You’ve probably noticed, if you read this column regularly, that I think a lot about the interplay between public and private interests: the ways that personal motivations and decisions affect major public events like wars and scandals, but also the ways in which public, structural constraints affect people’s private decisions, shaping their lives and careers, and sometimes their safety.
That idea has informed how I write about corruption (individual decisions to commit crimes, shaped by the broader corrupt equilibrium that means that’s the only way to get ahead), coups (if individual elites believe that the way to protect their personal interests is to support the coup, then the plot often succeeds), gender equality (women’s success and participation in public life is constrained by institutions that place the burden of preventing violence and overcoming discrimination on the victims rather than the perpetrators), and more. And it is a central theme of a big project that I’ve been working on with some of my colleagues, which you’ll hear more about soon.
My reading list this week has focused on the private element of that equation: the decisions people make to win respect, preserve status or maintain personal relationships, and the implications that has for society as a whole — particularly its creative and literary progress.
In “Lives of the Wives,” Carmela Ciuraru dissects five literary marriages, tracing in detail how the public literary success of writers like Roald Dahl and Kingsley Amis grew out of the private support of their spouses at home.
“The ideal wife of a famous writer has no desires worth mentioning,” Ciuraru wrote. “She lives each day in second place. Rather than attempt to seize control of her own fate, she accepts what she has been given without complaint. Her ambitions are not thwarted because she doesn’t have any.”
But the molten core of conflict in those relationships was that the husbands in those relationships simultaneously wanted someone who lacked ambition and ego, but also someone who possessed tremendous intellect and creativity that she was willing to place at the service of his career rather than her own.
It’s not difficult to see why these men would want such a partner — or why such relationships would be bitterly fraught. Ciuraru writes that Kenneth Tynan, a well-known theater critic, was enraged when his wife, Elaine Dundy, published an acclaimed, successful novel, shouting at her that “You weren’t a writer when I married you!” But of course she was still the same person — the change was that she was now putting her literary talents to use under her own name, rather than supporting his.
That’s a theme that has always struck me when reading about Picasso’s relationships. In her autobiography “Life with Picasso,” Françoise Gilot described how Picasso drew on her skills as an artist, demanding that she inspire, critique, and sometimes even paint his own works. It was not that he did not value her artistically, but rather that he did, and wanted to reserve that value for himself.
Likewise, in “Finding Dora Maar,” Brigitte Benkemoun’s biography of Picasso’s previous partner Dora Maar, a well-known surrealist photographer, documents how Picasso treated Maar’s artistic capabilities as if they were a natural resource he was entitled to mine. He encouraged Maar to help him with his painting “Guernica,” among other works, at the expense of her own work as a photographer and painter.
One conclusion would be to ask, as my opinion colleague Jessica Grose did in her column this week, what these women might have accomplished if they’d had wives, too.
But after reading “The Militant Muse,” Whitney Chadwick’s excellent book on the women of the Surrealist movement in the mid-20th century, I wonder even more what women like Gilot might have accomplished if they could have participated in artistic and literary life without having to have any connection to a prominent man. She details the ways that the women of the movement supported and inspired each other, creatively and personally, and the masterpieces that those collaborations led to.
But she also writes about an interview with Roland Penrose, one of the most influential intellectuals of the Surrealist movement, in which he told Chadwick not to write a book about female Surrealists.
“They weren’t artists,” he told Chadwick. “Of course the women were important, but it was because they were our muses.”
A truly remarkable statement, considering that the women in question included Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Lee Miller, Valentine Boué, Dora Maar, and Meret Oppenheim, among many others. But all the more so considering that two of those women — Miller and Boué — were Penrose’s wives.
One wonders how much more they, and the other women of Surrealism, might have accomplished if the movement hadn’t had men like Penrose in it.
Reader responses: What you’re reading
Barbara Harrison, a reader in Chestertown, MD, recommends the novel “Symphony of Secrets” by Brendan Slocumb:
If you read only one book a year, I urge you to consider this two-day contemporary musicological procedural in which Black Ph.D. Kevin Bernard Hendricks attempts the resurrection of an opera by his hero, Frederick Delaney, who was white.
Joyce Rubenstein, a reader in Avon Lake, OH, recommends “Our Wives Under the Sea” by Julia Armfield:
A year ago, my husband died after a lengthy decline from old age and ultimately liver failure. Our Wives Under the Sea gave me both comfort and new insights into what is simultaneously the shared experience yet very personal and lonely long journey of grief and loss. The book is essentially a confirmation of grace and love. It helps me better cope with the absence in my own life to be reminded that grief is universal as is the endurance of love.
What are you reading?
Thank you to everyone who wrote in to tell me about what you’re reading. Please keep the submissions coming!
I want to hear about things you have read (or watched or listened to) that moved, inspired, or surprised you.
