The Marriage Book (15 page)

W. B. YEATS

JOURNAL, 1909

One of the great poets in the English language, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) used his journal to record fresh encounters, sketch out essays and poems, and—notably, for a man who never got to marry the love of his life (see
Youth and Age
)—ponder the mysteries of love.

In wise love each divines the high secret self of the other and, refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in daily life.

HENRY NEUMANN

MODERN YOUTH AND MARRIAGE
, 1928

Henry Neumann (1882–1966) was a leader of the Society for Ethical Culture, a movement founded in 1876 by Felix Adler on the principle that ethics are independent of theology.

Disillusion, of course, enters in time. There are no full-grown perfect beings. Sooner or later the frailties are recognized. But there is in most people a better self which the fallible self hides; and the greatest privilege of the married life is to be the one who assists the other more and more to do justice to that better possibility.

KARL MENNINGER

LETTER TO A
LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL
READER, 1930

Son of one physician and brother of another, Karl Menninger (1893–1990) helped establish the Menninger Sanitarium, a group practice in Topeka, Kansas. Focusing on psychiatry, Menninger authored more than a dozen books that had a significant influence on the perception of mental illness. In 1930, he began writing “Mental Hygiene in the Home,” an advice column for
Ladies’ Home Journal
that lasted only eighteen months but generated thousands of letters from readers, all of which Menninger is said to have answered. His demystification of psychiatry was quite ahead of its time, even if his advice was hardly progressive.

My dear Mrs. P.:

I read with care your letter of October 24 addressed to me in care of the
Ladies’ Home Journal
.

What are the facts according to your own statement? First you married an ambitious, hardworking man who was well-liked. Secondly, he has given you the comforts of life, if not the luxuries. Thirdly, he recently worked hard to get a certain position which was, however, given to someone else who was personally preferred; fourth, this discouraged both him and you. Fifth, you suggested to him that he had better stop trying or hoping for a better position and take a job as a common laborer. Sixth, you are tired of poverty and feel cheated to have been given such a husband.

I am reciting these facts which you have given me because it will look and sound different to
you coming from someone else. I think it will become perfectly obvious to you if you study over it, that you have been heartlessly cruel toward your husband. Instead of encouraging him, you have discouraged him; instead of boosting him a little when he met with a reverse which every man has to meet with in the battle of life, you gave him a further kick when he got home. Instead of loving him, it sounds to me as if you almost hated him. And why should you hate him? Because he didn’t bring you the luxuries of life. I am quoting almost your own words.

Yes, I think you are dead wrong. I think you have the wrong attitude toward your husband entirely. I think it may be this disparagement of him, this unconscious depreciation of him, this doubt of his ability, and so forth which has been partly responsible for his not having more self-confidence and getting further ahead than he has. But your husband hasn’t made a failure; he has failed in one particular as every man must do. Not once but many times if he ever amounts to anything. As a wife your duty is to do just the opposite from what you have done. You ought to love him more than ever. You ought to back him up, encourage him, reassure him, tell him that he has the stuff in him and next time he will be more successful, and so forth. This is the only way in the world for you to accomplish the thing which you say you want to accomplish. But the way you are treating your husband is the surest way in the world to achieve the things you say you cannot stand. I am a little surprised that your womanly intuition does not show you this.

Did you ever hear about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife? Hawthorne was fired from his job and came home heartbroken and discouraged and in tears. His wife was sunshiny and happy and he was so afraid it would break her heart and make her cry that he didn’t want to tell her. But finally he did. She burst into laughter and clapped her hands and he was amazed. But Darling, he said, how can you act that way, how can you be happy? Sweetheart, she said, now you will have time to write your book. And he sat down and wrote one of the most famous novels ever written, and certainly some of the finest literature ever created in the United States. . . . The
point is that she encouraged him when he was so discouraged so that he was able to turn out a great piece of work, and turn defeat into success.

What you must do is to help your husband turn this little minor defeat into a greater success. But what it looks to me as if you were about to do is to turn his little defeat into a disaster for both of you. I think there is still time to change, but get busy.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

LETTER TO ZELDA FITZGERALD, 1934

Decadent, tragic, brilliant, and doomed, Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) and Zelda became the embodiment of the glittering 1920s and the tarnished 1930s. When Scott wrote this letter, Zelda was staying at one of the several sanitariums where she battled mental illness, with decreasing success, from the early thirties on. In one of his journals from that time, Fitzgerald wrote: “I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium.” Though he dictated this letter, it is one of his most poignant.

Anthony and Marjorie were among Zelda’s siblings; Anthony had killed himself the year before. The pictures to which Scott refers were those shown in an exhibition of Zelda’s paintings, one of her many attempts to forge an artistic identity of her own. Scott’s reference to Zelda as a swan comes from the checklist she had designed for the exhibit, which featured a swan above the title “Parfois la Folie est la Sagesse” (sometimes madness is wisdom).

The thing that you have to fight against is defeatism of any kind. You have no reason for it. You have never had really a melancholy temperament, but, as your mother said: you have always been known for a bright, cheerful, extraverting attitude upon life. I mean
especially
that you share none of the melancholy point of view which seems to have been the lot of Anthony and Marjorie. You and I have had wonderful times in the past, and the future is still brilliant with possibilities if you will keep up your morale, and try to think that way. The outside world, the political situation, etc., is still gloomy and it
does
[a]ffect everybody directly, and will inevitably reach you indirectly, but try to separate yourself from it by some form of mental hygiene—if necessary, a self-invented one. . . .

There is no feeling of gloom on your part that has the
slightest
legitimacy. Your pictures have been a success, your health has been very much better, according to the doctors—and the only sadness is the living without you, without hearing the notes of your voice with its particular intimacies of inflection.

You and I have been happy: we haven’t been happy just once, we’ve been happy a thousand times. The chances that the spring, that’s for everyone, like in the popular songs, may
belong to us too—the chances are pretty bright at this time because as usual, I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand—and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and—I find it to be you and you only. But, Swan, float lightly because you are a swan, because by the exquisite curve of your neck the gods gave you some special favor, and even though you fractured it running against some man-made bridge, it healed and you sailed onward. Forget the past—what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven forever and ever—even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you—turn gently in the waters through which you move and sail back.

LADY BIRD JOHNSON

LETTER TO LYNDON JOHNSON, 1964

The Democratic convention was in full swing, but LBJ—wracked by terrible divisions within the nation—was hesitating about accepting the party’s nomination when Lady Bird Johnson (1912–2007) sent him this note.

Her reference to
Time
magazine concerned that week’s cover story, which, in a somewhat brutal and obvious comparison to Jacqueline Kennedy, had described the fifty-one-year-old first lady as “cast more in the pleasant image of a neat, busy suburban clubwoman than in the queenly mold of a jet-set Continental beauty. . . . Her nose is a bit too long, her mouth a bit too wide, her ankles a bit less than trim, and she is not outstanding at clotheshorseman-ship. She has a voice something like a brassy low note on a trumpet, and she speaks in a twanging drawl.”

Beloved—

You are as brave a man as Harry Truman—or FDR—or Lincoln. You can go on to find some peace, some achievement amidst all the pain. You have been strong, patient, determined beyond any words of mine to express.

I honor you for it. So does most of the country.

To step out now would be wrong for your country, and I can see nothing but a lonely wasteland for your future. Your friends would be frozen in embarrassed silence and your enemies jeering.

I am not afraid of
Time
or lies or losing money or defeat.

In the final analysis I can’t carry any of the burdens you talked of—so I know it’s only
your
choice. But I know you are as brave as any of the thirty-five.

I love you always

Bird

ERNEST THOMPSON

ON GOLDEN POND
, 1981

On Golden Pond
, written by Ernest Thompson (1949–), was first produced as a Broadway play in 1979, then, two years later, as a film with dream casting. Katharine Hepburn was the feisty Ethel Thayer, and Henry Fonda her crotchety, more fragile husband, Norman. Oddly, it was the first and only time the two veteran actors worked together. Fonda died shortly thereafter, and Hepburn’s shaking voice in this scene—a symptom of her neurological disorder, essential tremor—gave it unavoidable pathos.

Norman has gotten confused on his way to pick strawberries for lunch. Charlie is the town’s mailman.

Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn

ENDINGS

ROMAN HUSBAND

“LAUDATIO TURIAE,” 1ST CENTURY BC

Marriages that are ended by death, not divorce, sometimes provide the most extraordinary gifts of inspiration. Nothing is known about the author of this famous eulogy except that he was a wealthy Roman husband who lived during the reign of Augustus and apparently loved his wife very deeply. The eulogy was extraordinary for its length (just half the speech survived, and what follows below are only excerpts of that half), but even more so for the fact that the entire speech was inscribed on the wife’s large tombstone.