Note

WHAT A MISFORTUNE it is to lose one’s will, to abandon one’s family and career, to be crippled by a force stronger than one’s self, to be invaded by visions! And yet most of us can’t help envying the lovesick hero of Anton Chekhov’s “A Misfortune,” who complains to his beloved: “What am I to do if your image has grown into my soul, and day and night stands persistently before my eyes, like that pine there at this moment? Come, tell me, what hard and difficult thing can I do to get free from this abominable, miserable condition, in which all my thoughts, desires, and dreams are no longer my own, but belong to some demon who has taken possession of me? I love you, love you so much that I am completely thrown out of gear; I’ve given up my work and all who are dear to me; I’ve forgotten my God! I’ve never been in love like this in my life.”

Meanwhile, in another century, in another country, the besotted Ethel, in William Carlos Williams’s “The Knife of the Times,” must suffer for years before she begins to understand the unthinkable, that she is in love with her correspondent Maura, her childhood friend:

. . . as these letters continued to flow, there came a change in them. First the personal note grew more confidential. Ethel told about her children, how she had had one after the other—to divert her mind, to distract her thoughts from their constant brooding. Each child would raise her hopes of relief, each anticipated delivery brought only renewed disappointment. She confided more and more in Maura.

Before lovers understand they’re in love, they wonder: What’s wrong with me? Am I sick? Am I dying? Realizing that the answer to the mystery is “love” has the impact of religious revelation:

She loved her husband; it was not that. In fact, she didn’t know what it was save that she, Ethel, could never get her old friend Maura out of her mind.

Until at last the secret was out. It is you, Maura, that I want. Nothing but you. Nobody but you can appease my grief. Forgive me if I distress you with this confession.

But if love is an illness, why do we all want to catch it or at least, having recovered from it and now seemingly immune, fondly recall our lovesick days and nights?

Fortunately, inevitably there is more comedy than tragedy in love stories. People in love make us laugh! How revealing is a lover’s joy and misery! Anthony Trollope’s narrator observes of one of Miss Ophelia Gledd’s suitors: “. . . in the society of Boston generally he was regarded as a stout fellow, well able to hold his own,—as a man by no means soft, or green, or feminine. And yet now, in the presence of me, a stranger to him, he was almost crying about his lady love.” However sympathetic we are to the suitor, we smile because we know the brilliant intensity of those feelings won’t last!

We know that the suffering in love is just as unimaginably debilitating as the joys are blissful. In “White Night,” Colette describes the quiet ecstasy of physical love:

How my heart beats! I also hear yours under my ear. You’re not sleeping? I lift my head a bit, I imagine the paleness of your upside-down face, the tawny shadow of your short hair. Your knees are fresh as two oranges . . . Turn to my side, so that mine can steal this smooth freshness.

When we condescendingly refer to lovers as living in their own little world, we’re wrong; these stories will remind us that we’ve only forgotten the grace of that experience! The world, for lovers, isn’t small, it’s only so focused, so essential; it’s we undizzy ones who are distracted by the inessentials; we’re the ones content with our carved-out routines and busy practicalities in a tiny circumscribed neighborhood. It’s Heinrich von Kleist’s heroes, Jeronimo and Josefa (with their divine baby Felipe) who have their heads and hearts in the right place. The most dramatic of writers, Kleist imagines his lovers, after being persecuted by the church for their love affair, witnessing and surviving a devastating earthquake in Santiago that miraculously reunites them:

. . . they had an infinite number of things to talk about, the convent garden, and the prisons, and what they had gone through for each other; and they were very moved when they thought of how much misery had to come upon the world for them to be happy.

Yes, the happiness (or despair) of lovers is the only human state that detaches itself from the gravitational pull of the Earth’s woes. But love has so much power that no lover, except in his joys, feels himself content and sure of himself. Love is an imbalance because nothing can avert it; no amount of leaning away from it will restore our equilibrium. Who’s stronger than the Goddess of Love? Not the old Greek gods, who were continually dazzled by Aphrodite’s charms, and for whose “weakness” there are some—too wise for this world—who have rebuked them for their immorality rather than sympathized with them for their vulnerability. We’ve all heard enough stories to know that any being who declares himself physically or spiritually invulnerable to love, as does the hero of Yukio Mishima’s “The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love,” is due for a fall:

Unwittingly the Great Priest glanced in her direction and at once he was overwhelmed by her beauty. His eyes met hers and, as he did nothing to avert his gaze, she did not take it upon herself to turn away. . . .

In the twinkling of an eye the present world had wreaked its revenge on the priest with terrible force. What he had imagined to be completely safe had collapsed in ruins. . . .

After all, someone invulnerable to love is nobody at all. We would despise Mishima’s priest if he could deny the reality of his feelings:

A woman’s beauty, he told himself, was but a fleeting apparition, a temporary phenomenon composed of flesh—of flesh that was soon to be destroyed. Yet, try as he might to ward it off, the ineffable beauty which had overpowered him at that instant by the lake now pressed on his heart with the force of something that has come from an infinite distance. The Great Priest was not young enough, either spiritually or physically, to believe that this new feeling was simply a trick that his flesh had played on him. A man’s flesh, he knew full well, could not alter so rapidly. Rather, he seemed to have been immersed in some swift, subtle poison which had abruptly transmuted his spirit.

So these two dozen stories could be called tales about vulnerability; it’s not that lovers are especially susceptible (most of us could plausibly deny susceptibility, because we know we can always apply resistance to an inclination), but vulnerability, on the other hand, is humankind’s common lot. The God of Reason can’t fend it off, as the Cajun store-clerk ’Polyte discovers (in Kate Chopin’s “Azélie”) when he falls in love with a thief:

The very action which should have revolted him had seemed, on the contrary, to inflame him with love. He felt that love to be a degradation—something that he was almost ashamed to acknowledge to himself, and he knew that he was hopelessly unable to stifle it.

Our spiritual or psychological balance, so otherwise essential, teeters every which way under love’s influence and even shows us that such balance is a sad meager goal. The distraught and frustrated narrator of James Joyce’s “Araby” recalls his youthful encounter with love:

I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play.

Love is amusing and ridiculous, mockable, as long as it’s not, misfortunately, happening to us.

* * *

Preceding each story, I have offered short biographical notes, with a detail or two about the author’s love life. Such details, it seems to me, are too often ignored or discounted by us editors or professors when we present thumbnail sketches of artists’ lives; in a collection of brilliant love stories, however, by some of the greatest authors of the past and present, these details will seem, perhaps, justified and relevant.

I would like to acknowledge my appreciation to a friend, the poet John Wilson, for his suggestion of a couple of these stories, and to Ekaterina Rogalskaya, for her help in translating Chekhov’s “A Misfortune” (though we finally decided Constance Garnett’s superb version was the best). I dedicate this collection to Suzanne Carbotte, my wife, the heroine of my own ongoing love story.

—B.B.

New York City

January 1, 2015