PARTISAN REVIEW
123
ventures, with the single exception of Vita's passing involvement with
Geoffrey Scott, author of the widely praised
Architecture of Humanism,
were always for each of them homosexual. Far more than it was a
phenomenon of bisexuality, the marriage was an example of the suprem–
acy of friendship between the sexes over sex between the sexes -- and
this, I suspect, is why Mr. Nicolson's book is so attractive to the
present-day public, especially an American public. From Freud, that
most bedint of psychologists bred in middle-class Vienna, Americans
have for some years now learned that a properly ongoing marriage is
built upon the kind of love which is nurtured in, also expressed in,
sexuality, "mature" (i.e., reciprocally genital) sexuality. Fundamental to
marriage, in the Freudian view, is sexual fidelity; where fidelity breaks
down, neurosis is believed to have taken over. More recently, however,
this imperative of an invigorating monogamy has lost much of its force as
a troubling ideal of marital health. In fact, our American post-Freudian
culture is in many ways coming to resemble the still-ruling pre-Freudian
culture of England, a country
who~_
personal choices continue to be
largely determined by a class in which the arrangement of family life
meets few of the conditions which Freud took for granted. Not only for
the American young or for the consciously "free" but for many classes
of Americans, even, one is told, in solid suburbia, the assumption that
love is exclusive, like the idea that it is limited to persons of opposite
gender and is properly rooted in "normal" appetites; loses the reassuring
grip it was once thought to have on the imagination .
It
constitutes no
new or radical insight to recognize that if sex makes the foundation of a
marriage and something goes wrong sexually between a husband and
wife, perhaps only that they no longer have mystery for one another,
inevitably the whole of the relation is damaged; what Mr. Nicolson's
book provides is welcome evidence that sex and love do not necessarily
even combine, let alone bolster each other. In any culture at any time a
relation such as existed between Mr. Nicolson's parents, the enduring
affection and respect and sympathy they had for each other, would
represent a rare attainment; and it is understandable that at the present
time, when we try to persuade ourselves that there are fresh and lasting
solutions for old woes in all departments of life, we should regard the
success they made of their marriage as containing a generally applicable
lesson. Certainly in Vita and Harold's situation, in which both the
husband and the wife were predominantly homosexual, the elimination
of sex from the relation provided not just a first but an absolute
condition of their enduring peace and happiness. But the sexlessness of
the marriage was also what it seldom, if ever, could be in the marriage of
