Couples

 An interesting piece in The Times yesterday, about literary couples, i.e. cohabiting couples composed of two writers, each pursuing their own projects or, sometimes, collaborating. American examples include Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt,  Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig. From this side of the pond, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath of course, Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn – and our old friend Kingsley Amis and his wife of 18 years, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Their honeymoon in Spain seems to have been positively idyllic, at least according to Howard: 'In the mornings we wrote sitting opposite each other at the table, our typewriters almost touching in the small space. Then we went to the beach...' 
 As we know, that happy time did not last, as Howard was soon struggling with the domestic demands of looking after the needy and demanding Amis – plus a house full of friends and family – and coping with his drinking. I've written about the Amises' life in their 'bloody great mansion' before, and the wonder is that Howard put up with it for as long as she did (and somehow managed to carry on writing). In happier times, I was interested to learn from the Times piece, she and Amis once 'decided to write a few pages of each other's novels'. The novels were Howard's After Julius and Amis's One Fat Englishman. They duly swapped manuscripts, briefed each other on where the plot was going, and set to work. According to Howard, the chapters that resulted from this work-swap experiment went unnoticed and unsuspected. I guess there's an opening there for a literary sleuth, armed with the latest tools of textual analysis – though perhaps there is more important work to be done...

'One of the most unmeddlesome of women'

 Having recently read Richard Holmes's excellent account of Tennyson's early years, The Boundless Deep, I was amused to come across this picture, in J.G. Riewald's Beerbohm's Literary Caricatures (a great book for browsing in). It shows Thomas Woolner, the only sculptor in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, sculpting his portrait bust of the still beardless Tennyson in 1857 – the bust that is now in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The caption reads: 

Mrs Tennyson: 'You know, Mr Woolner, I'm one of the most unmeddlesome of women; but – when (I'm only asking), when do you begin modelling his halo?'