There is the lightly feminist novelist Elizabeth Von Arnim and her several-times-married husband John Russell, a maniacal bully of whom his friend George Santayana wrote that "like Henry the Eighth he desired to marry all of his lady loves; but that only made him wish later to cut all their heads off."
The best-written and most suggestive portrait of marital every-which-ways is that of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf's painter sister. Her husband, Clive, was idyllically ardent until the birth of a baby aroused Vanessa's lusty maternal instinct, revolting him. She and the art critic Roger Fry became lovers; then she took up with the mainly homosexual Duncan Grant. All four lived together, joined by Grant's lover David Garnett (who unsuccessfully propositioned Vanessa).
Fry praised it all as "an almost ideal family based as it is on adultery and mutual forbearance. . . . a triumph of reasonableness over the conventions." Roiphe notes, ironically, that this forward-looking menage was able to function only on the basis of reticence and unspoken understandings, easily matching the silences about delicate matters in the most Victorian households. Vanessa's daughter, Angelica, for instance, was 17 before she was told the facts of life, one of them being that her father was not Clive but Duncan.
As in Victorian households, silence could breed disaster. Angelica, to general consternation and Vanessa's hysterics, married Garnett, Duncan's longtime lover. And disaster could breed silence. After Vanessa died at 82, Duncan and Clive went on sharing the house.
Richard Eder reviews books for several publications. 