The Marriage Book (61 page)

My good, lovely and abused Wife!

I have no doubt you think that I speak truly when I say “abused Wife”; a Woman as good and lovely, as saving and industrious, as kind a wife and good mother as you are should be left alone hundreds of miles from her husband who loves her more and with more fervor, zeal and devotion than any other man can love, just at this time in your situation, with 3 small children and one coming, or that he should leave her at all. That I went to this War I never yet regretted. I think it helped me in my health, reputation and pecuniary, and if just now I were permitted to go home and stay 30 days, I would gladly stay until Fall in the Service. But it does not make me very kind to military authorities if I do not get a leave of absence for some 20 or 30 days pretty soon. If I should not succeed in getting permission to go, I ask of you if you love me, to be as easy as you possibly can be and spend the fifty Dollars which it would cost me to come home
for your own benefit and comfort. Get that Woman from Akron to stay with you during that time and if you should bring us a Son give the “Gefattershopt” to Brother Joseph and mother. Call the Boy “George McClellan Spiegel.” Buy everything you want to be happy and just console yourself. Yet it seems to me as though such a thing could not be possible without me being there. I would gladly walk 600 miles to see you if they would only say go.

God bless you my love, my sweet, my all; may the blessings of heaven rest upon you. Ever your true and loving Marcus

VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

LETTER TO HAROLD NICOLSON, 1929

They married in 1913, embarking on what was essentially an open marriage, with both partners having affairs—for the most part homosexual. But by all accounts, the marriage of writer Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) and Harold Nicolson was a hugely positive force in both their lives, contributing to their separate but remarkable productivity as writers; to Nicolson’s career as a British diplomat; and to their partnership as creators of the amazing Sissinghurst Castle gardens.

Nicolson was returning to Berlin, where he was stationed as chargé d’affaires, when Vita wrote him this letter, one of hundreds that passed between them. “Hadji” and “Mar” were Harold and Vita’s childhood nicknames. “Coffee cups” were what the couple called reminders. Resht, in what was then called Persia, was one of Nicolson’s postings. He resigned from the diplomatic corps three months after this letter was written. Eventually Nicolson outlived Sackville-West by six years.

My darling,

What is so torturing, when I leave you at these London stations and drive off, is the knowledge that you are
still there
—that, for half an hour, or three quarters of an hour, I could still return and find you; come up behind you, take you by the elbow, and say “Hadji.”

I came straight home, feeling horribly desolate and sad, driving down that familiar and dreary road. I remembered Resht and our parting there; our parting at Victoria when you left for Persia; till our life seemed made up of partings, and I wondered how long it would continue.

I got home, and all the way was strewn with coffee-cups: specially the road through the beeches on the common. I remembered how you had said that so long as you were alive they were there for you, and when you were dead it wouldn’t matter.

Then I came round the corner onto the view—our view—and I thought how you loved it, and how simple you were really, apart from your activity; and how I loved you, for being both simple and active, in one and the same person.

Then I came home, and it was no consolation at all. You see, whenever I am unhappy for other reasons . . . the cottage is a real solace to me; but when it is on account of
you
that I am unhappy (because you have gone away), it is an additional pang—it is the same place, but a sort of mockery and emptiness hangs about it—I almost wish that just
once
you could lose me and then come straight back to the cottage and find it still full of me but empty of me—then you would know what I go through after you have gone away.

Anyhow, you will say, it is worse for you who go to a horrible and alien city, whereas
I
stay in the place we both love so much, but really, Hadji, it is
no
consolation to come back to a place full of coffee-cups—there was a cardboard-box-lid full of your rose petals still on the terrace.

You are dearer to me than anybody ever has been or ever could be. If you died I should kill myself as soon as I had made provision for the boys. I really mean this. I could not live if I lost you. Every time I get you to myself you become dearer to me. I do not think one could conceive of a love more exclusive, more tender, or more pure than that I have for you. It is absolutely divorced from physical love—sex—
now
. I feel it is immortal, I am superstitious about it, I feel it is a thing which happens seldom. I suppose that everybody who falls in love feels this about their love, and that for them it is merely a platitude. But then when one falls in love it is all mixed up with physical desire, which is the most misleading of all human emotions, and most readily and convincingly wears the appearance of the real thing. This does not enter at all into my love for you. I simply feel that you are me and I am you—what you meant by saying that you “became the lonely me” when we parted.

Darling, there are not many people who would write such a love letter after nearly sixteen years of marriage, yet who would be saying therein only one-fiftieth of what they were feeling as they wrote it. But you know not only that it is true, every word, but that it represents only a
pale version of the real truth—I could not exaggerate, however much I tried—I don’t try. I try sometimes to tell you the truth and then I find that I have no words at my command which could possibly convey it to you.

Your Mar

DYLAN THOMAS

LETTER TO CAITLIN THOMAS, 1950

Welsh poet and novelist Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) was thirty-six years old and only three years away from his early death—by some combination of pneumonia and alcohol poisoning—when he made the first of his four trips to the United States and wrote this passionate, evocative letter to his wife, Caitlin, whom he had married in 1937.

Both Thomas and Caitlin were heavy drinkers, and their marriage was bumpy, marked by a number of infidelities on his part—including one during this first U.S. tour. Laugharne was the Welsh town in which they settled in 1949, though their lives together had involved many moves and homes.

Caitlin my own own
own dearest love whom God and
my
love and
your
love for me protect, my sweet wife, my dear one, my Irish heart, my wonderful wonderful girl who is with me invisibly every second of these dreadful days, awake or sleepless, who is forever and forever with me and is my own true beloved amen—I love you, I need you, I want, want you, we have never been apart as long as this, never, never, and we will never be again. I am writing to you now, lying in bed, in the Roman Princess’s sister’s rich social house, in a posh room that is hell on earth. Oh why why,
didn’t
we arrange it
somehow
that we came out together to this devastating, insane, demoniacally loud, roaring continent. We
could
somehow have arranged it. Why oh why did I think I could live, I could bear to live, I could think of living, for all these torturing, unending, echoing months without you, Cat, my life, my wife, my wife on earth and in God’s eyes, my reason for my blood, breath, and bone. Here, in this vast, mad horror, that doesn’t know its size, or its strength, or its weakness, or its barbaric speed, stupidity, din, selfrighteousness, this cancerous Babylon, here we could cling together, sane, safe, & warm & face, together, everything. I LOVE YOU. I have been driven for what seem like, and probably are, thousands of miles, along neoned, jerrybuilt, motel-ed, turbined, ice-cream-salooned, gigantically hoared roads of the lower region of the damned, from town to town, college to college, university to university, hotel to hotel, & all I want, before Christ, before you, is to hold you in my arms in our house in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire . . . Oh, Cat, my beautiful, my love, what am I doing here?

JIM WEATHERLY

“MIDNIGHT TRAIN TO GEORGIA,” 1970

Originally titled “Midnight Plane to Houston,” the song was written by Jim Weatherly (1943–) after a phone call he had with the actress Farrah Fawcett, who happened to be packing for a flight home. At the time, Fawcett was living with Weatherly’s college friend (and Fawcett’s future husband), actor Lee Majors. As recorded in 1973 by Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Midnight Train to Georgia” was eventually inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

In 2013 Knight recalled: “While recording that single, I was thinking about my own situation. My husband at the time was a beautiful saxophonist and so gifted. But he was unhappy that we didn’t have a more traditional marriage because I was often on the road or recording. Ultimately it all proved too much for him, like the song said, and we divorced . . . I was going through the exact same thing that I was singing about when recording—which is probably why it sounds so personal.”

LA proved too much for the man,

So he’s leavin’ the life he’s come to know.

He said he’s goin’ back to find, ooh,

What’s left of his world,

The world he left behind not so long ago.

He’s leavin’

On that midnight train to Georgia,

And he’s goin’ back to a simpler place and time.

And I’ll be with him

On that midnight train to Georgia

I’d rather live with him in his world

Than live without him in mine.

SEX

THE CODE OF HAMMURABI, CIRCA 1780 BC

The Babylonian ruler Hammurabi (?–circa 1750 BC) derived his extraordinary code from many long-existing Mesopotamian laws, but he is famous in modern times as a lawgiver because his code was literally written in stone: all 282 laws, covering everything from commerce to slavery to marriage, were inscribed on an eight-foot-tall monument for all to see. It was discovered by a French scholar in 1901 and now is on display in the Louvre.

If a man take a woman to wife, but have no intercourse with her, this woman is no wife to him.

1 CORINTHIANS 7:1–9

Often quoted but rarely in context, the Apostle Paul’s final injunction in this passage clearly does not refer to outer flames but to inner longings. While there remains some debate about whether Paul (circa 5–circa 67) had once been married himself, it is generally agreed that he was a committed celibate when he wrote the verses below.

1 Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.

2 Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.

3 Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband.

4 The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.

5 Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.

6 But I speak this by permission, and not of commandment.

7 For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.

8 I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I.

9 But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.

HALY ABBAS

THE PANTEGNI
, 10TH CENTURY

A millennium before Viagra altered the equation, impotence captured the attention of practitioners who identified—with scientific-sounding precision—causes and cures rooted in magic.
The Pantegni
was the Latin translation of an influential medical encyclopedia written by the eminent Persian physician Haly Abbas, who died late in the tenth century.

Magical incantations often rhymed. The Latin
avis
means “bird”;
gravis
means “heavy” or “serious”;
seps
means “venomous serpent”;
sipa
doesn’t appear in Latin dictionaries, though
sipo
and
sipare
are forms of the verb “to scatter.”

There are some people who, impeded by spells, cannot have intercourse with their wives. We do not want to deprive our book of help for them, because the remedy (if I am not wrong) is most sacred. Therefore if this happens to someone, he should put his hope in God, and he will show him kindness. But because there are many kinds of magic, we ought to discuss them.

For some spells are made from animated substances, such as the testicles of a cock which, when put under a bed with the cock’s blood, bring it about that those who lie in the bed will not have intercourse. Some are made of characters written in bat’s blood. Some are made of inanimate substances, for instance if a nut or acorn is separated, and one half is put on one side of the road where the bride and groom must pass, and the other on the other side. . . .