This is a pretty interesting book if rather predictable because I've read this story a million times before--allow me the hyperbole--only the names are different. The author, Carmela Ciuraru, delves into a brief biographical recap of five literary giants, and then how their wives suffered under the weight of all that "genius." All of these writers are basically monsters who can write. I mean that sincerely. These are assholes with a capital "A." They are cruel, arrogant, vicious, and petty, people I would avoid at parties no matter how scintillating the conversation.
Having spent several years doing a deep dive into the Hemingway/Pfeiffer marriage with more than a layperson's grasp of his marriages to Hadley, Martha, Gellhorn, and Mary, I found myself just nodding in weariness at the shenanigans and utter ridiculousness of these relationships. I asked myself over and over again, why are you staying with this man? And even though I find Martha Gellhorn to be made in much the same mold as Hemingway (a narcissistic bully), I also was applauding her from the sidelines for her just saying, buster, I'm done, and dusting her hands off on her trousers as she exited that toxic relationship (as all his relationship with EVERYONE became toxic after a certain point). All of these vignettes felt very familiar and, frankly, tired.
The five marriages analyzed are as follows: Una Troubridge and Raddclyffe Hall, Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, Elaine Dundy and Kenneth Tynan, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis, and Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl. I don't think it's surprising that the male authors in this house of literary horrors are English. The post-war years in Britain ushered in a type of unruly, arrogant, angry type of writer that glorified repudiating the values of pre-WWII Britain, and glorified the brutality of that rejection. Did they need rejecting/ Sure, but because women are often the scapegoats of any social or political movement, misogynistic is far too mild a word to describe these men. They are vile and angry for the sake of being vile and angry. This is what sold in post-WWII Britain. Even though they needed women to bed and run the mundane aspects of their lives because they couldn't be arsed to hire people, they also loathed them, exactly like Hemingway.
Tynan, Amis, and Dahl used their wives, who let themselves be used because either one walked or one cooked and cleaned and kept one's mouth shut. In between all that washing up, if you managed to create your own art, well, you'd better not get more accolades than your husband. These weren't partnerships. It wasn't, oh, Patricia, my darling, you won an academy award, and just received a whopping big paycheck, now we can spend six months in France. It wasn't like that. Nope. Tantrums, pouts, and general all-around nastiness followed because how dare you be AS talented as me. And that's the kicker to these stories. You couldn't even be equal. You were always a lesser light. You couldn't be even a candle to a spotlight, You could be the flame a match. Some days. Between the three of them, Tynan, Amis, and Dahl, it's almost impossible to choose a more horrible husband. They were all lauded, all lionized, and all of them were absolute bastards to their wives and mistresses.
The relationships of Troubridge and Hall and Morante and Moravia are less fraught with these competitive dynamics. Troubridge, allegedly gifted in her own right as an artist, just gave it all up for John Raddclyffe Hall, and was perfectly satisfied in being bathed secondhand glory. The case of Morante and Moravia wasn't so much about two authors competing against each other as it was that Morante was an absolutely impossible person, and their relationship seemed more cerebral than anything else. They respected each other's writing.
The question that kept arising when I was writing my historical fiction on the Hemingway/Pfeiffer marriage was as a reader, do you accept the genius along with the cruelty? I was never much of a Hemingway fan (although at sixteen there were passages in For Whom the Bell Tolls that had me weeping) precisely because he only writes about men and how fucked it all is and how there is no honor anymore and how we should all put a gun to our heads because if you can't die with honor, what's the point? That said, I cannot deny his genius. I just don't have to read it. Same here with these authors. I don't want to read them. They might be amazing writers, but I cannot separate the man from the page. I think about the woman banging out meals and making beds, and tiptoeing out of bed at two in the morning to write a page or two or read a script. That is the person who has my admiration (but also my scorn because why did you put up with that nonsense for so many years?) That might be a character flaw, but so be it.
