Love Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell
In Bed With: Unashamedly Sexy Stories by Your Favourite Women Novelists, edited by Imogen Edwards-Jones, Jessica Adams, Kathy Lette and Maggie Alderson
When Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed by the Paris Review in 1977, he was asked: ‘Let’s talk about the women in your books.’ ‘There aren’t any,’ he replied. ‘No women, no love.’ He described this as ‘a mechanical problem’:
I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.
Vonnegut was probably right about that — but most writers have taken that realisation as a licence to indulge. Diana Secker Tesdell’s collection of short stories about love — which, in good Everyman’s Library fashion, brings some classics together with the best new writing — shows just how gaga the reader can go, given encouragement.
Opening with Maupassant’s ‘Clair de Lune’ — an immaculate exercise in irony, in which the pious-proud Abbé Marignan is allowed a brief glimmer of self-knowledge — it includes a lively variety. Nabokov, Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield and Italo Calvino jostle with Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore and William Trevor, all of them on top form. ‘Armande’, by Colette, describes a young couple too shy to declare themselves — only to have their destinies changed by a falling chandelier. It sounds absurd but it tweaks the heart terribly in the final line. So does a gorgeous ghost story, ‘Immortality’, by Yasunari Kawabata.
This is a book about love, though, in which none of the stories lapses into sentimentality. Margaret Atwood’s ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’ — and Atwood seems to me one of the least sentimental, most merrily dragonish writers of all time — is a case in point. Atwood makes entirely convincing a woman who loves her husband, despite — no, because of — his profound apparent stupidity: ‘Ed is unbelievable … you should pin his mittens to his sleeves when he goes out in the morning.’
Secker Tesdell keeps it light. A number of these stories are simply wonderfully amusing. There’s Roald Dahl’s ‘Mr Botibol’, for instance, about a man with the physical looks (and all the existential clout) of an ambulant spear of asparagus. Botibol’s apotheosis comes when, unwontedly tipsy at lunch time, he discovers the pleasure of listening to classical music on the radio and pretending (in the privacy of his home) to be the conductor. Being Dahl, there’s a neat twist.
Fabulously funny, too, is T. C. Boyle’s ‘Swept Away’, in which romance is sparked between a taciturn Scots sheep-herder and a dowdy American ornithologist when the latter is knocked flying by a cat landing on her head in a hurricane. The cat’s the least of it. As the wind, and the emotion, rises we see Ayrshire cows whipped into the air, ‘hurtling sheep, rabbits that flew out of the shadows like nightjars, posts torn from their moorings, the odd roof or wall, even a boat or two lashed up out of the heaving seas’.
F. Scott Fitzerald’s contribution, ‘Winter Dreams’, starts light, too — but moves into something sadder as it tells the story of a young man’s doomed entanglement with a flirt. In the way only Fitzgerald can, it manages to be funny, romantic and coolly cynical all at once.
Dorothy Parker’s ‘Here We Are’ achieves, I’d say, two in three of those qualities. Describing a honeymooning couple bickering on a train two-and-a-half hours into their marriage, it’s funny-horrendous; a cookie full of arsenic. ‘Well, that’s nice. That’s lovely. The first thing you say to me, as soon as you get me off on a train away from my family and everything, is that you don’t like my hat.’ That’s with the wedding night still to come. ‘I mean — well, look at us! Here we are married! Here we are!’ he says with bleak spryness at the end. ‘Yes, here we are,’ she replies. ‘Aren’t we?’ That has the same dreadful ring as the closing line of Washington Square, with its jilted heroine settling down with her sampler ‘for life, as it were’.
Anything missing from the picture? There’s little or no sex here, and an odd lack of homosexual love represented — not that I’m insisting on a quota. Ali Smith’s ‘May’ ventures pleasingly off-piste, though, telling the story of a woman who falls in love with a tree.
I read this book with a mounting sense of marvel. It is a triumph of the anthologist’s skill: moving, artful, unceasingly entertaining. There isn’t a duff story in it. Well, perhaps one. There’s the D. H. Lawrence tale about a bulldog-faced pauper who’s fished out of a smelly pond after botching her suicide attempt, only to find true love, the untamed Pan etc, in an epiphanic moment on the kitchen floor. That left me cold, but then I can’t usually read more than a paragraph of Lawrence’s prose without wanting to give him a bust in the snoot. That’s just me. This is a book to cherish, to give to your lover, and to escape joyfully into at the first sign of flying saucers.
Slightly by contrast, I’m afraid, are the mucky stories collected in In Bed With. There’s the odd good one, though the age-old apparatus of wolfish spankers, horny-handed mechanicals and bored housewives feature prominently.
The problem is that over the whole project there hangs a ghastly pall of tweeness, very straightforwardly explained by the subtitle. Needing to boast of being ‘unashamed’ rather implies that shame is on your mind — and as for the claim that the contributors are ‘your favourite women novelists’, most readers will think: ‘I’ll be the judge of that, lassies.’
So unashamed are my favourite women novelists — from Ali Smith and Esther Freud to Rachel Johnson and Kathy Lette — that they’ve all taken pseudonyms and are writing under their ‘porn names’, compounded from the names of their first pet and their street. Thus ‘Minxy Malone’, ‘Storm Henley’ and, er, ‘Samantha Sutton Place’. Can you guess who’s who? Care much?
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