How to live through (and enjoy) a flaming good row
LET'S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF: LOVE QUARRELS FROM ANTON CHEKHOV TO ZZ PACKER SELECTED BY KASIA BODDY, ALI SMITH and SARAH WOOD (Penguin £9.99)
What better time than the run-up to the feast of St Valentine to publish an anthology of short stories about lovers' quarrels through the ages? Valentine's Day itself, as we all know, can be relied upon to produce some humdingers.
'Let's not do anything.' 'No. Let's not.' Pan forward a week. 'I can't believe you didn't do anything!' 'But we agreed -' 'Not even a card!' 'But-' 'I can't believe it!' And so forth. Caveat amator.
Angry couple
Still, as Kasia Boddy's thoughtful introduction reminds us (quoting the Latin playwright Terence: Amantium irae amoris integratio est): 'Lovers' quarrels are love's renewal.'
She directs the reader's attention, too, to the warming example of Beatrice and Benedick, the quarrelsome lovers in Much Ado About Nothing.
Actually, this is a somewhat more melancholy collection than that would suggest. Far more of these stories are about relationships dealt mortal wounds by rows than about that exhilarating 'merry war' that serves, in Shakespearean comedy, as the prequel to happiness.
That's, perhaps, only to point up a truth. There are quarrels and there are quarrels. There's the sort of pleasurable squabbling, particularly early in a relationship, that explores and delights in the fact of your simultaneous closeness and difference: this can at any moment break into laughter. You catch sight of yourself being absurd, and fits of temper pass like the weather.
Then there are the serious rows, minesweeping rows; you stray somewhere you shouldn't go, there's a detonation and you mark the danger areas in your mind with barbed wire and CIVILIANS KEEP OUT placards.
Then there are the long-haul, unspoken rows: the deep-sunken resentments that smoulder underground like peat fires. If they burn long enough and then break to the surface, God help you. That's when the impossible thing, the thing that can't be taken back, is said.
This collection contains instances of all - but it's weighted towards the heavier end of the scale: failed love, exile, melancholy withdrawal, lingering death.
More than a few of these stories are ennobled by a brave sniff of fellow-feeling - but it's a wistful one; a sniff that carries to the nostrils the rancid aroma of milk long since spilt.
The book is divided into four sections: We've Only Just Begun, Just Another Day, The Best Part Of Breaking Up, and No Regrets? These, it becomes clear, correspond to the stages of a relationship. They might as well be called: Doomed From The Start, Struggling On, The Bitter End, and Regrets.
Not all the stories are so doomy, though. Jhumpa Lahiri, a writer wonderfully attentive to the texture and eccentricity of everyday life, describes the early days of an arranged marriage in This Blessed House. It perfectly captures those earlyrelationship quarrels, half-serious, that a couple have; quarrels that are all the more intense because the arranged marriage situation combines intimacy and strangeness.
Twinkle and Sanjeev have just moved into their new home when Twinkle starts finding caches of born-again Christian tat in odd corners of the house: a statue of the Blessed Virgin in the long grass of the garden; a porcelain Christ in the cupboard above the stove; a kitschy poster of the Crucifixion rolled up down the back of a radiator.
Sanjeev wants to throw them out - 'We're not even Christian!' - but Twinkle, enchanted, wants to collect them on the mantelpiece and show them off to guests. Suddenly, a teasing dispute becomes a struggle for power, for ownership of the space. Merry war gives way to minesweeping.
The tension rises when Twinkle manages to co-opt all the guests at their housewarming to hunt for more treasures - but at the end, with lovely tenderness, Sanjeev is suddenly able to see his wife through the eyes of his guests and give way. This Blessed House accedes to its title: this couple might make it.
Katherine Mansfield's Mr And Mrs Dove - about a botched proposal of marriage - was among my very favourite of these stories. The comic description of the protagonist's dreadful 'mater' and her Pekingeses - 'Biddy lay down with her tongue poked out; she was so fat and glossy she looked like a lump of halfmelted toffee' - is worth the price of admission alone. Yet the story ends on a perfectly poised ambiguity, and tears at the heart.
Some of the most powerful pieces here show love surviving a dent. The Return, by Andrey Platonov, describes a Russian soldier returning to his wife at the end of a campaign, then walking out on her, then suddenly seeing past his own pride to things as they really are. This is what D. H. Lawrence is getting at: 'Every man is his own hero, thought the wife grimly, forgetting that every woman is intensely her own heroine.'
It's not all men and women, though. In the odd case it's men and men - Harold Brodkey describes the souring of a friendship between teenage boys; Joyce Carol Oates a turningpoint quarrel between lovers in late middle age - but more often it's women and women.
There's a sexy, open-hearted piece by Colette; an original, muscularly funny story by Z Z Packer about an undergraduate misanthrope and her sort-of-girlfriend; and a sad Jackie Kay tale about a long-term lesbian relationship hitting the skids under the influence, oddly, of late Martin Amis. I don't mean Jackie Kay's story is influenced by Amis, by the way: I mean her going-theirseparate-ways lesbians are. I said 'oddly', didn't I?
What our anthologists seem to have set out to do, and have accomplished, is to gather stories that evince a sympathetic or a wittily exact sense of the actual mechanics of quarrelling: where it sits in a relationship, how it gets there, what it means, how it can be overcome or accommodated.
It's not always - as Beatrice and Benedick know - the opposite of sex but its secret sharer. A. M. Homes's narrator writes, rather more elegantly: 'Instead of ****ing we fight. It's the same sort of thing, dramatic, draining. When we're done, I roll over and sleep in a tight knot on my side of the bed.' The effect of reading this fine anthology was, for me, quite the opposite. Not a knot, but a spoon.
