On Love

John Menneer: Atiamuri Rest Area

In 1822 the novelist Henri Beyle – Stendhal – published what purported to be the reflections on love and love-making of Lisio Visconti, a (fictitious) young Italian aristocrat. “On the day of his untimely death, he gave permission to the translator to publish his essay on Love, if he could find a straightforward way of arranging it.” [1] De l’Amour [On Love] was in two volumes, attributed to “the author of the History of Painting in Italy” (1817), which had, in its turn, been signed with the initials “M. B. A. A.”

The identity crisis suggested by this succession of masks was reflected in the contents. As well as “Visconti’s” comparatively straightforward taxonomy of passion, it included copious annotations, plus a series of appendices containing stories, aphorisms, and translations from the medieval Latin and Provençal. The whole enterprise was intended to sublimate Beyle’s love for the stand-offish Métilde Dembovski (née Viscontini), a political agitator from Milan. He described it as “made for Métilde,” and she was asked to comment on each of the early chapters as they were written. It did little to soften her heart.


In 1823 the essayist William Hazlitt published, anonymously, under the guise of a “native of North Britain,” a book called Liber Amoris, or The New Pygmalion. It chronicled in intense – even sickening – detail every aspect of his love for Sarah Walker, his landlady’s daughter, whom he identified as “S. L.” His authorship became an open secret in literary circles, many believing that his reputation would never survive such revelations of masochistic self-abasement.

Hazlitt and Stendhal might be said to represent different aspects of Romanticism in full flower. The heroes (and heroines) of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) or La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) specialise in absurd and self-destructive passion. Hazlitt’s heroes Napoleon and Shakespeare are driven by the will to power (over world and word, respectively). A love of the grandiose and suspicion of restraint characterises both.

Generations of literary commentators have spelt out the details of Hazlitt and Beyle’s real-life love affairs, but contemporary readers could not be expected to do much more than read between the lines. Hence pseudonymous publication. Hence, too, the confusion of genres in both books (Hazlitt’s also contains dialogues and playlets, journal entries and letters – some verbatim, some “modified” – in place of straightforward narrative).

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from Henri Beyle [Stendhal], De l’Amour (1822):

• Laissez travailler la tête d’un amant pendant vingt-quatre heures, et voici ce que vous trouverez: Aux mines de sel de Salzbourg, on jette, dans les profondeurs abandonnées de la mine, un rameau d’arbre effeuillé par l’hiver; deux ou trois mois après on le retire couvert de cristillisations brillantes: les plus petites branches, celles qui ne sont pas plus grosses que la patte d’une mésange, sont garnies d’une infinité de diamants, mobiles et éblouissants; on ne peut plus reconnaître le rameau primitif. [2]
• Le vrai grand monde tel qu’on le trouvait à la cour de France … était peu favorable à l’amour, comme rendant impossible la solitude et le loisir, indispensables pour le travail des cristillisations. [3]
• … le ciel m’ayant refusé le talent litéraire, j’ai uniquement pensé de décrire avec toute la maussaderie de la science, mais aussi avec toute son exactitude, certains faits dont un séjour prolongé dans la patrie de l’oranger m’a rendu l’involontaire témoin. [4]
• Ne pas aimer quand on a reçu du ciel une âme faite pour l’amour, c’est se priver soi et autrui d’un grand bonheur. [5]
• Écrivez ce soir sous des noms empruntés, mais avec tous les détails caractéristiques, le dialogue que vous venez d’avoir avec votre amie, et la difficulté qui vous trouble. Dans huit jours … vous serez un autre homme, et alors, lisant votre consultation, vous pouvez vous donner un bon avis. [6]
• C’est de l’histoire que je cherche d’écrire, et de telles pensées sont des faits. [7]
• Or, comme en physiologie l’homme ne sait presque rien sur lui-même que par l’anatomie comparée, de même dans les passions, la vanité et plusieurs autres causes d’illusion font que nous ne pouvons être éclairés sur ce qui se passe dans nous que par les faiblesses que nous avons observées chez les autres. [8]
• Je ne blâme ni n’approuve, j’observe. [9]
• Quel excellent conseiller un homme ne trouverait-il pas dans une femme si elle savait penser … [10]
• Je ne leur demande [de ces grands poètes] qu’un témoignage sur leur siècle; et dans deux mille ans un roman de Ducray-Duminil sera un témoignage de nos moeurs. [11]

• [If you leave a lover to fantasise for twenty-four hours, this is what you’ll get: In the Salzburg salt mines they toss a bare branch into the depths of a shaft. Two or three months later it’s pulled out, coated with gleaming crystals: the smallest twigs, dainty as a mouse’s paws, are garnished with diamonds, bright and scintillating. You can scarcely recognise the original stock.
• Real high society (as one saw it at Versailles before the Revolution), did not favour love, which requires both leisure and solitude for this process of crystallisation to operate.
• Heaven having refused me literary talents, my only wish is to describe with scientific rigour (gloomy, no doubt, but exact), certain phenomena which a prolonged stay in the South have made me witness almost involuntarily.
• Failing to fall in love, when God has given you a soul framed for passion, is to deprive yourself and others of a great joy.
• Write down this evening, with borrowed names (but not neglecting incidental details), the conversation you’ve just had with your girlfriend – and what you were arguing about. In a week, you’ll be a different man; then, rereading your notes, you’ll be in a position to give yourself some good advice.
• I’m trying to write history here, and ideas such as these are facts.
• As in physiology mankind can only make really new discoveries by means of comparative anatomy, so, in the case of the passions, vanity and other sources of illusion make it necessary for us to investigate ourselves by means of the weaknesses we observe in others.
• I neither approve nor disapprove, I observe.
• What excellent advice a man might obtain from a woman, if only she knew how to think …
• I ask of great poets merely a report on their times – in two thousand years even a novel by Harold Robbins will be a witness to the way we live now.]

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from Wm Hazlitt, Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion (1823):

• No betrothed virgin ever gave the object of her choice kisses, caresses more modest or more bewitching than those you have given me a thousand and a thousand times. Could I have thought I should ever live to believe them an inhuman mockery of one who had the sincerest regard for you? Do you think they will not now turn to rank poison in my veins, and kill me, soul and body? [12]


• That S. L might have been mine, and now never can – these are the two sole propositions that forever stare me in the face, and look ghastly in at my poor brain. I am in some sense proud that I can feel this dreadful passion – it gives me a kind of rank in the kingdom of love … [13]


• Betsy.Oh! if those trowsers were to come down,
  what a sight there would be.
  (A general loud laugh)
  Mother.Yes! He’s a proper one: Mr Follett is nothing to him.
  Mr. Cajah(aged 17) Then, I suppose he must be seven inches.
  Mother W.He’s quite a monster, He nearly tumbled over Mr. Hazlitt
  one night.
  Sarah.(At that once, that still as ever dear name,
  ah! why do I grow pale, why do I weep and forgive)
  said something inaudible, but in connection.
  Cajah.(laughing) Sarah says …
  Sarah.I say, Mr. Follett wears straps –
  ------ [I ask you candidly whether on hearing this I ought not to have walked quietly out of the house and never have thought of it again.] [14]


• I asked F. if he want to take a girl into keeping would he allow her half a guinea a week to be his whore? And he said, No, for one might get girls that would have some conversation in them for that, and she had not. ... He asked what was to be done if she consented to come to bed to him. I said Why you had better proceed. He did not seem to like the idea of getting her with child, and I said I supposed he didn’t like to have a child by a monster ... [15]


• Let her [and then cross-hatched up the right side of the page is:] be to hell with her tongue –. She is as true as heaven wished her hearts and lips [to] be. My [own?] fair hell. [16]


• Exquisite witch! But do I love her the less dearly for it? I cannot. [17]

•

Graffiti from Atiamuri Rest Area (1996):

[Men’s side]


• I was waiting outside and a guy about 40 came up and asked if I had read the stuff in here I said son thats why Im here He told me to follow him into this cubicle where he sucked my 6 inches deep into his throat I came in spurts as I squeezed my balls and his finger was up my arse All the time he was jerking his cock which must have been 8 inches I wouldn’t let him fuck me but I let him wank into my crack



• 15–1–93
  When is the last time10.50
  
  _______
  6–42.30
  Still nobody sick of playing with myself
  What about tomorrow
  
  _______
  12–2
  Balls bursting
  Still nobody
  
  _______
  1–12–94 26–11–944.30
  PULLING Myself again
  Still nobody
  What about a date and time31–1–95
  
  _______
  Still aroundMay 1996

[Women’s side]


• Hello to the young girls that read this message. Slide down your jeans or lift up your frock and rub your vagina through your panties feel the deep slit and push your lacy panties into your vagina passage now pull down your panties sit down on the toilet with your legs really wide apart slide your big finger into your hole and rub between your cunt hole and your clit use your other hand to massage your bossoms keep this up till your cum juice is dribbling out of your vagina and youve had an orgasm.
  • This is a public toilet not a place for your
    private filth. I hope you get A.I.D.S.


• Since Dad Died I don’t think mum has been getting much cock. The other night I went just next door to baby sit while the neighbours came over. I came back for a book later & found the door to the lounge almost closed. When I peeked in I saw mum on her hands & knees squatting over Lynns face. None of them had any clothes on apart from Lynn’s Nursing bra holding her very full tits, which had leaked out all over her cups. They were eating each other out. Bob had his cock buried up mums arse. Soon mum came over Lynn’s face It mustve been good because she pissed at the same time. Next Lynn took her tits out of her Nursing bra & mum sucked on one side & Bob on the other. After drinking for a couple of minutes Lynn told mum that seen she’d suck milk out of her Tits she’d better suck some cream out of Bobs cock. It Didn’t take long for Bob to spurt his cream into mums mouth.
  Isn’t it nice to have friendly neighbours?


• LADYS
  I would like to stikc my toung up your pussy and suck the come out of it so if you want me to leave time and date
  Ill be here

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Notes:

[1] "Le jour de sa mort imprévue, il permit au traducteur de publier son essai sur l’Amour, s’il trouvait moyen de le réduireà une forme honnête.” Stendhal, De l’Amour. 1st ed. 1822. Ed. Michel Crouzet. GF. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1965), 33.

[2] Stendhal, De l’Amour, 34-35.

[3] Stendhal, De l’Amour, 56-57.

[4] Stendhal, De l’Amour, 79.

[5] Stendhal, De l’Amour, 89.

[6] Stendhal, De l’Amour, 121.

[7] Stendhal, De l’Amour, 130.

[8] Stendhal, De l’Amour, 150.

[9] Stendhal, De l’Amour, 166.

[10] Stendhal, De l’Amour, 220.

[11] Stendhal, De l’Amour, 271.

[12] William Hazlitt, The Book of Love: Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion. 1st ed. 1823. Introduction & Appendices by Richard Le Gallienne. 1893. New Introduction by Michael Neve (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985), 24.

[13] Hazlitt, Liber Amoris, 70.

[14] Hazlitt, Liber Amoris, 284.

[15] Hazlitt, Liber Amoris, 286.

[16] Hazlitt, Liber Amoris, 287.

[17] Hazlitt, Liber Amoris, 15.

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Jack Ross: Monkey Miss Her Now (2004)


[29/7-2/8/03]

[1956 words]

[Published in Monkey Miss Her Now (Auckland: Danger Publishing, 2004): 44-51.]

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