The Marriage Book (52 page)

P

PASSION

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

LETTER TO MARY WORDSWORTH, 1810

The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) had a love affair in France with a woman named Annette Vallon in 1792. He was back in England when war broke out between France and England the following year, and he didn’t see the daughter he had fathered until the brief Peace of Amiens in 1802 allowed him to visit France again. After squaring things with Annette, he returned to England to marry his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson. They had five children together, three of whom they outlived. Wordsworth, as is evident from this and other letters, did not save all his poetry for his poems.

Every day every hour every moment makes me feel more deeply how blessed we are in each other, how purely how faithfully how ardently, and how tenderly we love each other; I put this last word last because, though I am persuaded that a deep affection is not uncommon in married life, yet I am confident that a lively, gushing, thought-employing, spirit-stirring, passion of love, is very rare even among good people. I will say more upon this when we meet, grounded upon recent observation of the condition of others. We have been parted my sweet Mary too long, but we have not been parted in vain, for wherever I go I am admonished how blessed, and almost peculiar a lot mine is.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

DAYBREAK
, 1881

For background on Nietzsche, see
Communication
.

We ought not to be permitted to come to a decision affecting our life while we are in the condition of being in love, nor to determine once and for all the character of the company we keep on the basis of a violent whim: the oaths of lovers ought to be publicly declared invalid and marriage denied them: the reason being that one ought to take marriage enormously more seriously! so that in precisely those cases in which marriages have hitherto taken place they would henceforth usually not take place!

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

ON MARRIAGE
, 1908

Well known for his writings about theater, music, politics, economics, and society, the Irish author George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) is often cited as one of the world’s greatest playwrights. Through his semi-comic works—most famously
Arms and the Man
,
Major Barbara
, and
Pygmalion
—Shaw presented the human condition with a mixture of irresistible wit and profound social insight. Those same elements were evident in one of his early plays,
On Marriage
, and particularly in the lengthy introduction he wrote to it.

After numerous flirtations, as well as passionate correspondences that he called “paper courtships,” Shaw had a long but reportedly platonic marriage with a fellow member of the socialist Fabian Society, Charlotte Payne-Townsend, as well as several affairs and some passionate correspondence with other men’s wives.

The [marriage] service was really only an honest attempt to make the best of a commercial contract of property and slavery by subjecting it to some religious restraint and elevating it by some touch of poetry. But the actual result is that when two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. And though of course nobody expects them to do anything so impossible and so unwholesome, yet the law that regulates their relations, and the public opinion that regulates that law, is actually founded on the assumption that the marriage vow is not only feasible but beautiful and holy, and that if they are false to it, they deserve no sympathy and no relief.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

“WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH MARRIAGE?,” 1925

William Faulkner (see
Knowing
) was twenty-seven, unmarried, and struggling to support himself as a writer when he sent in his response to the contest question “What Is the Matter with Marriage?” The
New Orleans Item-Tribune
printed his answer, paid him ten dollars, and ran a photograph of him captioned, “Poet, philosopher, student of life.” In 1929, he married Estelle Oldham. The couple remained married, despite his alcoholism and many affairs, until Faulkner’s death.

The first frenzy of passion, of intimacy of mind and body, is never love. That is only the surf through which one must go to reach the calm sea of real love and peace and contentedness. Breakers may be fun, but you cannot sail safely through breakers into port. And surely married people do want to reach some port together—some haven from which to look backward down golden years when mutual tolerance has removed some of the rough places and time has blotted out the rest.

If people would but remember that passion is a fire which burns itself out, but that love is a fuel which feeds its never-dying fire, there would be no unhappy marriages.

C. S. LEWIS

THE PILGRIM’S REGRESS
, 1933

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) didn’t publish the first book of
The Chronicles of Narnia
series until 1950. Both before and after those children’s classics, the Irish author was primarily a Christian theologist who produced dozens of works about religion while teaching at Oxford and Cambridge.
The Pilgrim’s Regress
was Lewis’s first novel and a representation of his own path toward Christianity.

Like John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century
Pilgrim’s Progress
, Lewis’s novel describes the voyage of an everyman (named John) through a landscape of symbolic characters including Mother Kirk, Wisdom, and Mr. Sensible. John is questioning his faith when the hermit named History urges him to trust its authenticity. The last sentence is from Exodus.

“Have you not heard men say, or have you forgotten, that [spiritual craving] is like human love?” asked the hermit.

“What has that to do with it?”

“You would not ask if you had been married, or even if you had studied generation among the beasts. Do you not know how it is with love? First comes delight: then pain: then fruit. And then there is joy of the fruit, but that is different again from the first delight. And mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step: for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair. You must not try to keep the raptures: they have done their work. Manna kept, is worms.”

JOHN MICHAEL HAYES

REAR WINDOW
, 1954

Starring Jimmy Stewart as a maverick photographer whose badly broken leg has landed him in a wheelchair,
Rear Window
, written by John Michael Hayes (1919–2008) and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, made neighborhood detectives of Jeff Jefferies (Stewart); his girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly); and his insurance-company nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter). Early on in the film, Jeff tries to persuade Stella that Lisa isn’t the right woman for him to marry.

POWER

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
, CIRCA 1592

The basic plot: Younger sister Bianca has eager suitors; father forbids her to marry before older sister Katharina does. Problem: Katharina is a shrew. This famous final speech of hers, supposed proof of her “taming,” has given generations of critics fodder for debate: Is she being sincere in her submissiveness, or utterly sarcastic? Joseph Papp, who directed Meryl Streep in the role in 1978, wrote: “Shakespeare says quite plainly that if two people are really in love, the issue of who does what for whom does not exist.”

Froward
means “wayward” or “difficult.”
Vail your stomachs
means “swallow your pride.”
Boot
means “profit.”

I am ashamed that women are so simple

To offer war where they should kneel for peace,

Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway

When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.

Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,

Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,

But that our soft conditions and our hearts

Should well agree with our external parts?

Come, come, you froward and unable worms!

My mind hath been as big as one of yours,

My heart as great, my reason haply more,

To bandy word for word and frown for frown;

But now I see our lances are but straws,

Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,

That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.

Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,

And place your hands below your husband’s foot,

In token of which duty, if he please,

My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT
, 1835

Another part of
La Comédie Humaine
(see
Fidelity
;
Honeymoon
;
Sex
),
The Marriage Contract
features a naïve daughter (Natalie); a wealthy, smitten suitor (Paul de Manerville); and a strong-willed, calculating mother (Madame Evangelista) for whom Natalie’s marriage is the surest way to reclaim the wealthy lifestyle that has diminished since Monsieur Evangelista’s death. This is Madame Evangelista’s prenuptial advice to Natalie.