The notion of giving always involves, in multiple ways, the questions that surround taking. It’s possible that where we recognize the generosity implicit in giving, we only much more rarely think about the generosity implicit in response to what’s offered, in acceptance.
These are ancient terms, primal terms, as the poet HD suggests — aptly on several levels of consciousness here — in this story from her memoir, Tribute to Freud, about the problematics of giving a gift to her analyst, Sigmund Freud:
The Professor was seventy-seven. His birthday in May was significant. The consulting room in the strange house contained some of his treasures and his famous desk…Instead of the semicircle of priceless little objets d’art, there was a carefully arranged series of vases; each contained a spray of orchids or a single flower. I had nothing for the Professor. I said, ‘I am sorry, I haven’t brought you anything because I couldn’t find what I wanted.’ I said, ‘Anyway, I wanted to give you something different.’ My remark might have seemed a shade careless, a shade arrogant. It might have seemed either of these things, or both. I do not know how the Professor translated it. He waved me to the couch, satisfied or unsatisfied with my apparently casual regard for his birthday.
I had not found what I wanted so I did not give him anything. In one of our talks in the old room at Berggasse, we had gone off on one of our journeys…‘Ah, the Spanish Steps,’ said the Professor…‘the gardenias! In Rome, even I could afford to wear a gardenia.’…
It was sometime later that the Professor received my gardenias…I found them in a West End florist’s and scribbled on a card, ‘To greet the return of the Gods.’ The gardenias reached the Professor. I have his letter…
Dear H.D., I got today some flowers. By chance or intention they are my favorite flowers, those I most admire. Some words ‘to greet the return of the Gods’ (other people read: Goods). No name. I suspect you to be responsible for the gift.
Freud here, noting the slippage of others, marks exchange as a place where the gods and the goods come together. But the act of giving and accepting which goes between Freud and HD marks not just that crossover of matter and immortality, not just the act where authority is recognized and paid (or promised) homage, not just questions of satisfaction and its opposite, and not just the suggestion, fascinating in itself, that in some way we are (and will be held) responsible for what we give to others. It also includes these simple-seeming, repetitious statements: ‘I haven’t brought you anything because I couldn’t find what I wanted,’ and again a moment later, ‘I had not found what I wanted so I did not give him anything.’ In context, of course, it means HD simply hadn’t found what she wanted to give Freud. But that’s not what it very simply says. Very simply, it links the act of giving to that of fulfilling your own desire.
Giving frequently concerns — and addresses our concerns about — all we believe we have, and in terms that are much more than material. In The Golden Bowl, a novel about selfish and selfless loves and how human beings judge the worth of things, Henry James is keen to point up the dangerous resonances in all gift-giving. “Thank goodness then that if there be a crack, we know it!” Charlotte says when she finds out that the beautiful bowl she was about to buy as a wedding present, and which has been offered to her rather shadily as a ‘bargain,’ is worse than worthless. “But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don’t know—!” And she smiled with the sadness of it. “We can never then give each other anything.”
Giving is fraught with danger — as is taking. In Peter Hobbs’s novel In the Orchard, the Swallows (2012), a young boy in Pakistan gives a girl socially divided from him by both gender and status a pomegranate from his father’s beautiful orchard. She gives him her name. Gifts become the foundation of a narrative about the joint dangers and healing forces in generosity and hospitality, a story in which the boy, who ends up near-dead then imprisoned because of the unacceptability and the consequences of these gifts and this love, leaves jail a broken young man a decade later and is taken in off the street by a stranger who treats him as family. In this family, he learns to write. What he writes is the book we’re holding in our hands, a gift of love for a girl who’s unlikely ever to read it. The imagined giving and the act of art it involves become as important as the gift itself. The responsibility of accepting the gift radiates beyond the story’s protagonists and passes to the reader of the novel.
Art is always an exchange, like love, whose giving and taking can be a complex and wounding matter, according to Michelangelo in this love sonnet (translated by Christopher Ryan): ‘Within the sweetness of an immense kindness there often lurks concealed some offense to one’s honor and one’s life;…Anyone who gives wings to another’s shoulders, and then along the way gradually spreads out a hidden net, extinguishes completely the ardent charity enkindled by love precisely where it most desires to burn.’ It’s interesting that the opposite happens, when it comes to wings, in Alexander Montgomerie’s poem The Cherrie and the Slae, from the late 1500s, a work that’s a near-contemporary of Michelangelo’s sonnet. In it, Cupid, who’s been woken by paradisal birdsong and feels like a bit of mischief, descends from the clouds and offers his wings, his bow, and his arrows to a man who’s having a very nice time lying about listening to nature in an idyllic garden. The man, immediately taken with the golden wings, straps them onto his shoulders, rises into the sky, takes aim with one of the arrows and manages to shoot himself in the chest. He falls down through the air and hits the ground; Cupid holds his sides laughing and flies off, leaving the man bleeding and sorry for himself. But shooting himself with Cupid’s arrow has kindled a different, unexpected gift in the man. The narcissistic wound in his chest starts to glow with courage and desire the like of which he’s never felt.
In Paradise you’re bound to be offered all sorts of fruits, all sorts of free advice from snakes, which you’ll end up paying dearly for. There’s a short story by Tove Jansson, one of her earliest pieces written specifically for adults rather than children, which suggests that maybe all offering (and by extension the profanation we call art) is about the gulf between human and divine, and about getting some kind of attention from God, at least getting some kind of dialogue going. In this story (translated by Kingsley Hart), two small cousins are playing a game called the Children of Israel in a field behind their grandparents’ idyllic house:
We raised our voices in the wilderness and were continually disobedient because God so likes to forgive sinners. God forbade us to gather manna under the laburnum tree but we did all the same. Then he sent worms up from the earth to eat up the manna. But we went on being disobedient and we still raised our voices.
All the time we expected him to get so angry that he would show himself. The very idea was tremendous. We could think of nothing but God. We sacrificed to him, we gave him blueberries and crab apples and flowers and milk and sometimes we made a small burnt-offering. We sang for him and we prayed to him to give us a sign that he was interested in what we were doing.