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Benjamin
Disrali not so famously said that romance was the offspring
of fiction and love. So who would know more about romance
than fiction writers? In the St. Valentine's season, in between
thoughts of gourmet truffles, my mind occasionally turns to
thoughts of literary couples, sitting at home (perhaps sitting
very close if they live in Manhattan, Paris, or London and
they're not millionaires), composing page after page, hour
after hour. How do they do that without killing each other?
Sometimes my boyfriend will try to tell me about some exciting
news story he has come across while I'm tending to my Neopets
and I want to immolate him—Monsieur_Monstre, my 300-pound
koi, is hungry, dammit!
It seems
like the literary couples I know are a little different than
other people (meaning me). One (not famous, living in a teensy
studio-ette) couple I know actually emails each other,
even though they're no more than two feet apart! Even IM'ing
is too intrusive for them. Are all the writer folk so quiet
and polite? I did a little snooping around and found out that
the literarati are just like people! They get inappropriate
tattoos, marry and divorce, gossip about each other, defy
their parents, and cheat on their spouses. Even though we
admire and idolize some of these writers, it seems clear that
even they are not immune to the horrors and charms of romance.
Back
in olden times, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley were the quintessential
lit it-couple. No doubt, they had plenty of room and servants
bringing them tea in their separate offices on opposite sides
of the house. When Mary began writing Frankenstein,
the couple wasn't even legally married. Quel romantique!
Percy already had a wife when he decided to elope
with Mary in France, in July 1814. I don't know exactly what
eloping meant in this case, since he never divorced his first
wife, Harriet. Mary and Percy didn't officially marry until
two years later, after Harriet drowned herself. Luckily for
the Shelleys, there were no blogs back then. Public postings
about their scandalous affair would have driven poor young
Mary to a nervous breakdown.
Poets
Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning were secretly married
in 1846, when Elizabeth was already 40. They had to do it
secretly because her father was against the marriage. Nowadays,
if you're 40 and your father is still exerting that sort of
control, it sounds like Dr. Phil needs to be called in. But
Liz could not be denied. The Portuguese (Browning's pet name
for her) was getting her groove. She was already a highly
successful poet when Robert sent her a fan letter, and the
rest is history. Fan mail! If this took place today, Robert
would probably be one of those totally creepy cyber-stalkers
wearing a black trench coat and stripey arm warmers from Hot
Topic.
There
are many contemporary literary couples that I find insufferable
(what a surprise! I'm generally so tolerant). Ayelet Waldman
and Michael Chabon top that list, mostly because of her constant
blathering about how super-awesome they are and that they
have lots of super sex and too many kids. I've never read
anything by Waldman that wasn't about her super-awesome life,
which makes me think she'd just be a suburban housewife by
now, had she not married Chabon. Chabon—she's your fault!
I'm holding you accountable. Then there are Nicole Krauss
and Jonathan Safran Foer, who both keep writing the same book
over and over again. I wonder if they're just emailing each
other files back and forth, making minor changes each time,
like some elaborate game of Literary Telephone.
But I
do like Chip Kidd and his significant other, poet J.D. McClatchy.
In an interview, they discuss sharing a studio in Italy during
a working vacation. When Kidd gave McClatchy his 10,000-word
manuscript to read, McClatchy suggested it be in the third
person, "At which point," Kidd says, "I wanted to roll it
up and introduce it into his gullet." That's love.
But Valentine's
Day is really about bitterness, ain't it? It's about getting
cheap drugstore candy from your guy, or your girl having another
headache after you've given her that cheap drugstore candy.
What about those literary lovers who are no longer together?
Jonathan
Lethem and Shelley Jackson were a couple once. When you think
about it, these two are really perfect together: They both
write off-beat, slightly mainstream, slightly speculative
fiction in a smart, engaging, provocative and humorous fashion;
they're cute, and they both live in Brooklyn. But something
broke them up.
What
about Paul Auster and Lydia Davis? It's too crazy to even
speculate. They too both write accessible but experimental
fiction, and they're both translators, so one could see how
this might have been a meeting of the minds. They have a son
together, who is now an adult, and who I hope is working on
a memoir. Lydia has a story in her recent book, Varieties
of Disturbance, that appears to be about Paul bringing
his new wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, to Lydia's house, and
how young he acted with Siri, making Lydia feel like Paul's
mother. For the record, Hustvedt is not that much younger
than Davis.
Then
there was David Foster Wallace and Mary Karr. My contentious
opinion of Mary Karr's memoir, The Liar's Club, has
been documented previously in this column. Let's not get into
that again! I'm sure it was tough having a suicidal mother,
but why did she devote entire chapters to not getting a pony
and how they got to the hotel too late for her to go swimming?
These are the big events of her childhood? I know a girl who
was kicked out of school because her mother would call at
least once a week and say, "Send Ellen home, please—I'm
going to kill myself." There was not even a theoretical
pony for Ellen. All Ellen wished for was for her mother not
to vacuum at two in the morning. (OK, I lied. I got into it
again. I can't help it!) Anyway, some time after reading Wallace's
Infinite Jest and becoming totally obsessed with the
book and the author, I found out that Wallace and Karr had
a big time romance which resulted in... wait for it... a
tattoo. Guess who got the tat? Nope, it was Wallace.
It appears
that even our idols are not immune to the charms of love,
and it makes them as crazy as it makes the rest of us. So,
the next time you read a book that amazes you, just remember
that the author may call her loved one "schmoopy."
(February,
2008)
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