Her hymn to love was beautiful, but Jeannette Winterson's mistake is to generalise this most specific of emotions
The Guardian honoured Valentine's Day on Tuesday with a front page piece by Jeanette Winterson on love. It was a fine idea, given prominence over the euro, phone hacking and Syria. Winterson is a glorious writer and a delightful person. But why a woman? Why is it that only women can write of love?
The stereotype holds that women do love and men do lager. Women are delicate and sensitive and men crude and unthinking. In Dickens and Trollope women are cardboard, in Austen and Eliot they are passionate and alive. To Winterson, men are mere suitors and wooers, while "women have to do the love-work needed to make life more than a series of dates". The Guardian would no more have a man celebrate Valentine's Day than a woman celebrate cage fighting.
Winterson's hymn to love was beautiful. She eulogised "known love, new love, love's ghosts, love's hopes". A 60s nostalgic, she set love against money and power, and cited Haight-Ashbury and the anti-war movement. Love, she said, was not for weekends, flowers and chocolates, but rather an ecosystem, ever vulnerable to pollution. She wanted a National Love Day, transcending romance and sex with what appears to be a mass hug-in. She waxed so biblical I expected her to burst into 1 Corinthians 13: "Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up."
This lurches perilously between pulpit platitude and Lennon and Ono's "make love not war". The latter involved a week in bed in the Amsterdam Hilton, with acorns sent to world leaders. The couple planned bed-ins round the world until the bed in the Bahamas Sheraton proved too hot and sticky. Commentators deplored love being reduced to an existential abstraction, good for no one but hippies, theologians and narcissists. It was like Molesworth's Fotherington Thomas, "who sa hullo clouds, hullo sky and skip like a girlie". As abstraction it was ridiculous.
I met Winterson at dinner this week and protested love's transitive nature. Its emotional force lay in there being another person, an object to the verb, a beloved. It could not be generalised across the world. Love demanded a strong definition. The great lady was surrounded by friends who looked at me as might Jeremy Clarkson on seeing a cyclist eating quiche on Top Gear. How dare a man speak thus in the presence of love's priestess? We hope, they cried, he won't do something disgusting like write about it.
Jeannette, of course, was sweetness and light. She retorted that love begins intransitively, as a state of mind within us. It is a necessary prelude to fastening on a person. It is something that needs to be felt before moving to engagement, an attitude of mind, an outlook on the world. Hence her adoption of it to drive a social movement transcending conflicts and, presumably, personal relations.
I remain unconvinced. Verbs without objects slither towards emptiness. We cannot feel compassion or sympathy without having someone to direct them at. We may be generous and tolerant in the abstract, but we cannot love in the abstract. Famous lovers of mankind, such as the Dalai Lama or Mother Theresa, are better seen as selfless, soothing or contemplative. The word love is easily reduced to triteness, yet it is so deep and explosive in its reference that it commands definitional respect.
That is why the Greeks needed a range of words for love: agape, eros, philia and storge, roughly translated as affection, desire, companionship and parental bonding. Winterson has written so movingly of love's darkening hinterland, in loss, jealousy and pain, in betrayed friendships and parental love denied. She must know it is a concept not to be treated lightly or misapplied. Love is never all you need, any more than it is just for Valentine's Day.
That said, I like the idea of occasionally seeking qualities that lift humanity above the rude mechanics of economics and society. Jan Morris is another writer tempted, like Winterson, to straighten the crooked timber of mankind. She fixed on kindness. In her masterpiece on Trieste, she wrote of a diaspora of the kind, "sharing, across all nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality. They suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful."
Morris even toyed with founding a kindness party. Sitting on her balmy terrace in the Snowdonia, I remember slipping easily into her reverie of kindly bliss. We tried to draft a manifesto, until the chianti got the better of us. I suggested a tolerance party, a fairness party, even a love party, à la Winterson. I settled on a courtesy party.
I borrowed courtesy from the art historian, Kenneth Clark. When he asked himself what civilisation most required to go forward, he chose "the rituals by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos". He wrote that it was through courtesy that society enabled individuals to be themselves and genius to flower. It required an accepted framework of behaving towards others, dignity in human relationships, customs and gestures of respect. Only thus would we avoid Yeats's hell, where "passionate intensity" was confined to the worst.
I would reclaim love from abstraction and platitude, and marry it to courtesy. Then Winterson could be prime minister.
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