Thursday, August 15, 2019

The Love Letters of the King by Richard Le Gallienne (1901)

This was called The Life Romantic in Britain - I read the American edition. It is the same old Gallienne to a strong extent, but I do notice a welcome change. It is a change hard to pin down in some ways, but best exemplified by saying that, though it has the same philosophical preoccupations as always, and the same high-falutin' over-delicacy about them, it does also show signs of increased gutsiness of appreciation of them. There is some iron in the skeleton of this which accrues weight to the proceedings. And then leads to quite strong plot-lines: Pagan Wasteneys, the main character, even gets to the point of wishing to become a 'holy killer' toward the end, which hasn't been on the cards in any of Gallienne's other tales of great love to date! It is the story of a young, but no longer very young, man in a crisis of love. The obsession which typifies it has detrimental effects! Wasteneys philosophises about the minutiae of the great emotion, trying to get to the bottom of his locked existence via various women who surround him - this trope is familiar right through his oeuvre, but particularly from his first novel The Quest of the Golden Girl. Some of his attitudes toward women will make modern readers twist and wriggle in their easy chairs; they're like artsy pontifical versions of extremely conservative ones of today. Interestingly, in the end, it is not any quality in one of the women which releases him from his misery. Instead it is a day out alone in nature which does the trick. This sounds hopelessly twee, but is in fact reasonably well put. One chilling thing about this narrative, as mentioned earlier, is the fact that Gallienne posits a certain near-climactic stage of this process as being one where Wasteneys decides to kill the woman of his obsession, in some sort of heightened consciousness of doing a greater good, once he has realised that they can never break the deadlock and be together. This is a frighteningly calmly put echo of the kind of process of thought that I'm pretty sure a lot of obsessed men of our time go through before they murder their partners. What a window, even if it is one with Gallienne's rose-tinted Edwardian high-cultural biases.