A muse, says the dictionary, “is an inspiring goddess”, from the nine daughters of Zeus in Greek mythology who oversaw the arts and science. That meaning has been expanded to include being a model and financial support, as well as a partner who looks after the home, pays the electricity bills or, as in one case (George Orwell’s), empties the cesspit outdoor.
There seems to be an unwritten rule that wives are meant to be muses in the latter sense, and if they are also creative, the ones expected to sacrifice their careers.
Many years ago, my wife alerted me to the imbalance inherent in Gandhi’s vow of brahmacharya taken when he was 38, the same age as Kasturba. “It was all very well for him, but what of his wife?” she asked.
Later, I discovered a poem that reads in part, It’s said in praise of Mahatma Gandhi –/ A sort of saint, though his legs were bandy,/ He was skinny and quaint – but still, a saint –/ That for years he had nothing to do with his wife:/ What about her life?
That question — what about her life? — has been asked in a number of recent books. Wifedom (Anna Funder) braids a lot of facts and some fiction (imaginary scenes, speculative dialogues) to highlight the story of Orwell’s first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Lives of the Wives (Carmela Ciuraru) discusses five couples where the wife played the secondary role. Katie McCabe’s More Than a Muse: Creative Partnerships That Sold Talented Women Short is self-explanatory, as is Ruth Butler’s Hidden in the Shadow of the Master. There’s also Jeffrey Meyers’s earlier book, Married to Genius, about the conflict between life and art, muse and spouse.
“The problem with being a wife,” writes Ciuraru, “is being a wife.” She goes on to say, “With an ego the size of a small nation, the literary lion is powerful on the page, but a helpless kitten in daily life — dependent on his wife to fold an umbrella, answer the phone, or lick a stamp… Those towering mononymic geniuses of Western literature — Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Nabokov — where would they be without their wives?”
Gross imbalance
When author Kingsley Amis married Elizabeth Jane Howard, he wanted to announce to the world they were “the most attractive, intelligent, funny, sophisticated and mutually suited pair since the Renaissance”.
While Amis wrote and drank and then drank some more, his wife, an award-winning novelist, took on domestic duties, changed light bulbs, scheduled her husband’s medical appointments and worked out the household budget. She was also the family chauffeur.
Men of talent often have a way of putting things in perspective, or more correctly, justifying the imbalance between creative couples. Composer Gustav Mahler told his wife Alma there could be only one composer in the family, explaining: “The role of composer, the worker’s role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner...”
Alma’s resentment never really left her. On one occasion, she wrote: “I sit down at the piano, dying to play, but musical notation no longer means anything to me. My eyes have forgotten how to read it. I have been firmly taken by the arm and led away from myself. And I long to return to where I was.”
Austrian composer Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma, who was also a composer and author.
As the wife (on different occasions) of Mahler, Walter Gropius, architect and father of the Bauhaus School, and Franz Werfel, Austrian playwright and novelist, Alma was the muse who operated serially. In her autobiography, she wrote of realising “my childhood dream of filling my garden with geniuses”.
Josephine Hopper, the wife of Edward Hopper, was the more successful painter when they met. She had exhibited her works alongside those of Picasso and Modigliani. It was her recommendation that got her husband his first show. She kept his records, wrote his correspondence and remained his only model. “Of course,” she wrote, “If there can be room for only one of us, it must undoubtedly be he. I can be glad and grateful for that.”
Marketing the artist
In an essay, ‘Lee Krasner: The Unacknowledged Equal’, on Jackson Pollock and Krasner, the first couple of abstract expressionism, author Carter Ratcliff writes, “The ranks of first-generation Abstract Expressionist painters includes just one woman: Lee Krasner. If Krasner had not been so furiously stubborn, there might have been none.”
Ahead of a retrospective of her works in London four years ago, the curator said, “I’m not sure we should apply our own expectations to her career retrospectively. [It is] not very accurate. If there was a deference there, it was mutual. For instance, they would only visit one another’s studios by invitation. I was determined not to put together a straightforwardly feminist, revisionist interpretation of her career.”
American abstract expressionist painter couple Lee Krasner (far left) and Jackson Pollock (in black), in the latter’s studio in New York, August 1953. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Krasner had much to do with the marketing of her husband as an artist and a persona. And although the favour was never returned, Krasner felt that being overlooked gave her the freedom to do her own work.
Patriarchy and misogyny feed off each other. Yet, the creative spark can be sustained either by a wife-muse playing the role set out for her voluntarily or for pragmatic reasons (Orwell, James Joyce, Nabokov), or because the partnership is a rollercoaster of emotions (Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes).
George Orwell and his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy.
Giving each other ‘space’, as we say today, saw the blossoming of Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, who, according to Meyers was “sufficiently self-assured to surrender his masculine prerogatives and give first priority to Virginia’s career”. That still assumes Leonard had a masculine prerogative!
Is The Old Man and the Sea worth any number of broken women? Do we see Picasso’s many muses, including the photographer Dora Marr and the artist Francois Gilot, merely as collateral damage en route to Weeping Woman and Guernica?
How we answer that question will tell us about ourselves, the times we live in, the fraught relationship between art and civility, and the price spouses and muses are willing to pay. Either to keep the peace or to inspire great works.
The writer’s latest book is ‘Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read?’.
