Bloggers’ Classic Love Stories

Who doesn’t love a challenge?

Last week author Jeffrey Eugenides posted about the pleasures (and difficulties) of picking favourite love stories for his recent anthology. He had a whole book to fill – but what if you could only choose one?

With Valentines approaching, we asked our favourite bloggers and some of our top authors to name their own favourite love story – in any medium. Nearly twenty responded, citing romances from books, poems, songs, films – and more besides.

Read on today for personal tips from some of the best writers in the blogosphere… and check back tomorrow when our authors will be taking up the gauntlet. Many thanks to all our participants, and if any of these names are new to you, I can only suggest you click through…

Sarah Crown, Guardian Books Blog

Two friends who are getting married this summer asked me recently if I’d choose and read a poem at their wedding. Many occurred – ee cummings’ Being to Timelessness as it’s to Time, Edna St Vincent Millay’s Love is not all, Larkin’s Wedding Wind – but the one I found myself returning to was John Fuller’s Valentine.

A shopping list of love, he celebrates the poem’s subject in meticulous — occasionally anatomical — couplets that verge, at times, on the anti-poetical: the language is unsophisticated; the rhymes contrived, occasionally risible (“I like it when you tilt your cheek up./ I like the way you nod and hold a teacup.”). But don’t be fooled: Fuller is a master technician, and the clunkiness sets the stage for the ringing beauty of the profoundly tender final lines — I won’t quote them here, because you really need to read the whole poem for the full effect.

Suffice to say that, after laughing my way through with Fuller as he solemnly informs the object of his affections that “I’d like to see you ironing your skirt/ And cancelling other dates./ I’d like to button up your shirt./ I like the way your chest inflates …” I never fail to feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise when I reach the end.

I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that, given the church setting and the likelihood of a plethora of elderly relations, a poem rich in lines such as “I’d like to find you in the shower/ And chase the soap for half an hour./ I’d like to have you in my power/ And see your eyes dilate” may not in the end make the most appropriate reading. But as a depiction of comprehensive, real-world love, it takes some beating.

Scott Pack, Me And My Big Mouth

Let’s face it, love isn’t always as great as it is cracked up to be. Love can be fickle, inconsistent and occasionally just plain dull. Love goes through phases, and some of them aren’t all that exciting. We put up with the crap bits because when the planets line up, our chakras are all in order, when our lucky numbers come in love can be fucking amazing and make us invincible.

Many writers can capture one side of the equation but not the other. For me the finest writer on the subject of love is Charles Baxter. He successfully combines the truly momentous wonder of being in love with the fiddly little annoying bits. He tells the truth, and he tells it beautifully.

Think of him as a cross between Richard Yates and Anne Tyler and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s in store. I would recommend starting with his novel Saul & Patsy, a book with the finest opening and closing chapters I have ever read. The bits in between aren’t bad either.

dovegreyreader

I was a true guitar-playing folky at the age of 16-17 back in the late 1960’s and there was really only one songwriter to master and that was Paul Simon. The songs gently declared our angst and our love in equal measure. I clearly remember the day Bridge Over Troubled Water was played on the radio for the very first time and the minute I hear those fulsome yet gentle opening piano chords swelling and then dipping again towards Art Garfunkel’s pitch-perfect ‘When you’re weary…’ I’m back there.

Much later I heard Art Garfunkel sing the song live at The Albert Hall with Paul Simon accompanying on piano and that was it, Bridge was welded into my psyche forever. A pure and timeless song that speaks for every single one of life’s moments.

John Self at Asylum

Dr Haggard’s Disease, by Patrick McGrath. As one friend of mine put it, “What kind of ding dong could read this and not be enchanted?” And it is an enchanted story, but it’s the enchantment of fairy tales, with something nasty lurking in the background… Edward Haggard is a GP living in an old house on the south coast of England at the beginning of WWII, trying to recover from a love affair when he is confronted by the son of his dead lover, and inappropriate passions begin to resurface.

What’s wonderful about this book is how it combines brevity with a complex structure and a unique narrative voice of biblical expression. It is a tale of smoke and mirrors, where the reader always knows both a little more and a little less than the narrator. Could Dr Haggard’s love of morphine be clouding his memory? And who is he talking to as he tells the story? The end of the book provides the most grotesquely tender image I have ever read in a novel, which it would be no exaggeration to describe as a small masterpiece.

Harry Bingham, Toasting Napoleon

Favourite love story? Yikes. But it would probably have to be Dr Zhivago. Not the film or TV versions (haven’t seen ‘em), but the book. The amazing, haunting, perplexing, ever-beckoning book. Pasternak hooked me from his very first line (”On they went, singing Rest Eternal …”) and never let me off since.

I wrote my most recent novel, The Lieutenant’s Lover, under the spell of those words and it would have been a better book if I’d managed to find more distance. I don’t even know if Zhivago is correctly called a love story – it’s so much more than that. And as for being my favourite, I don’t know that either. Favourites are for easy things: chocolates, musicals, Jane Austen adaptations, scarves. Zhivago ain’t like those things. It’s a love story. It bites.

Kate Monro, The Virginity Project

Does love ever darken the door of virginity loss? I have spent the past two years interviewing people about virginity loss, so I should know. In the case of Charlotte and Peter, it made a lifelong visit and it began in the fifties. She was fourteen and he sixteen. They were drawn to each other, ‘very immediately and very sexually’. Nobody thought for a moment what they were actually doing. Losing virginity as it happens, and the rest.

Everything changed when his family moved away. ‘I didn’t say a thing. I simply said, ‘yes, that’s lovely’, and nearly died inside. I never told him how I felt’. For Peter, there was the ‘awful realisation that actually that is quite rare’. Love. It doesn’t happen every day, but it can happen every thirty-two years. Which is the exact amount of time it took to rectify this situation. ‘He’d always promised himself that when he was fifty he would get in touch with me come hell or high water’. He did. And how do I know this? Because Peter and Charlotte have just told me this story together – as man and wife. Now that my friend, is the power of love.

Mark Johnson, Fifth Estate

“I’m too tired not to go out with you,” mutters the girl at the heart of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. It’s hardly Casablanca. For two hundred pages Hornby’s lovers aren’t exactly star-crossed — they’re pretty pissed off.

When cynical record store manager Rob is dumped by his long-term girlfriend, his attempts to win her back kick off an anti-love story that in its good humour and plain-spoken realism somehow still contrives to wind up more romantic than a whole forecourt of roses.

“I’m beginning to get used to the idea that Laura might be the person I spend my life with, I think,” he writes, as realisation finally kicks in, “…or at least, I’m beginning to get used to the idea that I’m so miserable without her that it’s not worth thinking about alternatives.” Coming from a character obsessed with a popular, glossy vision of love, it’s as compelling a conclusion as anything you’ll find in more literary fare…

Emma Barnes, Snowblog

Oscar Wilde’s short stories are all superb, but my favourite is ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’. It gets me all choked up just thinking about it. A girl promises a Student a dance if he presents her with a red rose — but none are to be found. A Nightingale outside his window hears his lament, and resolves to help:

“Here indeed is the true lover,” said the Nightingale. “What I sing of, he suffers—what is joy to me, to him is pain. Surely Love is a wonderful thing.”

She urges the Rose Tree to produce a red rose, who tells her that the only way is to stain it with her heart’s blood:

“Death is a great price to pay for a red rose,” cried the Nightingale, “and Life is very dear to all. Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?”

And so the Nightingale sacrifices herself for Love:

So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and the thorn touched her heart. Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb.

The Student awakes to find the perfect, blood-red rose blooming outside his window. Upon presenting it to the girl, she says that it will not go with her dress. In a fit of anger, the Student throws the rose to the ground where it is run over by a cart.

“What I a silly thing Love is,” said the Student as he walked away.

But the Nightingale! The sacrifice! The heart-wrenching song, the belief in Love perfected by Death! Like I say, chokes me up every time.