Ron Rosenbaum starts his new book, In Defense of Love, with a clear mission:
“All my life I have wanted to write about love.... But it is only now that I feel the need to risk writing a book about love. A defense of love. It’s only now that I have come to feel that love needs defending, love is under siege, love has powerful enemies. Love has deniers.”
Here is a book about love, but also a book about hate for the enemies of love. The statisticians, the econometricians, the oversimplifiers, the down-and-dirty materialists. Those who believe that love can be detected and measured with advanced technology, e.g., the fMRI, some picture of the brain that supposedly has explanatory value but really doesn’t.
Ron stands in awe of the unexplained and the inexplicable, whether it is the nature of Hitler’s evil, of Shakespeare’s genius, or of love itself. It is a central part of his methodology to examine failures—abject failures—of explanation. He loves them. (Yes. I believe that’s the correct way to describe it.) He is a chronicler of our worst instincts for oversimplification.
Over the years, I have learned an enormous amount from Ron’s examination of these failures. His portrait of Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to hundreds of murders before confessing his confessions were fraudulent, is a testament to man’s unfettered credulity. His profile of Dr. James Grigson, also known as “Dr. Death,” an expert witness who obligingly predicted future dangerousness whenever he was put on the stand by prosecutors, led to my discovery of Randall Dale Adams (an innocent man on death row, thanks in part to Grigson) and the making of my movie The Thin Blue Line.
In Defense of Love, at its heart, is a defense of poetry over science. Should we trust Shakespeare over some medical hack? The book reads like a broadside against those who might think otherwise. Where some might let it go, Ron goes into full attack mode. For example, Helen Fisher. Who is she? An anthropologist, and the author of Why We Love?: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. Or, as Ron sees it, a pompous, self-righteous, and self-assured peddler of TED Talk nonsense.
His profile of Dr. James Grigson, also known as “Dr. Death,” led to my discovery of Randall Dale Adams (an innocent man on death row, thanks in part to Grigson) and the making of my movie The Thin Blue Line.
I find myself, by and large, completely sympathetic to such complaints. Ron hates many of the same things I do. (Is there a better reason to like someone’s writing?) But I find Fisher easier to hate than, for example, Tolstoy, who comes under fire in the fourth chapter. Is he a misanthrope? A misogynist? Take your pick. He might have been all of the above.
In Defense of Love contains an extended complaint about three novellas from Tolstoy—The Kreutzer Sonata, Father Sergius, and The Devil. We might call it his trilogy of misogyny. But I have a hard time simply dismissing these works. Yes, they repeatedly express a horror of sex—and a horror of what Tolstoy sees as the rank treachery of women.
But is it a horror of women or of self?
Ron writes:
“What the three novellas … have in common is a bleak, dark vision of love and sex that made late Tolstoy seem almost a different person from the celebrated genius and sage whose peerless worldwide reputation for sanctity and sagacity was unequalled in the nineteenth century and sustained long beyond it.”
Ron unpacks Tolstoy’s growing religious insanity. The sage who disappears into saintliness. But how saintly is this sage? For Ron, shame is at the heart of the matter.
“It is in The Devil that we find again that remarkable, profound source of that antipathy between Tolstoy and love: shame.... I think shame—which I’ve argued can have salutary manifestations—is often elided as a powerful source of misogynistic hatred in Tolstoy, particularly in his last trilogy.... The heart of the hatred is the fear of shame. The weak link in the armor, the wild card: love.”
I love Ron’s book. Love is the right word. Perhaps because of its quirkiness, perhaps because of its underlying intemperance, perhaps because of its endless literary references—e.g., Virginia Woolf’s invaluable essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” which tells how the utterance of a single word (“Semen?”) changed all of human nature—perhaps because I love Ron. It is a book ablaze with philosophical questions and issues, from David Chalmers’s hard problem of consciousness to Thomas Nagel’s explorations in Mind and Cosmos.
Ron doesn’t want to disappoint the reader. So his book on love also contains a lot of equally fascinating information about sex. For example, if you’ve been wondering how Anne Boleyn became queen, according to Ron it involves “French methods” or “buccal onanism” (though he prefers the more common idiom: oral sex). You might say that she got ahead by giving head and lost her head for similar reasons.
I have read almost everything Ron has written, almost his entire oeuvre, and have learned an enormous amount. And I agree with Ron: love is ineluctable. I’m not sure that I can understand love—Ron asks whether that is even possible—but I am perfectly willing to accept its power and the power of Ron’s examination of its irreducible mystery.
Errol Morris, an Oscar-winning filmmaker, is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL