On Valentine's Day

For a year, Jeffrey Eugenides read nothing but love stories in order to select the best for an anthology. With the tormented poet Catullus as his guide, he went from Chekhov to Nabokov to Alice Munro and discovered that the greatest works depend on disappointment, boredom and broken hearts

The Latin poet Catullus was the first poet in the ancient world to write about a personal love affair in an extended way. Other poets treated the subject of "love", allowing the flushed cheeks or alabaster limbs of this or that inamorata to enter the frame of their poems, but it was Catullus who built his nugae, or trifles, around a single, near-obsessional passion for a woman whose entire presence, body and mind, fills the lines of his poetry. From the first excruciating moments of infatuation with the woman he called "Lesbia", through the torrid transports of physical love, to the betrayals that leave him stricken, Catullus told it all, and, in so doing, did more than anyone to create the form we recognise today as the love story.

Gaius Catullus was born around 84 BC, in Cisalpine Gaul, the son of a minor aristocrat and businessman with holdings in Spain and Asia Minor, and lived until roughly the age of 30. It was as a very young man, then, that he found his way to poetry - and to Lesbia.

Lesbia wasn't her real name. Her real name was Clodia. Classical scholars disagree over whether she was the Clodia married to the praetor Metellus Celer, infamous for her licentiousness and possible matricide. Lesbia might have been one of Clodia's sisters, or another Clodia altogether. What's certain is that she was married and that Catullus's relationship with her was adulterous. Although, like many adulterers, Catullus disapproved of adultery (in poem LXI he writes, "Your husband is not light, not tied / To some bad adulteress, / Nor pursuing shameful scandal / Will he wish to sleep apart / From your tender nipples"), he found himself, in the case of Clodia/Lesbia, compelled to make an exception. He became involved with a wicked aristocratic Roman lady who used him as a plaything, or - the alternate version - he fell for a fashionable, married Roman girl, who ended up sleeping with his best friend, Rufus. Whatever the details, one thing is clear: a great love story had begun.

Of Catullus's many hendecasyllabics devoted to his relationship with Lesbia, only two concern us here. The first two. The poems having to do with Lesbia and her pet sparrow.

Sparrow, my girl's darling

Whom she plays with, whom she cuddles,

Whom she likes to tempt with finger-

Tip and teases to nip harder

When my own bright-eyed desire

Fancies some endearing fun

And a small solace for her pain,

I suppose, so heavy passion then rests:

Would I could play with you as she does

And lighten the spirit's gloomy cares!

That's poem II. And by poem III, Lesbia's sparrow is dead. "[P]asser mortuus est meae puellae, / passer, deliciae meae puellae, / quem plus illa oculis suis amabit," Catullus writes, which translates as "My girl's sparrow is dead, / Sparrow, my girl's darling, / Whom she loved more than her eyes."

Incidentally, this poem - or, more specifically, the onomatopoeia of its two central words, "passer" and "pipiabat" - did more than anything I can remember to make me want to become a writer. I can still hear our Latin teacher, Miss Ferguson, piping out in her most piercing sparrow's voice, "passer pipiabat", getting us to notice how much the plosive rhythm resembled a bird singing. That words were music, that, at the same time they were marks on a page, they also referred to things in the world and, in skilled hands, took on properties of the things they denoted, was for me, at 15, an exciting discovery, all the more notable for the fact that this poetic effect had been devised by a young man dead for two thousand years, who'd sent this phrase drifting down the centuries to reach me in my Michigan classroom, filling my American ears with the sound of Roman birdsong.

But back to the poem. The pluperfect of "pipiabat" is elegiac: the bird "used to sing". Now its song has been silenced. Catullus, who in the previous poem had cause to wish the bird would fly away, now changes his mind. "Oh what a shame!" he writes. "O wretched sorrow! Your fault it is that now my girl's / Eyelids are swollen from crying."

Things were bad with the sparrow around. They're bad with the sparrow gone. Nothing is keeping Lesbia from giving all her love to Catullus now. But Lesbia's no longer in the mood. Worse, her crying has ruined her looks. If Catullus gave us the confessional love story, these first two poems delineated its scope. At the behest of Dave Eggers, I've been reading almost nothing but love stories for the past year for an anthology, My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, which takes its title from Catullus (the proceeds of which will go to support Eggers's literacy project 826 Chicago).

The subjects of the stories range from two lovers taking a road trip in communist-era Czechoslovakia, in Milan Kundera's "The Hitchhiking Game", to the two terrifically well-groomed, adolescent "TrendSetters & TasteMakers" from the near-future, in George Saunders's "Jon", to the little Jewish boy in Isaac Babel's "First Love" who falls for the Christian neighbour sheltering him during a Russian pogrom. Despite the multiplicity of subjects and situations, one Catullan requirement remained in force: in each of the love stories, either there is a sparrow or the sparrow is dead.

In discovering and gathering these stories, my method was maximally random and sociable. At lectures and book parties, in elevators with editors and at literary festivals with fellow novelists, on college campuses, in loud tapas bars, I asked whoever happened to be nearby to name a favourite love story. Jonathan Franzen, bobbing off the Amalfi coast after an illegal dinner of sea urchins, suggested three separate stories by Alice Munro. Kathy Chetkovich nominated "Secretary" by Mary Gaitskill, which I didn't select (I didn't think it was about love) and Mary Robison's "Yours", which I did. Jhumpa Lahiri was the first of many to insist on James Joyce's "The Dead". Asked to propose something from his own oeuvre, Martin Amis struggled to find anything sufficiently romantic.

I didn't confine myself to writers. Natasha Egan, associate director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, mentioned a story I'd read and loved a few years earlier, David Bezmozgis's "Natasha". The German artist Thomas Demand had me look at Robert Musil's difficult and rather punishing "Tonka", which I tried my best to forget but couldn't get out of my mind. (How like love!) Edwin Frank, editor of NYRB Classics, was responsible for sending my way the work of the illustrious Chinese writer Eileen Chang (whose Lust, Caution has recently been made into a film by Ang Lee), which was a revelation to me. And then there were the students and dinner-party guests, the bookworm bartenders, the voluble taxi drivers.

Many of the stories didn't need an advocate. They were among my favourites already. As a way to narrow literary focus, selecting "love" as your theme doesn't help much. Viewed a certain way, almost any story appears to be a love story. Generally speaking, however, what animates most of the stories isn't agape, but eros. The love is mainly romantic love. In almost every story you'll find a lover and a beloved, a subject pursuing an object. In Miranda July's "Something That Needs Nothing", a young woman longs for the love of her best friend, only to finally win it at the expense of turning herself into another person. The spinster in William Faulkner's southern gothic, "A Rose for Emily", whose chances for marriage have been doomed by paternal opposition, devises a desperate measure, after her father's death, to keep her next lover at her side. A frustrated teenage love affair leaves the narrator of Stuart Dybek's "We Didn't" with a memory more indelible than any resulting from consummation.

At dinner one night, when asked to list and describe the love stories I was thinking about, I was met with furrowed brows. This wasn't what my dinner companions had expected when I'd said the word "love". They were expecting happier, fluffier stories. They were expecting love. And so here I should make an important distinction: my subject wasn't love. My subject was the love story. A compendium of philosophical notions of love might begin with Plato's hypothesis that human beings were originally hermaphroditic. Severed into two sexes, men and women spend their lives seeking their other halves. Saint Thomas Aquinas reasoned that before the Fall, erections were volitional. Adam, sinless, couldn't have randy thoughts. In the Garden, confronted with Eve's nakedness (nakedness he didn't recognise as such), Adam issued disinterested, elevator-operator commands. "Up" was one. And afterwards: "Down".

Evolutionary biology does away with love completely, finding in the novelist's most dependable material - adultery and divorce - nothing more than a hardwired imperative to pass genes along to the next generation. Sexologists see only a chemical state of infatuation that lasts a couple of years, transforming thereafter, among even the most well-matched couples, into the bath-towelly togetherness known as pair-bonding.

When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims - these are lucky eventualities, but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

We value love not because it's stronger than death, but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.

And we certainly wouldn't write about it. From William Trevor's "Lovers of Their Time", which tells the story of a married travel agent and pharmacy clerk who have nowhere to meet but an out-of-the way bathroom in an old hotel, to Gilbert Sorrentino's postmodern "The Moon in Its Flight", where the teenage lovers are thwarted not only by fate, but by the literary conventions of romance, to Harold Brodkey's scandalous story "Innocence", which consists of the extended account of a Harvard senior's unflagging attempt to bring his girlfriend to her first orgasm by means of a virtuosic and intensely cerebral act of cunnilingus, the characters seek a paradise that recedes endlessly before them. Escape from one set of circumstances brings confinement in another. The fated love turns out to be a human fantasy. Desire is a homeostatic system. Push it down in one place and it rises in another.

Many of the stories fall within the continuum laid out by Catullus's first two Lesbia poems: from voyeuristic longing to disenchanted entanglement. The narrator of Nabokov's "Spring in Fialta" recounts the many missed romantic opportunities he's had with a woman named Nina, whom he'd first met, and kissed, on a pitch-black Russian winter night years and years before. Nina recurs in the narrator's life like a theme in a piece of music, and every time the strings announce her arrival, the cymbals clash and she disappears.

I'd been under the impression lately that I was cooling ever so slightly on Nabokov, that sober middle age had made me less susceptible to his lush lyricism. But rereading "Spring in Fialta" reminded me how much better Nabokov is than everybody else. Not only does the story impart to the reader a profound wistfulness, in which the evanescence of love expands to suggest the fragility of life and time and memory itself, but Nabokov manages, at the same time, to weave into the story secondary and tertiary levels of meaning. There's what's happening with the weather, for instance, the "cloudy and dull" spring of Fialta that, in the background of the narrated events, is slowly transforming, thawing, dripping and brightening, in order to flash out at the end with the story's tragic revelation. Along with this, Nabokov has studded the story with recurring details - of the circus coming to town, of speeding automobiles - all of which will figure in the denouement. The literary craft in all this mirrors the literary imagination (the seeing of patterns, the orchestrating of fate) that the narrator brings to his random meetings with Nina throughout the years, a literary imagination that every lover possesses. "Spring in Fialta" isn't only about a love fated never to be. It reenacts the story-making we inevitably engage in whenever we fall in love.

The sparrow in "Spring in Fialta" is Nina's husband Ferdinand, who's always in the way. In the case of Chekhov's "The Lady with the Little Dog", however, the sparrow is dead. Gurov, the unfaithful husband in the story, seduces Anna Sergeevna, an unhappy young married woman, while they are both visiting Yalta. Gurov, who has done this sort of thing before, assumes he'll forget Anna as he's forgotten other women. But he doesn't. Her memory haunts him and, finally, he pursues her to her hometown, where they resume their affair. In the story's final scene, the two lovers clandestinely meet in a dingy hotel room in Moscow. And then comes one of the most enigmatic endings in literature. "And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning."

One of Chekhov's admirers, Serafima Remizova, was highly disappointed with this ending. "I read your story," she wrote to Chekhov in a letter, "and I should like to ask you to write the continuation of it. You have abandoned your heroes ... at the most critical moment in their lives, when they are about to make a decision. But which one? ... It is important for someone like you, Anton Pavlovich, who can see into the human heart, to show ... how happiness can be found in such a situation."

But the inconclusiveness of Chekhov's ending, his failure to show how happiness can be found in such a predicament (along with the suggestion that perhaps it can't be found), is exactly what makes this story one of the greatest love stories of all time. It ends where the preliminaries of love end, after the stirrings of attraction, after the trysts and renunciations and the renunciations of those renunciations, when desire has attained its object and the real, the heavy problems begin.

I've read "The Lady with the Little Dog" countless times over the years and my interpretation continually changes. When I was younger (and more sophisticated), I was sure the ending was ironic. The emotional deadness of the lovers' marriages was sure to infect their own new relationship in time. Reading the story now, older (and more innocent), I couldn't help finding in Chekhov's last line a glimmer of optimism. The story seemed to me, this time, to be about that miracle you come across every once in a long while: two unexceptional people, for no demonstrable reasons, being exceptionally in love.

Christianity, which in its beginning retained much of the earthiness of Judaism, a sense of the body and its sexual appetites as inherently good, was slowly influenced by Neoplatonism, which held for a strict duality between the body and the spirit. Asceticism, abstinence, monasticism - you can blame it all on the Greeks. Nevertheless, it's the renunciation of the body that distinguishes true love from any simulacrum. When the body is no longer desired, when beauty has faded, when possessiveness has been relinquished, real love shows its face. This seems to happen most often in old age, or as the result of a winnowing of ego. Born with desire, the stories say, we grow into love, and then only sometimes, and only if we're lucky.

In Alice Munro's magnificent "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (now a film, Away from Her, starring Julie Christie), the husband of a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease, after regretfully relinquishing her to a nursing home, finds, on his subsequent visits, that she is slowly forgetting him and becoming involved with an elderly male patient. The husband responds to this death-in-life with an act of love that goes beyond the bounds of matrimony, approaching the selflessly divine. Deborah Eisenberg's shatteringly beautiful and unerring "Some Other, Better Otto" suggests that, in moments of existential crisis, the only lifeline remains the quotidian, humdrum, durable presence of that imperfect thing: one's life partner.

Each of these two stories is nearly impossibly good. The complexity of the characterisation alone is a marvel - Munro's model husband was, it turns out, a serial philanderer some years back, and the irascible Otto of Eisenberg's tale becomes, despite his scorched-earth policy relating to other human beings, a person of uncommon tenderness and philosophical insight, in the way depleted soil is enriched by burning. These two stories tiptoe right up to the abyss, Munro by unsentimentally describing the inevitable decay of the mind and body, Eisenberg by insisting on the absurd and pitiful insubstantiality, the puniness, of the self. And yet these are the stories in which love, to use an old-fashioned word, triumphs. To borrow from Raymond Carver: this is what we talk about when we talk about love. Not eros, maybe, when all is said and done. Closer to agape.

Had Catullus written only those two opening poems about Lesbia's sparrow, he might not be remembered today. Although they prefigured his own fraught relationship with his married woman, and although I find in them the poles around which all love stories revolve, there is a whole world of detail, particularity and specificity in between. From the bracing acerbities of Lorrie Moore's "How to Be an Other Woman", to the stark assessments of Richard Ford's "Fireworks", to Bernard Malamud's comic presentation of one very picky rabbi, the stories that made their way to me, by sometimes circuitous paths, never failed to be just the thing, after a long, unromantic day at my desk, that I most wanted to read.

It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. There 's this thought, too. After Lesbia spurned him, what did Catullus do? Kill himself? Drink to excess? No. Mostly, he wrote, and eulogised his friendships and his dead brother. He brought to his work the same devotion he'd once lavished in vain on Clodia. And he left behind his poems.

Passer pipiabat. Here's a loose translation: "Better a sparrow, living or dead, than no birdsong at all."