The Marriage Book (38 page)

. . . Jealousy is the worst Rack the Heart that harbours it can possibly sustain.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

LETTER TO JOSEPHINE, 1796

Right up there with Scott and Zelda or Liz and Dick, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) and Josephine were as famous for their friction as they were for their love. Only days after their wedding, Napoleon was in Italy leading the French army, which did nothing to keep him from sending Josephine a barrage of letters, some adoring, some suspicious, and this one—written within a year of their marriage—clearly a bit of each.

Both spouses had affairs, and tempers, but their marriage continued despite all obstacles until Napoleon was forced to recognize that Josephine could never give him an heir. “I want to marry a womb,” he reportedly said—and a “royal womb” at that. In 1810, he divorced Josephine and several months later married Marie-Louise of Austria, the future mother of Napoleon II (ironically heir only to the collapsed First French Empire). But according to one witness, the last words on the emperor’s deathbed were “France, armée, tête d’armée, Joséphine,” i.e., “France, army, head of the army, Josephine.”

I love you no longer; on the contrary, I detest you. You are a wretch, very clumsy, very stupid, a Cinderella. You never write to me; you do not love your husband. You know what pleasure your letters give him, and you never write him even six miserable lines!

Pray, madam, what do you do all day? What important affairs have you that take up all the time in which you might be writing to your husband?

What affection stifles and pushes on one side the love, the tender, constant love, that you have experienced from him? Who can be this marvellous being—this new lover who absorbs all your time, tyrannizes over your days, and prevents you from thinking of your husband? Josephine, beware! One fine night I shall break open the doors and be with you.

In truth, my dearest, I am uneasy at having no news from you. Write me four pages filled with those nice, kind things that are such a pleasure to my heart. I hope that ere long I shall seize you in my arms, and cover you with a million burning kisses—burning as though they came from the equator.

MARY BAKER EDDY

SCIENCE AND HEALTH
, 1875

Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) devoted an entire chapter of her defining work to marriage, which she considered a binding contract.

Jealousy is the grave of affection; mistrust where confidence is due touches with mildew the flowers of Eden, and scatters to the four winds the leaves of love.

THE REAL TOLERANCE
, 1913

Written anonymously, this British volume was dedicated to “Those who can understand” and was filled with aphorisms in categories such as “Friendship,” “Pleasure,” and “Sinners.” In the foreword, the author wrote that the book was “an attempt to show how the true Charity, set forth in all Divine Philosophies, may be adjusted to the spirit of the age and brought to bear on the manifold circumstances of Life.” These were among the author’s injunctions about tolerance in marriage.

O you who strive after perfection and high love! unto you I say: if sometime you discover your wife loves another man, yet because of your children or the law you are unable to permit her to live with or marry this man, even if she desire to do so, then it beho[o]ves you to invite him to your house and treat him as your friend: for by so doing you will render two human beings happy instead of miserable; you will also save them from deceiving you, and will call forth unto yourself their grateful love.

O you who yearn after true magnanimity, unto you I say: if your wife has a child by another man, then do not give vent to your anger, but strive to love and care for that child as truly as if it were your own, for verily the man who is incapable of loving that which is not his own flesh and blood is still the slave of vanity.

Wise indeed is that woman who, knowing herself to be no longer possessed of bodily attraction, sympathetically suffers her husband to enjoy the embraces of another woman—treating that woman as her friend—for having lost the physical unity, which some day must inevitably pass away, she not only retains, but magnifies the mental unity, which is the greatest and most enduring love.

O you who are a passionless woman and find the sexual embraces of your husband irksome to you, so much so that you would fain deny him your body, unto you I say: drive him not to deceitfulness nor into the loveless arms of a harlot, but allow him the passion of some noble woman, and sanctify the relationship by the balm of your friendship; for it beho[o]ves nobody to deny unto another that which they cannot or will not give themselves. . . .

Fortunate is the man who can implicitly
trust
his wife, but infinitely more fortunate is he who
need
not trust his wife, in that he has uprooted the sense of possession, which is the mother of most misery.

O you who would be a noble husband, if your wife fall in love with another man, and you, in your resentment, are tempted to deny her the enjoyment of that love, then I say unto you: put your own selfish thought away; for in denying her that love towards the other man you only awaken her hatred towards yourself, while in permitting it you awaken her gratitude and greater devotion.

H. L. MENCKEN

A BOOK OF BURLESQUES
, 1916

For more Mencken, see
Adam and Eve
;
Expectations
.

The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little bit jealous. The way to lose him is keep him a little bit more jealous.

“DECLARES HER HUSBAND WAS JEALOUS OF DOG”

PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
, 1916

The specter of marital jealousy, as suggested by the court case of Lillian Pulitzer (1885–?), was not always due to the presence of another man or woman.

Pulitzer obtained her divorce in Reno in 1918.

New York, Nov. 14—Supreme Court Justice Young of Westchester county yesterday transferred for trial from Westchester to this county the separation action brought by Mrs. [Lillian] Hearne Pulitzer against Walter Pulitzer, nephew of Joseph Pulitzer, late multi-millionaire publisher.

Mrs. Pulitzer alleges in her complaint that her husband showed signs of being jealous over her
regard for her bulldog during her early married life, and abused the dog out of spite. Pulitzer denies the charges.

RICHARD BEN CRAMER

JOE DIMAGGIO
, 2000

The marriage of Hollywood and baseball royalty in January of 1954 had the makings of a fairy tale, though as it turned out, more Grimm than Disney. Joe DiMaggio’s intense discomfort with Marilyn Monroe’s fame and sexual allure created obstacles from the start, resulting in raging fights and, at times, physical abuse. As told by writer Richard Ben Cramer (1950–2013), the breaking point came on September 14, just eight months after the wedding, when Marilyn filmed the famous subway-grate scene for the movie
The Seven Year Itch
, with an enraged DiMaggio as witness. Monroe filed for divorce the following month. DiMaggio, who never married again, sent roses to Marilyn’s crypt several times a week for two decades after her death in 1962.

Natasha Lytess was Monroe’s acting coach. Milton Greene was a photographer best known for his portraits of the star.

It was the need of the columnists that brought Joe out to watch Marilyn work. Walter Winchell (as he would later recall) knew it would make a good story. The studio had publicized a night scene with Marilyn, the papers trumpeted the news: “Miss Monroe’s costume,” Hearst’s
Journal-American
announced, “is expected to be more revealing than the one she wore yesterday to stop the traffic.” On a Wednesday at midnight, about fifteen hundred newsmen and fans, pro photographers and snapshot amateurs, turned out on Lexington Avenue, at 52nd Street, in front of the Trans-Lux Theater. But Winchell needed more than a street scene. (Everyone would have that.) That’s why he hunted up Joe, who was having a couple of quiet belts with [a friend], in the bar of the St. Regis Hotel. Winchell wanted Joe to come with him to watch Marilyn strut her stuff.

Joe didn’t think it was a good idea. “It would make her nervous, and it would make me nervous, too.”

But Winchell insisted. “Oh, come on, Joe. I have to be there. It might make some copy for me.”

The scene they went to witness would produce one of the most famous screen images in history—Marilyn Monroe, in simple summer white, standing on a subway grating, cooling herself with the wind from a train below. But what sent Joe DiMaggio into a fury was the scene around the
scene. Fans were yelling and shoving at police barricades as the train (actually a wind machine manned beneath the street by the special effects crew) blew Marilyn’s skirt around her ears. Each time it blew, the crowd would yell, “Higher!” “More!” Her legs were bare from her high heels to her thin white panties. Photographers were stretched out on the pavement, with their lenses pointed up at his wife’s crotch, the glare of their flashbulbs clearly outlining the shadow of her pubic hair. “What the hell is going on here?” Joe growled. The director, Billy Wilder, would recall “the look of death” on DiMaggio’s face. Joe turned and bulled his way through the crowd—on his way back to the bar—with the delighted Winchell trotting at his heels.

That night, there was a famous fight in Marilyn and Joe’s suite on the eleventh floor of the St. Regis. It was famous because none of the guests on that floor could sleep. And famous because Natasha Lytess was so alarmed by Marilyn’s cries that she went next door to intervene. (Joe answered the door, and told her to get lost.) It was famous because the following morning Marilyn told her hairdresser and wardrobe mistress that she had screamed for them in the night. (“Her husband got very, very mad with her, and he beat her up a little bit,” said the hairdresser, Gladys Whitten. “It was on her shoulders, but we covered it up, you know.”) And famous because Milton Greene’s wife, Amy, came to visit at the suite the following day (to try on Marilyn’s mink), and was appalled to see bruises all over her friend’s back.

And the fight would stay famous—as the end of Joe and Marilyn’s famous marriage.

GINA BARRECA

“JEALOUSY: HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE MEDEA?,” 2009

Regina Barreca (1957–) teaches literature, creative writing, and feminist literary theory at the University of Connecticut while writing books and articles on such topics as gender, power, and politics. This passage comes from her edgy take on jealousy, which appeared in
Psychology Today
and began: “Jealous? I was born jealous; I needed no apprenticeship.”

Jealousy makes detectives, clairvoyants, and thieves of us all. We track down private papers; we imagine encounters in gruesome detail and construct passionate conversations; we purloin letters, phone bills, and e-mails; we decode their passwords, the retrieval code for their answering machines, their journal entries. When their phones are busy, we call the other numbers to see if indeed we can make the connection—are they talking to the one we
fear
? We drive by to see if lights are on, if cars are in driveways; we walk by offices to see if doors are open or shut; we go through trash; we go through credit card statements. We go through hell.

K

KNOWING

VICTOR HUGO

LETTER TO ADÈLE FOUCHER, 1821

Considered one of the greatest masters of French literature, Victor Hugo (1802–1885) wrote poems, plays, and novels, most famously
Les Misérables
and
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
. He fell in love with Adèle Foucher, a childhood friend, and married her in 1822, the year after his disapproving mother’s death. They eventually had five children and countless infidelities, but his certainty about their rightness for each other was expressed in numerous lengthy, portentous, and occasionally pretentious letters.

When two souls, which for a longer or a shorter time have sought each other amidst the crowd, at length find each other; when they perceive that they belong to each other; when, in short, they comprehend their affinity, then there is established between them a union, pure and ardent as themselves, a union begun upon earth in order that it may be completed in heaven. This union is
love
; real and perfect love, such love as very few men can adequately conceive; love which is a religion, adoring the being beloved as a divinity; love that lives in devotion and ardor, and for which to make great sacrifices is the purest pleasure. It is such love as this that you inspire in me, and it is such love that you will some day assuredly feel for me, even though, to my ever-present
grief, you do not do so now. Your soul is formed to love with the purity and ardor of the angels, but it may be that only an angel can inspire it with love, and when I think this I tremble.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

GO DOWN, MOSES
, 1942

In the connected series of short stories that was published as
Go Down, Moses
, William Faulkner (1897–1962) tells the tale of Lucas Beauchamp, a mixed-race descendant of a prominent Mississippi family. In his increasingly obsessive search for the family’s fabled buried treasure—and the legitimacy that he feels will go with it—Lucas alienates his wife, Molly. In the section of the book called “The Fire and the Hearth,” her divorce proceedings turn out to be the only way to get him to give up his search.