YOU MAY HAVE READ that last week Salman Rushdie, accustomed these days to a relaxed level of personal security compared with that which surrounded him in the 1990s, arrived in Philadelphia to be greeted by an armed escort and guard dogs. He was, reports stated, “absolutely horrified”. What perhaps Salman didn't realise is that the tooled-up phalanx surrounding him was there not, I suspect, to protect the great proponent of modern magical realism from any leftover fatwa implementers but rather from any attractive women who, in an unguarded moment, he might suddenly decide to marry.

Because although Rushdie has vowed, after leaving his fourth wife, Padma Lakshmi, never to marry again, I'm not sure that I believe him. Because, let's face it, Salman knew the risks before he bought the ring. It's in his books. His 2002 novel, Fury, outlines a character, Malik Solanka, driven to, well, fury by his marriage; and although I would never suggest for a moment any kind of convergence between Salman and Solanka, I still think I'd have paused before jumping into the marital bed a fourth time if the last novel I'd written had a scene in which the main character dallied with a knife over his sleeping wife's form, wondering whether or not to stab her.

To be fair to Rushdie, he is not alone in the pantheon of great writers afflicted by this conundrum. John Updike went through many years and many novels chronicling the essential impossibility of marriage before divorcing his first wife, only to marry his second two years later. The novels of Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer are littered with failed marriages: it didn't stop them tying the knot five and six times respectively. It could be argued that understanding marriage to be difficult, depressive and ultimately likely to fail forms the backbone of the modern literary novel, yet that understanding never permeates the emotional decision-making of the writers.

Ian McEwan - whose stories have been bent on destabilising matrimony from The Comfort of Strangers all the way to On Chesil Beach - has gone for it twice; Martin Amis, also twice, thus ignoring the example not just of his characters' failure to settle into connubial bliss, but his dad's (characters and life).

It's amazing, really, how much these men don't listen to what they write - even Richard Yates remarried after penning his great paean to unhappy marriage, Revolutionary Road. He later divorced. It's mainly, as you might expect, male authors who deride marriage in fiction while continually getting married themselves. Great women authors do something slightly different - which is to get married and stay married, while writing exhaustively about how untenable marriage is: see Iris Murdoch, Rachel Cusk, Zadie Smith, Anne Tyler, Katherine Mansfield, Carol Shields etc, etc. Of course, literature in general is not blessed with much in the way of happy unions.

In the higher echelons, I can think only of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle - which seems to have been mainly sustained by her sanguine approach towards Joyce's obsessive interest in her scatology - and Aldous and Maria Huxley: not a particularly standard example, as it involved the unusual and (I think most men reading this would agree) highly advantageous aspect of Maria being both bisexual and keen to involve her husband in expressing said bisexuality.

The argument might run that if the abyss that apparently is marriage is indeed a principal subject of modern literary fiction then authors must get married to experience it. But a) research isn't that important -Amis didn't insist on living his life backwards in a concentration camp in order to write Time's Arrow - and b) surely once is enough?

What's more, there are great authors on the subject who have lived by their own example. George Eliot, who perhaps began the focus on bad marriage as modern literature's central trope in Middlemarch, never married the love of her life, George Henry Lewes (she did let the side down eventually by marrying a man 20 years younger than herself, but at least had the decency to die only six months later). Edward Albee, the writer of the most significant contemporary drama about matrimonial torment, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, is gay. Admittedly, until recently that meant he didn't have the option, but so far, still no sign of a civil partnership.

The truth is that, however negatively they describe marriage, great writers are no more able to restrain themselves than the rest of us from thinking that this time it might just work. I'm hoping for Salman's sake, though, that should his hooded eye alight on a new Post-Colonial-Literature-Loving-Lovely, he pauses long enough to perhaps reread Fury. Either that or the fifth Mrs Rushdie invests in a padlock for the cutlery drawer.

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