Note: this piece was not originally so ladylike, but in order to remove both an adult-only rating and facebook blacklisting of the site, it has had all rude words replaced with nice euphemisms.  The necessity of rewriting the piece rather proved its point: the word shocks like no other.

So, while reading an interview with the now 73-year-old Jilly Cooper about how getting old ain’t all bad, I realised that, to my shame, I’ve never read any of her books.  Nor have I read any Jackie Collins, Danielle Steel, or Barbara Taylor Bradford.  This isn’t a boast – it’s a confession.  And one I’m embarrassed to admit.

It’s not that I’m a snob.  It’s just that, somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that, literary giantesses though they are, these women’s books didn’t matter.  That it was love and not romance that mattered.  That there was something desperate about the women who read them, as though they had nothing in their lives – or their heads – but badly written bonks, charmers, and chicks.  Quite what I thought I had in my life, or my head, that was so much worthier of taking up space, I don’t know.   Come to think of it, had I let any one of these writers’ heroines live all manner of things for me,  I could have saved myself many many hours to devote to all those higher things, whatever they might be.

I could try blaming school – my English teacher let me write about Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha for my Review of Personal Reading.  Maybe it was university and all the Italian metaphysical poetry I’m sure even the poets didn’t understand (and which, incidentally, my pet rats would shred years later, unafraid to be outspoken about their literary taste).  Raised in the Scottish countryside without a tv, deprived of Blake and Bobby James, I could even give blaming my upbringing a shot.  But, really, I’ve only myself to blame.

It is entirely through my own doing that I’ve allowed myself to be ruined by literary fiction.   Jilly, Jackie, Danielle, and Barbara – these women are Queens of Literature.  They are amongst the bestselling authors the world has ever known.  By definition, their books are classics.  They tap into something in the female psyche – in their multimillions.

And if they’re trash, well I can’t help thinking of the scene in The Fisher King where Robin Williams hands Amanda Plummer a loveseat he’s made from a champagne cap and says “There’s nothing trashy about romance.  Besides, you find some pretty wonderful things in the trash”.

So, I set aside Jill Dawson’s moving, expertly crafted depiction of Rupert Brooke (a man whose musings take self obsession to new lows, though it is very well written if you want to read about the minutiae of the man), and took my hollow tin chest off to the Saint Columbus Hospice charity shop where they had a half price sale on books.  I resisted Mills and Boon, though the British Heart Foundation shop has them on sale at two for £1 and a friend and I were thinking of co-writing one because, apparently, there’s a lot of money in it.  It might help if I read some first.  Taking the first step towards an alternative career and doing good – what more could one ask for?

Jilly’s Riders was a jolly good fun romp through steaminess I never knew existed in the Cotswolds countryside.

I stuck with Jackie and Lethal Seduction till I got bored of the repetition.  The man’s a rogue who likes having sex where people can see him; the girl’s a brat with a wholesome, caring husband who she thinks is boring; her father’s a gangster caricature who likes women with enormous breasts and little brain; the intelligent journalist is undervalued and feels lost.  You’ve made the point – get on with the story.  She doesn’t, though, and the whole thing drags on for over 500 pages when 200 would have done.

I read all of Danielle’s Secrets because it was short and, from the opening lines, had the promise of a happy ending and who doesn’t like those.  It all came together very neatly which was pleasing.  The beautiful yet aloof and formidable star finally opens her heart (by way of enormous diamonds and enough mink coats to render the mink extinct) to the television producer who, in her arms, finally recovers from the loss of his wife and children in a plane crash; the sweet, sensitive actor’s junkie wife has the decency to get herself murdered so he can marry the woman he’s been horrible to throughout the entire tv shoot but who he secretly loves and who secretly loves him; and the motherly, gorgeous actress who everyone loves, leaves her abusive husband and makes the gay matinee idol realise that all that gayness he’d been indulging in was just the result of an emotionally-deprived childhood, but with her love, he’s all better now.  Sorry if I’ve just ruined the story.

I got bored of Barbara’s Being Elizabeth pretty quickly, when I could see how it was going.  I like a feisty heroine, but when the whole thing’s been mapped out and you’ve read the bit at the back where she talks about it being based on English monarch, Elizabeth Tudor, so you know it’s not going to end well, the story loses some of its momentum.

Then there were the sex scenes.  Jilly romped, Danielle ascended to new heights they’d never known, and Barbara smouldered and suppressed.

Jackie’s scenes got me thinking, though.  Not about sex so much as about words.  Jackie’s intention, it seems, is to shock.  Thing is, there’s nothing shocking in the language she uses.  If  the unmentionable four-letters-beginning-with-f-word no longer needs to be replaced with “fug”, what words can a writer use to shock?  There are shocking acts, of course – scenes a writer could put down that would horrify readers across race, class, age, gender, and culture.

The only single word I could think of that is pretty much guaranteed to offend is the not-to-be-mentioned-four-letters-beginning-with-c-word.  There are other words directed at certain social groups that are intended to offend, but sometimes members of those groups use them when addressing each other.  So, though their original intention is to cause offense, they’ve been appropriated into cultures to the point that they may be used as terms of endearment or with pride.  Since it changed from a slightly racily descriptive word in Middle English to an insult, the afore(not)mentioned has not been appropriated by any cultural group.  Unless you have a particularly witty or personal putdown, if you want to offend, to express just how much you loathe an individual, it is the most powerful word we have in our vocabulary.  The same is true, whether you’re in conversation (of sorts) or a writer attempting to shock your readers.

Jackie used it once, slotting it into a coke-addled machismo rant from a photographer who refers to a temperamental model as a “super-not-to-be-mentioned-four-letters-beginning-with-c-word”.  Makes it sound like a super power – something to be proud of.  And maybe it is.  We could appropriate the word into our culture – use the “super” prefix to give it a new meaning.   Should you decide to test it in its all-new incarnation, do let me know how you get on.  Meantime, I have some chicklit to attend to.

Biblically, it is a symbol of shame, of the white rose so embarrassed by Adam and Eve’s carryings-on that it blushed crimson.  For a celebration of romance, however, Aphrodite opening a vein for her Adonis is probably a more apposite backstory to the flower’s symbolism.

A red rose is for courage.  It is an expression of a love that must be kept secret (though the universality of that particular symbol rather detracts from the secrecy).  It is brewed to lure, bewitch or poison – depending on the stage of the relationship.  Should you be in the happy situation of having a bevy of suitors from which to choose, write their names on the leaves of a red rose and cast them into the sky.  The name on the leaf last to reach the ground is the man you should marry.  If what you’d actually like most for Valentine’s Day is some peace and quiet, a rose is also a symbol of silence.  It might be more straightforward just to buy earplugs or ask your beloved to be quiet than hope that they’ll work out the intended symbolism – a process that could take quite some time and a great deal of guessing.  Also, its powers to silence are said to be effective only when presented to the likes of banshees, vampires, and unquiet spirits.  If you happen to have a penchant for the undead – enough to have got yourself into a relationship with one – you may well be quite happy to hear about their day forevermore.

The quantity also carries symbolic meaning.  If all you want to say is ‘I love you’ then give one; if you miss someone, give six; if it’s just a passing infatuation, send seven; if you both love them and delight in their company, give a dozen; eighteen roses is a floral begging for forgiveness; congratulate with twenty-five; and to show a love that is everlasting and unconditional no matter what (including, presumably, spending the month’s rent in interflora), heft home a bouquet of fifty.

However many you intend to give, be sure to keep them fresh: a withered red rose symbolises a fading passion and dying love.  Valentine’s (or Valentinus’s) Day is hardly the time and place to tell someone it’s over.

But, really, you could.  Flowers, cards, jewellery, chocolate, dinner, champagne, and perfume are perfectly nice.  They’re pretty and pleasant – a delightful way to say ‘I love you’ – but in romance of yore, they would have won you neither maiden nor squire.

Devotion required a little more than a bunch of flowers, a card, and some chocolates.  It had to be proved via feats of remarkable invention and questionable sense.  You could, for example, raise a rooster til it was 11 months old then chop off its head, cut out its heart and eat it.  If you could get hold of a wild duck or dove, your intended would be equally impressed, though only if you pointed at the ground and held their shoulder while you swallowed it.  It would take a little more if all you could get your hands on was an owl – to impress with an owl’s heart, you’d have to cut it out, dry it, and carry it round in your pocket.  Attempting to woo a gentleman, a lady could win him by secreting a teaspoonful of ground fingernail into his beer.  He would have to come by the web of a wild gander’s foot to dry, crush into a powder, and sprinkle in the coffee of the woman whose affections he sought to ensure she would both marry him and stay faithful.  To make himself irresistible, a gentleman could pull out some of a lady’s hair, hide the dried tongue of a dove in his bedroom, or chew a piece of gristle while standing on his head.  Continuing the livestock theme, if you and your friends wish to know who will marry first, put a cat on a quilt and fling it up in the air.  Whoever it lands nearest will marry first.  Or have her eyes scratched out.  If you meet THE ONE at a party, whisper his or her name twenty times (it has to be done in front of him or her so try to find a way to work it into the conversation) then before you go to sleep (presumably alone) wish twenty times that you’ll be together forevermore and you shall.  Assuming the muttering hasn’t put them off.  Should you have any concerns about your husband’s fidelity, simply cut a lemon in half, rub the pieces on the four corners of your bed then put them under your pillow.  If you dream of him, he is faithful; if you don’t then all this Valentine palaver is for naught.  Should you want to prove your undying devotion to your husband, run three times round the block with your mouth full of water.  If you succeed, he will know that your affections are true.  Presumably, choking, asphyxiating or spitting it all over him for making you take part in such a ridiculous activity when you’ve already made your feelings perfectly clear proves he’s better off without you.

Going to such bizarre and strenuous lengths to prove one’s feelings does sound more impressive than stopping by the shop on the way home to pick up some flowers, but I’m not sure that all the muttering, gargling, heart-swallowing, hair-pulling, and cat-flinging is indicative of devotion so much as serious disturbance.  Ground fingernails and gander’s foot don’t sound half as appetising as champagne and chocolates; and if we all sought out an owl, duck, dove, goose, or rooster to fillet every Valentine’s, they’d soon become endangered species.  Personally, I’d rather not come across the dried tongue of a dove in a man’s bedroom and would be perfectly happy with a card.  I suppose it depends on just what sort of feelings you wish to convince your beloved.

Daughter of Aeolus and wife of Ceyx, when her husband perished in a shipwreck, Halcyone threw herself into the sea and drowned.  Out of pity, the gods changed them both into halcyon birds (later to be known as kingfishers), then forbade the winds from blowing for seven days before and after the winter solstice so Halcyone could lay her eggs in peace without the threat of storms.  In a further act of perilous spousal support, the female halcyon bird is said to support her mate when he tires flying over the sea by carrying him on her wings.

Though her tale is tragic, the birds named for her are beautiful and the days of rest the gods gave her, too, are halcyon.

Now, halcyon days are golden.  They tend to be associated with times of peace, prosperity, and tranquillity; family picnics at the seaside from which familial bickering is absent; and days in which joy is abundant and strife forgotten.  Depending on your disposition, this is either a nauseating prospect best dispatched to the same spot in hell as Hallmark’s wonderful mothers, true friends, devoted fathers, and forever-mine lovers; or remembrance of such days fills you with the glow of repose, idle nostalgia, and hope.  It really depends who you ask.

In the search for golden moments, fiction is as good a place to start as any.  Writers tend to have something to say about it.  To name a few: Lucy Maud Montgomery, sent Anne of Green Gables off to spend many a halcyon day in “the golden prime of August” in the lodges and harbours of Prince Edward Island.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky declared them to be “frightfully dull” leading to such desperate boredom that it “sets one sticking golden pins into people”.  Jack London only found them with a drink in hand.  Arthur Conan Doyle brought a certain flamboyance to his idea of bliss with the “strange tales of fortunes made and fortunes lost” and “stirring adventures” of the pioneers.  W. Somerset Maugham sided with Dostoyevsky after being charmed by a woman into married misery.  And Charlotte Bronte’s Professor mistook female subjugation and repugnance for a “halcyon mien”.

So, tragic little Halcyone, leaping from the rocks, knew nothing about the dastardly, plundering writers who would either venerate or take her name in vain.  All she wanted was to see her man.  Preferably in human form, but feathered and with the promise of immortality was the only deal the gods were offering that day.

May Sinclair is in danger of being lost under a mountain of critical essays; smothered by scholars of literature and psychoanalysis alike, apparently determined to claim her as one of their own; and dissected by biographers until every word on the page is weighted with biographical reference, no matter how tenuous.  Her fate is partly her own fault – she is the writer to whom “stream of consciousness”, in its literary sense, has been attributed; she was a member of the Society for Psychical Research; and wrote studies on philosophy, most notably German Idealism.  However, she is best read, not as an object of study, but as the teller of a damn fine tale.

Uncanny Stories is a collection of tales of the supernatural.  Eerie, startling and, of course, macabre, they are also terribly civilized.  There is no projectile vomit, no ectoplasm, and no demon incarnate.  There are murders, but only for the most honourable of reasons and in the most civilized of settings, committed by terribly nice people who just happen to have murdered someone.  In The Victim, a valet murders his employer while assisting him with his toilette, believing he drove his sweetheart away.  Rigid with fear and guilt, he is visited by the spectre of his victim who thanks the valet for murdering him, thereby relieving him of his debts.  Reunited with his sweetheart, he finds a slightly askew happy ending.  After death in The Finding of the Absolute, Mr Spalding finds solace and ease from the pain of his wife’s adultery in debate with Immanuel Kant on a space-time continuum in heaven.  Not everyone’s idea of heaven, but Mr Spalding blossoms.  Discovering on an illicit trip to Paris that they are bored rigid by each other but seemingly unable to end their relationship, Harriott and Oscar are doomed, after death, to spend an eternal hereafter in each other’s mind-numbing company.  In place of hell fires, it seems a sort of suburban punishment somehow.  The most striking story in the collection is The Flaw in the Crystal, a love story, really, about a telepathic woman’s attempts to protect her lover and keep him, as she sees it, “supernaturally safe”.  She uses her powers to protect him from the pain of an unhappy marriage and provides him with an escape from his wife.  However, when she tries to do the same for a friend and cure him of his psychoses, she discovers that using her powers for her lover’s benefit has rendered her unclean and she is possessed by the demons she was hoping to exorcise.  Without a purity of saintly proportions, it seems her powers are useless.  However, there is no devastation of Carrie proportions.  Instead, she quietly tells her lover he has to leave and let her return to the self-abnegating state she was in before they met.

So there you have it.  Dissect the tales if you wish: there’s a 14-page critical theory introduction to assist, promising Freud, Einstein, and Modernism to be buried in the text, if you care to look.  Personally, I think the best accompaniment to the tales is your bed on a dark, windy night while the gothic and supernatural swirl about you.  If your floorboards creak, then so much the better.

Rebecca has been many things to many people.  To the reading public, it is a gothic romance and ferocious tale of jealousy, betrayal, and suspense.  To academics it is ripe with Freudian subtext – the younger second wife (daughter) longing for the affections of her husband (father), but envious of and intimidated by the first wife (mother).  To biographers of du Maurier, it is a playing out of her own difficult relationship with her parents, loving her father but being less enamoured of her mother or her jealousy of the beautiful woman to whom her husband, Tommy, had been engaged before he met her.  Neville Chamberlain is said to have read Rebecca on the flight to meet with Adolf Hitler and sign the entirely unsuccessful Munich Agreement.  Unless Chamberlain picked up on some subliminal pro-appeasement of dictators message I didn’t notice and du Maurier presumably didn’t intend, I don’t think Rebecca – with whatever subtext the book may or may not have – can be blamed for his monumentally poor diplomatic judgement.  That said, though it was never put into practice, the book was used by the Germans in World War II for devising code; constructing sentences from single words in the book, referenced by page number, line and position.

Du Maurier began writing Rebecca in the late summer of 1937 in Egypt where her husband was posted as a commanding office of the Grenadier Guards and where she sat out her duty as a military wife, bored and homesick, longing for her life back in Cornwall “like a pain under the heart continually”.  Completed on her return, it became a bestseller, largely dismissed by critics, but bought by thousands on the promise of love and tumultuous passion.

Beginning with a dream of a return to her once stately home, Manderley, from which she and her husband have been exiled in infamy, the narrator’s tale is one of romance and adoration, sabotaged by hatred, fervent devotion, jealousy and, finally, murder.  Naïve and cowed by her employer, Mrs Van Hopper, to whom she is a paid companion, the narrator is entranced by the charms of wealthy widower, Max de Winter.  She is whisked into a hasty marriage – she remains unnamed until she becomes Mrs de Winter – and a life she expects to be filled with wealth, happiness, and romance.

However, the reality of life with her betrothed is far removed from her fantasy of happily married life.  On arrival at Manderley, Max’s home, he becomes maddeningly moody and uncommunicative, veering between apparently unprovoked violent outbursts and sedate evenings in the drawing room by the fire.  She attempts, in a plaintive sort of way, to ingratiate herself with him, playing the part of the dutiful, adoring wife in the hope that he’ll reveal the source of his angst.  Intermittently successful in her earnest endeavor with Max, she fails entirely in any attempt to win over the indomitable housekeeper, Mrs Danvers.  Zealous in her devotion to Max’s first wife, Rebecca, Mrs Danvers attempts – and succeeds – in destroying whatever happiness she might have hoped for, eventually burning down their home.  Conspiring to make Mrs de Winter feel inadequate and pathetic in comparison to her predecessor, she convinces her that Max still loves and longs for Rebecca.  It turns out that he hated and murdered Rebecca, shooting her, concealing her body in their boat and sinking it in an attempt to make it look like suicide or a sailing accident.  It is an act Mrs de Winter, in her dogged devotion to him, seems to find almost endearing and preferable to any evidence of him still loving her.  The body is discovered and the ensuing investigation forces the couple into exile where they live out a life of quietude and seamless routine.

Much of the novel’s complex, volatile dynamics could quite possibly have been resolved without such great drama by couples’ therapy, but a homely counselor – notepad in hand and a kindly, if smug, disposition – asking them to share just one thing they liked about each other would have detracted rather from the tumult and tension that drives the plot.

Du Maurier could never understand the popularity of her novel: to her it was simply a study in jealousy.  Though academics may have tried to draw out of her some subtext – Freudian or otherwise – she resisted.  Despite attempts to give some psychological significance to it, she was no more forthcoming on the question of an unnamed narrator, saying she couldn’t think of a name and then it became a challenge to write an entire story without giving one to her.  But the novel doesn’t need to be dissected in order for its full effect to be felt.  Its female characters – harpy, duteous wife, and maligned seductress – revile, smilingly pander to, and toy with Max in the home he so wishes to be his ordered domain.  It seems du Maurier enjoyed toying with her readers’ expectations and the fates of her characters.  Mrs de Winter, against all reasonable judgment, decides that murder is no insurmountable object in her love for Max; Mrs Danvers, shrewdly subversive until her desire to avenge Rebecca’s murder drives her to burn down the house; and Rebecca, in her wildness, flaunting the freedoms tradition reserves only for the men with whom she surrounds herself.  If you’re looking to immerse yourself in romance, Mills and Boon it isn’t, but for the madness of love and passion, since its publication in 1938, it hasn’t been bettered.

In August 1937 writer Elizabeth Smart walked into a London bookshop, opened a collection of poems by George Barker and fell in love.  By the time they met and began an affair three years later – resulting in the birth of four children, although he never left his wife – she was already so utterly besotted by his work that the writer and his writing had become fused into a single entity.  In a sometimes terrifying account, she immortalised their relationship in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept, exposing both its agonies and ecstasies, from infatuation to abandonment.

The book is terrifying for its exposure of an individual publicly skinned alive: the rawness of Smart’s vulnerability as each emotional layer is stripped away by her burgeoning adoration of Barker.  She is at once both hungry for and horrified by his effect upon her.  “He has martyred me, but for no cause, nor has he any idea of the size and consequence of my wounds,” she writes, “Perhaps he will never know, for to say, You killed me daily and O most especially nightly, would imply blame.  I do not blame, nor even say, You might have done this or this rather than that.  I even say, You must do that, you have to do it, there is no alternative, urging my own murder.  But if a knife is stuck in the engine that pumps my blood, my blood stops, no matter how I reason with it.  Will he notice that my heart has ceased to beat?  But he may, O he may at one glance, restore me and flood me with so much new love that every scar will have a satin covering and be new glitter to attack his heart.  From this great distance, after these nights of separation, more I cannot see.  My imagination is snowed under the eternal unpunctuated hours”.

If her relationship with Barker cost her reason (“The parchment philosopher has no conception of the price of love…I posture in vain with his weapons.”), it gave her an insight and a voice which she could never revoke.  For the creativity he unleashed and that compelled her to write, she plundered emotional chasms that, for everyday life to continue, would have been better left undiscovered.  Instead she disgorged the agony without which the ecstasy would have meant nothing.

The exultation she did know remained unrivalled throughout the rest of her life.  “Delirious with power and invulnerability” and with “happiness as inexhaustible as the ocean, and as warm and comfortable as the womb”, she entrusted herself to Barker completely.  Smart’s insatiable hunger for the poet and for his effect upon her, gave her an avariciousness almost too intense to be sufficiently communicated in writing: her hunger was not for his wealth (he didn’t have any to speak of), but to be absorbed by his writing as though the man and his work were one and the same.  There is something verging on the cannibalistic in the novel, as though Smart sought to consume Barker without regard for anyone or anything that might have assumed a prior hold over him: “In a bleeding heart I should find only exhilaration in the richness of the red”.

Her depiction of the man is so steeped in metaphor and the pitch often so achingly hyperbolic that – aside from the fact that she had four children with him – it seems as though Barker himself were almost incidental to Smart’s creativity.  She wrote half the novel before actually meeting him and, like many of the most ardent and prolific writers of love poems and letters, she was infatuated and overtaken by the act of writing: perhaps more than by the man to and about whom she wrote.  It’s possible, on reading Barker’s work, that she attributed an “I” to him that wasn’t entirely apposite to who he actually was.  Proust always felt condemned to the “I” with which he wrote his first work and which readers ever after assumed to be him: perhaps Barker felt the same.  He made great, and appropriately poetic, declarations to Elizabeth, saying he had fallen in love with her name even before he met her, but while his adoration of her may have been total, his loyalty was not.  She is sometimes offended by her own flesh, so unlike Barker’s other lovers – “the boy with green eyes and long lashes” – about whom he dispassionately tells her, but it is his emotional promiscuity that she cannot bear.  When he returns to his wife apparently out of pity – thereby committing “the one sin which Love will not allow” – it is not sexual jealousy Smart feels, but despair at the emotional investment Barker still has in his relationship with his wife.  “How can I put love up to my hopes so suicidal and wild-eyed when the matter is too simple and too plain: It is her tears he feels trickling over his breast each night; it is for her he feels the concern; and the pity after all, not the love, fills all his twenty-four hours”.

Yet she knew all too well that, regardless of what she may have experienced through her relationship with Barker, the sympathy of onlookers would always reside with his wife, whose silence Smart regarded as “propaganda for sainthood”.  “On her mangledness I am spreading my amorous sheets, but who will have any pride in the wedding red, seeping up between the thighs of love which rise like a colossus, but whose issue is only the cold semen of grief?”.

Hoping to attain sainthood through silence is not, however, something of which Smart could have been accused.  Though she made herself emotionally transparent to the reader, more striking is the way in which she did so to Barker.  “I am the obsessional type,” she wrote to him, “Which type are you?  If you are the butterfly type you will never forgive my intensity”.  It would have been far easier to lie to him and feign indifference – as she occasionally tried to do – and to go instead, “whoring after oblivion” rather than have the courage to present herself to him unexpurgated.  “But if you do me the wrong of thinking I am beautiful, that I have a million rescuers from despair, and therefore I can take calamity better than anyone else, remember, truly, it is only you who bestow even these gifts upon me.  Therefore, how much greater my loss must be which takes away even what appears to be mine by nature, my power to endure and resist.”  In a sense, Smart’s declaration of her feelings to Barker should be almost unremarkable, but it is a risk not often or easily taken.  By its courageous and untempered honesty, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept is a liberation of female sexual and emotional hunger: of a woman whose muse both freed and destroyed her.

In 1940, Elizabeth Smart began an affair with the poet, George Barker, which she eternalized in its many agonies and seemingly far fewer ecstasies in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.  Though Barker stayed with his wife, they had four children who Smart supported through journalism and advertising work in London before dropping out of the literary scene and moving to the country.

The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals is roughly a sequel to By Grand Central Station and meanders through Smart’s life in post-WW2 London as she struggled to support her family through bouts of poverty and rationing.  By turns, poetic, grim, pleading, wise, and witty, it isn’t the easiest read.  Smart has a tendency to career off into rants and bursts of dialogue, mostly revolving around not having enough money to buy a beer, her boredom at work, and general disappointment with her lot.  Reviews at the time of the book’s original release tended to resort to lengthy comparisons to other writers, which is all very well if the reader happens to share the same extensive knowledge of said writers – or, at least, a similar fondness for literary name-dropping – but isn’t very helpful in attempting to decipher Smart’s sometimes seemingly nonsensical novella.

Though it does detract from the book’s impact, the need for some deciphering doesn’t rob it of its power.  Smart casts a keen, if often melancholy, eye over the everyday lives of those around her who “make up ways to make things possible” and to get by with “their offices, their surgeries, their rehearsal halls, their notebooks, their night-crying babies, their laboratory experiments, their flagging lettuces”.  Not that she fares a great deal better in her own life.  Even sunshine and youth, it seems, are not immune from her disappointment: “on this lovely afternoon, what is left of my youth rushes up like a geyser, as I sit in the sun, combing the lice out of my hair.  For it is difficult to stop expecting (What my heart first waking whispered the world was), even though I am a woman of 31½, with lice in her hair and a faithless lover”.

But, even in the face of her pervasive despair, there is a wilfulness in every emotional state.  “A pen is a furious weapon”, she writes, “But it needs a rage of will”.  That rage drives the book on and acts as the thread that binds together a tale that sometimes necessarily veers dangerously close to an incoherent rambling.  It’s not always an uplifting read, but a genuinely rending account of life less ordinary which is difficult to put away unfinished.

Every once in a while, a book comes along in which the pacing is so precise, the pitch so perfect, the language so measured, and the cast so beguiling that I am mesmerized and awed. Louise Shivers’ first novel, Here to get My Baby out of Jail appeared over twenty years ago and, when I was fifteen, brought with it an entirely new genre of teenage fantasies. My walls were dedicated largely to Mel Gibson and my head was occasionally turned by a boy at school, but my heart thumped at the thought of a man who, by any reasonable measure, I should not have found attractive.

“Red-headed, jagged-faced” and looking like “a walk-away from a nearby CCC camp”, Jack Ruffin steps up onto the porch of Roxy’s father’s funeral home “as deliberately as a casket salesman” and she’s lost in him.  He’s apprenticed at the funeral home for a while before coming to work as a labourer on the tobacco farm owned by Roxy and her husband, Aaron. There are no thunderbolts or swooning love at first sight. If anything, Roxy is confused and made cautious by Jack’s effect on her. Slowly the tension between them seeps insidiously into the narrative. “Every chance we’d get we’d snatch at each other, slip, hide – and when we couldn’t it was hard not to be cross or surly. We’d stare across the kitchen at each other – our eyes dry and cagey. Watching. Waiting. I’d realized by then that the fond feeling I’d had for Aaron was just a weak hum compared to the raging thing in my chest now. I didn’t think about the rest of my life. I didn’t care. I had to have him.”  The tobacco harvest ends and, along with it, Jack’s employment on the farm. Faced with the prospect of never seeing Roxy again, he kills Aaron and takes her and the baby. Away from the farm and numbed by Aaron’s murder, the hunger that Roxy felt for Jack is quelled as she realises “I’d breathed all the things I’d wanted into him and thought that that was love”, but the vessel for all her wants is just a man. She reports the murder to the police and Jack is arrested and sentenced to death. It is a quiet denouement: Roxy’s grief is neither dramatic nor maudlin and, though she cries for Aaron and Jack, she does so quietly.

To my fifteen-year-old self, the subtlety and skill of the book were as far removed as Roxy’s 1930s small town in North Carolina: all I wanted was the effect and I didn’t care how it was created. Actually, what I wanted was for a Jack Ruffin to amble into my life, press his tobacco stained fingers against my mouth, and mesmerize me so intensely that anything else was nothing to me. I wanted “the raging thing in my chest” Roxy feels for Jack and to think that a man would want me so badly he’d murder my husband to be with me, then, knowing he was being sentenced to death, tell a courtroom full of people “I love her and will die loving her”. It wasn’t something the boys at high school were really up to.

Reading the book a second and third time a few years later, it still creates the same breathy presence. I know that raging in the chest – as yet, it hasn’t been accompanied by the desire/need to murder a spouse – but Shivers’ depiction of it is as sexy and startling as it was on first reading. When she writes about sex, Shivers does so with language that is spare and frank, relying neither on euphemisms nor graphic description. From the lingering taste of tobacco left on Roxy’s mouth after Jack leaves to “lying down in the middle of the morning and raising my skirt and getting sticky and messed up”, it is written in much the same way as someone of Roxy’s background – small town polite without pretension – would describe it.

The men of Roxy’s world are depicted with similar candour: from the sweetness of funeral home apprentice, Neb, with his silky brown eyelashes walking “like he was hearing some real good music in his head”; the tenderness of Aaron towards his tobacco plants; “highpitched men’s voices singing about prison and darling”; and the hunger and ease of Jack’s love for Roxy; to the cocksure apprentices and the brutality of Aaron’s murder.

I suppose, ostensibly, it’s a tale of a lonely housewife fucking the hired help, but Shivers takes the scenario and cleaves it open. Then, with a delicacy most writers would fail to muster, she exposes its guts. It may seem something of a paradox, but the understatement of Shivers’ prose; her measured tone; and, despite ample opportunity, the absence of escalation into melodrama charge the book with an eroticism and pace in which she does not falter

Numerous biographies back this up, attributing to Scott her rise and fall, her ascent into the literati and her descent into alcoholism and madness.  Like a one-man chauvinist show, he paraded his wife as his glamorous assistant before boxing her up and sawing her into tiny pieces.  He drunkenly abused her, ridiculed and plagiarised her work, and imprisoned her in a series of mental institutions.

All of which begs the question: why did she stay with him?

Scott courted her with letters and extravagant declarations of adoration.  Zelda’s replies, though often equally gushing, reveal a degree of pragmatism one would have thought preceded a fairly rational assessment of Scott’s intentions as regards the treatment of his future wife.  Though intended to charm Zelda, his disappointingly unoriginal pronouncement, “I used to wonder why they kept princesses in towers” speaks more of acquisition than love.  Her reply, “Scott, you’ve been so sweet about writing, but I get so damned tired of being told that – you’ve written that verbatim, in your last six letters!” is reflective more of a woman all too aware of the fate of fairytale princesses destined for towers than one blindly in love.  It’s a small – though hardly subtle – step from a princess fêted for her beauty and talent to the towers of a more gothic scenario.  There was only so far the accoutrements of romance could take them before the champagne went flat, the roses wilted, and the old staple, Prince Charming, turned jailor and tormentor.

Aside from the occasional pastiche, the literary appeal of the gothic had all but faded from view by the 20’s, but I’m too tempted by the parallels between the Fitzgeralds and the genre to suggest it had faded from personal experience.  Scott appeared to slip too easily into the role of jailor – if, indeed, he ever played any other part – holding Zelda captive in the institutions of psychiatry and marriage.

In 1932 she wrote her autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, drawing on the material with which Scott was struggling for Tender is the Night.  Both books detailed the decline and disintegration of the Jazz Age and of their marriage, but while Scott’s entered the canon of 20’s writing, he demanded Zelda’s be subjected to cuts and published only under his supervision.  In a journal entry outlining his divorce strategy if Zelda continued to write, Scott noted: “Attack on all grounds.  Play (suppress), novel (delay), pictures (suppress), character (showers), child (detach), schedule (disorient to cause trouble), no typing.  Probable result – new breakdown.”  It didn’t stop her writing, but faced with the prospect of estrangement from her child (daughter, Scottie, was born in 1921) and the suppression of her work, Zelda capitulated and an abridged version of her novel was published.

It’s possible the analogy of the gothic extended to the way in which they talked-up and used their infidelities as a means with which to taunt each other, suggesting they were meted out as a means of pleasurable punishment.  The infidelities, her homosexual crushes (it’s questionable how appropriate “crush” is as a label – it may have been merely a convenient inclusion on a psychiatric admission form), and his fear of or fascination with homosexuality tended to precipitate the numerous crises within the marriage.

Although Save Me the Waltz, even in its tempered form, is considered Zelda’s testimony of her marriage and creative ventures, it is the short stories of Bits of Paradise that offer a more interesting and frank disclosure of her life.  Though written by Zelda, they are attributed to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald – occasionally only to F. Scott Fitzgerald, prompting Zelda’s remark, “Mr Fitzgerald – I believe that is how he spells his name – seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home”.  By attributing them to both himself and Zelda, Scott presumably endorsed their content and could argue that the perceptions they detailed were at least in part his own.  In a curious way this may have given Zelda greater freedom to divulge views and information missing from her novel, not least because recourse to the excuse that they were merely fictional characters remained.

I’ll leave scholarly supposition to those with more patience and a higher word count, but it’s not exactly a robust excuse.  Her characters buy underwear in which to find themselves dead, attempt suicide rather than be jilted by lovers, and find themselves disappearing into solitude, drudgery, and begrudging domesticity in place of the careers of which they dreamt.

The possibility that the awe expressed by the heroine of The Girl the Prince Liked is a reflection of that felt by Zelda at least in her initial dealings with Scott is too persuasive to resist.  “There is something infinitely disturbing in the phosphorescent rosiness that surrounds the successful and the great, a mystic magnetism that promises the same freedom from doubt and trouble that is part of themselves to all who surround them.”

I could retrace my steps at this point and qualify Scott’s actions with the assertion that Zelda was no saint.  She was accused by Hemingway of draining Scott emotionally and economically, and of undermining his artistic and sexual self-confidence.  The declaration by Ring Lardner that, “Mr Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs Fitzgerald is a novelty”, suggests there was something of the hanger-on about Zelda.  If so, then it was a tendency about which she wrote in a letter to Scott, describing herself as “that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal”.  It brings to mind Dorothy Parker’s take on the Flappers with which Zelda was allied: “Her golden rule is plain enough – Just get them young and treat them tough”.  Perhaps that was how Zelda saw Scott.  If she did then his regard for her was no more charitable.

There is also the line most commonly taken by biographers of the couple and the period that both parties were victims of societal expectation and psychological practice that sought to punish and suppress creative women.  Aside from the fact that it sounds a rather trite argument, it seems highly unlikely that either would allow such apparently proscriptive doctrine to become so entrenched as to govern the dynamics of their relationship.  “Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant” are, at the very least, the words of a woman sufficiently aware of the short-comings of those around her and not someone intending to follow the pattern.

Nancy Milford’s 1970 biography of Zelda may have delivered a more frank and personal account, but the manuscript so upset Scottie that she threatened suicide unless it was substantially cut.  This does, however, dangle the possibility of a sequel.

Porn is posh.  It is not explicit or pornographic: instead it is “libertine philosophy” (review of The Sexual Life of Catherine M in the Times Literary Supplement, no less).  It does not need to be concealed from wives and servants (see Mervyn Griffith-Jones’ Opening Address for the Prosecution in Lady Chatterley’s Trial).  It “exemplifies the power and range of the authentically feminine voice and vision” (see Evelyn J. Hinz on Anais Nin’s Diary).  And it springs from “one of the most radical minds of Western history, one that touched, with an astonishing fusion of madness and cold rationality, on some of the most central aspects of psychic life” (Newsweek review of the 1989 re-issue of the Marquis de Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, skirting around the book’s content in what looks like a desperate attempt to pretend there wasn’t actually any sex in it).

I’m not sure if this is necessarily a good thing, for the simple reason that I think it makes reading the rude bits less fun.  Declaring a book a literary classic or a work of high art almost guarantees its inclusion on reading lists and arts programmes which inevitably leads to the whole drawn-out messy affair that is scholarly deconstruction. Transcendence of cultural bounds, literature as a measure of modern morals, and symbolism are moreish fodder for The [remarkably un-] Erotic Review, but they are not what gives porn its appeal.  The trouble with such analysis is that it attempts to distance the book from its content.  Somehow it can’t just be porn for porn’s sake: there needs to be some reason to read it other than for its lewdness.  This is not to say that writers of good fiction should go unremarked – good writing is always much appreciated – but the interest is in the phallus, not its symbols.  Explaining the reasons why a book is erotic seems to run counter to why it was written.  The Marquis de Sade, for example, wrote for pure shock value – and was given successive prison sentences resulting in life imprisonment for the privilege – so it seems odd to dedicate tomes, longer even than the thousands of pages he actually wrote, to analysing why he wrote what he did.  In a single paragraph he came as close as he or anyone else probably ever got to explaining himself, declaring: “Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change”.

Ironically, it is frequently those most opposed to pornographic writing that make it sound most enticing.  In attempting to shame the jury into a guilty verdict, Mervyn Griffith-Jones succeeded in making Lady Chatterley’s Lover sound like the most erotic book ever written.  “Members of the Jury”, he said, “when you have seen this book, making all such allowances in favour of it as you can, the Prosecution will invite you to say that it does tend, certainly that it may tend, to induce lustful thoughts in the minds of those who read it.  It goes further, you may think.  It sets upon a pedestal promiscuous and adulterous intercourse.  It commends, and indeed it sets out to commend, sensuality almost as a virtue.  It encourages, and indeed even advocates, coarseness and vulgarity of thought and of language.”  He went on to count the number of “good old Anglo-Saxon four-letter words” (“The word “fuck” or “fucking” occurs no less than thirty times.  I have added them up, but do not guarantee that I have added them all up.  “Cunt” fourteen times; “balls” thirteen times; “shit” and “arse” six times apiece; “cock” four times; “piss” three times, and so on.”).  And later counted the number of sex scenes declaring, “twelve of them certainly are described in detail leaving nothing to the imagination.  The curtain is never drawn.  One follows them not only into the bedroom but into bed and one remains with them there”.  Sounds good to me.  Also sounds like no one could possibly enjoy the book as much as Griffith-Jones evidently did; it probably became required reading for both his wife and servants.

This lengthy preamble brings me to the book I’m supposed to be discussing, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty.  Written by Anne Rice under the pseudonym of A. N. Roquelaure, it casts off the Disney fairytale and returns to what was apparently the original version of the tale: Beauty is woken, not by a kiss from her Prince Charming, but by being raped.  The Prince takes her to his castle where she begins her training as a plaything and general dogsbody for the royal household along with the other princes and princesses who have been donated by the surrounding kingdoms as tributes to the Queen.  Once they have completed their training to become roundly submissive creatures – a mishmash of femdom/maledom scenarios, a great deal of spanking, and other household duties – they are returned to their kingdoms “being enhanced in wisdom”.  Beauty falls in love with Prince Alexi who regales her with stories of his own training in humility – his time at the castle being spent refusing to yield to the Queen before being broken by the crude catering staff and a stable boy, after which he allowed her to steer him around the grounds by the butt of a riding crop.  Despite being collared, whipped, and fucked by every passing gentleman and lady, Beauty refuses to become an obedient plaything and is sold to the commoners in the nearby village as punishment.

Roquelaure doesn’t take it as far as de Sade – no one is blinded, killed, or made to walk on glass – but she has, I suppose, borrowed some from the array of anatomical logistics he concocted in his tales of slaves grateful for punishment and aristocrats only too happy to give it.  The sheer volume written by him makes it difficult not to.  Can’t say it did a whole heap for me: leering aristocrats have never really been my thing and successive spankings all tend to merge into one.  I did learn one thing, though: should I ever be carried off by a knight in shining armour, I’ll be keeping my back to the wall.  Unless welts and butt plugs are your thing, I suggest you do the same.

Faced with such a disconcerting display, I thought I should take action.  It’s a fairly widely acknowledged fact that weddings tend to provoke one of two emotions: either delightful romance or violence.  Lacking the remotest possibility of the former – nothing, it seems, makes women more proprietorial than a single flapper – I tried to start a fight with the American girl on my left by telling her I’d slept with the outrageously dull boy she’d had an enormous crush on.  She didn’t take the bait; not even when I told her his imagination barely and reluctantly stretched to a minor variation on the proverbial thinking of England.

Thinking I could try the other option by some sort of osmosis, I turned to the couple on my right only to see the most nauseating – not to mention, logistically complex – public display of affection.  Somehow, throughout the entire, delicious meal they had managed to hold hands and were now at the point of cutting up each other’s dessert.  With his visions of conjoined humans cartwheeling into eternity, Aristophanes would have been proud.  I didn’t think it was quite so pretty.

So for the sake of poor Dorothy who would no doubt outwardly resent me doing so while inwardly smiling smugly, I feel duty-bound to give her a little revival.

The popular perception of Parker – a sort of Dorothy-Lite – is of a woman of crackling wit, gaily and drunkenly garrulous, bitter to the point of vitriol yet with an ever disarming delivery.  The reality is a little darker.

For all her captivating presence, Parker’s first love was despair.  The wit, the charm, the ribaldry, and the bite were there, but so were suicide attempts, abortions, and decrepit, dog shit smeared apartments.  The woman who chewed up and spat out the great, the good, and the mediocre – the belle dame sans merci of every circle in which she moved – reserved her most abject thoughts for herself.  It is with begrudging consent she agreed to live; the other options apparently marginally less attractive.  I might have done her no favours over dinner by quoting the poem, Résumé, in which she most directly expressed such sentiments:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

It isn’t really in keeping with joyous celebration of a life spent together (or perhaps it is, depending on your disposition).

It’s possible, of course, that Parker’s habitual displays of despair – both in her writing and everyday life – were part of an affected persona.  There is a certain intrigue about a figure whose every work, every drink, and every day may be her last.  I can’t help but wonder if, as a woman familiar with celebrity, she knew the value of offering glimpses into her private life through work assumed to be autobiographical.  The overdosing Hazel Morse of Big Blonde; overwrought Mimi’s desperate, fraught attempts to please her soldier husband in The Lovely Leave; and the tormented woman, beseeching god to make a man phone in A Telephone Call can all be traced to episodes in Parker’s life.  By creating characters so close to her own, she became her own anti-heroine.

But in the face of – or perhaps because of – her despair, her poems and stories, even at their most sour, are funny.  She is, after all, a woman who put international relations into a bra (“Mrs Martindale’s breasts were admirable, delicate yet firm, pointing one to the right and one to the left: angry at each other, as the Russians have it.”); created an entire life philosophy in just a few lines (“Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.”); declared her contempt for any even vaguely proprietorial presumptions (“But now I know the things I know, And do the things I do; And if you do not like me so, To hell, my love, with you!”); and voiced the oft-heard woman’s lament over non-committal men (“He’s so sure of me, so sure.  I wonder why they hate you as soon as they are sure of you.  I should think it would be sweet to be sure.”).

Yet no matter how wittily dressed up it may be, such determined despair gets a little wearing.  For all the scope of her engagement with the world of writing – from Broadway and frolicking with the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, to working as a war correspondent in the Spanish Civil War, and being blacklisted as a member of the Anti-Nazi League – she is somehow self-limiting in her perceptions.  Entertaining though it undeniably is, sardonicism only goes so far.  But if misery was her muse then I suppose she had no choice but to indulge it: to think as she passed every blossoming cherry tree, “How gay ‘twould be to hang me from a flowering tree”.  Far more helpful, it seems to me, would be to have given said muse a good slap, and chided it for draining her far more harshly than any other presence in her life.  That, however, is the fantasy of a slightly Dorothy-fatigued Criticess in need of a little speakeasy wit – perhaps without the rancour.