What makes for a happy marriage ? What makes two people stick together, day after day, month after month, year after mundane year ? Is it love ? Is it compatibility ? Is it fear of being alone ? Is it social pressure ? Is it ennui, the deadening of desire and energy that seems to come with age ? Is it habit ? Is it the pain of modern divorces, with their petty separations – this pickle bottle is mine, my mother pickled it and you never cared for it, this painting is mine, this coffee table book on Maine is mine ? Is it the fear of knowing that the relationship has been no more than the sum of their collected possessions and a shared bed ? Is it children ? Is it a biological need ? Is it the willful looking past hurts rendered, consciously and unconsciously ? Is it money ?
And what are the ingredients of a happy marriage ? Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike. So what is common across all happy marriages ? Is it fealty, physical and emotional ? I’m so faithful to you, I haven’t sleep with anyone else, even if we haven’t slept together in eons; I don’t discuss my fears and confusion with anyone else, I don’t even acknowledge them to myself anymore ? Is it the ability to work through conflicts, to sleep with compromises and to not think of them as compromises ? Is it the lack of conflicts ? Is it respect ? Are successful marriages egalitarian ?
Few books I’ve read explore the narrative of a marriage, searching for answers to these questions. Most are about either the romance or the breakup, or about infidelity. Only a few are about the sustenance past puppy romance, about the transition from pop songs about love to jazz songs about relationships, of the transformation of coca cola to fine wine. The first book about a married life that stayed with me was Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking”. The book was about the grief of losing her husband of forty years, but in chronicling the silence, she chronicled what lived before. She wrote: “Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.”
Two books, one finished a month back and the other still in progress, are two recent reads that explore the inner life of a marriage.
A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias. The title leapt out at me as I passed a neighborhood book store. The reviews it garnered made me pick up a copy from the local library. The first chapter barely interested me. The second walloped me. Never before have I read a book that laid out with such unflinching detail what it is like to be by the side of your spouse dying of cancer. The passages stunned me with their rawness and honesty. How do the people around you react when they know that you’ll die in two weeks ? What do you do ? When do you choose to say goodbye ? Who do you choose to say it to ? When is it too early and when may it be too late ? He writes the details he has to manage, people (the in-laws, the parents, the children, the friends), the choices of medical treatment, who gets to see her and for how long, what does she have the strength for and for how long. Just as Joan Didion’s book first showed me a glimpse of the foreign country that is grief, this book offered me a clearer glimpse of the landscape of the end of days of a spouse. Like Didion’s book, this book is semi-autobiographical, a mostly truthful rendering of the death of his wife, Margaret (only some of the dialogues have been made up, to make up for gaps in memory).
Juxtaposed with these chapters of end of days are chapters of courtship, marriage, parenting, the temptations of love outside marriage and the reasons for sticking on. While the chapters on courtship come off seeming weaker than the ones that describe her end, their courtship is rendered with honesty in unusual scenes, vulnerable scenes, vulnerability brought on by patterns laid out by the author’s culture, complicated by his early success (the author was a successful, published author at 16, a position I envied. He narrates the consequences of such an early success with such candor, I reconsidered my envy). Some of the author’s awkwardness reminded me of my own when I courted Shanthala. I read with a sense of deja vu scenes such as the awkward birthday gifts that he usually got her in the early days.
Yglesias writes: “He longed to penetrate the mystery of how they had managed to live a life together while they were so different in their natures and in their expectations of one another. And if there was no answer to be found in a last talk with his wife, at least he wanted to tell her what she had meant to him, and to hear what he had meant to her, because soon there would be only the loneliness of monologue.” Yglesias’s unstated question is whether their’s was a happy marriage. As I read the book, I wondered about some preconceived notions I had about a happy marriage such as: Is a happy marriage empty of strife, of infidelity ? Do opposites attract only during courtship or can it also cement a marriage ?
The other book, the one that I’m still reading, is Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize winning “Angle of Repose”. The narrator is an old, wheelchair bound historian, Lyman Ward. Trapped within the confines of a frail, paraplegic body, living alone – stubbornly, despite the misgivings of his son – he tries to piece together the life of his grandmother. Like Mark Knopfler, in narrating the story of a single life, he narrates a larger story, of a country, of a generation. Interposing passages of his grandmother’s life are Lyman Ward’s musings and aspects of his life. His introspective thoughts are filled with a grace and luminescence that make me want to go back and read them again and again.
The book drew me in with its meditative power, observations of nature, musings about the applications of the laws of physics to life, of life at the wild frontier that was the American West. For example, the very first page has this passage about the intersection of time and personality: “Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were – inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, cultures, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors I defend as if they were personal and not familial.”. In another passage, Lyman Ward muses about the Doppler Effect of the life of his grandmother: “The sound of anything coming at you – a train, say, or the future – has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. … I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne”. In a third, he writes about a morning in Grass Valley, California: “May 28, I see by the calendar. The brief and furious spring of these foothills is over, summer is here before I saw it coming. The wildflowers along the fence are dried up, the wild oats are gold, not green, the pine openings no longer show the bloody purple of Judas trees, the orchard and the wisteria are in fruit and pod, not blossom. From now until the November rains, the days will be so unchanging that without the Saturday ballgame I won’t be able to tell week from weekend. Who wants to ? When I was a boy here, summer was narcosis. I am counting on it to be what it always was.”. I wish I could write a tenth as sublimely as Stegner does.
In trying to piece together his grandmother’s life, Lyman Ward realizes what he’s doing is trying to understand the marriage of his grandparents. Lyman Ward explains to his skeptical son: “What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That’s where the interest is. That is where the meaning will be if I find any”.
Two thirds of the book are a record of that relationship. Of a relationship forged by distance, by the hard frontier life. And in describing that relationship, he also describes the conquest of the West, of life in one horse mining towns, of lynchings by vigilantes, the conflict of interest between government surveyors and the miners wishing access to that information before it became public, and the people who lived in these times. But the kernel rests on the unlikely relationship. The remaining third of the book cover aspects of Lyman Ward’s life, how this quest affects his life and his graceful musings.
Like Yglesias’ book, Stegner’s book is part fiction and part true story. The characterization of the grandmother and grandfather are also drawn from Stegner’s mother and father. Stegner also modeled the grandmother on Mary Hallock Foote, whose letters provided a basis for the novel (and stirred up some cries of plagiarism). The novel is peppered with cameos by real life Western explorers and engineers such as Clarence King, Henry Janin and Samuel Emmons.
The story of people striking West in search of opportunity, fame and fortune is not unlike an immigrant story. Of the many Indians I have seen in this country, the price of the journey has always been paid more dearly by the women, just as women and children have always paid the price of men’s ambitions through history. A passage that addresses the plight of such women is an example of the universality of Stegner’s writing: “When frontier historians theorize about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut-off who settled the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother. So much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them”.
Shanthala grew up in a single place since she can remember, mostly in the same house. I grew up everywhere, uprooted every 3-4 years. Shanthala, like Scarlett of Gone with the Wind, is rejuvenated by a visit home, her parents’ home. I envy her. I wish sometimes a place could rejuvenate me so, a place I could call home the way she does. Stegner addresses this feeling from a different perspective, but in a way that touches the essence of my envy when he writes: “I wonder if ever again Americans can have the experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to ? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places”. Reading this, I realized that I was an immigrant before I came to the US, have been an immigrant all my life, living too shallowly in too many places, uprooted just as I was beginning to set roots.
Great literature can speak to people of completely disparate backgrounds, to the common humanity that binds us all. Stegner’s book is great literature.
I highly recommend both books.
You can read excerpts of both “A Happy Marriage” and “Angle of Repose” online. I also recommend Terry Gross’ interview of Rafael Yglesias (transcript available too).
