A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Peace and Consolation, by Alison Light
JANE O’GRADY
A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation By Alison Light Penguin £20
‘Falling in love’ is the most confected, insidious and bourgeois of social constructs.
For all its pretensions to luxuriantly wild inadvertency, it epitomises ‘false consciousness’, encouraging feminine passivity to the rampant male. So, variously, say feminists, the Left, Freudians, historians, evolutionary biologists and the religious – practically everyone, in fact.
A Radical Romance gives the finger to such sneers. Alison Light, author of Common People (about her forebears), Mrs Woolf and the Servants and other working-class histories, reminds the killjoy critics of the Left that Marx called religion not only ‘the opium of the people’ but also ‘the heart of a heartless world’.
Analogously, she argues that ‘romance … liberates us, temporarily at least, from the rigid stories of ourselves and where we came from, the Montagues and Capulets, and the murderous legacies of hatred, fear and disgust’.
In 1985, Light was teaching at a polytechnic while doing a doctorate at Sussex University. Having just finished writing an article defending ‘romance’, she was attending a history workshop on ‘popular romance’ at Ruskin College, Oxford, when someone pointed Raphael Samuel out to her (he was well known for having written People’s History and Socialist Theory). Sitting on the floor in a bomber jacket and scruffy jeans, with long unkempt hair, smoking a roll-up, he looked (she thought) ‘a bit of an old hippy’.
‘Lovers dramatise themselves as if they walk a tightrope across an abyss of contingency,’ says Light, and she and Samuel would later rehearse the what ifs, salient clues and near-misses of their love story. For 18 months, she was merely one of the large popular-fiction reading group sitting in his East End kitchen every week. They accidentally met in a queue at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the Mall, and she was ‘seduced by his attentiveness’ – so unusual in distinguished male academics – to her ideas. He phoned to ask her advice about neo-victorian fittings, and, in their subsequent meetings for dinner, she noted in her diary that it ‘might be possible to fall in love with him, despite the impossible hair’. But because he was ‘impeccably well-mannered with everyone’, she felt it would be ‘presumptuous’ to imagine anything other than friendship on his side.
Light is well aware of ‘memory’s elasticity’. As a historian herself,
she is clearly aiming for total accuracy, and is determinedly honest about the difficulties in their relationship. Aged 50 when they first met, Samuel was 20 years older than she was, and from a workingclass Jewish background which she loved but was not entirely at ease in, though she became very close to his mother, an energetic Trotskyite composer. She was awed by his scholarship, reputation and famous friends and afraid of being seen as his protégée.
His house in then-ungentrified Spitalfields became the third person in their marriage. Built in 1727, it felt more Dickensian than Georgian, with an outside loo and one room on each of the five floors accessed by a creaky staircase; dusty, dark, draughty, utterly cluttered with pictures, postcards, pewter, old stones, bric-à-brac and books. Because it seemed so unsuited to children, she kept postponing, maybe regrettably, her decision to have any.
She suffered a depression so crippling that she would lie fully clothed in the bathtub next to the kitchen; she is unclear about how long this lasted, and was surprised, when consulting her diaries, to discover how early in the marriage it occurred.
But she also conveys their mutual enjoyment of each other and of their respective work in their respective studies, and how loving, eccentric, exuberant and clever Samuel was, with his ‘steely gentleness’. He was oblivious to others’ opinions (she once saw him squatting on a crowded pavement outside a West End theatre, intently correcting proofs), yet generous and empathetic. Like Romeo and Juliet’s, the Samuels’ story is framed by death. They had less than ten years together and, as Light admits, who knows what might have happened had they had longer.
But, as Samuel said in the last stages of his cancer, ‘They can’t take the purity of our romance away, darling, can they?’