Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Loving Attitudes by Rachel Billington Loving Attitudes by Rachel Billington. ‘One Summer is a real emotional roller-coaster of a read, and Billington expertly sustains the suspense.’ Daily Mail. Available to order. One Summer is unashamedly a tragic love story. Great passion is a theme I return to every decade or so. (For example, my earlier book, based on Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Occasion of Sin.) Of course it is a theme recurring in all fiction over the centuries. In this case the man, K, is twenty four years older than his love object who is still a school girl – and a naïve school girl at that. I have, however, not just written about the love affair but about its consequences fourteen years on so that the story is told in two different time-scales. It is also told in two voices – the male and the female. Part of the book is set in Valparaiso, Chile, where I stayed with my daughter, Rose Gaete, and my Chilean son-in-law just as I started writing the novel. Chance experience always plays a big part in what goes into my novels, although my characters are virtually never drawn directly from life. ‘Writing with grace and unflinching intensity, Billington acknowledges the complexity of cause and effect in a novel that is as much about the sufferings of expiation as the joys of passion.’ Sunday Times. ‘One Summer is a real emotional roller-coaster of a read, and Billington expertly sustains the suspense.’ Daily Mail. ‘Reading One Summer is an intense, even a claustrophobic experience: there is no escape, no let up, no Shakespearian comic gravedigger to lighten the tension. Rather the progress of Claudia’s and K’s love – and the long term psychological damage it wreaks – is anatomised minutely and with an absolute-seeming veracity by Rachel Billington.’ Spectator. Heartily sorry for these and others. The title of Teresa Waugh's third, and resolutely down-beat, novel comes from the Book of Common Prayer, and refers to `our misdoings'. The comic success of the book derives from the author's deftness in turning the humdrum anxieties of a specta- cularly ordinary suburban family into a subtle satire on the emotional platitudes of our decade. Nancy Potter is a housewife married for some 30 years to a literal-minded banker, George, who catnaps under his newspaper at weekends and is waiting for retirement. But Nancy, who makes excellent short- bread, thinks he is 'perfectly extraordin- ary'; when not fantasising about David Owen, or recalling her earliest lover, she is consumed by guilt about everything in her life — the death of her hideous granny (in whose Bromley abode she was brought up on seedcake and repression, a past evoked with a splendid drabness worthy of Paul Scott), or the insidious nature of her son Roddy, for which she blames herself after an incident concerning a tulip-bed. The nervous, benevolent, rather silly turbulence of Nancy's view of the world has its effect on her daughter Claire, a social worker with a 2 CV and a caring mission, whose profession as an emotional troubleshooter belies a personal life that is racked with indecision. Like her mother, she bends over backwards to be under- standing about the appalling weakness of others, especially the feckless torpor of her asthmatic lover, Francis, a layabout whose unrealised projects range from a history of suspension bridges to a replica of Bucking- ham Palace done in matchsticks. Although there are darker intimations in places, these characters are mainly con- cerned with trivial problems of responsibil- ity and fair play; lassitude, fantasy, mild lust, and an uncharitable view of the sensitivity of others are the extent of their misdoings, but although these cause them terrible anguish they are small deer in the menagerie of sins, and big game Cardinal Vices seldom wander into the open. The female Potters are fuelled by a generalised sense of pity, that becomes a choric refrain — 'Poor Francis', 'her poor mother', 'the poor fellow', 'Poor, poor Francis', 'Poor, beautiful Francis'. As her characters swerve this way and that, Teresa Waugh spins a yarn of social realism shot through with subrisive humour. Her creatures are vulnerable, suffering from emotional rickets, and the vagueness of their apprehension of things is only heightened by their belief in the inadequate formulae of popular psychology. These well-meaning delusions end in tragedy, for which the book, like some Problem Com- edy, has largely prepared us by its focus upon constant misunderstandings of mo- tive. The result is both entertaining and pathetic, and it is a finely modulated achievement. Where Lady Teresa throws emotional clichés into relief, Lady Rachel allows them to stand on their own, and Loving Attitudes suffers from a singular lack of implicit irony. While the premise of the title looks workable enough (there are several different types of love that one may be capable of sustaining simultaneously) the psychological method of the novel is incoherent and novelettish, and when genuine distress comes to the plot it is too laboured, and too late. It reads from the start like a down- market teleplay, and none of the internal references to scenes resembling those out of fiction or drama serves to suggest this is parody. The opening shot is of Mary Tempest, 40, successful broadcaster, mar- ried to David (leading barrister), on holi- day in Somerset, 'sucking cream off her right index finger'. The telephone rings. Out of the blue, she is contacted by her illegitimate first child Elizabeth, adopted at birth by an American couple 22 years earlier, and now intent on confronting her natural mother. This cue-ball initiates a snooker session of passionate rebounds and realignments for the Tempests, involving their own daughter Lucy, a spoilt student, their country neighbours Ian and Helen, and Mary's rekindled love-lust for Elizabeth's father, a cold fish named Richard Beck. Hypocrisy and self-interest, loneliness and deceit are jostled around off the cushions of Oxford, London and New York, but the action is stagey and contrived, and as a novel it is utterly unconvincing. The reason for this is simple enough. Rachel Billington has not enjoyed the services of an editor who could launder from her saga the worst excesses of her prose. 'Lucy agreed fervently, smiling and smiling till her legs buzzed' is absurd. Swathed in her habitual red cloak, the heroine attends a barbeque in the snow `Poor Mary, standing there with glazed eyes and flushed cheeks' — and one pities her for being a victim of such twaddle. Poor Mary. Poor, poor Francis. Oh, dearie me. The forgotten female writers of Play for Today: 'If you failed, it was pretty public' E stablished by the start of the 1980s as a writer for Coronation Street and the creator of the nursing series Angels, Paula Milne was pleased but fearful to be invited to write her first single play. A Sudden Wrench, in which a woman fights to be taken seriously in the male world of plumbing, went out in March 1982 as a Play for Today, a BBC One strand that could reach audiences of up to 12 million in its heyday, and averaged 5 million. “There’s a line in the script,” Milne remembers, “where the husband says to his wife, when she goes to work on a construction site: ‘Just remember, there’s no allowance for failure out there.’ And that pretty well sums up how I felt about writing for Play for Today. If you failed in that slot, it was pretty damn public.” Looking back through the archives, ahead of the 50th anniversary on Thursday of the launch of Play for Today, it becomes clear that the plot had another external resonance – women single TV playwrights were almost as rare at the time as female plumbers. Although there had been about 250 Plays for Today before Milne’s (the series occupied two dozen slots each year), she was only the 20th woman to have been commissioned in 12 series. Paula Milne: ‘I didn’t want to write a patronising feminist piece.’ Photograph: Mark Large/Daily Mail/Rex. “While there were two or three gifted female producers in the BBC plays department at the time,” Milne remembers, “it definitely had a prevailing Oxbridge-macho ethos that was pretty damn intimidating. The fact that so few women writers contributed to the huge output of Play for Today bears that out. It’s not just that women didn’t get the breaks, but that our voice wasn’t heard during such an intense political period.” Play for Today had started on the third Thursday of October 1970, (Tuesday later became its regular night), replacing The Wednesday Play, which had run for six years on the network. That midweek series had included at least two masterpieces of social-realist TV – Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction and Jeremy Sandford’s Cathy Come Home – but was caricatured as leftist miserabilism by rightwing critics and politicians. Reviewing the first Play for Today in the next morning’s Guardian, Nancy Banks-Smith wrote: “The reason BBC changed the name Wednesday Play, and therefore the day of transmission, was a conviction, based on audience research, that people were avoiding the plays out of prejudice.” In time, conservatives would have the same objection to the new strand, but, on the first night of transmission, it seemed to be aiming for warm inclusivity. The Long Distance Piano Player by Alan Sharp was a fable about a child prodigy who sets out to play the piano for four full days and nights. Banks-Smith, always a good reporter as well as a great critic, noted that it was a leftover Wednesday Play, recorded seven months earlier. Sharp, who moved to Hollywood to write TV movies, is one of those who wrote only a single script among the more than 300 PFT episodes, a scripting equivalent to those in sports who win only one international cap. The honour of most called-up playwright is shared, with six each, between Dennis Potter – the peak Blue Remembered Hills (1979), a tale of youthful malice, with the children played by adult actors – and Mike Leigh. Absolute purists mutter that two of Leigh’s pieces had originally been created for theatre, but Abigail’s Party (1977) is the single most celebrated and cherished Play for Today, although Leigh deeply regrets that it was a TV recording of the stage production, rather than a reconfigured film, as happened, for example, with his Nuts in May (1976). More surprising are the three authors who each featured five times in the series. The novelist and short-story writer William Trevor, although a habitual adapter of his fiction for the screen, has little association with the politically driven contemporary stories for which PFT is remembered. There was also a quintet of scripts from Jim Allen, a Mancunian ex-soldier and miner, and from Colin Welland, part of a screenwriting apprenticeship that led to an Oscar for the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire. Among them were Allen’s The Spongers (1978), about the effect of welfare cuts on a mother with a vulnerable child, and United Kingdom (1981), a feature-length epic set amid anti-austerity riots in a northern city, in which Welland showed his versatility by playing a draconian chief constable; he had also appeared as one of the adult-sized kids in Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills. United Kingdom and The Spongers established the tone of leftwing critique that enthralled many viewers (including the teenage me), but inflamed Thatcherite opposition to the BBC, seeding a hostility with ramifications to this day. As a journalist, Michael Gove, now chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, denigrated Play for Today. But it is in the rank of those who wrote four PFT scripts that the biggest shock – and, historically, shame – occurs. Older viewers and historians of TV will not be surprised to find Trevor Griffiths and David Hare. The former’s Comedians (1979), adapted from his stage play about the morality of professional jokers, and the latter’s Licking Hitler (1978), exploring British wartime use of what we now call fake news, are among the finest achievements of the series. And, while detractors like to depict Plays for Today as relics of outdated attitudes to politics and drama, Comedians and Licking Hitler address issues – of artistic morality and political mendacity – that are currently urgent again. Alongside Griffiths and Hare, on this tier of the leaderboard is Julia Jones, an unjustly neglected figure in TV drama, later known for BBC children’s adaptations such as Tom’s Midnight Garden. Less than one-tenth of the scripts for Play for Today across its 14 years were written by women, but, remarkably, more than 10% of those came from Jones. (It is, grimly, no surprise that this was not the only imbalance; less than 3% were by writers of colour.) Jones was the first woman to feature in the series, on 28 January 1971, and, by odd coincidence, it turned on the same musical instrument as Sharp’s franchise starter, The Long Distance Piano Player. Jones’s The Piano explored the dilemma of a northern family moving from the old family home, which had space for Grandpa’s upright, to a new council house, where it wouldn’t fit. Nancy Banks-Smith found the play to have its “own comedy and poignancy” and thought a scene of a Lancastrian family row “authentic”. However, by the time of Jones’s fourth and final contribution – Back of Beyond in November 1974 – Banks-Smith sounded bored, and found more diversion in an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. When Play for Today ended in 1984, Jones was one of only six non-male dramatists to have written more than one edition. In late 1982, Milne had joined this group with John David, an autobiographical story about the decision to deny a lifesaving heart operation to her severely disabled son. Strikingly, two of the other women to do the double – Rose Tremain and Rachel Billington – are now better known as novelists, as were three of the single-hitters (Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Mortimer, Elaine Feinstein). This probably resulted from BBC Plays’ usual source of contributors – TV and stage drama. Because there were almost no high-profile women theatre writers in the 1970s, apart from Caryl Churchill (who had two PFTs screened in 1978), the diligent attendance of theatres by BBC scouts – which brought in Hare, Griffiths, Leigh, Howard Brenton and many others – created inbuilt gender-imbalance, although Carol Bunyan, Marcella Evaristi, and Mary O’Malley eventually arrived through that door. Some of the novelists recruited, though, had been aspiring dramatists in a way that might surprise their readers. Late in the 1970s, Tremain had written two un-produced stage plays, including A Room for the Winter, in which a white dissident exile from South Africa is troubled by having a black landlady in London. Rose Tremain: ‘I felt that being a “woman writer” wasn’t helping …’ Photograph: Alecsandra Raluca Drăgoi/The Guardian. Tremain recalls that, when a major London producer turned down the play as “too gloomy”, her agent, the formidable Margaret “Peggy” Ramsay, told her: “You’d better write it for TV, dear”, a comment that confirms the sense at the time of the small-screen single play as a gloomster route. A Room for the Winter went out in November 1981, making Tremain the 17th female contributor in 11 years. “I remember watching it when I’d just got back from a trip to America, with extreme jetlag, so it all felt very surreal,” Tremain says. “I had Peggy Ramsay’s voice in my head suggesting that all this work was second best because it was on TV.” Banks-Smith admired the drama for “breathing a sense of love and pain”, and observed: “It was also, though it is probably illegal to say so, a remarkable play for a woman to write about men.” Tremain’s producer, June Roberts, encouraged her to write a second, Moving on the Edge, which went out in PFT’s final season. Apart from the masculinity of the commissioning apparatus and the shortage of women in the feeder medium of theatre, another reason for the invisibility of women may have been that feminism, though clearly a form of politics, did not fit easily into the series’ more Westminster-centric definitions of power and opposition. Rachel Billington, who, like Tremain, was a prose fiction writer with dramatic ambitions (she had written radio plays), was conscious of the opportunity to bring feminist perspective to the franchise. Her PFT pair was Don’t Be Silly (1979), about domestic violence, and Life After Death (1982), which depicts widowhood. Rachel Billington: ‘I thought I was writing about a social issue, but, rewatching it recently, now it’s nearer politics.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian. “Both my plays were a shout for women who had allowed themselves to become – in one case, fatally – undervalued, and in doing so lost their own self-esteem,” says Billington. “I had the idea for Don’t Be Silly when I fell over and got a black eye and, to my amazement, everyone assumed it was my husband. So then I got other women’s stories. I thought I was writing about a social issue, but, rewatching it recently, now it’s nearer politics.” Milne, although an “avowed feminist”, was, perhaps because of her background in mass-audience TV soaps, wary of assuming that all women viewers shared these views. “I had the idea for A Sudden Wrench when I was in a supermarket doing the family shop surrounded by queues of exhausted looking women and I thought: ‘I want to write for them .’ I didn’t want to write a patronising feminist piece that might make them recoil, but depict an ordinary woman who wasn’t a victim, whose ambition to be a plumber was relatively humble, and show her dogged tenacity to make it happen.” Milne and the late Julia Jones were alone among the PFT women in continuing to sustained careers as TV screenwriters. Milne’s hits included The Politician’s Wife and The Politician’s Husband. After her Play for Today debut, the BBC wanted to turn A Sudden Wrench into a series, but she couldn’t think of enough bathroom or kitchen scenarios, so instead wrote Driving Ambition, a 1984 BBC One eight-parter about a homemaker who becomes a racing driver. Billington was commissioned to write a three-parter about a boy kidnapped by a cult, but it was never made, for reasons, she thinks, of logistics (the producer was redeployed to Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads), rather than sexism. “So I realised that, as my novels were always published, I’d better stick with them. I did write a play during lockdown, so the longing has never quite left me.” Tremain had plays screened on two other drama anthology strands, Screenplay and Screen Two, but her TV writing career ended in the mid-80s. She attributes this to a BBC decision to shift commissioning power from individual producers to managers. “After that happened, absolutely nothing else came my way. A new play idea I was hatching was kicked out, and a series I wanted to write was rejected. I felt that being a ‘woman writer’ wasn’t helping from that time on.” Dramatists and critics have intermittently suggested reviving Play for Today, but it has never happened. The disappointed have usually blamed lack of political courage at the BBC, but the reasons are cultural and industrial, thinks Milne. “There’s often a misconception that the series’ demise was due to the BBC surrendering to government concern about its radical output. But it was more about budgets. Serials allowed economies of scale and, by focusing on the global market, could raise co-production money. Single dramas, often dealing with parochial British issues, were a casualty of the search for ratings and long content.” That pressure has only increased. An idea for a one-off piece of TV drama would need to be multiplied by at least six before Netflix or Amazon came on. But what should not be forgotten from Play for Today, Milne argues, is that it was “always predicated on the vision and individual voice of a writer and, more importantly, trusting it”. Rachel Billington - Author. Evocative, emotional and compelling, this historical novel may centre on a relationship, yet it throws open a door to the Second World War. Meet Spitfire pilot Eddie and painter Eva as they leave their teenage years at the onset of war. The prologue in late 1940 sets the scene for what is to come, I found myself in the clouds in the middle of a dogfight between Spitfire and Messerschmitt, the outcome of which stayed with me as I read on. Chapter one took me back to March 1939, I slid effortlessly in as Rachel Billington ensures the small and intimate elements are as well crafted as the more obvious aspects of war. The two main characters are fascinating, Eddie is self-centred yet not overwritten as unlikable, while Eva is finding her path, and both feel as real as can possibly be. Surrounding them are family and friends, all helping to create a vivid view of the times. The ending sliced into my emotions, and left me sitting for a while in contemplation. Expressive, rich and sharp, Clouds of Love and War is an engaging and worthwhile read. Other books by Rachel Billington. Glory. Author: Rachel Billington Format: Paperback Release Date: 22/10/2015. A poignant and compelling story of three lives torn apart by the Battle of Gallipoli. Arthur Tarrant, an Oxford graduate headed for his uncle's law firm, changes path leaving behind his fiancee Sylvia and joins the army, destined for Gallipoli. There, his life becomes entwined with that of Fred Chaffey, a country boy from Dorset. Glory tells of the fatal errors made by the leaders of the army, the heroism of the men, and the struggles to understand the situation while nurturing relationships in the most strange and difficult of circumstances. Maria and the Admiral. Author: Rachel Billington Format: Paperback Release Date: 09/05/2013. A sweeping historical drama, based on the true and enduring love of Thomas Cochrane and Maria Graham. Chile, June 1822. Maria Graham, a young British widow, watches as her compatriot Admiral Lord Cochrane sails triumphantly into the Valparaiso Bay, fresh from leading the Chilean fleet to victory over the country's Spanish rulers. Cochrane, a popular yet outspoken hero of the Napoleonic wars, is drawn to Maria, a woman whose intelligence and spirit of adventure rival his own. Yet their intense and extraordinary relationship must contend with a climate of uncertainty, political turmoil and civil war. Inspired by Maria Graham's own journals, MARIA AND THE ADMIRAL vividly brings to life the story of one woman who tested the limits of society, and of her enduring love for one of the most colourful figures of her age. The Missing Boy. Author: Rachel Billington Format: Paperback Release Date: 17/02/2011. The disappearance of a teenage boy tears a family apart in this poignant, highly topical and searching story. Thirteen-year-old Dan hasn't returned home and his parents don't know whether he's run away, been kidnapped - or something worse. For one family the world as they know it is about to fall apart. At first Dan is sleeping rough, revelling in his independence. But with every passing day, his world is becoming darker and more frightening. A hundred thousand children run away each year. Most come back. But will Dan? Dan's mother, Eve, a drama teacher, can't focus; his father, Max, only knows how to flee his own demons; and his aunt, Martha, while trained to control difficult situations as a prison officer, struggles to hold it all together. Dan's story is told against a grown-up drama of love and shifting loyalties and two sisters who were best friends until Max came between them. Gradually, all three begin to recognise just how badly they have failed the missing boy. Rachel Billington has written a tense and emotional novel about the day-to-day existence of a contemporary family living through their worst nightmare. Anguish and hope move across the pages until the final breath-taking denouement. Lies and Loyalties. Author: Rachel Billington Format: Paperback Release Date: 11/12/2008. An emotional, gritty family drama exploring the power of frustrated love and intense sibling rivalry - from the acclaimed author of ONE SUMMER and A WOMAN'S LIFE One cool March morning in London, MP Leo Barr is told that his brother, Charlie, is dead. He has hanged himself from a chestnut tree in the grounds of a mental hospital. His family reacts in different ways. Charlie's mother, Imogen, sees no point in pretending that life is still worth living - he was always her favourite. Leo and his lawyer brother Roland fight, as they always have over Charlie. The fourth brother Ron, a Catholic priest, must break the news to Charlie's wife, presently in HMP Holloway. In the days following Charlie's death the conflict builds among members of this diverse and complex family. Who really loves whom? What are the motives behind Roland's fixed antagonism towards Charlie? Is Leo right to put his career on the line? Above and between them all is the larger-than-life figure of Charlie. He follows no rules, not even about dying, and it becomes clear that his tragedy is only part of a web of mystery and deceit that connects them all. As well as being a powerful human drama, LIES & LOYALTIES deals with gritty contemporary issues in today's Britain. It moves from parliament to prison, from church to mental hospital and from those who conduct the law to the outcasts of society. But at the heart of the novel is one family - divided by rivalry and frustrated love and forced, at last, to learn the truth about themselves. Loving Attitudes by Rachel Billington. Date: April 19, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 8, Column 1; Book Review Desk Byline: RACHEL BILLINGTON; Rachel Billington's most recent novel is ''The Garish Day.'' Her new novel, ''Loving Attitudes,'' will be published next year. Lead: LEAD: TEMPORARY SHELTER By Mary Gordon . 213 pp. New York: Random House. $16.95. Text: TEMPORARY SHELTER By Mary Gordon. 213 pp. New York: Random House. $16.95. THE keening of a frightened and suffering woman is never far from the surface of Mary Gordon's writing. These 20 stories - some long, others only a few pages, some about the Irish immigrant poor, others about the Long Island rich, some imbued with the spirit of the countryside, others set in cosmopolitan London or New York - all carry with them the same atmosphere of fatalistic depression, of lives lived with at best lack of hope and at worst something dangerously threatening. This theme is most acutely expressed in the second story, just four pages long, called ''The Imagination of Disaster,'' which is written in a first person, present tense, stream of consciousness narrative. A housewife and mother going about her everyday tasks is obsessed by the dangers of the future. Faced by her daughter wanting help with modeling clay animals, she thinks with terror: ''I cannot pervert her life so that she will be ready for the disaster. There is no readiness; there is no death in life.'' The vulnerability that the Gordon woman feels about herself is increased and made obvious through her concern for her children. ''Temporary Shelter ,'' the long title story, takes this process a stage further and makes the child's terrors central. It is one of several stories where the author speaks with a child's voice and deals with the loaded themes of class and religious differences. It is a more densely worked piece than ''The Neighborhood,'' where another small, unhappy child, also possessing a single unsatisfactory parent, searches for comfort. In ''The Neighborhood'' the child finds a moment of happiness with a warmhearted but sluttish Irish neighbor. In ''Temporary Shelter '' the child steps out bravely into the wide world. In neither case does the black curtain of gloom lift very far. Adult gloom centers, hardly surprisingly, on the relationship between women and men. The divorced or otherwise single woman, usually with children she must cope with on her own, features in almost every story. ''The Other Woman'' is the simplest but most effective example. A happily married wife - a unique state in the book, expressed mainly through a comfortable physical relationship - discovers her husband weeping uncontrollably after reading a story about a husband who, out of love for his children, didn't leave his wife for his lover. It has reminded him of a similar sacrifice he made in the past. The happily married wife is horrified at his tragic tears, realizing he has never loved her so deeply. The moral comes out clearly: there is no security anywhere; only temporary shelter . The alternative to the pain inherent in the male-female relationship is shown through one of the best stories, ''Out of the Fray.'' Here a newly paired (though much-divorced) couple go to London, where they find a discarded wife. Apparently supremely self-sufficient, she is soon revealed to be emotionally crippled by the breakup of her marriage nearly 20 years ago. Moral: loneliness is as threatening as involvement. ''Out of the Fray'' is written in the personal, almost diarylike manner that seems to come most naturally to Ms. Gordon. It suits her aim for a high emotional content but tends to limit her to a one-tone voice. Possibly she is aware of this problem, since one of the longest stories, ''Now I Am Married,'' is divided into a short prologue and five sections headed by the names of the women who speak. The narrator is a second wife visiting her husband's family in England. The other women talk to her. The technique does get around the problem to some extent, but it also appears as an admission of structural defeat. Besides, here, as in the other stories, there is no real indication of an authorial point of view - a dangerous lack in stories aiming to be above glossy-magazine level. Perhaps this is another way of saying there is very little sense of morality, of choices made, for good or for ill, of guilt suffered rightly or wrongly, of the struggle to break the barriers of being merely human. Although Ms. Gordon's characters suffer, they do so in a numb and mindless kind of way. She is writing out of emotion, and it suffuses and blurs the writing. ''The Dancing Party'' is the most stylishly written of the collection and comes nearest to breaking what seems to be the Gordon mold. The subject is the habitual one, and no less compelling for that, of the pairing or nonpairing of the sexes and is approached with the usual sense of foolish hopes sharpened by impending doom. However, the characters are dealt with separately, and their different thoughts and reactions during the course of the same event are cleverly counterpoised with each other. In one sense the story does Ms. Gordon a disservice because it points up the tendencies in the rest of her writing. Neither wit, irony, satire nor humor is on her agenda, all sacrificed, presumably on the altar of sensibility. MS. GORDON attempts to step beyond her limits with ''A Writing Lesson.'' Sadly, the result is pretentiously obscure rather than thought-provoking: ''If you are writing a fairy tale, you can begin by saying that they had built a house in the center of the woods. And they sat in the center of it, as if they were children, huddled, cringing against bears.'' Short stories are a testing ground for any novelist, particularly one whose talents lie rather in conveying the intimacies of a woman's mind than in any stylistic finesse. This sort of writing, in which Mary Gordon is most successful, is in danger of becoming indigestible in a collection of short fiction, needing the breadth of the novel form to give it background and air. Nevertheless, ''Temporary Shelter '' contains some stories that are touching, and some that are memorable.