Frances Wilson
WORDS OF LOVE
Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939
By Katie Roiphe ((Virago 352pp £12.99))

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Uncommon Arrangements explores the dynamics of seven miserable 'marriages à la mode'. From the hell that was life with H G Wells ('I am thinking continually', wrote his wife, who shared him with a harem, 'of the disappointing mess of it') to the weirdness of being loved by Radclyffe Hall, each relationship was for the most part a self-consciously hectic arrangement involving a fair amount of bed-hopping and hypocrisy.

Uncommon Arrangements is really another book about Bloomsbury, as most of the marriages discussed involve either Bloomsberries themselves or those who grew in their shade. We have the union of Lady Ottoline and Philip Morrell, a lifeless concoction regenerated for a while by the philosophising of Ottoline's lover, Bertrand Russell; the 'curiously abstract' arrangement between the exquisite Katherine Mansfield and monastic John Middleton Murry; the fizzy cocktail of Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell and anyone who turned up at Charleston; and the almost comic cruelty of Earl Russell, deranged elder brother of Bertrand, to his wife, novelist Elizabeth von Arnim, who was cousin to Katherine Mansfield. The book closes with the 'semi-detached' marriage of Vera Brittain to the hapless George Gordon Catlin, who found himself cuckolded first by the ghost of her former fiancé killed in the war, and then by Vera's devotion to the writer and journalist, Winifred Holtby. 'You preferred her to me', Catlin wrote after Holtby died. 'It humiliated me and ate me up.'

Because the stories of these marriages are already well documented and in some cases have formed a mythology of sorts, the strength of Uncommon Arrangements lies in their cumulative impact, which is striking. Taken together, two things become apparent: first, that faithless husbands have a pathetic dependence on their wives ('You are, in so many things', HG wrote to Jane Wells at the height of his involvement with Rebecca West, 'bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh and my making. I must keep you'). Second, that rejected partners have a pathetic dependence on the rejecting spouse: 'I am always coming across things that hurt', said Una Troubridge of Radclyffe Hall's decade-long affair with Evguenia Souline, 'the door I must not open, the letter I must not read, the thing I must not say, the caresses that are given elsewhere and not to me. She is the holiday, the excitement and the pleasure and I am the tired old routine who offers nothing new.' Yet Troubridge stayed with Radclyffe Hall for the rest of her life.

Marriage is, as Roiphe says, 'by definition an uncommunicable state', but for the couples she discusses - all of whom, apart from the society hostess Ottoline Morrell and the painter Vanessa Bell, were writers - communicating the state they were in was very much a part of the experience of being married. Using the many letters, memoirs and diaries produced by either the spouse, the mistress, the lover or the whole crew, Roiphe works her way 'inside' each marriage, taking apart its 'oily mechanism' so she can 'feel it in my hands, and see how it work[s]'. Biography is a dirty business, but the purpose of this dismantling is 'selfish' rather than academic. 'What can they tell me?' Roiphe asks of each marriage, 'What can they teach?'

The disingenousness of the question becomes fully apparent at the end of the book when, mechanisms exposed, instead of now revealing what she has learned from the bohemians, Roiphe makes another, rather different, point instead. What might it mean, she asks, 'to love in words? For a certain type of person the words are inextricable from the experience.' The question is all the more tantalising because while Roiphe has chosen to explore the marriages of specifically literary people who all, at times, found words inextricable from experience, she has shied away from 'dismantling' what it actually means 'to love in words' as opposed to loving in the flesh or loving over a good bottle of claret. Her line of approach is sociological rather than literary; her focus is on how the generation that followed the Victorians reconceived the domestic and erotic rather than what it is like to be more involved in literature than life. Whatever drew these couples together or drove them apart, the seductive and destructive appeal of the written word had nothing do with it.

The problem for me with Uncommon Arrangements is that writers - real writers - are not like other people. As Henry Miller put it to Anaïs Nin, 'I am at core a writer and not a human being.' Flaubert put it differently: 'I write a love letter, to write, and not because I love.' Because Katie Roiphe discusses writers as though they were human beings who wrote love letters because they loved, and because she sees writing as either creative or 'therapeutic' rather than as something intoxicating and obsessive, a drive which can erase the significance of all else, she misses a major part of the sexual dynamic she sets out to explore. Only in the case of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry does she recognise the part played by writing in the relationship: 'the relationship had become ... constructed entirely out of words: telegrams, letters, and notes had become the substance of their love, rather than the expression of it'. The relationship between H G Wells and Rebecca West was also constructed out of words: from the start Wells responded to West as a writer rather than as a woman, and she fell in love with the writer at the core of him. For Vera Brittain the case was different but no less extreme: she found experience palatable only when it had been edited, mythologised and placed on the page, hence she spent her life producing autobiographies.

As a book about marriage, Uncommon Arrangements will teach you many things, none of them comfortable; but the peculiar pleasures and pains of marriage to a writer remain as incommunicable as ever they were.

Frances Wilson's books include 'Literary Seductions' and, most recently, 'The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsorth' (Faber & Faber).