Married to genius
Women have forsaken their own creative pursuits to rally around celebrated husbands. Books like ‘The Chosen’ and ‘Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life’ and films like ‘Maestro’ and ‘Priscilla’ are now recasting spouses as historical actors in the tales of artistic achievements
“To those who marry authors, I would say, ‘Do not help him — to the extent of extinguishing your own life — but go on with former pursuits,’” cautions Emma Gifford in a private journal she had kept on her husband, the Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy. When Thomas came upon these damning confessions after her death, he burnt them, page by page. Emma’s journals are resurrected from the ashes in Elizabeth Lowry’s recent novel The Chosen. Recreated entries, based on letters, accounts and whatever writings survived of Emma, bring her story back to life, while also bringing into focus her troubled marriage. When the Thomas of Lowry’s fiction discovers Emma’s journals, he is paralysed with remorse. Their marriage may not have been a happy one; the two had spent the last 20 years of her life on separate floors and barely saw each other. But seeing his life, his work and their marriage through Emma’s eyes pushes him to recognise the part he played in reducing his most passionate champion to a shadow of her former self — unhappy, neglected and slowly becoming invisible. The shock of her revelations freezes him in a haunted limbo, mourning a woman he didn’t fully know and didn’t bother to fully understand.
Emma was once a young woman with her own writerly ambitions until marriage became her prison. Long before Emma and well after, women have forsaken their own creative pursuits to rally around their celebrated husbands — only to be written off as a footnote, airbrushed out of the picture and pushed out of frame. Now, books like The Chosen and Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life and films like Maestro and Priscilla are rescuing spouses from obscurity to recast them as historical actors in the tales of artistic achievements we so cherish. The idea of genius as the apotheosis of individual creativity is reconfigured as a triumph of an enterprise that is sometimes collaborative, sometimes carnivorous, sometimes even cannibalistic. From artist to artist, spouses have had to take on the sweeping roles of muse, mother, maid, manager and martyr. Wives, in particular, have posed, typed, counselled, proofread, edited, negotiated, raised children, and endured infidelities — all for the sake of creating optimum conditions for genius to thrive. As the cultural spotlight shines on these women at last, it isn’t surprising that they emerge as the spine and the beating heart of the stories, even if they aren’t necessarily at the centre of these stories.
In Maestro, the portrait of legendary conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein isn’t half as interesting as the portrait of his marriage with Felicia Montealegre. This is partly down to the gulf between the two lead performances: Carey Mulligan’ embodiment of a supportive, defiant and ultimately forgiving wife ironically overshadows Bradley Cooper’s hollow impersonation of genius. Felicia was an actor herself who performed on TV and Broadway. But her longest-serving role becomes playing second fiddle to Leonard, enabling his genius and bringing up their three children. “I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr or sacrificing myself on the LB altar,” she had once written in a letter to Leonard, unaware of the future she is enlisting herself for by marrying a closeted bisexual man. With each infidelity, she starts to disappear more and more from his life. As Leonard gets sloppier, her frustration sours into anger, culminating in a heated argument and a painful realisation.
“It’s my own arrogance, to think I could survive on what he could give. It’s just so ironic. I would look at everyone, even my own children, with such pity because of their longing for his attention. It was sort of banner I wore so proudly: I don’t need. I don’t need. And look at me now. Who’s the one who hasn’t been honest?” These words are charged with regret and resignation of a woman whose fierce commitment to her husband has come at the price of her own happiness. When Felicia confronts Leonard on his infidelities, the myth of genius is punctured, exposing how it can be used as an excuse for dishonesty by those who make their living creating new fictions, new worlds, new sounds — as if the novelty of other lovers were necessary fuel for creativity.
Pursuing concurrent creative careers has torn at the fabric of many a marriage. The household of F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald could not withstand the pressure of more than one literary talent. But all the pain and turbulence from the marriage did fuel a lot of Zelda’s writing. F Scott undermined her ambitions, while stealing wholesale from her journals. Suffering breakdown after breakdown, in and out of clinics for years, Zelda died in a fire at a psychiatric hospital in 1948. Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar (and later Françoise Gilot), and Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, all made for no less passionate yet calamitous creative pairings.
One towering talent per household is no guarantee of a happy marriage either. Not when the towering talent is a control freak. Priscilla Beaulieu was 14 when she met the 24-year-old Elvis Presley. From the first time she visited his mansion in Graceland till the time she left, she was a woman whose relationship with “the King of Rock and Roll” had become her gilded cage. Adapted from her 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla finds a naïve teenager trapped by the fairy-tale allure of celebrity. Through Cailee Spaeny’s mascaraed eyes, we feel Priscilla’s suffocation as Elvis slowly but surely moulds her in his own image, from picking out her clothes to stifling her sexuality. The quiet anguish of being infantilised like she was a child playing dress-up and the simmering desperation of being neglected like she was a piece of furniture, harden into a maturing defiance of a woman striving to find agency.
Clara Schumann was a child prodigy but she was plagued with self-doubt as a composer. On marrying Robert Schumann, she not only had to care for their eight children but also a husband who suffered from bouts of depression. Any discussion as to why she could never reach the same heights as her husband must take into account the social conditions that hemmed in women like Clara. Matrimony, historically, brings with it a structural imbalance, a point emphasised by Anna Funder in her new book. As she sizes up “the motherload of (her own) wifedom,” Funder conjures another literary spouse “buried first by domesticity, then by history.” Part memoir, part biography, part speculative fiction, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life rescues Eileen Blair from the blinding dazzle of her husband George Orwell. Eileen had a stronger influence on Orwell’s work than he or history gave her credit for. One of the curious discoveries Funder makes is that Animal Farm may not have been read today in its current form if not for Eileen. “The form of the book itself — as fable, novel, satire — was Eileen’s idea,” Funder writes. “She steered him away from writing a critical essay on Stalin and totalitarianism.” Nineteen Eighty-Four shared a similar title and a similar dystopian vision as a poem Eileen had written at university called End of the Century, 1984. Sadly, Eileen did not live to see either of her husband’s most enduring works published. She died during a hysterectomy in 1945.
Criticism of the misogyny in Orwell’s work may not be new. But many readers were shocked to learn about the claims of sexual assault and instances of the writer sleeping with Eileen’s friends and taking her permission to sleep with prostitutes. For Funder, it is Eileen’s invisibility, her erasure that is particularly troubling. It was Eileen who typed up Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s memoir about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Yet, across the hundreds of pages, Funder finds Orwell mentioning Eileen as “my wife” 37 times, not once naming her. “No character can come to life without a name,” writes Funder. “But from a wife, which is a job description, it can all be stolen.”
In Véra, a biography of Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Stacey Schiff finds a woman so devoted to her husband and his work, she is willing to erase herself. The same woman who saved an early draft of Lolita from an incinerator, destroyed all her letters to Nabokov, leaving us to see her as only he saw her. Véra was his first reader, his editor, his driver, his agent and his publicist. Schiff contends Nabokov’s public persona was in fact Véra’s creation. “Véra assumed her married name almost as a stage name; rarely has matrimony so much represented a profession. It was one of the ironies of the life that – born at a time and place where women could and did lay claim to all kinds of ambitions – she should elevate the role of wife to a high art.”
Mutually supportive creativity isn’t inconceivable but it is rare. Think George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, Marina Abramović and Ulay, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Zadie Smith and Nick Laird. Virginia and Leonard Woolf? Maybe. History has been much kinder to Leonard than it has to most literary spouses. For three decades, he is said to have nurtured Virginia’s genius through manic-depressive episodes and affairs. The couple founded Hogarth Press, which published not only Woolf’s novels like Orlando and The Waves, but also works by other writers like TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. Leonard himself was a writer, having authored the 1913 novel The Village in the Jungle. But he knew very well who the genius was between the two. Before she died by suicide, Virginia addressed her final letter to Leonard, expressing her gratitude for whatever little happiness and strength she found in their marriage. “If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness,” she wrote. Leonard may have brought some degree of stability to Virginia’s life. But he could also be controlling and quite unpleasant, as Sophie Cunningham discovered in her metafictional novel This Devastating Fever.
Perhaps, it is the foundational power imbalance of the matrimonial institution that must be placed under scrutiny, as Phyllis Rose did in Parallel Lives. On studying the relationships of five famous couples (Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Effie Gray and John Ruskin, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes), she found the sole unmarried couple (Eliot and Lewes) to be the happiest. “Marriages set two imaginations to work constructing narratives about experience presumed to be the same for both,” wrote Rose. “Happy marriages seem to me those in which the two partners agree on the scenario they are enacting.” Eliot and Lewes had agreed to enact a scenario not bound by law, but built on personal commitment without competitive reservations — and maybe that made all the difference. It goes without saying that narratives like Wifedom and Maestro give a voice to the forgotten wives, while also giving long-deserved due to the many roles they played in their superstar husbands’ creative productions. But the two running themes across the books and the films is how genius can be used as a shield and how fame can heighten the power imbalance in a marriage. The price of genius and fame remains invisible until it isn’t.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.