Over the first twenty years of my life, I had the benefit of observing both the unhappy marriage of my grandparents, who remained miserably chained in wedlock all their adult lives, and the unhappy marriage of my parents who, having quite quickly divorced, were free to make several more unhappy marriages. Which was the better course?
Conventional wisdom has it that mothers and fathers should stay joylessly together for the sake of their children. Mine didn’t—which is why I lived largely with my grandparents. I have no doubt that the instability of my background (I was provided at various moments with Hungarian, French, and English step-parents to add to my Swedish mother and Anglo-Irish father) gave me the advantages of a slow start and low self-esteem. Driving a car, publishing a book, marrying—all seemed as unlikely for me as captaining the English cricket team.
I didn’t drive a car or publish my Lytton Strachey until I was in my mid-thirties; and I didn’t marry till my late forties. But deferred pleasures, especially when unexpected, are all the keener (I am still waiting for the call to captain England at cricket and plan to enjoy every second of it).
My marriage to Margaret Drabble in 1982 was reckoned to be highly unusual. After all, was I not a happy-go-lucky bachelor? Hadn’t Margaret sworn never to remarry following the divorce from her first husband, the distinguished actor Clive Swift? And, most surprising of all, did we not apparently continue living in separate London houses? This was certainly how our marriage was presented in the newspapers—though had we not married, the same newspapers would happily have reported that we were “living together.” In fact, we had a fine precedent in Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, who, after their marriage, lived as near neighbors.
Of course I went into training for the marriage: taking a honeymoon in Hollywood with Margaret before the actual ceremony, briefing Beryl Bainbridge as our best man, and studying Hugh Kingsmill’s famous panorama of marriage Made on Earth (1937). From all this I emerged as a radical. Legal proposals to make divorce more difficult are popular in England these days. But I agree with Milton, who objected to the “discord of nature” involved in keeping an “ill-yoking couple” together; and I liked the Shavian notion of limiting the marriage contract (easily obtainable at the drugstore) to one year, with a joint option to renew it every twelve months. Such bold ideas strike me as good-natured and sensible.
But though I am a radical theorist, the fact is that Margaret and I were not conducting a brave experiment so much as exercising romantic common sense. I noticed how envious other couples were of our arrangement. Except for at weekends, there was little room for me all day in Margaret’s house along with her children, a secretary, and the commodious Oxford Companion to English Literature, while my own apartment was amply filled with Bernard Shaw, about whom I was then writing.
Then, when the Oxford Companion and GBS eventually moved off, we began living together at the same house in London—and lost our notoriety. We also have a house now in Somerset (where Margaret finds it easier to write her novels) and chase each other from town to country and back—occasionally, too, taking holidays from each other. But we are no longer newsworthy. Thank God..
Michael Holroyd is the author of a major biography of George Bernard Shaw as well as a memoir, Basil Street Blues.
