“The world is rather tiresome, I must say — everything at sixes and sevens — ladies in love with buggers, and buggers in love with womanizers, and the price of coal going up, too. Where will it all end?

That's a Lytton Strachey quote, referring to a situation in his own life (more about that in a moment), and brought to you because I read Simon Callow's Love is where it falls, about his relationshp with Peggy Ramsay. Which set me musing. Love stories thrive on obstacles to overcome, there aren't many credible obstacles left these days outside of fantasy genre or period drama, hence, perhaps, the minor subgenre of straight woman/gay man. (The only lesbian woman/ straight man example right now I can think of is Mona Lisa.) Which is tricky to do without implications, no matter how unintended, about het trumping or, heaven help us, "curing" gay. Otoh, if the story told is not fictional, it somehow seems easier to avoid said subtext. By which I don't mean "gay man marries because of homophobic society, gets along with his wife surprisingly well", which probably was the case for a considerable number of homosexuals throughout history. No, I mean voluntary relationships on both parts. The two examples that I found most moving, because they didn't shy away from including the enormous difficulties and also made it clear sexual orientation didn't change, were the film Carrington (starring Jonathan Pryce as Lytton Strachey and Emma Thompson as Carrington - she disliked her first name of Dora and only went by her last), and now Callow's memoir.

Curiously, I should be annoyed about Carrington because it is another example of a biopic about a female artist which focuses strictly on her romantic life, something I complained about at length in a past post. And yet I found the story told so moving that it seduced me looking part that. (Also it is scripted by Christopher Hampton and thus has the virtue of witty dialogue, and I don't mean just the authentic Strachey quotes.) I was curious enough to look up the background, and found out that the film stuck mostly to the facts, omitting only that Carrington herself had at least one same-sex relationship later in her life, and also downplaying the extent of snobbish hostility which she faced in the Bloomsbury circle when Lytton first started living together with her, causing much mockery from Virginia Woolf et al. ("And if Lytton did Carrington a disservice at all, it was not by not loving her sufficiently but by failing to have the courage at that time to acknowledge to his oldest friends how important she was to him", said one biographer.) As depicted in the film and probably in real life, the problem of sexual incompability isn't downplayed, with Carrington's various unsatisfactory affairs with other men collateral damage, but, and that's always important if a story wants you to root for a relationship, it's also clear that they do bring out the best in each other, that their companionship makes them happy. (Basically, if Carrington had been male, there would not have been a problem.) The portrait of Lytton Strachey which is in the National Portrait Gallery is striking for both her talent and the feeling of intimacy it conveys:



Love is where it falls is in many ways a mirror/contrast to that constellation. With Lytton Strachey and Carrington, he was the older iconic figure and she the young talent when they met; whereas Simon Callow was a young up and coming actor when he met legendary agent Peggy Ramsay, who was 40 years older than him. (If you've ever watched Prick up your ears, the biopic about Joe Orton: she's the agent played by Vanessa Redgrave in that one.) With the later relationship, Ramsay was the larger-than-life character prone to spouting sarcastic epigramms, a living legend in her profession, whereas Callow was the younger party going through a series of romantic/sexual entanglements ending badly while carrying on the platonic relationship. This being a first person narration, you also have the oddness of a divided self; narrator Callow, old himself now, looking back on being young Simon. Again, sexual incompability isn't downplayed (and painful for Peggy, who in one letter wishes she were a young, slim man), and not resolved by a magic love-overcomes-all. There's also the unconnected tragedy of the sharp, bright Peggy succumbing to dementia in the last years of her life, something that painfully reminded me of one of my grandfathers. (And I think most people by now have someone in either their family or social circle whom they have seen losing their mind bit by bit, so you know what I mean.)

Having read various biographies by Callow (his two volumes about Orson Welles, the one about Charles Laughton) I was intrigued that in examining a part of his own life, he employs the same vividness of description but a far more high strung language. His description of Peggy Ramsay, while tender, doesn't come across as idealizing; for example, sadly she seems to have been the type of successful woman making it in a dominantly male profession who can't stand other women. (When Callow makes an admiring remark about "Wide Saragasso Sea", written by one of Peggy's own clients, Jean Rhys, saying how well it explores women's emotional lives, Peggy snaps back: "I know all about women's emotional lives. They're dull.") It's interesting that while he examines at some length the relationship between his lover Aziz and Aziz' mother, he at no point suggests there is anything maternal in the way Peggy relates to him, and this despite the fact she showers him with gifts, gets him jobs and furthers his education, is as possessive as Aziz' mother, and the age gap; from the start, there is an emphasis on how this is a "passionate friendship" between equals. (Given the sheer difference in status I'm not sure whether he isn't kidding himself there, but anyway.)

It helps to know a little about Britain in the 80s (naturally, Margaret Thatcher is an issue - with two main characters in the theatrical profession, I'll give you three guesses as to whether positively or negatively), and if you're interested in the background of Hampton's play about Rimbaud and Verlaine, or the effect of coming out in the early 80s, there is material there, too. But mainly the book lives as the portrait of a woman and an odd couple romantic friendship.

Something else that's true: neither the Strachey/Carrington nor the Ramsay/Callow story end happily ever after, which, were they fictional, I suppose the authors wouldn't have been able to resist letting them do.