Asking for trouble
Guardian staff Andrew Motion
<p>Andrew Motion on the pros and cons of living with a writer.</p>
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the Guardian
Living With a Writer

edited by Dale Salwak

237pp, Palgrave, £18.99

Why "Living with a writer" - what's so special about that? Why not "Living with a gynaecologist", or "Living with a parking attendant"? Wouldn't their domestic arrangements produce more interesting stories of negotiation and support?

Everyone agrees that writers' lives are internal and invisible in certain crucial ways, and most people also suppose that the parts which do show are predictably unpleasant. Writers are selfish, vain, greedy, neurotic, competitive and obsessive, as their biographers have been hurrying to point out for centuries. In fact, because we know so much about this already, we might doubt that we need yet another book to make the case, even when it's written by names as interesting as some of those in Dale Salwak's collection. Wouldn't they be better occupied getting on with their real work, rather than bearing witness to yet more narcissism and damage?

Salwak obviously thinks not. His book contains 26 essays, of which 21 are "entirely original" and he believes it provides "a glimpse behind private doors into very private worlds". At least two of the contributors give the sense that a long-defunct notion lies at the heart of the collection - the idea that "helpmeet" women will move heaven and earth for their writerly men. But it turns out that Salwak has made a significant effort to diversify. We read about men supporting women (Holroyd on Drabble, George Howe Colt on Anne Fadiman), daughters on parents (Judy Carver on Ann and William Golding), sons on fathers (David on John Updike), outsiders on couples they knew (James J Berg on Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy) and, yes, wives on husbands (Drabble on Holroyd).

This range does the book credit, and Salwak tries to stretch things still further by dividing his contributors into two sections - "The Pleasures" and "The Problems". Judging by his introduction, he wanted to get away from the stereotype of all writers being bastards (see above), and it's true that in terms of pages covered, at least, he succeeds in being even-handed. We hear as much about the satisfaction of mutual support, the thrill of being the first to read a new thing, and the fascination of watching experience turn into words, as we do about the misery of Emma Hardy (who is mentioned on three separate occasions), or what Colt calls the unions that "could only end in alcoholism and madness (the Fitzgeralds), black eyes and hurled martini glasses (McCarthy and Wilson), or separation and suicide (Hughes and Plath)".

But Salwak himself has a problem. Although the cheerful stories fill an adequate amount of space, their details simply don't linger. Updike registers this when he says, "My father, in answer to a question I am often asked, is doing fine, thank you: he lives with his wife in a small pleasant town 40 minutes north of Boston, in a large white house overlooking the sea. And yes, he's still writing books, and another is coming out soon." The tone here is more than family-protective. It also reflects the necessary privacy of writing itself, and the fact that tense, turbulent books do not necessarily emerge from tense, turbulent lives. (If they did, the best books would all be written by people who "killed a lot of dragons" as Larkin put it.)

This means that despite Salwak's best efforts, his two categories converge, with the bad times always seeming to dominate the good ones. Admittedly the problems get examined more fairly and squarely in their own section. There's a (too) long piece on Somerset Maugham and his wife Syrie, for instance, in which Jeffrey Meyers shows how the sexual difficulties of their marriage were compounded by the fact that "she constantly interfered with, or even prevented, his writing". And a detailed account by Hershel Parker of how Melville's struggles as a writer shattered his family: he had a daughter whose arthritis was brought on by a bad diet, a son who committed suicide, another son who died young.

Long before we reach these tales of woe, the "Pleasures" section has warned us to expect them. In the entertaining opening essay (first published in 1988), Malcolm Bradbury identifies various types of "Writer's Wife" - meaning men-wives as well as women-wives - to warn just about everyone imaginable off the role: whether they're the Muse wife, the Deferential wife, the Genteel wife, the Sexy wife, the Utterly Contemptuous wife or the Widow wife, they all turn out to be shackled to one kind of treacherous baby or another.

This chilly verdict is followed by Ann Thwaite's piece about Emily Tennyson, whom she calls "a model writer's wife", and says must be the envy of anyone who ever put pen to paper - before reminding us that she sacrificed herself almost entirely to the laureate's needs. Thwaite implies this fulfilled Lady T, but it's difficult to think things were really as simple as that. When she quotes from her epigraph to the biography of Emily she published in 1996, a passage from Middlemarch, which ends: "No one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done", she holds up a bigger picture. No one did state an alternative "exactly", but somebody could have done.

And so on, and so on. Salwak arranges for us to hear a report from Paul Theroux on the sympathy between Pat and VS Naipaul, from Edmund Morris on his devotion to Sylvia Jukes Morris, and to read what are effectively love letters sent beyond the grave from Kathleen Symons to her husband Julian and from Brian Aldiss to his wife Margaret. But all around them lie deep shadows of compromise, frustration and sometimes actual cruelty.

Then again - and this is where we came in - can't the same be said for the vast majority of living and working relationships? On the evidence here, the single thing writers appear to need in greater quantities than most is solitude. Catherine Aird says: "The only writer with whom I live is me, myself, alone"; Nadine Gordimer talks about '"the secret intimacy"of "living with myself"; and Parker talks about Melville's desperate need for what he called "the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose", (matching Keats's equally brilliant words about his hunger for "delicious diligent indolence").

"Beyond all this, the wish to be alone": Larkin again, this time from his lyric "Wants". If solitude really is the foundation of writing, then selfishness is the offshoot - often horrible, but not inevitably so. (Gordimer asks, bracingly, whether "selfishness is monstrous".) All the same, it's difficult for most people to deal with solitude at close quarters, day after day, unless they have a similar need. Which generally means chatterboxes, children, and anyone whose happiness depends on intimacy at all times shouldn't think of "living with a writer". Whether this is a more interesting observation than one might make about the home-coming gynaecologist or parking attendant depends on one's point of view.