Literary wives are a unique breed, writes Carmela Ciuraru in the introduction to her strange new book – at which point the reader pictures Véra Nabokov either licking Vladimir’s stamps, or pulling the pages of an early draft of Lolita from the fire in which he was attempting to burn it. (“We are keeping this,” she is supposed to have said.) But no sooner has the smoke faded than alarm bells start to ring. It’s not true, is it, this statement of hers? And what’s more, she must know it. The women in Lives of the Wives, all of them the long-suffering partners of writers, could not be more different from one another if they tried; each one, in fact, is what my late father-in-law would have described wryly as a breed apart. What, you begin to wonder, is the aim of her project? What on earth might she be trying to prove?
But we’ll get back to this. Lives of the Wives is a group biography in which Ciuraru, previously the author of a book about pseudonyms, tells – and tells – the stories of five couples. Some are both writers: the Italian novelists Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia; the English novelists Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis. Others are not: Elaine Dundy, the first wife of the Observer theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, began by being an actor, only becoming a writer later; Patricia Neal, whose marriage to Roald Dahl lasted 30 years, was an Oscar-winning movie star who wrote one acclaimed memoir after her divorce. Finally, there is Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall. While Hall is remembered now for her lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, a book judged by a court as obscene in her lifetime, Troubridge has no real claim to fame other than her (then highly daring) relationship (before she met Hall, she had aspirations to be a sculptor; afterwards, she translated Colette). Now you begin to see the problem.
It would be easy, thesis-wise, if all these women were kept down by their men (or woman, in the case of Troubridge). But this is not so. Morante and Moravia were an unhappy couple, but he encouraged her work, renting a writing studio for her at one point; Tynan may have been a compulsively unfaithful, thin-skinned egomaniac who loved to be spanked – he kept a schoolmaster’s cane in the bedroom – but Dundy always gave as good as she got (she drank as much as him, shouted as loudly as him, and baited him when he threatened suicide). An awful lot has been written about Roald Dahl in recent days: and, yes, he was a bully and an antisemite. Neal, though, came to believe that she owed her recovery from the catastrophic strokes she suffered at the age of just 39 to the brutal regime he insisted upon. In the end, only Howard put aside her own art in order to facilitate the creativity of a man (she should have written more, but it’s also worth saying that, of the two, she’s the one who is read now).
The model for a book like this is Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives, an examination of Victorian literary marriages that is without peer. It’s a template that, though much copied – notably by Katie Roiphe in Uncommon Arrangements, which also includes a chapter about Troubridge and Hall – is rarely replicated successfully. It isn’t enough merely to rehash stories that have already been told elsewhere; what sets Rose apart is her mind, and the way she brings it to bear on the evidence before her. Alas, Ciuraru is rather more Viking in her approach: she simply raids and pillages all the memoirs, letters and existing biographies, giving us the facts, but little more. Her synopses – for that is what these essays really are – feel lazy and rushed and somewhat on the familiar side (only Morante and Moravia’s story was unknown to me).
Still, as gossip goes, this is juicy stuff. These are some wild lives, several universes away from anything you might see on TV’s Couples Therapy (shrinks, of course, are mostly disdained by this lot, and even when they’re not, they do no good: Howard’s lunges at her, and she has to run away). Morante has an affair with the film director Luchino Visconti, and he sends her an owl in a cage; Dundy has an affair with the poet George MacBeth, and Tynan comes home to find him in their kitchen wearing nothing but a tie. These couples have their own way of doing things, and it isn’t yours or mine. Troubridge dries her baby daughter after a bath by hanging her out of the window in a muslin bag. Hall visits a psychic called Gladys in the hope of contacting a dead lover, taking Troubridge with her to write notes. Neal has Dahl’s mistress, Liccy, to stay after a tonsillectomy, and somehow doesn’t question things when she hears her husband padding down the corridor to the patient’s bedroom in the dead of night.
There’s a lot of bad behaviour here, and a lot of pain, too: Neal and Dahl lose a daughter; Howard cannot fully recover from the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. But in the end, it’s impossible – and stupid – to take sides, assuming this is what Ciuraru wants us to do (it may not be). Almost everyone in her book is damaged. Their mental health is poor (either that, or they’re addicts). They can hardly help themselves most of the time. Like Martin Amis, who said, after his stepmother finally found the courage to break with his father, that he’d “lost all appetite for apportioning blame in matters of the affections”, I wound up feeling sorry for pretty much everyone, husbands included.
• Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages by Carmela Ciuraru is published by HarperColllins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
