Читать книгу I Am No Longer Myself Without You: How Men Love Women - Jonathan Rutherford - Страница 6

The stretched-out hands are alight

in the darkness like an old town.

ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

I

When I walked into the darkened room in the Tate Gallery in London, three video images were being projected across one wall. In the left-hand frame a woman is giving birth. She is crouching, leaning back into somebody’s arms, her muscles straining and contorting with each contraction. In the right-hand frame a video camera had recorded the face of an older woman. She is dying. She lies perfectly still and silent, her mouth dragged downward by a stroke, her cheek bones and her skull pressing through her papery skin, her breath a whisper. Birth and death. And between the two is the figure of a man floundering under water, and the sound of a muffled echoing.

Video artist Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych is a technological version of a medieval altarpiece. It runs for approximately fifteen minutes: the woman struggles to give birth, the man rises and sinks, turning aimlessly in the water, and the older woman lies quite still: the giving, the having and the losing. In life it is women who give and lose. Men want from them. They want the pulse of life first from their mothers, and later in adulthood from the women they love. The man, his features indistinguishable through the blur of the water and the flare of air bubbles which rise to the surface with each immersion, flails blindly between the two: between birth and death, between mother and lover. In the final minutes of the video the woman – Viola’s wife – gives birth. The baby emerges from between her legs, and into the arms of the midwife. In the same instant a flicker of life crosses the impassive face of the older woman – Viola’s mother – and she dies. Men use art to return to this moment, constantly attempting to understand their journey between these two states, between these two women.

The original story of men’s love – in his youth a man escapes from his mother; monogamy brings him back to her. She is always present in the mind’s eye of her son, yet she is also always lost. A man remembers the body of his mother; her feel, smell, touch. It gave him life, but its familiarity is also frightening. It reminds him of his childish dependency on her and impels him to try to escape his need of her. The paradox at the heart of men’s heterosexuality: desire and need, escape and no escape. Heterosexual love eventually leads back to a man’s childhood home, to the loss of his mother as the original object of his love.

The day following my mother’s death I went into her bedroom. There were pictures of her mother and father laid beneath a glass top on her bedside table. Cluttered across its surface was a portable radio, a bottle of hand cream, an alarm clock face down, the empty foil of two Disprin tablets and a couple of books. One lay open at the last page she had been reading. There were photographs of our family around the room: my sisters together; my brother; my sister and her new baby; me; me and my son. I switched on the radio to hear what station she had listened to. It was the local radio station and the tinny, slightly earnest sound of the news. Her clothes – jeans and a dark blue sweater – lay folded on the chair as she had left them. The thread that had held all these various objects together, the life which had given meaning to their side-by-sidedness, had gone. The slippers on the floor no longer had any connection to the book on the table. The family photographs, with their insinuations of unity, were broken apart into their different lives. Each item in her wardrobe had its own special memory: a wedding, a party for this dress, a holiday for that. The telephone filled the house with an incessant ringing. Each caller was no longer held to the next by a living presence, but only by a memory which belonged separately to each. Something was finished. She was dead and all that she had held together was now apart.

There was a bloodstain on the carpet, evidence of the paramedics’ attempt to revive her. I bent down to touch it. It was still damp from someone’s vain effort to wipe it away. Her bed had been stripped, the sheet bundled and the blanket folded. I lifted one of the sheets. It was stained with blood and urine. This sheet seemed to be emblematic of our relationship, its function as a source of childhood comfort subverted by these abject signs of her body. The dearest and the most difficult contained in one place. This is the paradox of my love for my mother: the longing for her to love me in the way I wanted her to, and the desire to be free of my dependency on her.

I kept the sheet my mother had died on for several years, in a plastic carrier bag at the back of one of my drawers. I imagined it, infused with the smell of her, spread out on the floor. As a child I had revolved around my mother’s body like a moon, held to her by my need. But I sensed she was always just beyond me, an absence I could find no words to fill. I could never name this void between us; nor could I leave her for long enough to live for myself. Now, after her death, maybe I could put to one side the distance I had established in adulthood, and circle this empty and crestfallen place, and discover the connection between us.

I was unsure what to do with the sheet. I could destroy it. I could burn it or throw it in the dustbin or consign it to a skip (there were always skips around where I lived). In doing so I could release myself from the entrapment of my childhood. I wanted both to keep it and to be rid of it. And so it remained in its plastic bag in my drawer, until one day I stopped my circumambulations and stepped, so to speak, in the middle of the sheet and, remaining there, I finally decided to take it out and burn it. I cleared a space in the back yard and draped it across a large stick. I had no matches, so I lit a piece of screwed-up newspaper from the gas stove and placed it beneath the sheet. The synthetic material mixed with the cotton erupted. The yard is very small and for a moment the heat in the confined space was intense. I was reminded of a Guy Fawkes night when my son was small. I had lit a number of cheap Roman candles and fountains. I had imagined they would be innocuous, but their magnesium brightness and roaring smoke overwhelmed the narrow space between the wall and the side of the house, and I brought them to a premature end with a bucket of water. The flames of my mother’s sheet roared. I watched it burn, and felt on my face the fierce energy of the fire. Oily plastic residue dripped onto the concrete.

When I was a child, separation from my mother brought on pangs of inexplicable fear for her safety. I recall one autumn evening when I was ten, looking out of a window at my boarding school, watching the rain fall. I had heard a flood warning on the news and now, as I pressed my face against the glass and watched the headlights of the cars glisten through the rain on the main road beyond the school’s walls, I imagined my mother drowning, swept away in a flood tide, her hair spread out and floating like seaweed on the surface of the water. In earlier years, as I lay in bed in the evening, I would call for her to say ‘good night’ to me. She would arrive in my room, sit on my bedside and kiss me and I would ask her to open my cupboard to make sure there was no demons hiding inside. As soon as she had thrown open the doors to reveal nothing more sinister than my father’s old suits and dinner jacket and a few toys, and she had pronounced the words ‘goodnight’, I was comforted. I took an image of her with me to sleep.

When I grew past this childish phase, I lost the reassurance of her presence, and the image of her would sometimes fade as I hovered over sleep and felt myself slipping into another world. At this moment on the cusp of sleep, when sleepers let go of their waking self, I experienced a terror that I would never find myself again. As I sank into sleep I would encounter an emptiness, its nameless, globular form rising up in concentric waves to smother my breathing. I felt myself suffocating and would spring into wakefulness, gasping for air, my eyes snapping open in the dark and my heart thudding. I tried to put off this moment and would stay awake, filling my mind with pleasurable thoughts, sometimes into the early hours of the morning. I would try and slip past its sentinels, and sleep without warning, unknown to myself. I never said any of this to my mother. I don’t know why.

At the end of each holiday, before I was due to return to boarding school, she would take me on an outing. The two of us would go out for the day to watch a film, or to eat at a restaurant. One end of summer I had a project on wild flowers to complete. We walked through the woods at the back of our house to a field. We called it the wild flower field. It lay through a railway bridge where, as children, we would yell beneath the Victorian arch and wait for the sound to rebound. It smelt dank and was always muddy. And out on the other side was the wild flower field, a long strip of meadow, bordered by the railway below and woodland above. That summer afternoon my mother and I sat in the field making a perfunctory search for wild flowers. I think we both felt the imminence of my departure for school. My fingers scrabbled through the coarse grass, coming upon a cowslip, or the flower of a wild strawberry, which I picked and placed between sheets of blotting paper, and I would glance across at my mother, on her knees searching, and she would look at me and smile, and in that moment there would be nothing between us but my own sense of emptiness.

We repeated this tableau vivant: an evening performance of the film Tobruk. We sat together, hearing guns blasting, heroic figures shouting, and then the lull of the desert after the battle. And in this momentary quiet and dark of the cinema I felt numbed. And my mother? She would have loathed the film. A day out to see Steve McQueen in Grand Prix. We sat on a seat in a small square, somewhere in central London, my mother voicing her exasperation, the meal ruined by my feeling unwell, the anticipation of the film squandered. Such brief moments laid our relationship bare: the time and the energy which went into maintaining propriety, and the evasions of a nameless dread which neither of us could cope with. And as everything began to unravel, I would abandon myself in compliance with her need to shore up my unhappiness behind the frontispiece of normality. I became my own worst enemy. I remember that film. I lost myself in the speed and excitement. But nothing we did together ever changed the silent fatalism that bound us together.

My mother’s childhood in South London had been interrupted by the war. She had been sent to a boarding school and then had moved to the countryside with her parents. Her father was a small businessman whose tastes were continental. He dressed with a fastidious élan which belied his English conservatism. She shared his ambiguous loyalties. A part of her held to the Puritanism of a petit bourgeois culture and the order it gave her. But she disliked its meanness and the sanctimonious hypocrisy it cultivated in the better off. She chose convention. It stifled her, confirmed her desire to escape into something of her own making. But she held to it. The Puritan inside her anchored her against drifting ambivalence. I think she believed that pursuing what she wanted was wrong. She feared it would lead to madness, and to the loss of her sense of belonging. Her own mother had suffered years of mental instability. Addicted to barbiturates, she would phone her psychiatrist at moments of crisis. When she lay dying, she had asked my mother if she loved her and my mother told me she had lied and said that yes she did. Hers had been a solitary childhood which she had palliated with her sense of fun; always the gay, vivacious one in the photographed group of young women. Popular and beautiful, she enjoyed parties and making friends. She had grown adept at hiding her feelings of despair. She expected the same of me when I was sent away to boarding school. I sensed a desperation in her when this did not happen, which left me stunned and pensive. She chivvied me, distracting herself.

My childhood was similar to those of tens of thousands of middle-class English boys growing up in the suburbs in the 1960s. We were the children of men and women who had married in the 1950s. Our families were divided between the domestic world of mothers and the masculine public world of work. Despite the trappings of modern culture, relations between men and women were fashioned on the example of the mid Victorian middle-class family, with its almost feudal ascription of roles. Nature still appeared to determine one’s destiny. My mother was the central figure at home; the housekeeper who managed relationships, organized our schooling, bought clothes, birthday cards, food; arranged holidays; cooked and entertained. Her work produced the family – myself, my two sisters, my brother. My father, on the other hand, was a more peripheral figure in family life. He left home each morning at 7.05 for the City of London and returned at 7 p.m. Every Saturday morning he took us to the sweet shop, then went to the pub. In the afternoon he worked in the garden. On Sunday he returned to the garden and in the evening went to the pub again. Our family life was maternal. The language of emotions – of need, pleasure and pain – were profoundly feminized.

The years after the war had witnessed the promotion of this kind of family. A growing number of childcare experts reinforced this division of roles by emphasizing women’s natural inclination to be mothers and their instinctive need for a child. In a series of radio broadcasts in 1944 D. W. Winnicott had introduced the public to the idea that the psychological health of children was determined by the quality of mothering they received. John Bowlby postulated his theory of human attachment, originating the term ‘maternal deprivation’ to describe the consequence to children of an inadequate bond with their mother. In 1958 Benjamin Spock published Baby and Child Care and gradually supplanted Truby King’s orthodoxy with his more intuitive approach to mothering. A new emphasis was placed on a woman’s empathy with her child. Mothers and children were fixed and frozen into domesticity, in service to the child’s developmental needs. This promotion of women as mothers provoked a misogynistic backlash. Motherhood came under renewed scrutiny from welfare agencies, academics and social commentators. Following research in the United States it was claimed that mothers were overprotecting their children and failing to allow them to separate. A woman’s domestic power and her control in the middle-class home was seen as a potential threat to male dominance. Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger railed against the influence of women: ‘No, there is nothing for it, me boy, but to let yourself be butchered by the women.’ The drama of this historically specific family – the domestic division of labour, the polarization of masculinity and femininity, the misogyny and the male anxieties and fantasies about the power and influence of mothers – introduced the spectre of the doting, overprotective mother, who smothered her children and undermined their capacity to become independent adults.

The mother–son relationship was subject to particular attention, and this is still the case in all classes and among all ethnic groups. To different degrees, a boy’s need for his mother is seen as shameful and effeminate. Social attitudes cultivate in boys a pseudo independence, in which a boy’s need for his mother is repressed and denied. He is forced to relinquish his attachment to his mother prematurely. The mother is lost as an object of love. Freud writes of this loss in his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’: ‘one feels a loss … has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost.’ Grief at this loss holds the boy prisoner to his mother. Unable to mourn, his capacity to love another is inhibited. The mother assumes an omnipotence in the unconscious of her son, because only she can satisfy his need. She becomes a threatening figure at the gateway to male freedom and desire, the original gorgon who will deny her son his potency and transform him into a block of stone. Adrienne Rich has described this male fantasy of the mother: she is ‘controlling, erotic, castrating, heart suffering, guilt-ridden and guilt-proving; between her legs snakes; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son’.

As he grows up, a boy idealizes his mother at the same time as he hates her, an ambivalence he later brings to his relationships with other women. When I began to try to understand how this relationship had shaped my life I turned to Freud. His ideas pervade our common-sense understanding of how masculinity is formed in our childhood struggle to become independent from our parents. For Freud the father was the central, most important figure of family life. In his 1909 essay ‘Family Romances’ he argued that a boy’s rivalry with his father in the Oedipus complex meant that he battled to be free of his father rather than his mother. But as I was growing up in 1960s Britain, the problems of my independence centred around my mother. Freud was not so helpful in understanding this issue of separation and the role of motherhood in the making of masculinity. Much of his comments on the subject reproduced his own society’s idealization and demonization of mothers. While he praised the special bond between mother and son in several of his essays, his glowing remarks do not disguise the ‘terrifying impression of helplessness’ he felt in a boy’s dependence on his mother. He argued that a mother naturally projected her thwarted ambitions onto men: ‘even marriage is not made secure until the wife has succeeded in making her husband her child as well as acting as mother to him.’ It has been the mother, not the father, who has been the psychologically dominant figure in the family. I struggled to be free of my mother, and at the same time I did not want to be parted from her.

II

I was fourteen and walking with my mother up the high street, five paces behind, ashamed of being with her, but reluctant to lose sight of her in the crowd. We’d been shopping for clothes – clothes she wanted for me. On the other side of the high street there was a large gang of skinheads. Boys my age and older cut a swathe through the shoppers; their bald heads and Doc Martens and tight jeans and sharp-cut Ben Shermans condensed their bodies into hard, clear, dispassionate lines. I imagined them glancing across at me, and felt the humiliation of trailing behind my mother. I wanted my feet encased in a pair of strong, masculine, industrial boots. I had saved my money and several weeks later I bought a pair, ankle high, but not too thick soled. My mother disapproved. We fought over clothes as we’d later argue around politics: bell bottoms, loons, three-button shirts with Indian embroidery, army surplus great coats, patched jeans and patched denim jackets and long, badly cut hair, later to be displaced by the regalia of punk rock – black drainpipes, motifed shirts, pierced ears and dyed hair. Clothes were a battle between our competing ideas of who and what I was to be.

I conjured up my future when I left school. It was a world far removed from my mother. I would live on a croft, a commune, a kibbutzim. I’d take off and hitch-hike anywhere. I bought copies of OZ