It Takes Two

Wozniak has said that from the earliest days of their friendship, Steve Jobs would talk about historical figures who had made a mark on humanity, like William Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci. ‘He wanted to be one of them, and he felt he had the motivation,’ Wozniak revealed, then twisted the knife: ‘Sometimes motivation, wanting something, is a lot more important than having the real skill.’[21] That Jobs, who encouraged the cult of personality that formed around him with his trademark minimal wardrobe and gnomic pronouncements, saw himself in these terms is no surprise.

Nothing, however, short-circuits the power of two more than the countervailing theory of the Lone Genius.

Nearly two centuries after Thomas Carlyle promoted his ‘great man’ theory of history in On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (1840) – broadly, the idea that individuals, and male ones at that, are the drivers of historical change – many still prefer to see history as a roll call of charismatic leaders, from Joan of Arc to Henry VIII, Napoleon to Hitler, Stalin to Churchill.

‘They were the leaders of men, these great ones,’ Carlyle writes. ‘All things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these … He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near.’[22] Of course, as the historian Frank McDonough has pointed out, the cult of personality is central to all recorded history: ‘The Greek and Roman Empires linked their greatest periods with great leaders. Most European monarchs claimed to rule by divine right. Individual greatness was integral to the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.’[23]

Surely, though, most of us accept nowadays that it is possible to have two or more Carlylean ‘light fountains’? That two of the things put next to each other might actually generate even more light?

The idea that industrial or technical inventions are the result of one brilliant person’s efforts has long been discredited. A funny piece in the Quarterly Journal of Economics from February 1926 – ‘Industrial Invention: Heroic, or Systematic?’ – makes the point subtly in a story about car tycoon Henry Ford: ‘[Rival automobile inventor] Charles B. King, pedalling a bicycle, followed Ford’s car and picked up the bolts and parts which fell off on its trial trip.’[24]

The myth that individuals can rise above society to shape the course of history remains pervasive. For one thing, the dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin happened frighteningly recently. For another, in the last decade we have seen, on both the left and the right, a resurgence in populist politics fuelled by economic insecurity and worries about immigration. This has led to a new generation of political ‘strongmen’: Donald Trump in the US, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

These leaders see themselves as transcending the usual constitutional checks and balances, if not the political process itself. As I write this, Putin is finding creative ways to stay on as president despite his term coming to a constitutional end. In Turkey, President Erdoğan may well govern until 2029 thanks to new powers he has awarded himself. These characters want to rule not as mortals but as undeposable kings.

Yet there are limits to individual power. One of the early architects of what became Marxism, the Russian thinker Georgi Plekhanov, took on Carlyle in his book On the Role of the Individual in History (1898).

Plekhanov conceded that individuals could influence the fate of society and that this influence could be considerable. But how far a single person’s influence stretched depended on the way a society was organised: ‘The character of an individual is a “factor” in social development only where, when and to the extent that social relations permit it to be such.’[25]

In other words, social and economic forces beyond that individual’s direct control – a hungry, dissatisfied peasantry, say – will limit and maybe even end power. A leader can be swept along by events that catch them by surprise and push them in a direction they would otherwise have had no intention of going. Were it not for Covid-19, Prime Minister Boris Johnson would surely never have countenanced his chancellor Rishi Sunak’s multi-billion-pound state bailouts.

A better example might be Russia at the start of the First World War. Weak, stubborn and disorganised, Tsar Nicholas II was obsessed with the idea of being a military leader and made the disastrous decision to take direct command of the Russian armies when, in Trotsky’s words, he was ‘not fit to run a village post office’. From then on every military failure – and there were many – was directly associated with Nicholas personally. Meanwhile, the growing influence of Rasputin over the tsarina in Nicholas’s absence did irreparable damage to the royal family’s image so that, by the spring of 1917, the Romanovs had surrendered charge of Russia to Kerensky and the provisional government. By the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks had taken power in Russia’s major cities.

While we are on the subject, Marxism is just one phenomenon we lazily attribute to a single person when it was actually the creation of two – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Marx and supported him financially so that he could research and write Das Kapital.

Ditto evolutionary theory. So closely linked with Charles Darwin is its formulation that few people are aware of the contribution of Alfred Russel Wallace, another British naturalist, who had been thinking and writing along similar lines at exactly the same time. Wallace hit upon his version of the theory – that the fittest animals survive and reproduce, passing advantageous characteristics on to their offspring – in 1858 while he was ill with malaria and confined to his hut on the island of Ternate, in what is now Indonesia. ‘Every day, during the cold and succeeding hot fits, I had to lie down during which time I had nothing to do but to think over any subjects then particularly interesting me,’ he wrote later.[26] Wallace immediately shared one of these thoughts with his friend and older mentor, Charles Darwin.

When he received Wallace’s letter, Darwin was momentarily taken aback – ‘smashed’, actually, was the word he used. He had been working on this same theory for twenty years and now risked being leapfrogged by a younger rival, albeit one he admired hugely. His friends Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell came to the rescue. They arranged for both men’s works to be read at the Linnean Society in Piccadilly – a way of preserving Darwin’s claim. ‘Wallace’s letter gave Darwin a good kick up the backside,’ says the geneticist Steve Jones. ‘He had prevaricated for 20 years and would have done so for another 20 if he hadn’t realised someone else was on the trail.’[27] Darwin quickly got to work writing up his mass of research as On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859).

This highly readable tome cemented Darwin and Darwinism in the public imagination, to the exclusion of any collaborators. But Wallace did not seem to mind. He knew Darwin was the better scientist, the person whose research had been needed to verify his hunch. Some modern scholars allege that Darwin is guilty of intellectual theft. His biographer, Janet Browne, insists this is not so: ‘No two authors thrown together in such a fashion tried harder than Darwin and Wallace to treat each other fairly. Wallace greatly admired On the Origin of Species. In turn, Darwin regarded Wallace as the one man who truly understood the idea of evolution by natural selection.’[28] Browne points out that Darwin persuaded the British government to award Wallace a pension for services to science; also that Wallace dedicated his book The Malay Archipelago to Darwin, ‘as a token of personal esteem and friendship’, and called a collection of essays Darwinism. Indeed, she says, even before the term ‘Darwinism’ had become popular, Wallace observed that the theory was coming to be called ‘Darwinianism’ and wrote to Darwin in 1868: ‘I hope you do not dislike the word, for we really must use it.’[29]

Darwin and Wallace did not have close contact at the point when their theory took off. Neither was present at the reading of their joint paper at the Linnean Society. Even so, as a couple they still managed to achieve something of immeasurable importance, not just to science but to religion and humankind’s sense of its relationship to the world – something neither would, arguably, have achieved on their own.

Sometimes, to appreciate people fully, we need to see them through the prism of the person closest to them.

The writer Virginia Woolf and her artist sister Vanessa Bell had an intense sense of themselves as a duo, of what Virginia called ‘a very close conspiracy’.[30] To grasp their importance as individual artists, we need to understand their closeness and interdependency, what their biographer Jane Dunn describes as the ‘essential reciprocity’ in their natures.[31]

Virginia and Vanessa were bonded young and in adversity – by the experience of having the needy, hypochondriacal, emotionally bullying Leslie Stephen as a father; and by the sexual abuse they both (though especially Virginia) suffered at the hands of their stepbrother, George Duckworth. And then there were the deaths: so many of them – of their mother, Julia Stephen, when they were teenagers; of their half-sister Stella, who had taken over the running of the household and whose place, going through the accounts with her bellicose father, Vanessa was forced to take; and of Thoby, their adored brother, from typhoid diagnosed too late.

Together Vanessa and Virginia endured the male-dominated, high Victorian stuffiness of the family home at 22 Hyde Park Gate – a symbol of everything they would go on to reject. ‘We had an alliance that was so knit together that everything … was seen from the same angle; and took its shape from our own vantage point,’ wrote Virginia, who was two and a half years younger than Vanessa. ‘Very soon after Stella’s death we saw life as a struggle to get some kind of standing place for ourselves.’[32]

This standing place was different for each of them, appropriately given their opposing temperaments. Virginia wrote, dazzlingly. She had always had a way with words, been a beguiling, witty conversationalist; while Vanessa struggled to be articulate in company, often retreating into herself and declaring: ‘I feel the only refuge is to become quite abstracted.’ Vanessa would find herself through painting and motherhood and extravagant sexuality; through creating a court for herself at her country house, Charleston.

They wrote to each other nearly every day. And they cemented their roles in conscious opposition to each other, an ‘artificial polarisation’ (as Dunn puts it) ‘which had protected them since childhood from the extremes of sisterly rivalry and had cast Vanessa as the sexual, maternal woman and Virginia as the intellectual and sterile one’.[33]

People were fascinated by the sisters as a joint phenomenon: Leonard Woolf, later Virginia’s husband, initially fell in love with both of them at first sight. Clive Bell, too – Vanessa’s husband: he had a serious flirtation with Virginia shortly after the birth of his and Vanessa’s first child, Julian, in 1908 which caused a rift between the sisters. Virginia’s love letters to him make Vanessa complicit in their affair, so intensely that it is as if she is Vanessa (or Vanessa’s lover): ‘Kiss her,’ she instructs him, ‘most passionately, in all my private places – neck, arms, eyeball, and tell her – what new thing is there to tell her? How fond I am of her husband?’[34]

Things changed between them after Vanessa married Clive Bell. For a period, when she suffered the first of her nervous breakdowns in 1904, Virginia rejected Vanessa, angered by her blithe ascension into the world of family and domesticity. The other polarisation the sisters encouraged was the identification of Virginia with mental instability – ‘Oh you know very well the Goat’s mad,’[35] they would say, jokingly – and Vanessa with sanity and rootedness.

You could say that Vanessa and Virginia were each other’s muses. That they inspired each other. ‘I always feel I’m writing more for you than anybody,’ Virginia told Vanessa,[36] while Vanessa admired Virginia’s impressionistic approach to character and narrative. I wonder if this had its roots in the intense mutual loyalty they felt towards each other, the sort of loyalty you often see in siblings who have had tricky or non-existent relationships with their parents.

Bonds forged in childhood are especially strong – an idea I’ll be exploring in more detail a little later on, when talking about Charles and Mary Lamb.

Duos are often invoked in this way to explain the mystery of artistic creation – or, as in Virginia and Vanessa’s case, the formation of a creative personality.

Most people know the story of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell – of ‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground’ (as the original title had it) spun to entertain Carroll’s friends’ daughter Alice and her sisters Edith and Lorina as they journeyed along Oxford’s Isis river in a rowing boat on 4 July 1862. When, in 1932 at the age of eighty, Liddell went to America to collect an honorary PhD from Columbia University, she met Peter Llewelyn Davies who as a boy had inspired J. M. Barrie to write Peter Pan. For him, being a muse turned out to be too close a conspiracy: he threw himself under a tube train at Sloane Square station in 1960, having grown to hate the association with Peter.

This follows a pattern of tragic muse relationships, starting with Dante and his lost love Beatrice. But it is worth reiterating that this kind of coupledom is not always exploitative and disastrous. We are all inspired by and seek to please those who are closest to us. As long as the right balance is struck, nobody need come to harm. John Lennon and Yoko Ono made a success of it, as did Gala and Salvador Dalí. A successful poet, Gala acted as Salvador’s agent and publicist as well as his model and muse. In the early 1930s, Dalí took to signing his paintings with her name as well as his own, in recognition of the fact that it is ‘mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures’.[37]

A good metaphor for the multifaceted nature of partnerships is the pas de deux in ballet – often the most intense, mythologised sequences. We think of these dances for two people as being expressions of love. But a lot of the time they are not; or at least, that is not the whole story. Swan Lake, for instance, has two pas de deux. There’s the ‘Love Duet’, danced between Prince Siegfried and his beloved Odette, the Swan Queen. But the other, the ‘Black Swan’ pas de deux from the third act is much darker, much more angular and complicated. It is danced between the prince and the disguised Odile, who tricks the prince into thinking she is his betrothed, thereby destroying his future with the Swan Queen.

One of the twentieth century’s most productive artistic collaborations was between the choreographer George Balanchine and the composer Igor Stravinsky. Their plotless, twenty-two-minute 1957 ballet Agon is significant politically as well as musically. At its premiere, Balanchine used the African American dancer Arthur Mitchell and the white ballerina Diana Adams to dance the pas de deux. He was making a daring civil rights point, but also mirroring Stravinsky’s first ever use of an idiom based on a twelve-tone technique in which every note in the chromatic scale – in other words, the black as well as the white notes – is equally important.

The title Agon derives from the Greek word for debate and conflict, with overtones of athletic contest. The whole point is that the relationship between the dancers never resolves into a single thing – it is always kept in a state of galvanised suspension. As the dance critic Alastair Macaulay has written: ‘The combination of formality and intimacy has a charge both erotic and strenuous. To us watching, the dancers’ relationship keeps changing. Are they lovers? Sovereign and vassal? Muse and poet? Sculpture and sculptor?’[38]

Coupledom is not about blissful, frictionless togetherness. Earlier, I mentioned Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, journalist legends with whom I was obsessed when I was a rookie reporter. (I was thrilled in 2000 to get a chance to work at the Washington Post and follow in their hallowed footsteps.) But the story of their partnership is more agon-ised than we perhaps remember.

Bernstein almost was not involved in reporting Watergate at all, as he was close to being fired for being lazy. (‘Stories he didn’t particularly like, he waltzed around a lot, procrastinated, dawdled, found small crevices that somehow became big problems,’ said his editor at the time, Tom Wilkinson.[39]) Bernstein did not like Woodward, considering him a ‘prima donna, and an ass-kisser, a navy guy, green lawns of Yale, tennis courts’ and admitting, ‘I didn’t really think a lot of most of Woodward’s stories.’[40] And Woodward mistrusted Bernstein because he was a college drop-out who wrote about rock music. But hey – something went right. Because in the end, as the academic Vera John-Steiner says, ‘collaboration thrives on diversity of perspectives and on constructive dialogues between individuals negotiating their differences’.[41] Or to put it more simply, Woodward and Bernstein worked out how to work together.

These are testing times. As I write this, within the confines of lockdown, it is hard to tell what the post-Covid future is going to look like. We can say with some certainty that the virus will change the way we work, shop and socialise. But how many of those changes become permanent features of our lives is hard to guess.

One thing is certain, though. Working together productively towards a shared goal has never been more important. At the peak of the crisis, the majority of scientific research ground to a halt as scientists combined efforts to find a vaccine or an effective treatment. Formalities such as who takes credit were set aside. Studies were made available and viral genome sequences identified and shared as rapidly as possible.[42]

This blueprint is the one to which we should aspire – not the one used by those countries who treated Covid-19 as a purely national concern. Former prime minister Theresa May was right to warn that the global response ‘risks exacerbating the shift towards nationalism and absolutism in global politics’. We might well end up with a world ‘in which a few “strong men” square up to each other’.[43] Although it sometimes feels as if we are inhabiting that one already.

Over the pages that follow I explore and celebrate coupledom in all its guises by telling stories about duos whose achievements particularly captivate me. In each case, each half of the couple has brought a different resource to the partnership. It might be the type of personality that thrives on opposition and tension. It might be bravery, or respect, or love, or generosity, or simply a willingness to tolerate fracture as well as fusion. All kinds of qualities are needed to sustain a shared endeavour.

I have approached the subject thematically. Coupledom is a jewel with many facets; this struck me as the best way to show them all off. So the first chapter looks at Commitment, focusing on the extraordinary mutual dedication of runaway slaves William and Ellen Craft; the quirky, self-sufficient world-building of the Ladies of Llangollen; and spies such as Peter and Helen Kroger, whose coupledom was cemented by a shared ideology.

Communication between couples is vital. The late Kate Figes talks about ‘the courage of honest communication’ in her brilliant book Couples: How We Make Love Last. ‘It is only when each [half of a couple] can articulate their resentments and face their fears that some sort of resolution can be found,’ she says.[44] She is talking about romantic partnerships, but I think this holds true for all varieties. As I show in Chapter 2, good communication bequeathed the world the scientific discoveries of Henry Cavendish and the music of Frederick Delius. Both required a specialised kind of help from a uniquely tolerant adjutant.

Competitiveness is important too. Chapter 3 examines rivalries – some healthy, others less so – in the worlds of art, sport and music and partnerships, and finds the missing link between Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud and cyclists Laura Trott and Jason Kenny.

Tension, the subject of Chapter 4, may not be healthy, but it was at the root of the relationship between the writer Edward Bulwer Lytton and his wife Rosina, and between on–off lovers and professional narcissists Cecil Beaton and Greta Garbo.

Sometimes what makes a duo work is down to the purest chance. Chapter 5 examines the role of Serendipity in the sometimes-fleeting pairings of characters as vivid and eccentric as Groucho Marx and T. S. Eliot; playwright Samuel Beckett and wrestler André the Giant; and legends of British film-making, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Were this a book solely about romantic couples then I would have made Love the subject of Chapter 1. But it isn’t, so I haven’t. Instead, in Chapter 6, I show how different types of love have animated different types of partnerships, from writer siblings Charles and Mary Lamb to Indian transgender path-blasters Aarav Appukuttan and Sukanyeah Krishna.

Finally, in Chapter 7, I square up to Power Couples, from Hollywood big beasts to tech titans. Are Jay-Z and Beyoncé wise to make their marriage the subject of their art? And how the hell did the movie Cleopatra ever get made when its stars, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, were so busy throwing their weight around?

I’ve tried not to be dogmatic in my habits of selection or appraisal; although, that said, I have tried to make it as much of a smorgasbord as possible. A book about Straight White Male couples would be duller and more predictable than I hope this one is.

I owe a massive debt to the many people who suggested couples for inclusion in It Takes Two. I thank them in the Acknowledgements, but given this book’s subject it would be remiss not to thank my husband John upfront. My domestic collaborator for nearly thirty years, he was also my professional partner on this book, doing masses of research and helping me wrestle the manuscript into shape. Working with him has taught me a huge amount about trust and cooperation.

1

Commitment

The village of Ockham sits twenty-five miles south-west of London in the Surrey countryside, not far from where I grew up in Godalming. It is a friendly, unassuming place, most famous until recently for being the birthplace of the fourteenth-century monk-philosopher William of Ockham (sometimes written ‘Occam’). His gift to humankind was the problem-solving principle, Occam’s Razor, which holds that the simplest explanation is far more likely to be correct than a complex one.

Between 1845 and 1873, Ockham was the home of one Dr Stephen Lushington, a leading figure in the British anti-slavery movement. He was a former judge and privy councillor who presided over a wealth of reforming legislation, including a law banning the transfer of slaves between British colonies. Lushington had, in the twilight of his career, become a teacher at the rural branch of the progressive Ockham Schools, founded by the mathematician – and daughter of Lord Byron – Ada Lovelace. Lushington and his family lived at Ada’s manor house, Ockham Park, where, according to a neighbour, he ‘collected around him the cleverest folk of the day’ and enlisted the help of his own daughters in running the school.[1]