Distortion and Love by Nigel Rapport

Author:Nigel Rapport [Rapport, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472461346
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

Hilda epitomized for Stanley the sense of being in a couple, and it was coupledom that he came to wish to identify and represent, and celebrate, in the 1930s, culminating in ‘The Beatitudes’. The period between 1932 and 1938 was sexless, Stanley later reflected, a ‘starvation period’ – barring odd ‘incidents’ with Hilda and Patricia.71 And yet, as he wrote to Hilda after their divorce, and ‘in the presence of great money worries & ridiculous criticism’,72 it was still the case that she remained ‘the most revealing person of true essential joy I know’.73 His relationship with Hilda epitomized the merging of male and female into a unity.

Stanley elaborated on this point repeatedly in his writings. Spouses took a spiritual journey together; it was the progress of their souls, and only ‘when this state of unity is reached, [does] real life begin’.74 The joy of marriage was that spouses were making themselves anew together; discovering the other, one entered a new land, with a new body, for spouses ‘penetrate[d] into all the ramifications’ of each other’s spirits without fearfulness.75 Chronicling and celebrating this me-you-ness was something that Stanley continued to do in relation to Hilda beyond their legal marriage and even beyond her life. Here is Stanley writing to Hilda and recalling their honeymoon in Wangford, Sussex (a guest house on Hill Street), having reread his old notebooks: it is 1948, some 23 years after the event and 11 years after their divorce:

[A]t last, we were alone. (…) We could each be our self. We were both one: each a new part of the other’s self. We freely, and without scruple, invaded our new selves (…). Everything was as if we had never seen it before, we were walking about in our marriage looking at this marriage substance, the straw & grit of it. (…) We wanted to get to where there was, on the right [of the garden at Hill Street], a great plain. Our longing to marry seemed like a longing to see that place (…). It was the vast Gobi desert of you that I longed to wander into & about in & to put here and there the me things. (…) Wangford is the native land of our you & me self. (…) Everywhere & thing was a place of rest for our feelings. Everything was new because what we did or what we saw was now a way of experiencing our feelings for each other. (…) We could stand looking at a hedge for ages longer than would ordinarily be natural for a person to do. (…) Conversationless our love poured and passed from us. (…) We were shiny-faced & glitter-eyed & unmindingly tossed the catch-ball of our love to each other. It went from us without a throw and came all over us without a catch. (…) We just make empty handed armless snatches in the air & catch our love anywhere. (…) I wish I could write pages & pages of our arm in arm walking.

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