LIVING WITH A WRITER

My husband was once rung up by the Daily Telegraph, and asked what it was like to live with a novelist.
“ Like being the back end of a pantomime horse”, he said. I have always thought this a perfect metaphor for the absurdity of living with a writer. Your partner is invisible, apart from maintaining the illusion the this strange, cavorting parody of a horse has a pair of hind legs. Yet unlike the back end, you can at least see where you’re going. Your partner, your back end, can push blindly but receives neither applause nor credit.

Living with a writer must be so horrible that it is a wonder anyone chooses to do it. For a start, I have yet to meet even the nicest of us who is not, at heart, a kind of monster. How but through utter selfishness, arrogance, single-mindedness and bloody-mindedness would a book ever be written? Graham Greene claimed that every writer must have a chip of ice in his heart, and this is uncomfortably close to the truth. No matter how warm the human being, there is this necessary detachment that does not sit easily with a happy love-life or a well-balanced family. If, in addition, you happen to be a novelist, producing an imaginary history from certain observed psychological traits, you are going to be far less tolerant of any flaws in a partner. To a novelist, mild indolence speeds towards tragedy brought about by sloth; attention to personal appearance is magnified and distorted into grotesque vanity; and every motive or action is fraught with ominous possibility. We tend, I suspect, to see the world both more vividly, and more garishly.

Vain, self-dramatising, self-pitying, arrogant, callous, foolish, prying, censorious and just plain selfish – why does anyone put up with us? I suppose because we also have to contain and express the opposite qualities, too. Someone entirely made up of faults would be hopeless at creating characters for readers to engage and sympathise with. So novelists (and good biographers) have also to be more selfless, brave, loving, humble, wise and generous than might be normal, too. We are rendered more aware of moral choice by searching for a kind of truth. It is my belief that anyone who writes a book, whether fiction or non-fiction, in which imaginative sympathy is engaged, becomes a richer human by being forced to fully inhabit the bad in themselves, and to become more aware of their own potential for good. What they then do with this awareness is another matter.

Certainly, when I first met the man who became my husband, one of the things that interested him in me was my being a (then unpublished) novelist. His oldest friend has always believed that he subsumed his own creativity into mine, which is not the case, but it’s certainly true that our passionate love of reading is one of the great bonds between us. His support has been largely emotional and, to a degree, financial, but it rarely includes child-care because of his long office hours. My admiration for partners who take up the duties of looking after children at week-ends and out of school while their partner is pent in a pine-clad attic, writing, is tempered with a certain amount of rage. The real pros are those like PD James who got up early every morning to write, before taking her children to school, going to work as a civil servant and looking after a sick husband. Only amateurs have temperaments that render them too delicate to take their kids swimming or carry out the garbage.

In stories and films about writers, you always get told that their debut was an instant success and that the worst a couple has to face after publication is the temptation of the successful writer by the world, the flesh and the devil. You don’t hear of the opposite happening, which is much, much more common and far harder on a relationship. The anguish of a writer’s partner at a publisher’s rejection or a bad review is as bad as that of the writer, (though for both, time and experience modifies this). Nor do you hear of the gruelling years of writing books that may never get published, or which fail to sell or be reviewed, which are even harder on a partner (who after all wants to feel their sacrifices are justified) than an author.

What you need in a writer’s partner is a combination of rock-solid faith, a sense of the absurd and deep sensitivity. You need someone who can accept, at the end of their own day’s work, the fact that they can come home to find one or other of the following: a delicious dinner and a happy writer, or someone sobbing onto the unpeeled potatoes because their new book isn’t working. In one sense, a partnership between two writers is doomed for this reason, for how can you know that you won’t both be down at the same time, or madly competitive, like Plath and Hughes? On the other hand, who else is likely to be so helpful, so understanding? There are authors such as Margaret Drabble and Michael Holroyd, or Maggie O’Farrell and William Shawcross, which appear to be mutually supportive to the highest degree. Almost all the authors I know who are happily married, however, have partners who aren’t writers, and who work in solid, professional jobs of the kind writers neither understand nor (often) respect. The ones whose marriages have ended in acrimony are those who inspire their partner to try their luck as writers too. Invariably, what they produce is a pale parody of their partner’s writing, which embitters them and fills them with resentment and incomprehension as to why they, too, aren’t published.

No writer should ever sleep with, live with or God forbid, marry an aspiring writer – not without reading what happened to JD Salinger. After all, who wants to see a pantomime horse with two heads?

Amanda Craig's novel, In a Dark Wood is published by Fourth Estate, £16.99