My husband, painter and printmaker Robert Kipniss, has a wonderful new website-- www.robertkipnissstudio.com--and its inauguration has inspired me to write about writers’ partners. Or at least the kind of partners we need.
There is much advice these days being given about writing and how to succeed as a writer, but I rarely read about what’s so important to a writing life: having a supportive spouse or intimate other who understands the creative process.
Examples abound of writers who have worked and flourished together, at least most of the time—Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, among others—but there are also many lesser known stories about writers who failed at this.
Once I had abandoned hope of finding a man who would honor the solitary hours that writing demands. And the silent hours of reading a writer must do. And then the hours to decompress from the intensity of writing. A man who would be genuinely glad when a book of mine was published.
I had attempted relationships with other writers, hoping that they would be empathic mates. One marriage floundered after an aspiring novelist was unable to get his novel published. Another failed when a playwright was unable to get his plays produced or written. Meanwhile, despite getting little emotional support from either of them, I steadily and stubbornly worked away on my biographies.
Then I met and married Robert, a prolific, successful painter and printmaker, who spent even more time in his studio than I did in my office. After publishing two biographies of artists, I gambled that it would be easier to work alongside an artist than another writer. However, the day he announced he had made one hundred mezzotints at a time when I was writing essays, I felt a pang because I had written nowhere near that many essays and knew I never would.
The tables were turned. What this realization demanded of me was an absence of comparison and, of course, competition. It took an understanding that working with images is different in many ways than working with words. And it required my acceptance of the fact that while I wanted to give many afternoons to my garden, he liked to paint imaginary landscapes in his darkened studio all day long.
Luckily, Robert respected my pace and and also intuitively understood what I needed as a writer. And he honored it. In the early exuberant months of our relationship, I asked him to please not telephone me before one o’clock when I stopped working. Then on every workday at precisely one o’clock, my phone would ring, and his gentle voice would ask me how my morning writing had gone.
What has made our marriage work is the respect we have for each other’s creativity during our more than thirty years together. I never asked him to leave his studio, and he never asked me to leave my office. At times he complained about my wish to be alone and the attention I gave to writing and other things (“the book, the garden, the house, the dog”), but he did it with humor and kindness.
Perhaps it’s easier for creative people to work side by side if they are in different fields, but I believe it’s more a matter of personality.
As I wrote in my memoir, Word for Word: A Writer’s Life, “Our marriage became a delicate balance between intimacy and independence, when at times I tolerated a little too much togetherness and he put up with a little too much apartness. It turned into an exquisite dance toward and away from each other, infused with loyalty and love, that allowed us to flourish as artist and author.”
You're welcome. It seems necessary to say.
Thanks, Marnie.