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Analyzing the relationships of literary geniuses appears to be the popular thing to do these days. BPS sent me this Guardian article a couple weeks ago, and Shani showed me this Times review the other day. The Times piece begins with the sentence, "Geniuses are traditionally difficult to live with," and from then on mentions only literary geniuses. But from my limited knowledge of the lives of other geniuses, I take it all geniuses are rather difficult. John Nash (economics/math genius) only married once (unlike some of these authors who married multiple times, e.g. Saul Bellow: 5 times), but had a troubled marriage, and also of note: he had a premarital affair with another woman and illegitimate child, both of whom he largely abandoned. Richard Feynman (physics genius) married 3 times (his first wife died), and was somewhat of a womanizer. I don'’t know how many times Picasso (genius of art) married, but he was a huge womanizer. And everyone now knows the dirt on Bill Clinton (political genius)...Who else?

The most valuable piece of information I obtained from the Times article was the bit referring to Freud's diagnosis of the blond ditz phenomena:

Joyce seems to have been an extreme case of what Freud identified as the commonest sexual malady among modern males — the inability to feel intellectual respect and sexual passion for the same woman.

But it seems that woman's attraction to genius might be more problematic than the not entirely harmless male attraction to the blond ditz (although I take it geniuses are not as widespread as the latter group, and saying that women are attracted to genius is somewhat of an exaggeration of woman'’s attraction to smart men).