The Marriage Book (51 page)

ELINOR GLYN

THREE THINGS
, 1915

The British author and screenwriter Elinor Sutherland Glyn (1864–1943) would eventually be best known for her romantic, sometimes scandalous, works of fiction, most famously the short story “It,” which, as a film, starred Clara Bow as “the ‘It’ girl.”
Three Things
was a collection of some of Glyn’s early magazine articles. In the introduction, she explained: “to me there seem to be just three essentials to strive after in life. Truth—Common Sense and Happiness.”

Glyn herself was immortalized in the Rodgers and Hart song “My Heart Stood Still”: “I read my Plato. Love, I thought a sin,/But since your kiss I’m reading Missus Glyn!”

No marriage can be certain of continuing happy which has been entered into in the spirit of taking a lottery ticket. But most marriages could be fairly happy if both man and woman looked the thing squarely in the face and made up their minds that they would run together in harness as two well-trained carriage horses, both knowing of the pole, both pulling at the collar and not overstraining the traces, both taking pride in their high stepping and their unity of movement. How much more dignified than to make a pitiful exhibition of incompatibility like two wild creatures kicking and plunging, and finally upsetting the vehicle they had agreed to draw?

ROBERT FROST

“THE MASTER SPEED,” 1936

Often crusty and world-weary in his life and poetry, the great New England poet Robert Frost (1874–1963) also could be sentimental at times. This poem, written as a wedding present for his daughter Irma, is famous for its evocative last line. Frost married Elinor White in 1895 and, enduring the loss of four of their six children and his wife’s chronic heart problems, remained married to her until her death in 1938.

The last line of this poem is carved into the Frost family gravestone, under Elinor’s name.

No speed of wind or water rushing by

But you have speed far greater. You can climb

Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,

And back through history up the stream of time.

And you were given this swiftness, not for haste

Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,

But in the rush of everything to waste,

That you may have the power of standing still—

Off any still or moving thing you say.

Two such as you with such a master speed

Cannot be parted nor be swept away

From one another once you are agreed

That life is only life forevermore

Together wing to wing and oar to oar.

JOHN STEINBECK

LETTER TO GWYNDOLYN STEINBECK, 1943

The author most famously of the novels
Of Mice and Men
and
The Grapes of Wrath
, John Steinbeck (1902–1968) was married three times: the first time for twelve years; the second for five; and the third for eighteen, until his death. His first wife, Carol, is thought to have had a great impact on his early writing career. His second wife, Gwyn, a singer, became resentful of his success and was combative, competitive, and unfaithful. His third wife, Elaine, was reportedly the perfect fit: calming, uncompetitive, and thoroughly constant in her companionship. And yet this beautiful letter, surprisingly enough, was written to Wife Number Two.

Steinbeck was in London, working as a war correspondent, when he wrote this.

Darling, you want to know what I want of you. Many things of course but chiefly these. I want you to keep this thing we have inviolate and waiting—the person who is neither I nor you but us. It’s a hard thing this separation but it is one of the millions of separations at home and many more millions here. It is one hunger in a great starvation but because it is ours it overshadows all the rest, if we let it. But keep waiting and don’t let it be hurt by anything because it is the one really precious thing we have. Later we may have others but so far it is a single unit—and you have the keeping of it for a little while. You say I am busy, as though that wiped out my end, but it doesn’t. You can be just as homesick and lost when you are busy. I love you beyond words, beyond containing. Remember that always when the distance seems so great and the time so long. It will not be so long, my dear.

SYLVIA PLATH

LETTER TO AURELIA PLATH, 1956

American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) published one novel (the autobiographical
The Bell Jar
) and one book of poetry (
The Colossus
) before killing herself, at the age of thirty, a year after separating from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. The two were living in London and had married just months before Plath wrote this letter to her mother. By all accounts Hughes and Plath shared both poetry and passion. They had two children but eventually had to battle her depressions and his adultery.

Sylvia Plath is the only poet to have won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously. The ellipses appear in the collection of Plath’s letters.

Have been back here exactly a week and am going through the most terrible state, but stoically, and will somehow manage. It is the longest I have ever been away from Ted and somehow, in the course of this working and vital summer, we have mystically become one. I can appreciate the legend of Eve coming from Adam’s rib as I never did before; the damn story’s true! That’s where I belong. Away from Ted, I feel as if I were living with one eyelash of myself only. It is really agony. We
are
different from most couples; for we share ourselves perhaps more intensely at every moment. Everything I do with and for Ted has a celestial radiance, be it only ironing and cooking, and this
increases
with custom, instead of growing less . . . Perhaps, most important, our writing is founded in the inspiration of the other and grows by the proper, inimitable criticism of the other, and publications are made with joy of the other. What wife shares her husband’s dearest career as I do? . . . I need no sorrow to write; I have had, and, no doubt will have enough. My poems and stories I want to be the strongest female paean yet for the creative forces of nature, the joy of being a loved and loving woman; that is my song.

KURT VONNEGUT

CAT’S CRADLE
, 1963

In his fourth novel,
Cat’s Cradle
, American author Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) created not only a fictional Caribbean island but also a religion, a language, a flag, a currency, and an apocalypse to go with it.

In the Republic of San Lorenzo, Bokonon is the cofounder of the religion Bokononism, which he secretly proceeds to help outlaw in order to ensure its success. The book is narrated by a writer named John, one of the only survivors at the end of the book. A “karass” is a unit of cosmically linked people.

The seating on the airplane, bound ultimately for San Lorenzo from Miami, was three and three. As it happened—“As it was
supposed
to happen”—my seatmates were Horlick Minton, the new American Ambassador to the Republic of San Lorenzo, and his wife, Claire. They were white-haired, gentle, and frail. . . .

They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a
duprass,
which is a
karass
composed of only two persons.

“A true
duprass,
” Bokonon tells us, “can’t be invaded, not even by children born of such a union.”

I exclude the Mintons, therefore, from my own
karass
. . . The Mintons’
karass
was a tidy one, composed of only two. . . .

Bokonon tells us, incidentally, that members of a
duprass
always die within a week of each other. When it came time for the Mintons to die, they did it within the same second.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
, 1985

The fourth novel by Colombian Nobel Prize–winner Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) explored the intense power of love in the midst of war and ravaging disease. In this passage, he describes the long marriage of Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who together represent one side of the novel’s decades-long love triangle.

In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts without intending to, or the ridiculous accident of one of them anticipating in public what the other was going to say. Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.

OPPOSITES

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

TABLE TALK
, 1824

For background on Coleridge, see
Money
.

You may depend upon it, that a slight contrast of character is very material to happiness in marriage.

THOMAS HILL

HILL’S MANUAL OF SOCIAL AND BUSINESS FORMS
, 1879

For background on Hill, see
Conflict
.

PECULIARITIES SUITABLE FOR EACH OTHER.

Those who are neither very tall nor very short, whose eyes are neither very black nor very blue, whose hair is neither very black nor very red,—the mixed types—may marry those who are quite similar in form, complexion and temperament to themselves.

Bright red hair and a florid complexion indicate an excitable temperament. Such should marry the jet-black hair and the brunette type.

The gray, blue, black or hazel eyes should not marry those of the same color. Where the color is very pronounced, the union should be with those of a decidedly different color.

The very corpulent should unite with the thin and spare, and the short, thick-set should choose a different constitution.

The thin, bony, wiry, prominent-featured, Roman-nosed, cold-blooded individual, should marry the round-featured, warm-hearted and emotional. Thus the cool should unite with warmth and susceptibility.

The extremely irritable and nervous should unite with the lymphatic, the slow and the quiet. Thus the stolid will be prompted by the nervous companion, while the excitable will be quieted by the gentleness of the less nervous.

The quick-motioned, rapid-speaking person should marry the calm and deliberate. The warmly impulsive should unite with the stoical.

The very fine-haired, soft and delicate-skinned should not marry those like themselves; and the curly should unite with the straight and smooth hair.

The thin, long-face should marry the round-favored; and the flat nose should marry the full Roman. The woman who inherits the features and peculiarities of her father should marry a man who partakes of the characteristics of his mother; but in all these cases where the type is not pronounced, but is, on the contrary, an average or medium, those forms, features and temperaments may marry either.

NELSON SIZER AND H. S. DRAYTON

HEADS AND FACES, AND HOW TO STUDY THEM
, 1885

The late nineteenth century was a fine time for both phrenology and physiognomy, the studies, respectively, of the skull and the face. Authors such as Nelson Sizer (1812–1897) and Henry Drayton (1839–1923) popularized the ideas, some going back as far as Aristotle, that the character, and in some cases the future, could be known through such study. When it came to marital partners, the authors were firm in their belief that opposites not only do, but in fact should, attract.

There can be no harmony without some difference; there may be difference without harmony. It is not because she is like him that a man loves a woman, but because she is unlike. For the same reason she loves him. The more womanly the woman, the greater her power over men; in
proportion as she approaches the masculine in person or character does she repel the other sex. So a woman admires manliness, strength, force in men, and contemns effeminacy, weakness, supineness, whenever she finds it in masculine dress. In the matter of physique, nature inclines us to select our opposites; the dark-haired, swarthy man, is inclined to admire the light-haired, blonde woman; the lean and spare admire the stout or plump; the plain man generally admires and associates with the fair and beautiful woman; and on the other hand, we find plain and apparently unattractive women, so far as face and proportion are concerned, united to handsome, striking men. Nature abhors extremes, and gives an impulse to the production of harmony and proportion; would make the husband and wife not counterparts but complements, that the results which appear in their children be intermediate, symmetrical, and therefore an improvement on either parent. The temperaments, unless they are nicely combined on each side, so that the organization is well balanced and the character as finely proportioned as the mind is harmoniously developed, should be different; too close a similarity in special, one-sided constitution should be avoided.