SPOUSES AND MUSES

About literary geniuses and the price wives and husbands pay to inspire great art

Amuse, says the dictionary, “is an inspiring goddess”, from the nine daughters of Zeus in Greek mythology who oversaw the arts and science. That meaning has been expanded to include being a model and financial support, as well as a partner who looks after the home, pays the electricity bills or, as in one case (George Orwell’s), empties the cesspit outdoor.

There seems to be an unwritten rule that wives are meant to be muses in the latter sense, and if they are also creative, the ones expected to sacrifice their careers.

Many years ago, my wife alerted me to the imbalance inherent in Gandhi’s vow of brahmacharya

taken when he was 38, the same age as Kasturba. “It was all very well for him, but what of his wife?” she asked.

Later, I discovered a poem that reads in part, It’s said in praise of Mahatma Gandhi –/ A sort of saint, though his legs were bandy,/ He was skinny and quaint – but still, a saint –/ That for years he had nothing to do with his wife:/ What about her life?

That question — what about her life? — has been asked in a number of recent books. Wifedom (Anna Funder) braids a lot of facts and some fiction (imaginary scenes, speculative dialogues) to highlight the story of Orwell’s first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Lives of the Wives

(Carmela Ciuraru) discusses five couples where the wife played the secondary role. Katie McCabe’s

More Than a Muse: Creative Partnerships That Sold Talented Women Short is selfexplanatory, as is Ruth Butler’s Hidden in the Shadow of the Master. There’s also

Jeffrey Meyers’s earlier book, Married to Genius, about the conflict between life and art, muse and spouse.

“The problem with being a wife,” writes Ciuraru, “is being a wife.” She goes on to say, “With an ego the size of a small nation, the literary lion is powerful on the page, but a helpless kitten in daily life — dependent on his wife to fold an umbrella, answer the phone, or lick a stamp… Those towering mononymic geniuses of Western literature — Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Nabokov — where would they be without their wives?”

Gross imbalance

When author Kingsley Amis married Elizabeth Jane Howard, he wanted to announce to the world they were “the most attractive, intelligent, funny, sophisticated and mutually suited pair since the Renaissance”.

While Amis wrote and drank and then drank some more, his wife, an awardwinning novelist, took on domestic duties, changed light bulbs, scheduled her husband’s

I sit down at the piano, dying to play, but musical notation no longer means anything to me. My eyes have forgotten how to read it. I have been firmly taken by the arm and led away from myself

ALMA MAHLER Wife of composer Gustav Mahler