Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

The ‘enclosed’ was a facsimile of the 1502 first printing of Herodotus’ The Histories in the original Greek, bound in calfskin and bookmarked at the passage which tells of how Candaules, King of Lydia, a man disordered by the love he bears his wife, arranges for another man, Gyges — a well-regarded subordinate, but a subordinate all the same — to spy upon her nakedness. Outraged to discover this liberty taken with her person, the queen (to whom Herodotus never gives a name) offers Gyges a terrible choice — either he pays with his life for what he has unlawfully seen, or he assassinates her husband and succeeds as King of Lydia in his place.

Not knowing the state of my Greek, Victor included a translation of this famous story, for all that he was sure, given my precocious cleverness, I had ‘no need of it’. I say ‘famous’ but in truth the tale of Gyges and Candaules is well known only to classicists and to men of my strain for whom, despite the unfortunate ending, it enjoys the status of a sort of founding myth.

This much I can say about it today, but at the time I was out of my depth. I might have been a precocious turner of sentences but I had only briefly kissed one girl; to ask me to draw fine distinctions between degrees of wife-mongering was to ask too much. Now, of course, water having passed beneath the bridge, I get what Victor wanted me to understand: that there is a world of difference between the everyday torments a jealous husband suffers and that desire which is so overwhelming you have to share it. Love was at the bottom of it for both of them; but whereas Anselmo shrank into his own terrors under the alchemy of love, Candaules so could not contain the ardour of his desire that it spilled over into a thing it would not be fantastical to call philanthropy.

From the opening lines of Herodotus’ narrative — and I quote from the popular translation by G. C. Macaulay which Victor sent me — Candaules appears uxorious beyond the common run of men.

This Candaules then of whom I speak had become passionately in love with his own wife; and having become so, he deemed that his wife was fairer by far than all other women; and thus deeming. .

. . thus deeming, he contrives to have Gyges hide himself where he can see the queen disrobing for bed.

Is not the idea of a man becoming passionately in love with his wife intriguing? We must assume, else why would the opposite be remarked on, that husbands in the kingdom of Lydia neither married for love, nor found it after marriage. So this is a love story before it is anything else. First the rare and unexpected love which King Candaules bears his wife,then the conviction of her superlative beauty, then the wish to have it seen. To my mind an ineluctable progression.

Ask why King Candaules couldn’t have been content with Gyges beholding the queen clothed and you enter into the unconditional nature of his passion.

‘It was the completeness of my wife ’s beauty I fell for,’ he will tell you from whichever circle of lovers’ hell he inhabits. ‘Not the colour of her eyes or the turn of her neck, but the sum total of her parts, the harmony of her, and that harmoniousness, you must surely see, can only be appreciated naked .’

Ask why he couldn’t have been content to enjoy the totality of this beauty for himself alone and you touch upon the nature not only of romantic love, in one of its extreme forms, but of art as well.

‘The instinct to share that which we find beautiful,’ he will go on, ‘lies deep within our natures. It is not only for ourselves, but for others to look at too, that we hang paintings we care for upon our walls. The man who hides his artworks in a vault is considered to have deprived the world of a pleasure, some would go so far as to say an entitlement. Though I would lose my kingdom and my life for it, I could not deny the world its entitlement.’

Before succumbing to Candaules’ feverish persuasion, Gyges voiced the conventional man’s objections. ‘Master, when a woman puts off her tunic she puts off her modesty also.’

An observation seconded by Herodotus himself. ‘For among the Lydians as also among most other Barbarians it is a shame even for a man to be seen naked.’

But a man as mad in love as Candaules was in love, a man who had committed the folly of falling in love with his own wife, who found her nakedness too beautiful for himself to gaze on all alone, such a man knows shame only to court it. The greater wrong it was for a Lydian woman to be seen naked, the greater the necessity for Candaules to bring that wrong about.

I don’t condone it. I tremble before its imperatives as he must have done, that’s all.

Though the story isn’t officially over until the queen discovers what has happened and delivers Gyges her fearful ultimatum — kill him or die yourself — it’s over for me the moment Gyges sees, as I imagine it, how right Candaules was to estimate his wife ’s beauty so highly. For those who like a moral, the moral is on the side of modesty. But for me it is not a cautionary fable about impudicity. For me it is a tragedy. What is a husband to do when his wife ’s beauty is such that he cannot find enough ways of honouring it?

None of this, as I have said, meant anything to me when I was sixteen. Yes, Faith had sought the kisses of another boy, and I could still taste something scalding sweet sluicing through my stomach when I remembered it, but I made no connections. I read the story Victor had marked for me, saw it as an attempt to put a classical gloss on lewd and dishonourable behaviour, blushed a few more times for my own close shave with shame, and thought no more about it. But that doesn’t mean it was not all the time quietly eating at my soul, preparing me, without my knowledge, for Marisa.

Had I known what its effects would be I would have thanked Victor in person.

Not that those thanks would ever have reached him. About two months after my visit a fire consumed the house in Cookham. Neither Victor nor Joyce Gowan survived it. The fire took everything — the people, the photographs, the paintings, and all that had been left of Victor’s library.

THIS IS NOT, IN THE CONVENTIONAL SENSE AT LEAST, A FAMILY STORY. IF anything it is an anti-family story, the whole point of me, I have come to understand, being the example I set of how a man might win freedom from the evolutionary imperative. Never mind, I say, what happens to your seed. Let others overleap yours with their own if their biology dictates it. My seed is going nowhere. This is how I answer Marius who thought mankind was finished. Behold in me the promise of a brave new humanity, heroically careless of selection or extinction, come out of Darwin’s swamp at last.

So how does this heroic new humanity continue?

Questions, questions. It isn’t only the cuckold who’s forever wanting an answer to the question what happens next.

We stand on midgets’ shoulders — that’s how we prosper. We continue because we are parasitic on life ’s common seed-bearers. And ‘Your parasite,’ as Mosca, parasite of Volpone exults, ‘Is a most precious thing, dropped from above, / Not bred’mongst clods and clodpolls here on earth.’

Similarly your cuckold: callous, vain, as slippery as an eel, but a most precious thing. An example to future men, for the very reason that no future can proceed from us. We burn up like the phoenix. What’s bad in us, dies with us. We have no followers and belong to no sects. And we are fools to no belief systems, unless a wife is a belief system.

But I come from family even if I won’t be having one of my own, and I don’t think I compromise my exemplary refusal of evolution by saying a little more about the family firm of which I am the sole director. Though my father opposed my taking over the business, crediting me with no aptitude for any line of work other than ‘weeping into pillows’, my uncles honoured me with a trust I went out of my way to justify, even long after they’d died and my father was declined into a life of weeping into pillows and otherwise wetting beds himself, playing canasta in an old persons’ home from morning to night with elderly ladies who sat with their legs apart, on which account he made them promises he could not keep.