Love as misery

Love as misery is the narrator’s conviction that romantic feeling offers no escape from suffering: it is one of the forms through which misery becomes visible, and sometimes the disguise that keeps it from being recognized. At the Tarapout, a sentimental song turns a polished theatrical routine into an exposure of shared desolation; in Tania’s grief, distant love supplies both a fantasy of certainty and words with which to circle a death that cannot be undone.

The song that exposes misery

At the Tarapout, the narrator is performing a silent policeman in a sketch set on the London Embankment when the English girls’ song begins to overwhelm the scene. Its lament, accompanied by their movements and the fog-bound stage setting, makes him think of the misery of the world and his own. The song’s failure to persuade does not make it harmless: its off-key voices and the girls’ effort to perform it seem to draw calamity into the theatre. The change in mood is the point. A luxurious hall cannot contain or soften what the song brings into view; misery seems to spill across the stage and beyond it.

The girls understand the number as a song about a small romantic setback. The narrator hears something larger and more brutal: their performance, without their knowing it, sings of existence as calamity. Their sadness is visible in their eyes, but their belief that the song concerns love keeps them from grasping what they are expressing. The contrast between what they intend and what the performance communicates makes love less a refuge than a mistaken name for suffering. Their routine continues three times a day, complete with backdrop and accordion tunes, even as the narrator foresees that it will end badly.

Misery beneath the performance

The English girls’ costumes, lights, smiles, and stage routine cannot disguise what the narrator regards as misery already lodged within them. Its force is not limited to a particular love disappointment: it reaches them through their bodies and voices, and no theatrical surface can make them immune. Their appearance of hopeful entertainment therefore sharpens the contrast between performance and condition. The stage supplies a cheerful frame; the song carries a desolation that the performers themselves do not recognize.

The narrator generalizes from this scene into a rejection of love songs. In his account, young people imagine that one beloved person can contain all humanity, turning love into a dream of total fulfillment. But poverty and the hardships of their country await the girls beyond the stage, and romantic hope cannot release them from those conditions. The bleak irony is that misery can allow such hopes to continue for a time, almost as if it were amused by their songs, while remaining inescapable. Love becomes not the opposite of deprivation but a language in which deprivation is misread and rehearsed.

Tania: distance, bereavement, and words

Tania’s story gives the idea a different shape. A Polish performer who joins the English girls’ act, she is already prone to overwhelming crushes. She longs to return to Berlin to be with a forty-year-old bank clerk she has known since Berlin, and pursues theatrical agents for engagements while their promises leave her waiting and vulnerable to their unwanted advances. Her devotion fixes on a man who is far away; that distance helps sustain the ideal of the relationship, but also leaves her unable to reach him when he dies of influenza.

When the news arrives on a Saturday afternoon, Tania, disheveled and haggard, drags the narrator to the Gare du Nord and insists at the ticket window that she must get to Berlin in time for the funeral. Two station-masters have to make her understand that there is no longer time to go. The episode makes the material limits of love painfully concrete: distance and a missed possibility cannot be overcome by the strength of her longing. The narrator remains with her in her distress, while also describing the spectacle of grief as an opportunity. His response mixes companionship with self-interest, and does not present consolation as uncomplicated generosity.

Once the journey is impossible, they turn instead to telegrams. At the Bourse post office they compose a long message despite not knowing whom to address in Berlin; the only person they know there is the dead man. Their words can do nothing to reach him, so they exchange words about his death and walk around the Bourse two or three times. Then they move slowly toward Montmartre, still talking in grief. Language gives their sorrow a temporary action and direction, but not a remedy: the message has no effective recipient, and the dead remain beyond the reach of both travel and speech.

A theory of love without consolation

The narrator presents distance as an idealizing force. When lovers cannot meet often, he argues, they have fewer opportunities to quarrel and more room to sustain comforting falsehoods; from that distance, they may be happier precisely because they know less of one another. His reasoning turns a familiar romantic promise upside down. Absence does not prove the purity of love; it protects an image of love from the ordinary knowledge and conflict that proximity would bring. In this account, the fantasy may console, but its consolation depends on not being tested.

That suspicion governs the entry’s movement from the girls’ song to Tania’s bereavement. The stage number mistakes existence’s suffering for love trouble, while Tania’s love, rendered almost absolute by separation, meets an irreparable death and the practical fact that she cannot get to Berlin in time. In both episodes, feeling is real, but its promise of rescue is not. The narrator’s bleak thesis is therefore not simply that love hurts: love is one of the forms through which misery speaks, and romantic idealization can make the suffering seem meaningful without changing its conditions.