Product Description

Living with a Writer features some of our most insightful literary minds writing as only they could on the practical and personal considerations of being a writer. Entries include John Updike on being a writer; David Updike on being the son of a writer and a writer himself; Nadine Gortimer on living with herself; Margaret Drabble on her relationship with Malcolm Holroyd; Edmund Morris on his relationship with his wife, Sylvia Jukes Morris; John Bayley on Iris Murdoch; and Paul Theroux on V.S. Naipaul. These candid essays offer a rare opportunity to peer into and demystify the private lives of some of the very best contemporary writers of our time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1253394 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-06
• Released on: 2004-10-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781403904768
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
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From Publishers Weekly
Ah, the writer: suffering for art, he or she often subjects loved ones to poverty and neglect in service to the muse. So goes the myth. In this mostly engaging compilation from Salwak, an English professor at Citrus College in California, varying perspectives either debunk or uphold romantic notions of writers’ lives. Most of the contributors are writers themselves, leading Nadine Gordimer to exclaim, "There seems to be some confusion, here; I am the writer. So I can only conclude that I shall be relating what it is like to be living with myself." Numerous pieces are halls of mirrors, writers writing about writing about someone who lives with them. And it’s often strange to read writers’ notions of what their loved ones experience. The book often becomes a consideration of the "writer’s wife," who, as Malcolm Bradbury states in the charming opening piece, "can be of either sex, though admittedly in the folklore it is almost always women who are famous in the role." On the other hand, many writers are married to other writers; Michael Holroyd writes charmingly of being married to Margaret Drabble and how they keep their writing lives private: "Though we share much, the secret part of ourselves remains our writing." And Drabble, in turn, writes equally charmingly of how only a writer can understand a writer mate’s untidiness.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Conjure up the vision of living with a writer, and two conflicting images come to mind: either it's the most glorious confluence of intellectual stimulation and sparkling repartee or the most abject atmosphere of sanctimonious egotism and pompous pique. Salwak's dazzling collection of essays gathered from those who best know 27 of literature's most enigmatic and celebrated novelists, poets, playwrights, and biographers reveals the keys to successfully living with someone who makes a living out of living with words. Even when such cohabitation is more acrimonious than advantageous, the insights into how wordsmiths approach their craft, and how that approach affects their lifestyle, makes for fascinating reading. From Malcolm Bradbury's wry, tongue-in-cheek letter of advice to a writer's would-be wife to John and David Updike's individual takes on what it means to be the son of a writer, Salwak's beguiling, behind-the-scenes look at what is perceived to be a solitary pursuit explores both the vagaries of writerly relationships as well as the mysteries of the creative process. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Customer Reviews

Read the Melville Essay
On the back cover of Living With A Writer edited by Dale Salwak, the following question is posed: "what is the cost of a masterpiece or a caring relationship?" The first essay that I chose to read in this book answers that question all too well. In Damned By Dollars: Moby-Dick and the Price of Genius, Herman Melville biographer Hershel Parker tallies the huge cost that Melville paid in plying his craft in the face of a public and a publishing industry that was blind to his talent.

The opening of this wonderful essay sets the stage for this question:

In early May 1851, when he had finished almost all of Moby-Dick except the concluding chapters and late insertions, Melville wrote Hawthorne about 'the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose', a mood that could seldom be his: 'Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.'

Melville went on to say that because dollars damned him, because he was so rushed, 'the product is a final hash,' and all his books were botches. Certainly nothing could be further from the truth and one need not read very far into Moby-Dick to see it for the classic work that it is. Certainly one of the greatest tragedies in all of literature, it is still astounding to think that nearly fifty years after it was published, Moby-Dick had sold a scant four thousand copies. I am instantly reminded of the classic Gahan Wilson cartoon in the New Yorker in which a modern day Melville is adrift upon a city street and everywhere he looks are whale references, even on the slippers of a young child scuttling by him. The caption for the cartoon is something like, "I wonder if we've oversold Moby-Dick." One can only wonder what Melville might have produced had he not been so beaten down by his lack of recognition and his constant indebtedness, and achieved even a modest success. Certainly he escaped the worst, or maybe not -- one kept expecting his failure to rush him to an early grave but maybe having to work nineteen years as a lowly paid customs worker while stories swirled in your head may have been worse than death.

Reading Parker's fascinating essay on the toll that his masterpiece took on Melville and his family temporarily sends me scurrying for the countless books that I have with Melville references, especially Herman Melville A to Z by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock (Checkmark Books, 2001), which I hope to find the time to read soon. And from the "too bizarre to be true" department, this from HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature 2nd Edition:

Mocha-Dick J.N. Reynolds published an account of this white whale in The Knickerbocker Magazine in 1839, twelve years before Melville's Moby-Dick. It was the earliest account of a white whale legendary among seamen for its fierceness and the difficulty of killing it.

Lucky for Reynolds that he didn't expand his piece into an epic novel. No matter how good it might have turned out to be, I don't think the world is ready even today for Mocha- Dick. Those great white whales may not kill you, but they sure do a lot of damage.