The Marriage Book (17 page)

NOTEBOOK, 1904

Samuel Clemens (see
Adam and Eve
;
Lasting
) married Olivia Langdon in 1870. Through his literary successes, his financial peaks and valleys, the death of two children, and Livy’s own illnesses, he remained devoted. When she died of heart failure in Florence, he wrote to a friend: “I am tired & old; I wish I were with Livy.” He made these entries in his notebook as he prepared for and took the journey home.

The Clemenses’ son, Langdon, had died in infancy; their three daughters were Clara, Susy (who died at twenty-four), and Jane, known as Jean. Ugo was the butler. The green tin box to which Clemens refers held some love letters, as well as a book he had used in his courtship of Livy. The other tin boxes were presumably receptacles for other keepsakes: 1870 was the year of the Clemenses’ marriage, 1896 the year of Susy’s death.

June 5. At a quarter past nine this evening, she that was the life of my life, passed to the relief of heavenly peace of death, after 22 months of unjust and unearned suffering. I first saw her near 37 years ago, and now I have looked upon her face for the last time. Oh, so unexpected!

June 6. At 12:20 P.M. I looked for the last time upon that dear face—and I was full of remorse for things done and said in the 34 years of married life that hurt Livy’s heart.

June 7. . . . Fifty-four lamenting cablegrams have arrived—from America, England, France, Austria, Germany, Australia. Soon the letters will follow. Livy was beloved everywhere.

June 18. I got up in a chair in my room on the second floor and lost my balance and almost fell out. I don’t know what saved me. The fall would have killed me; in my bereaved circumstances the world would have been sure it was suicide.

June 21. Left the villa. All arrived with the baggage at the Hôtel de la Ville. First day of the sad journey home.

June 26. When we were ready to leave the hotel at noon Jean was not well enough. We canceled all arrangements. Wait over till tomorrow at 1:20 P.M.

Our ship is the Prince Oscar. Our dear casket went on board at Genoa, yesterday.

June 27. Came down to Naples. Hôtel du Vesuve, good. The green tin box (1870) then the two black tin boxes (1896)
all three now succeeded by the plain tin box (June 1904). After a little who will care for these so hallowed treasures?

How all values have shrunken.

June 29. Sailed last night, at ten. The bugle called to breakfast. I recognized the notes, and was distressed. When I heard them last Livy heard them with me; now they fall upon her ears unheeded.

This ship is the Prince Oscar, Hamburg American.

June 30. Clara keeps her bed and cannot bear to see any strangers.

The weather is beautiful, the sea is smooth and curiously blue.

In my life there have been 68 Junes—but how vague and colorless 67 of them are contrasted with the deep blackness of this one.

July 1. I cannot reproduce Livy’s face in my mind’s eye—I was never in my life able to reproduce a face. It is a curious infirmity—and now at last I realize that it is a calamity.

July 2. In these 34 years we have made many voyages together, Livy dear, and now we are making our last. You down below and lonely, I above with the crowd and lonely.

A MINER’S WIFE

LETTER, 1914

This anonymous letter was written after a mining accident in Whitehaven, England.

God took my man but I could never forget him he was the best man that ever lived at least I thought that, maybe it was just that I got the right kind of man. We had been married for 25 years and they were hard years at that, many a thing we both done without for the sake of the children. We had 11 and if I had him back I would live the same life over again. Just when we were beginning to stand on our feet I lost him I can’t get over it when I think of him how happy he was that morning going to work and telling me he would hurry home, but I have been waiting a long time now. At night when I am sitting and I hear clogs coming down the street I just sit and wait hoping they are coming to my door, then they go right on and my heart is broke.

ERNEST COWPER

LETTER TO ELBERT HUBBARD II, 1916

Elbert Hubbard was extremely well known in his day as an author, advertising pioneer, editor, publisher, and a leader of the Arts and Crafts movement. After the sinking of the
Titanic
, he elegized a couple who had insisted on staying together as the ship sank (“You knew how to do three great things—you knew how to live, how to love and how to die”). Strangely, he and his second wife, Alice (see
Friendship
), were on board the
Lusitania
when it was torpedoed by a German submarine just three years later. This was the description of their final moments, written to one of their children by a survivor, Toronto newsman Ernest Sedgwick Cowper (1883–1939).

Hubbard called Ernest “Jack” for
Jack Canuck
, the name of the newspaper for which he was working. During the sinking of the
Lusitania
, which took just twenty minutes, 1,196 of the ship’s 1,960 passengers drowned.

I can not say specifically where your father and Mrs. Hubbard were when the torpedoes hit, but I can tell you just what happened after that. They emerged from their room, which was on the port side of the vessel, and came on to the boat-deck.

Neither appeared perturbed in the least. Your father and Mrs. Hubbard linked arms—the fashion in which they always walked the deck—and stood apparently wondering what to do. I passed him with a baby which I was taking to a lifeboat when he said, “Well, Jack, they have got us. They are a damn sight worse than I ever thought they were.”

They did not move very far away from where they originally stood. As I moved to the other side of the ship, in preparation for a jump when the right moment came, I called to him, “What are you going to do?” and he just shook his head, while Mrs. Hubbard smiled and said, “There does not seem to be anything to do.”

The expression seemed to produce action on the part of your father, for then he did one of the most dramatic things I ever saw done. He simply turned with Mrs. Hubbard and entered a room on the top deck, the door of which was open, and closed it behind him.

It was apparent that his idea was that they should die together, and not risk being parted on going into the water.

The blow to yourself and your sister must have been terrible, and yet, had you seen what I have seen, you would be greatly consoled, for never in history, I am sure, did two people look the Reaper so squarely in the eye at his approach as did your father and Mrs. Hubbard.

It was there that the philosopher shone.

Both showed that they had not been talking for talk’s sake, or writing because it presented itself
as a means of securing a livelihood. Both were philosophers, and both showed that they were each other’s most apt pupils.

I don’t believe that the prospect at that moment troubled them any more than it would have done had the call been to go to lunch instead of to tread the Valley of the Long Shadow.

If he wrote his philosophy, he certainly lived it to the last moment. He was a big man in life, but to my mind he is a vastly bigger man in death.

I suppose you have asked yourself the question; “Was it possible for them to have been saved? Did they really do all that could be done?” To this I would say they could do nothing more than was done, especially if they wanted to remain together, and apparently there was no intention on either side of separating.

HOWARD NEMEROV

“THE COMMON WISDOM,” 1975

For his
Collected Poems
, in which this short verse appeared, Howard Nemerov (1920–1991) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize.

Their marriage is a good one. In our eyes

What makes a marriage
good?
Well, that the tether

Fray but not break, and that they stay together.

One should be watching while the other dies.

EXPECTATIONS

SYDNEY OWENSON, LADY MORGAN

LETTER TO ALICIA LE FANU, 1812

Either because they don’t want to tempt fate, or boast, or take the time, married people tend to comment less often upon expectations that have been met (or exceeded) than on those that haven’t been. Of course, this phenomenon might also be explained by the possibility that marriage is simply more often disappointing than not. But in her somewhat gloating letter to her friend Alicia Le Fanu, the Irish author Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (circa 1776–1859), seemed to offer proof to the contrary.

Lady Morgan had made her first literary mark with her novel
The Wild Irish Girl
and was well established in society circles when she married the British doctor and essayist Sir Thomas Charles Morgan. Alicia Le Fanu was a novelist and playwright. Lord and Lady Abercorn were prominent British nobility who were hosting the newlyweds at their Irish castle. Argand lamps were the household oil lamps of the day. Glorvina was the fiery heroine of
The Wild Irish Girl
. Prunella was a kind of wool used in women’s shoes, hence
leather and prunella
meant “nothing of consequence.”

It is quite clear, that like all heroines, I no longer interest when I gain a husband.

Since you will not even ask me how I am, I will volunteer the information of my being as happy as being “loved up to my bent” (aye, and almost beyond it) can make me, and, indeed, so much is it true, “the same to-day, to-morrow, and for ever,” that I can give you no other notice of my existence than that miraculous one of a man being desperately in love with his own wife, and she “nothing loath.”

Though living in a palace, we have all the comfort and independence of home; besides bed-rooms and dressing-rooms, Morgan’s study has been fitted up with all the luxury of a
joli boudoir
by Lady Abercorn (who neither spared her taste nor purse on the occasion). It is stored with books, music, and everything that can contribute to our use and amusement. Here “the world forgotten, and by the world forgot,” we live all day, and do not join the family till dinner time, and as
chacun a son goût
is the order here, when we are weary of argand lamps and a gallery a hundred feet long in the evening—we retire to our own snuggery, where, very often, some of the others come to drink coffee with us. As to me, I am
every inch a wife,
and so ends that brilliant thing that was GLORVINA.

N. B.—I intend to write a book to explode the vulgar idea of matrimony being the tomb of love. Matrimony is the real thing and all before but “leather and prunella.”

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, 1823

German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was seventy-three when, according to his friend the German statesman Friedrich von Müller, he said what follows.

Love is something ideal, marriage is something real; and never with impunity do we exchange the ideal for the real.

CURRIER & IVES

THE DAY BEFORE MARRIAGE
, 1847

“WHAT DO YOUNG MEN MARRY?,” 1854

This anonymously written article was reprinted many times; the earliest version we’ve found appeared in the British weekly
Eliza Cook’s Journal
.

Court plaister was an adhesive plaster used to cover small cuts. Empress Eugénie of France (married to Napoleon III) was a fashion icon of the day.

Some young men marry dimples, some ears; one I know married a beauty-spot made of court-plaister, while a second cousin of my wife’s married an expression,—I believe an amiable expression.

It is difficult in the absence of any accurate statistics on the subject, to say, decidedly, which feature is most frequently sought in marriage. The rosiest, however, certainly lies between the eyes and the hair. The mouth, too, is occasionally married; the chin not so often.

Poor partners these, you will own, but what will you say to Will Carson, who actually married a blue ribbon—neither more nor less? It was employed to bind up some bonny brown hair. Will liked it, and, scorning all those antiquated saws which tell us that “Like blood, like good, and like ages, make the happiest marriages,” and the counsel of a friend who advised him to seek a more suitable match, he clung honourably and firmly to the humble object of his affection, and married his bunch of blue ribbons.