So Much for Loving

I’ve been reading Aphra Behn’s love letters again, the ones to John Hoyle. I am drawn to them in idle hours, imagining inky scribbles on thick, dusty sheets instead of photocopied print on thin white pages. Sometimes I read them aloud, trying out the soft whispers and passionate inflections I imagine from Behn, and hear the pleading, desperate desire in my own voice. I listen for those twists of language that mark the fine line between love and hate, devotion and dismissal, obsession and indifference. My cat Cleo perks up when I proclaim Behn’s reckless love alone in my bedroom. She looks at me quizzically, her head cocked, blinking.

Aphra Behn probably wrote her insistent love letters to John Hoyle during the winter months of 1672. She also wrote at least seventeen plays for the London stage between 1670 and 1687 along with a short novel, Oroonoko. Her work is read in college classrooms today, where her plays are studied for their witty repartee and strong female characters. Her work is remembered because, among other achievements, Behn was the first English woman to earn a living by her pen, causing Virginia Woolf to note: “all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds”.

Yet accounts of her life are sketchy at best. Behn’s year of birth, childhood home and the identities of her parents are unknown. But there are a few certainties. She sailed to Surinam in her early twenties; there, she married a Mr Behn, who died soon after. She was a spy for King Charles II in Antwerp, yet upon returning to England she found herself destitute. So she wrote, and became one of the most popular playwrights of the age.

It is also certain that Behn loved John Hoyle, a handsome, merciless, unfaithful man who would never love Behn the way she desired. In her letters, she called him Lycidas; she signed herself Astrea. In the eight surviving letters, published posthumously, she employed various strategies to entice her lover: teasing him, railing at him, declaring her undying devotion. But underneath there was always this: Where are you? When will I see you again? Why are you so cold and neglectful? The winter season of 1672 may have given an urgent edge to her pleas. Perhaps the chill, the dim candlelight and wet snow on the window sill made her press further for Hoyle, insisting on the return of his warm body and rare kindness.

From her biographies and letters, novels, plays and poems, I imagine Behn as a woman who easily broke into song and dance, who would stop by a friend’s home just to tell a funny story or read from her latest comedy. She was probably one of those rare people who did and felt everything wholeheartedly, capable of grand, sweeping highs and crushing lows, scribbling at spare moments, or forced to when she was out of money. In her early thirties, Behn was at the height of her career. She lived in a vibrant city and supported herself with work she enjoyed. Her vivacious manner and talent won her many famous and influential friends. Her lifetime spanned an unprecedented period of history when an exceptional woman such as herself could presume to write plays for the London stage. By any standard, particularly that of the 1670s, Behn had an incredible life. Yet something was missing: love. 

I wonder, though, as I read the letters, retracing her anger and loneliness, reconciliation and sacrifices, how she could have waited for Hoyle night after night, only to be disappointed and emotionally battered. I look back at Cleo, who has now fallen asleep, her paws covering her eyes as if watching a scary movie, as if she knows what’s going to happen next. How could a woman like Behn have submitted to Hoyle?

This, I say may be the Danger; I may come off unhurt, but cannot be a Winner … 

His name is like an incantation, a word in a spell: Majid. At first I say it fast, running through the letters, stressing the hard d. But he takes his time. On the phone, he says, “Hey, it’s Mah-jeed.” And the accent is on the ma, as benign as the word map, as foreboding as malice. At the Blue Moose Café, I sit staring at the pages of my book, not comprehending, pronouncing his name again and again in my mind, hoping I’ll say it right this time. He enters, the swoosh of a long black pea coat, and sits down, flashing hazel eyes at me, black curly hair flopping over his forehead. I meet his gaze for a moment, then search the nicked tabletop instead, drumming my fingernails against the wood. He picks up my book and flips through the pages, his thumb rippling the edges. I watch his long, slender fingers and feel as though holding my book is as close to holding my hand.

I think of past relationships and wonder if Behn would have scolded me, numbering me among the many women who deny their passions, their right to exalt in love. I am too cautious, too aloof, and I wonder if I have it in me to love like Behn, if her intense response is innate, encoded in genes, or something I too might learn. Would I willingly go through the inevitable pain such love causes, for the splendid hours?

Majid calls a week later. I invite him over on a Sunday night, when he is tired of studying heart malfunctions. We sit on opposite ends of my futon, watching television. His conversation is cursory and distracted, discussing economic theories, gas prices, Excel spreadsheets, medical studies. When Majid has finished positing theories, we tentatively stretch out, his arms around me. I flip through the channels, unable to concentrate on the screen. Behn’s grand passion tugs at me like a persistent child: a woman should know at first glance, from the curve of a half smile, the way rifling through the pages of my book makes me feel as though he is touching me. 

I conjure thee, if possible, to come to Morrow about Seven or Eight at Night, that I may tell you in what a deplorable Condition you left me to Night.

In 1660, the start of the Restoration—when Charles II was restored to the throne after Oliver Cromwell’s puritanical rule—Aphra Behn would have noticed a shift in attitudes towards women, love and sex. Under Cromwell, theatres were boarded up, all forms of public entertainment banned. The style was severe: London was awash with shades of muted blues and charcoal gray. After being denied so much under the strictures of the Commonwealth, the ruling classes longed for sensory pleasure again. They wanted colour, opulence, and bawdy, explicit entertainment.

Behn subscribed to the Restoration’s Epicurean philosophy, but only to a degree. Here was the problem: the new moral code held that male desire was so unpredictable, so fleeting, that no woman should expect constancy. The men who endorsed this lifestyle were called libertines; they believed love was a myth, a sentimental word used to decorate raw, sexual desire that was easily satisfied—the woman lusted after immediately discarded. Men no longer wrote poems to the eternal beauty of their mistresses, but goaded them into surrender. And while women were no longer seen as passive beings to be enjoyed and penetrated, their men spurned them for the pleasure they showed. 

Behn liked the idea of sexual freedom unbound by marriage and class privilege, but she argued that the only love worth having was one of equal and total submission. She wrote, “What would love signify if we did not love fervently? In matters of love, excess is a virtue, and all other degrees of love are worthy of scorn alone.” Despite this idealistic philosophy, Behn chose Hoyle, a lawyer who, while still a student, had stabbed an unarmed watchmaker in the street and fled the scene. He has been called an atheist, sodomite, corrupter of youth and blasphemer of Christ. Not only did she choose a man who would not love her equally, but a violent criminal, a man so arrogant and cruel it’s surprising he had any friends, let alone lovers. 

Behn believed that love had a purifying effect, that it could cut through power struggles and false ambitions; she thought her love could change this violent, self-loathing man. Who better than a woman like Behn? As she proclaimed in a love letter to Hoyle, “I love more than any Woman can be capable of: My Soul is form’d of no other Material than Love; and all that Soul of Love was form’d for my dear, faithless Lycidas.” But love didn’t work that way for Hoyle. “Renounce your false friendship, or let me see you give it entire to Astrea.” I imagine him reading ultimatums like this one and discarding them along with the other missives she’d sent over the last few months. He’d come to see her weeks later, reprimanding his mistress for being too gay and generous, her attention given too freely to so many others. Yet when she did stay in and wait for him, he complained she was too fond. Aphra’s passion revolted Hoyle. She knew just how he operated: “Greedy Lycidas! Unconscionable! and Ungenerous! You wou’d not be in Love for all the World, yet wish I were so, Uncharitable!” Yet none of these proclamations really mattered when faced with the possibility of losing Hoyle. Behn could not give him up.

Why I write them, I can give no account; ’tis but fooling my self, perhaps, into an Undoing. 

I put on red lipstick and wipe it off, leaving a light stain. I brush it on again, staring at this slash of shimmering red, wondering what it would mean if I went out with my lips bold and shiny. I grab a tissue and blot five or six times, until the colour is manageable, until I look like myself.

It isn’t so much seeing him as waiting to see him. The sun streaks through the kitchen window and I watch for his white Jeep in the alleyway next to my apartment. In these moments I am imagining what a great love like Behn’s might feel like. I try it on like the lipstick and wipe it off until the sensation is not so bold, so obvious. Majid’s Jeep pulls up. I watch him walk to my door, peer into my living room, his hand on his forehead to block the sun. As I let him in, a part of me wants to follow Behn in her folly, because despite all the inevitable pain, she lives more intensely, fully. She did not analyse from afar, aloof and casual, but passionate in the moment. It’s not a question of why; this was the only way she knew how to live.  

He tells me he likes like grey light along my skin on those chilly mornings when he slinks off to the hospital at six a.m. I fall back into a dream of a life together, but Majid and I are too careful with each other; we have none of Behn’s messiness, the inextricably tangled lives of lovers, and so I don’t know what it would be like to live by his side. The dream is filled with hazy images of his face, kissing me goodbye again and again before leaving.

When he calls I lie on my bed, Cleo again at my feet, looking at me in puzzlement. Something has made him think of me—a medical study on sleep-deprivation, an NPR report on a writer I mentioned—and this little kernel of affection delights me to an alarming degree. I find myself willing him to walk into the Brew Pub some nights, but he doesn’t find me until late, on my way home, once his friends have left the trendy nightclub I rarely frequent and am never invited to. Like Behn, I wonder if I’m someone to be ashamed of, a separate, distant piece of his reality. Another night, I see him unexpectedly. He wears a tan leather jacket and a button-down shirt, his curly hair gleaming under the bar’s dusky lights. I can’t believe such a beautiful man is actually, somewhat, mine. When I approach he tells me he has other people to meet, that the bar is so full of his old friends, and I feel as though I am withering away.

I wonder what it is about him besides his undeniably striking looks. It is not just his wild curiosity, his vulnerability and eager attraction to me when we are alone, or even that I sometimes sense he perceives me as an exceptional addition to his world of intelligent and attractive friends. It is instead the fact that he draws something out in me I’ve never known before: complete admiration. In those moments, I don’t need to have his affection match mine, but instead am happiest marvelling at his face, his hazel eyes staring back and me and knowing that for a short while at least, he is mine. These flashes of recognition utterly move me. Yet, after six months, this acceptance is not easy to maintain. Friends tell me to give him up—he will never be in a real relationship with me; I deserve better. When I have not heard from Majid in weeks, my rational self agrees. I try to break it off with him several times. I am inexplicably cold and moody when he finally calls or shows up at my door, and he can’t figure me out. I date other men who barely register; each time, I keep coming back to Majid’s face.

I wish my attraction held some of Behn’s artful desperation, but I do not write love letters or advise other women to feel deeply at all costs. My love story will pass through the world unnoticed. I am cautious, but do not deny the truth either: he has undone me in my quiet way, and I hope not to redeem him but that he will redeem me, save me, but from what exactly?

I don’t know what to think any more. I’m tired of trying on the models of a seventeenth-century writer; I hate Hoyle’s brand of love. While Behn’s relationship is preordained to self-destruct, I hope mine will do something much more subtle, but what? Majid is no John Hoyle, and I am no Aphra Behn. We will make our own way, slowly, stumbling. I will be lonely sometimes but not desperately so. He will hurt me occasionally but not on purpose, not out of a desire to control. Our lives will be less complicated and messy; we will never experience those grand highs and lows. But it will somehow count; I won’t forget this feeling. 

Either let me never see that Charming Face, or ease my Soul of so tormenting an Agony, as the cruel Thought of not be belov’d.

Behn wrote in a fever, a disease of anxiety, suddenly conjuring the worst: debtor’s prison, pauper’s clothes, clinks of change in a tin cup. One thing that never failed her was writing—a witty line, another brazen female character, an improved plot from a French play. The repartee came easily, the intrigues, the volatile and comic relationships. These devices snapped into her mind in the middle of the night, in the heat of worry, the image of losing all she’d built up with her pen.

She also knew her worth. In the preface to one of her later plays, The Lucky Chance, Behn writes, “I value Fame as much as if I had been born a Hero; and if you rob me of that, I can retire from the ungrateful World, and scorn its fickle favours.” She had been confident in her talent, ready to renounce the world if it could not recognise her genius. But underneath was still the woman who believed fervently in love, who proclaimed its benevolent effect on a society rife with power struggles; underneath was still the woman who crumbled under the stare of John Hoyle, whose love lifted neither of their lives to anything close to purity.

A year before she fell in love, Hoyle appears in Behn’s poem “Our Cabal”. The verses describe the romantic intrigues among her friends. Even though Behn is involved with another man in the poem, Hoyle dominates the work with his cold black eyes, his self-absorption, his obvious yet strangely alluring contempt for those around him 

His eyes are Black, and do transcend
All Fancy e’er can comprehend …
But for new Victories he prepares,
And leaves the Old to its Despairs.

She knew what loving him would mean, how much his falsehood would hurt her, but a year later, the pleading letters and tortured poems began. She chose him because she knew they would not be a conventional pair, that their relationship would, one day, end. She needed to know that desperate love, that cloying lust. It was a writing experiment, a test of will, the most important game of her life. 

I read Behn’s letters over and over because I can see a part of her in so many love songs that tell us to feel desperate, crazy love. Because I sympathise and wonder at her strength and submission, and I hate the excuses she makes for her foolish and irrational behaviour. And I realise, more so with each new reading of her letters, that this is her point. I recognise Behn in all the women I know. She is the ultimate woman scorned; she is a drama queen; she is a teenager, heartbroken for the first time. She is all of us, at our worst and best, when we allow ourselves to commit to her brand of all-consuming love.

So much for Loving. 

Before I met Majid, I saw him at a play. He was wearing the grey T-shirt he would later wear often to my apartment, layered over a thin white shirt, both lifted over his head and onto my living room floor. But when I first saw him, I couldn’t imagine touching his body, waking up next to him, that face so close to mine. At the theatre, he didn’t notice me, passed right by. I went into the bathroom and searched my face in the mirror. I found nothing to keep him, but felt a strange delight at just having looked. I still search my face in the mirror, when I brush on red lipstick and wipe it off, when he comes over late at night, and I’m wearing glasses, my hair in a ponytail, and still find nothing there that might hold his interest. The delight remains in seeing his face peer through my window, watching his hands rifle through another book, and imagining what might come. I know it won’t be declarations of love, a dramatic interlude on a rain-swept night. We will move to other cities and find other lovers, but he is still the only man who made me come close to Behn’s testaments, gave me an inkling of her notion of love.

In the final letter, Behn is at her most vehement. Hoyle has left her again, and she is finally exhausted by this desperate routine. It seems as though she might finally end it, realise that her love cannot change him. But then there is the postscript: “I beg you will not fail to let me hear from you, to Day, being Wednesday, and see you at Night if you can.”

Perhaps Behn asked him over to say that she finally wants to be left in peace, no more letters or visits or tortured nights. Maybe she has realised that even his rare kindnesses would soon dissolve. But somehow I doubt this. On Wednesday, or whenever it was that Hoyle decided to drop by, she probably forgot her goodbye speech; all the anger she’d tried to keep boiling probably evaporated at the sight of him.

But eventually Behn did manage to leave Hoyle. She had accepted that her love would never match his, and finally decided that love for herself, pride in her writing and accomplishments, trumped the euphoria of Hoyle’s hard-won affection. This too I admire. She went on to have affairs with women, maybe a few brief romantic encounters with men, but there was no one like Hoyle. One of the few certainties of Behn’s life is John Hoyle. I have to wonder if she had wanted it that way, if their brief affair was something she meant to leave as a part of her legacy. Along with her plays, novels and poems, this romance might be a lesson left to women of future generations. Despite all the pain and disappointment, the attempt to love is somehow worthwhile. It is a sacrifice that makes us stronger, wise, purer. Perhaps. When I put down her letters, I imagine Behn at her desk, a smirk rising on her delicate lips, as she writes, “So much for loving,” and not meaning a word of it.