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You may have noticed, if you read this column regularly, that I think a lot about the interaction between public and private interests: how personal motivations and decisions affect public events such as wars and scandals, but also public ways. , structural barriers affect people’s personal decisions, shape their lives and careers, and sometimes safety.
The idea has informed how to write about corruption (individual decisions to commit crimes, formed by a greater balance of corruption, which means that it is the only way to move forward), coups (if individual elites believe that the way to protect private interests is to support them. coup, then the plot often succeeds), gender equality (women’s success and participation in public life is limited by institutions that place the burden of preventing violence and dealing with discrimination on the victims rather than the perpetrators), and so on. And that’s the main theme of a big project I’ve been working on with some colleagues, which you’ll hear about again.
My reading list this week has focused on the personal element of the equation: the decisions people make to honor, maintain status or maintain personal relationships, and the implications that has for society as a whole – especially creative and literary progress.
In “Lives of the Wives,” Carmela Ciuraru dissects five literary marriages, detailing how the public literary success of writers like Roald Dahl and Kingsley Amis grew out of the personal support of their spouses at home.
“The ideal wife of a famous writer has no desire to tell,” writes Ciuraru. “He lives every day in second place. Instead of trying to control his own destiny, he accepts what he is given without complaint. His ambitions are not disturbed because he does not have them.
But the molten core of the conflict in the relationship is that the husband in the relationship simultaneously wants a person who does not have ambition and ego, but also a person who has extraordinary intelligence and creativity that he wants to provide his career instead of him. .
It is not difficult to see why these people would want such a partner – or why such a relationship would be bitter fraught. Ciuraru writes that Kenneth Tynan, a well-known theater critic, was furious when his wife, Elaine Dundy, published an acclaimed and successful novel, shouting that “You weren’t a writer when I married you!” But of course he is still the same person – the change is that he now uses his literary talents in his own name, instead of supporting them.
It’s a theme that always strikes me when I read about Picasso’s relationship. In her autobiography “Life with Picasso,” Françoise Gilot describes how Picasso drew on her skills as an artist, asking her to inspire, criticize, and sometimes even paint her own work. Not because he didn’t appreciate her artistically, but her exerciseand wanted to reserve that value for himself.
Similarly, in “Finding Dora Maar,” Brigitte Benkemoun’s biography of Picasso’s previous partner Dora Maar, a well-known surrealist photographer, notes how Picasso treated Maar’s artistic abilities as if they were a natural resource with rights. He encouraged Maar to help paint “Guernica,” among other works, at the expense of his own work as a photographer and painter.
One conclusion would be to ask, as the opinion of my colleague Jessica Grose in her column this week, whether these women could have been fulfilled if they had been married, too.
But after reading “The Militant Muse,” Whitney Chadwick’s excellent book about the women of the Surrealist movement in the mid-20th century, I wondered what women like Gilot could do if they could participate in artistic and literary life without having to have it. have any relationship with famous people. She details how the women of the movement support and inspire her, both creatively and personally, and the masterpieces these collaborations create.
But she also wrote about an interview with Roland Penrose, one of the most influential intellectuals in the Surrealist movement, in which he told Chadwick not to write a book about female Surrealists.
“He’s not an artist,” Chadwick said. “Of course women are important, but because they are our muses.”
A remarkable statement, since the women in question include Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Lee Miller, Valentine Boué, Dora Maar, and Meret Oppenheim, among others. But it is even more so that the two women – Miller and Boué – are Penrose’s wives.
One wonders how much more they, and other Surrealism women, could have accomplished if the movement had not had a person like Penrose in it.
Reader response: What you read
Barbara Harrison, a reader in Chestertown, MD, recommends the novel “Symphony of Secrets” by Brendan Slocumb:
If you read only one book of the year, I urge you to consider the contemporary musicological procedure of these two days in which Black Ph.D. Kevin Bernard Hendricks tries to revive the opera by his hero, Frederick Delaney, who is white.
Joyce Rubenstein, reading in Avon Lake, OH, recommends “Our Wives Under the Sea” by Julia Armfield:
A year ago, my husband passed away after a long illness due to old age and eventual liver failure. Our Spouse In The Sea offers solace and new understanding of shared but also personal and profoundly lonely experiences of grief and loss. This book is meant to confirm grace and love. It helps me better deal with the absence in my own life to remind me that grief is as universal as the tolerance of love.
do you read
Thanks to everyone who wrote about what you read. Please keep the posts coming!
I want to hear about things you’ve read (or watched or listened to) that moved, inspired, or amazed you.
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