Kate Roiphe on Bohemian Marriages
Published 31 months ago
HG Wells, Katherine Mansfield, Ottoline Morrell and others in her new book Uncommon Arrangements.
The new book by journalist and post-feminist provocateur Katie Roiphe is called Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939. Started while Roiphe's own marriage was falling apart, it tells the story of seven couples - Rebecca West and HG Wells, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, Elizabeth von Arnim and John Francis Russell, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Ottoline and Philip Morrell, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Vera Brittain and George Catlin - whose romantic lives were as unconventional as their art.
Dazed Digital: Why did you choose that particular period?
Katie Roiphe: I think the particular way they were torn between Victorian morals and a more modern progressive idea of sexual equality does reflect our own contradictions. Today, we think of our problems as uniquely our own. But after immersing myself in these relationships that took place a hundred years ago, I saw how deeply entrenched certain forms of human unhappiness really are. Some of the dilemmas they were facing haven't changed.
People like Vera Brittain believed that once women were equal and feminism had achieved its revolution, relationships would be happy. They had this utopian idea of what marriage would be like in the future, but it never quite came to pass. The idea that there would be real progress in personal relationships ended up being overly hopeful.
DD: How closely were your subjects' lives related to their art?
KR: Many of them felt that they were living their lives as art. They even viewed their friendships as themselves a sort of creative act. And if you read Katherine Mansfield's diaries and letters, they are as brilliant as her short stories. Their relationships were often so flamboyant and complicated and obviously doomed, but this intensity to how they lived was itself a kind of art.
DD: Do you think their lives really reflected their philosophical and aesthetic beliefs, or were their "beliefs" just a convenient excuse for their awful behaviour?
KR: Well, HG Wells had a string of fascinating mistresses and a few illegitimate children and his wife knew all about it. And he did have a very elaborate justification for all this involving progress and frankness and all kinds of political ideas. But it's hard to say which comes first. For many of these couples, their political ideas mingled with psychological imperatives in a very interesting way. I was also intrigued that so many of these couples thought that they could rationally control emotions. Jealousy, for instance – they thought that if they cheated, their spouses could rise above their jealousy through transcendent rationality. That was a very fashionable idea.
DD: Do you think any of these people ever secretly wished they could just live like normal people?
KR: Many of them had these Victorian childhoods and then they come of age in this period that promises sexual frankness and equality between the sexes, and this contradiction informs everything in their lives. They're trapped in this moment of change. HG Wells, for instance, talks about how he's above the rules of schoolmaster and lawyers and teachers, and sees himself as unconfined by the inhibitions imposed on ordinary people by society. So they did self-consciously feel themselves outside the world of ordinary people.
But at the same time, even the people who lived more experimentally did feel a tremendous yearning for the conventional life. With Vanessa Bell, though she's a bohemian, you can see the influence of a more traditional morality. And it's very touching that Katherine Mansfield, who did have one of these unusual marriages, when she was in the Alps recovering from an illness she read all of Jane Austen. She's such a fierce progressive figure, and she's reading about a more ordinary life and what it might have offered her.
DD: Are there any writers who still live like that?
KR: Maybe this is just my small universe here in New York, but I do feel that writers are more conventional now. They try to live the same respectable materialistic lives as everybody else. I see very few people trying to live these romantic unusual lives.
DD: Why do you think that is?
KR: I think it would be harder to live like that today because in a certain way we lack the imagination that people had then. There is a new moralism. A hundred years later, you might think we'd be more tolerant of any kind of different behaviour, but I don't feel that to be the case. We live in a more materialistic culture where people care about things – having the right stroller and the right car – and a lot of energy is put into that and less into innovations in our personal life and writing letters to our friends. Writers have more bourgeois aspirations. Katherine Mansfield certainly wasn't worried about sending her children to private school.
I also think we don't have the same romantic ideas we used to about art and the artist. The novelst who's admired in today's culture is the one who sells his screenplay to Hollywood. So our obsessions with money and things does affect what kind of writing, and what kind of writers, we romanticise.
DD: Was there anyone you couldn't fit in the book?
KR: So many people. For instance, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, who were part of the social world I discussed and whose son has written a great book about their open marriage. I also contemplated writing about Graham Greene who comes a little bit later.
DD: You teach polemic at New York University. What does that involve?
KR: I start with Milton's Satan as a great polemicist and I move on to people like Christopher Hitchens. I teach the art of argument. It's really fun.
Uncommon Arrangements is published by Virago.
