Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers

If you are a writer, a muse or something in between, this book may fascinate you for more than purely scholarly reasons. It is an unusual approach, and in some ways it could be an especially helpful one. The two words I have are: cautionary tales. The things that we dream of, sometimes they are not such good ideas. If you like this book, or this topic, there are of course many other books about writers and the weaknesses of flesh and spirit, however you may especially like _What Lips My Lips Have Kissed_ about Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Even though not all readers are seduced and not all writers are compulsive, when a peculiar chemistry occurs between reader and writer, the written word is made flesh and creates strange bedfellows. Frances Wilson has connected the dots and produced a unique and astonishing study of this perhaps unholy alliance.Beginning with the famous courtship of Elizabeth Barrett by Robert Browning as a kind of contrast/control because of its relative wholesomeness, Wilson goes on to explore the more pathological literary seductions of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Osip and Nadzheda Mandelstam, and W.B. and Georgie Yeats. The Brownings were more normal and sane, according to this author, because they achieved the "...transition from a love of one another's words to a broader love beyond the literary."But the dynamic of the more pathological literary seductions are different for all. Anais Nin and Henry Miller were possessed by words. "Henry saw the English language as a part of his body" while Anais "...believed words were speaking HER rather than the other way around." They both wrote constantly and compulsively and their sexual involvement with each other was defined by their writing.Laura Riding, on the other hand, was "la belle dam sans merci." She and Robert Graves together created this mythic persona of Laura and they both fed upon and nurtured it in their writing. They did not "...live to tell the tale so much as tell the tale in order to find a way of living." In other words, they wrote themselves into existence.For the Russian husband and wife team, Osip and Nadzheda Mandelstam, life was a Gulag Archipelago. Osip was tormented by the poems that he heard as a buzzing in his brain until he wrote them down. But he had to memorize them rather than write them because he was so constantly subject to arrest and imprisonment. So his wife, Nadzheda, contained them within herself, committing them to memory much as Brandbury's characters in *Fahrenheit 451* memorized whole books because the written word had become illegal. Osip and Nadzheda completed one another to such an extent that their separations were torture to both.W.B. Yeats and his wife, Georgie, also wrote together on an intimate level, but in this case, Georgie received her husband's creative thoughts by automatic writing. She was his conduit; his writing hand was her hand. She wrote constantly and feverishly to such an extent that their authorship was blurred and defined by one another.In all these latter cases, there was at least one third party in the equation. For Miller and Nin, there was June (Miller's wife). Geoffrey Phibbs and Nancy Graves were present in the Graves-Riding duo. Laura Riding was "...endlessly getting rid of the third party in the way of her relationship, whilst she needed this third party in order to have the relationship in the first place." For the Mandelstams, there was the poetess, Anna Akhnatova, and for W.B. and Georgie Ye