Cursed by love unrequited

One hundred words. That’s all I’ve got to show for a day’s work. I have been trying to write about a time when I was young and unrequitedly in love and after a day at my computer I have written 100 words. The problem is the unrequited love, of course. It screwed things up back then and it still screws them up 45 years later. One hundred words. Ha.

I am used to taking time over words. As the wise man said, no writing is ever finished. It is only ever abandoned. But still, 100 words in a day! Old unrequited love will put me in the Poor House.

Because it was hard I was easily distracted. I checked clothes on the line that I knew were still damp. I re-ordered a bookshelf. I went online to watch clips of Trump lying.

I even went to the lavatory when I didn’t need to, and it was there that I met Kathleen Raine. She had a couple of poems in the Oxford Book of English Verse. I liked them.

Back at my desk, still struggling for words, I googled Kathleen Raine. Guess what. Exactly. Unrequited love screwed her up. And how.

The love of her life was Gavin Maxwell, who wrote Ring of Bright Water. No, I haven’t read it either but I know it was the story of his life with otters. What I didn’t know was that the title is taken from a poem by Raine.

Though Raine married two other men, it was Maxwell whom she loved. But Maxwell, even though he was briefly married, was homosexual.

Raine either didn’t know this or, more likely, chose not to know it, because she continued to lay her love at his feet for him to spurn.

Unrequited love is stubborn stuff. You could even call it stupid, but doing so won’t stop it being stubborn.

And when, after years of beating at the door of Maxwell’s affections, Raine finally accepted that the door was not going to open and admit her, she gave vent. She cursed the man she loved. ‘‘Let Gavin suffer in this place,’’ she wrote, ‘‘as I am suffering now.’’

Well now, Maxwell had an otter called Mijbil. He brought it back from Iraq as a pup and reared it, cared for it, wrote about it, doted on it. Then Raine lost it. She’d been charged with looking after it, but she let it escape and the otter died.

Maxwell was distraught, but Raine was even more distraught. She felt Mijbil’s death wasn’t just her fault; it was her curse’s fault – and she a good rational woman living in the second half of the 20th century.

Then, over the next few years, the curse really got to work. Maxwell’s depression worsened. His business ventures failed. His house burned down. Raine blamed all of this on her curse. And finally the man she loved got cancer and died, aged 50-something. The Greek tragedians would have revelled in it.

As is usual with curses, the curser lived on for many years. Eventually in 2003 at the age of 95 she went out to post a letter and was knocked down by a reversing car. The Greeks would have called that bathos.

What else is there is to say about it all? Nothing, except that unrequited love screws things up. And yet, for all its folly and for all its misery, I bet Kathleen Raine wouldn’t have unwished it. Not for one moment. And neither would I. However hard it is to find the words for.