Why, thought I, if the real life precedent that attracted the novelist's attention was both more interesting and happier (despite difficulties) for all parties concerned?
Seriously! Appreciative as it is, I side-eye the line "Who else but Forster could end up becoming firm friends with his lover's wife, and godparent to her child?" because quite a lot of people made poly arrangements work long before the word existed, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to read a novel about yet some more people who were happy.
(I only learned a few years ago that Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson had an open marriage that had much less to do with his bisexuality than with their individual feelings about monogamy. Alan Strachan quotes her in Secret Dreams (2004): "A person may only ever love one man or woman in the world; that is fortunate. But it is an extraordinary rule that once married no man or woman should ever have some of the love that men and women have in them to give. For a man never to experience any other woman or for a woman never to experience love with another man can be a kind of imprisonment." They both had multiple, sometimes long-term partners over the course of their marriage. One of Michael's most serious boyfriends effectively co-parented with them; the Redgrave children loved him. I was delighted to learn these facts. It wasn't always easy, because even two-person relationships aren't, but it was real and it worked for them.)
But recognizing the why doesn't sell me on the result. (With the caveat that maybe if I hadn't known anything about the rl circumstances, it might have worked? I can't be sure.)
I thought Pat Green was completely invented the first time I saw Breaking the Code, although I wasn't sure then why Dilly Knox, Sara Turing, and Christopher Morcom were represented with their real names while Arnold Murray appeared in the fictionalized form of Ron Miller. (I'm guessing now it's because Murray, like Clarke, was still alive at the time of the play's writing and production.) As an invention, she works fine! As a version of a real person, this entire conversation. I know less about Murray beyond what I have read in Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), but since Hodges writes firmly that he was traumatized by his part in Turing's conviction and suicide—he was blamed for them on the street in Manchester—I know he was more than a sexy bit of rough. What fiction does to people is so weird.
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Seriously! Appreciative as it is, I side-eye the line "Who else but Forster could end up becoming firm friends with his lover's wife, and godparent to her child?" because quite a lot of people made poly arrangements work long before the word existed, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to read a novel about yet some more people who were happy.
(I only learned a few years ago that Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson had an open marriage that had much less to do with his bisexuality than with their individual feelings about monogamy. Alan Strachan quotes her in Secret Dreams (2004): "A person may only ever love one man or woman in the world; that is fortunate. But it is an extraordinary rule that once married no man or woman should ever have some of the love that men and women have in them to give. For a man never to experience any other woman or for a woman never to experience love with another man can be a kind of imprisonment." They both had multiple, sometimes long-term partners over the course of their marriage. One of Michael's most serious boyfriends effectively co-parented with them; the Redgrave children loved him. I was delighted to learn these facts. It wasn't always easy, because even two-person relationships aren't, but it was real and it worked for them.)
But recognizing the why doesn't sell me on the result. (With the caveat that maybe if I hadn't known anything about the rl circumstances, it might have worked? I can't be sure.)
I thought Pat Green was completely invented the first time I saw Breaking the Code, although I wasn't sure then why Dilly Knox, Sara Turing, and Christopher Morcom were represented with their real names while Arnold Murray appeared in the fictionalized form of Ron Miller. (I'm guessing now it's because Murray, like Clarke, was still alive at the time of the play's writing and production.) As an invention, she works fine! As a version of a real person, this entire conversation. I know less about Murray beyond what I have read in Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983), but since Hodges writes firmly that he was traumatized by his part in Turing's conviction and suicide—he was blamed for them on the street in Manchester—I know he was more than a sexy bit of rough. What fiction does to people is so weird.