Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles (1910-1939)
Katie Roiphe
Virago, 303pp, £12.99
"Marriage is perpetually interesting; it is the novel most of us are living in," states Katie Roiphe in her introduction to these seven studies. Uncommon Arrangements does not, however, detail the kind of married life most people are living in: if it did, it might be a very much duller book. Rather, Roiphe concerns herself with unions that are fraught with infidelity, egomania and romantic delusion, each one a mini-melodrama of the domestic. Roiphe, who is a professor at New York University, shows herself a fine judge of literary merit in the lines she devotes to her subjects' writing; but this is a book about the sex lives of others and not unduly concerned with their work.
The studies centre on literary circles in London during the early decades of the 20th century. Here is H G Wells, looking more like a provincial auctioneer than a sex god, tormenting his mistress Rebecca West; sentimentalising his wife, Jane; remonstrating with Elizabeth von Arnim for not wanting to go on sleeping with him: "It's because I am common, isn't it?" Here are Vanessa and Clive Bell on the Bloomsbury merry-go-round, Clive half in love with his sister-in-law Virginia Woolf, while Vanessa is sleeping with Roger Fry and then Duncan Grant, and Duncan Grant is sleeping with Bunny Garnett; and then, years later, Bunny Garnett marries Bell and Grant's daughter, Angelica.
Meanwhile, Ottoline Morrell is sleeping with Bertrand Russell, more out of kindness than lust, while her husband has two mistresses, both pregnant by him at the same time. Vera Brittain wonders if she is frigid. Katherine Mansfield pines for her husband, John Middleton Murry. No one seems to be very good at sleeping with their actual spouses, for one reason or another, but most of them are adroit adulterers. The prevailing ethos was that affairs were endlessly discussed with long-suffering husbands and wives: "One didn't have to behave well, one simply had to tell the truth about one's bad behaviour."
Roiphe is an excellent storyteller with a gift for the felicitous phrase: "the sacred frivolity of sex", Mrs H G Wells's "consuming, anarchic sadness", the "dazzling impracticality" of Katherine Mans field's housekeeping and her "flamboyantly sparse" rooms. Elizabeth von Arnim possesses "a lively, charismatic discontent", while Vanessa Bell has "the same drama of cheekbones and lips" as Virginia Woolf.
Perhaps the best of the portraits is that devoted to the lesbian couple Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, a delightful mixture of absurdity, glamour and cruelty. "At 47, Una herself was still striking with her monocle, her blond bob, her leopard-print coat"; nevertheless, Radclyffe began a passionate affair with a Russian nurse. Being gay did not make Radclyffe unconventional in other respects, much less liberal. She meted out an allowance to her lover, but docked off a fiver if piqued. When Una's daughter (who had been boarded out to a dog breeder so as not to curtail the lovers' freedom) chose to live with her boyfriend out of wedlock, she met with disapproval from her mother and from Radclyffe. On a trip to Italy, Radclyffe and Una and the Russian nurse were frightfully keen on Mussolini and bought black shirts and fascist ribbons for their lapels.
There are few people to like within these pages. Only Van essa Bell, Elizabeth von Arnim and Winifred Holtby sound at all nice. There is only one kind of love that dare not speak its name in this book and that is the maternal sort; these three women, at least, were kind to children. And it is hard not to feel sorry for generous, mocked, giddy Ottoline Morrell, flamboyantly "dressed as if she was about to be painted and she often was". Ottoline wrote in her journal: "It does not do to show that one is unhappy. People feel it and it makes them uncomfortable."
Uncommon Arrangements has its faults, many of them the result of slack editing. Katherine Mansfield has "black bangs straight across her forehead" on one page and "thick black bangs cut straight across her forehead" on the next; the word "vivid", usually so pleasant an occasional visitor to a passage of prose, becomes almost dreary by its constant repetition. There are a few clunking sentences: "The modern marriage had a whole new power dynamic," for one. About Vanessa Bell's tendency to become hysterical, Roiphe says, straight-facedly: "This difficulty may have prevented her from giving Angelica the necessary information for her life choices."
"There is, after all, something majestic in witnessing the entire sweep of a marriage, in seeing a note sent in the mail, a hidden passage scrawled into a diary, a photograph of a couple drinking coffee in their garden," Roiphe writes. Majestic may not be the first description that comes to mind here. Wickedly enjoyable - or just plain prurient, depending on your point of view - might be more apt.
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