How is it to live with an author? These people could write a book

Living With a Writer

Edited by Dale Salwak

Palgrave Macmillan: 238 pp., $24.95

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A few years ago I had occasion to interview biographer Michael Holroyd and his wife, novelist Margaret Drabble, while each was crisscrossing the country, both promoting new books.

For reasons known only to their respective publishers, they traveled separately to the same cities, so while Holroyd was talking to me in Boston, Drabble might be in Los Angeles. The couple also maintained separate flats on opposite ends of London as a way to assure mutual productivity. “Say hello to Margaret for me, won’t you,” Holroyd quipped as we parted, and we both laughed. “Michael says hello,” I said to Drabble when we met later that week, easily the most effective opening line I’ve ever used in an author interview.

In “Living With a Writer,” a collection of 26 essays exploring the domestic side of the creative process, Holroyd writes that he and Drabble share a house in Somerset but still have a retreat in the city. And they never talk about works in progress. This is all driven by “romantic common sense,” he explains in his witty essay. “What we can sometimes do,” he confides, “is lift the other’s morale.” Otherwise, “we must not trespass.”

Keeping a respectful distance works for Holroyd and Drabble, but the essays assembled by editor Dale Salwak make it clear that there are no hard and fast rules. Biographer Justin Kaplan and his wife, novelist Anne Bernays, usually pursue separate projects, but the Cambridge, Mass., couple have worked together on two books and their brief essay appears under both names. Yet writing for them remains “a solo enterprise”; collaboration, by its very nature, they write, is “a partial surrender of both personal style and narcissistic gratification for the sake of the whole.”

For these two couples, the boundaries are accepted by everyone. The same cannot be said of Betty Fussell, the former wife of historian Paul Fussell, and since their divorce an author in her own right of several well-received books. “The fierceness of my needs conflicted almost totally with the fierceness of his,” she says of a relationship that had become so unpleasant that she never once identifies her ex-husband by name in her essay, revealingly titled “Room for One.” “My place was the kitchen, his was the writing room. I was good at cooking, he was good at writing. Looking back, I’m surprised that we lasted as long as we did.”

Thankfully, Salwak, a professor of English at Citrus College in Glendora, has balanced pleasant experiences with the unpleasant, and for every account that supports the perception that writers are self-centered, moody, brooding enigmas of petulant genius, there are uplifting tales of support, nurturing and inspiration.

Historian Edmund Morris reveals that his writer wife, Sylvia Jukes Morris, is the “first reader” of everything he does. The late Malcolm Bradbury offered this of his happy union: “I am partnered in my enterprise by my really first class Writer’s Wife, who looks after reality for me while I am absent from it, which I am most of the time.”

David Updike writes warmly of his father John, and Judy Carver writes evocatively of her father, the late novelist William Golding. James J. Berg has an interesting take on the relationship of Christopher Isherwood and his partner of three decades, artist Don Bachardy. Most curious is the selection by Jeffrey Meyers on Somerset Maugham, who spent most of his adult life living with men, but from 1905 to 1915 had affairs with four women, each of whom he portrayed in his fiction.

Perhaps the most telling quote comes from Catherine Aird, an author of detective fiction: “The only writer with whom I live is me, myself, alone.”

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Nicholas A. Basbanes is the author of “A Gentle Madness,” “Patience & Fortitude,” “Among the Gently Mad” and “A Splendor of Letters. “