On the Possibility of ‘Late Love’
A review of Peter Stamm's new novel: 'The Archive of Feelings'
Peter Stamm’s new novel, The Archive of Feelings (Other Press, December, 2023) interrogates the old French aphorism on n’aime qu’une fois, la première (one’s first love is one’s only love). Or, as Cat Stevens might put it, “the first cut is the deepest.” Seamlessly interweaving the past and the present, fantasy and reality The Archive of Feelings charts the psychological fallout of an unnamed narrator’s unrequited first love, Franziska, as it unfolds over four decades. Throughout, a sense of loss suffuses the tone of this elegiac and wistful novel. Aside from the novel’s exquisite construction and masterly control of tone, what’s most moving is Stamm’s examination of the possibility of a late love affair, after a lifetime of loneliness.
Stamm ranks today as one of Switzerland’s leading contemporary writers. The author of three collections of short stories, and seven previous novels—all translated from German by Michael Hofmann—Stamm was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013, and in 2014 he won the prestigious Friedrich Hölderlin Prize. World renowned, his work has been translated into more than thirty languages. As Claire Messud has noted in Harper’s Stamm’s “precise, dry prose builds suspense in its very insistence on the quotidian, creates narratives simultaneously ordinary and strange, even uncanny.”
Sexual and romantic entanglements fascinate Stamm and are frequently the subjects of his novels and stories because, as he has said: “Romantic relationships are probably the place where most tragedies happen in our modern, saturated lives. It’s where we are happy and sad, aroused and confused.”
At the beginning of The Archive of Feelings, we learn that the girl the narrator has been enamored of since he was nine years old, Franziska — his first love — does not reciprocate his sentiments. Even at that young age, when he is near her, he feels as if he was “in the middle of the world, and there were only the two of [them] and this moment in time; nothing and no one else…” Withdrawn and indecisive, he finally works up his nerve and tells her he loves her, then asks if he can kiss her. She obliges but tells him she is not in love with him and “the happiness of kissing her went under in the unhappiness of not being loved by her, and of secretly knowing that I didn’t deserve to be loved by her and never would.”
The repercussions of thinking he is unworthy leave him emotionally scared. Thereafter, all his relationships with women come to a sad end due to his “dithering” and his “unwillingness to accept responsibility, absentmindedness, and emotional coldness.” The men in Stamm’s novels are typically cold (which goes hand in hand with their piercing analytical ability to dissect their own — but not others — psychological state), distant, and somewhat callous. The women are no better.
First loves in literature (and who knows, maybe in real life as well) are a curious phenomenon, especially when they occur at an early age. They tend to be depicted with an aura of purity and innocence and generate unbridled passion that is rarely encountered in later life. Or, they become obsessions and drive wildly destructive and sometimes deadly behavior. One thinks of Catherine and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and the tragic end brought about by their unrequited love. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy Buchanan hurtles the plot forward to its catastrophic conclusion. To say nothing of the tempestuous (deadly!) love in almost every Shakespearean drama.
In more recent fiction, the archivist may remind us of Tom Aberant, in Johnathan Franzen’s Purity, who remains in thrall to his first love, Anabel Laird for four decades: “She’s eternal in me. Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person’s, and singularities like this are where you find eternity.” In his speech we hear echoes of Aristophanes concept of love as our search for wholeness, our desire to be united with our other half. This sounds nauseating rather than romantic (to me at any rate), but it is, in fact, the beginning of the idea of “romantic love” in the Western tradition. Of course, the concept leaves out the ensuing emotional carnage that can follow in the wake of such a belief.
Stamm is no stranger to stories about first loves. He explored this theme briefly in Unformed Landscape (2001), and more in depth in On a Day Like This (2006). In fact, the plot of The Archive of Feelings hews closely to the story line he carved out in On a Day Like This. In this novel, the protagonist, Andreas, leaves Paris to avoid hearing his lab test results which may show he has cancer. In Paris, he was involved with three women, in loveless, practical arrangements. He returns to his childhood home, ostensibly to deal with the graves of his parents, but actually to see his first love, Fabienne. She has haunted him all these years because — similar to the archivist in The Archive of Feelings— he loved her but she married another man.
Upon arrival in his village, Andreas, finds Fabienne not unhappily married, with children, living in “her little castle” behind a picket fence in a quiet neighborhood. He pursues her and succeeds in seducing her. He tells her that he loves her, that “he didn’t suppose he’d ever loved a woman as much as he’d loved her.” And that, twenty years later, he still wants her. Unsurprisingly, she is not willing to turn her life upside down for him. As far as picking up where they left off, “There’s no point,” she tells him. In a moment of clarity, Andreas realizes: “Presumably it wasn’t even Fabienne herself that he longed for so much as the love of those years, the unconditionality of the feeling that still floored him now, twenty years later.” He also understands that he “couldn’t feel like that anymore.”
The Archive of Feelings examines similar psychological territory. With no hope of winning Franziska’s affections, the narrator eventually goes to Paris to study, and at university enters into a relationship with a “dark-haired girl.” It ends badly because he “dithers” and doesn’t know what he wants from it. Back in his hometown after graduation, he creates a life for himself that is governed by routine: “I liked regularity and reacted angrily if my habits were disturbed.” He moves into his deceased mother’s house and continues his uneventful, empty existence — Franziska constantly on his mind.
At the press archive where he works (as an archivist), the narrator starts an affair with a colleague that lasts for eight years and ends without him understanding why, although he expects it is his fault, “just as I was always to blame for the end of all my relationships.” He then dates Franziska’s housekeeper Anita for six years without loving her. Now in mid-life he lives as a recluse, resigned “to the fact that there wasn’t going to be anything new in my life from hereon on in.” His personality falls somewhere between a curmudgeon and a misanthrope.
What keeps him on an even keel is the archive, which unlike the world around him, “has an order, where everything has its appointed place…” In fact, after he is dismissed from his job, he arranges to take the archive home with him and install it in his basement where he continues to work on it. Naturally, it contains a file on Franziska—who has become an acclaimed singer and artist—which, he tells us, weighs about “four pounds, I need both hands to hold it, that’s how hefty it is.” During the four decades he and Franziska have been apart he never stopped collecting news items about her, or thinking about her: “She turned up in my thoughts, talked to me, commented on my doings, gave me company, supported me, joked with me.” He sometimes fantasizes “That she would give me a call after ten, twenty, thirty years, and tell me she’d made a mistake, she had loved me after all and still did, I was the love of her life as she was the love of mine.”
When Franziska returns to a town near his to receive treatment for cancer at a local hospital, he reaches out to her. They email back and forth, and after several telephone calls agree to meet in person. Their reunion is more melancholy than joyous, has more of the tragic grandeur of Antony and Cleopatra than the star-crossed passion of Romeo and Juliet. The narrator tells Franziska that he has loved her all his life, but no sooner does he say this than (like Andreas) he reflects: “Now I ought to say I still love her, but I’m not sure if that’s true, if it’s her I love, or my memories of her.” Despite his inability to live in the moment, and despite the moment’s melancholy, the reunion goes well, so well, that they make love.
Afterwards, in bed at Franziska house, she tells him that from the very beginning of their relationship she knew she wanted a career and wanted to be a successful artist and there was “no room …for an unconditional love,” the kind of love he offered, which was possessive and controlling and unforgiving and “all or nothing” because of its absoluteness. Faced with this truth, he wonders what Franziska has represented to him all this time: “an unattainable love object, a yearning?” There is a flicker of acknowledgment that for all these years he has, selfishly, “only thought of myself, my wishes and desires.” He tries to imagine what a life with her would have been if they had come together when they were still young, and can’t decide if he would have been happier with her all those years, or happier with the way things turned out, which has allowed him to dream about her all this time (who among us has not suspected that our imaginings and yearnings surpass possession in terms of profundity). Stuck on the horns of this dilemma, in the middle of the night he gets up and attempts to slink away, but, ever perspicacious (or paranoid), Franziska has locked all the doors and the gate outside, making his escape impossible. In the predawn hours, she awakens finds him sitting outside in a lawn chair. She knew what she was doing when she locked up, she tells him.
Edward Said described an artist’s “late style” as the last works of artist in which “we meet the accepted notion of age and wisdom…which reflect a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity often expressed in terms of a miraculous transfiguration of common reality.” In a relationship, analogously, attaining this kind of “spirit of reconciliation and serenity” may also be possible: a “late” love, phoenix-like, can rise from differences that come to be reconciled or settled, particularly after years of being apart.
At the conclusion of the novel, we find Franziska and the narrator, these two lonely souls, both nearly sixty years of age, sitting side by side in Franziska’s backyard watching the sky lightening in the distance. They agree to try to be together, but caution each other that neither one of them must expect too much from the other. Franziska tells him, “I’ll take you just as you are.” A more than generous offer.