Self-obsession, what Christopher Lasch calls ‘pathological narcissism’, is the third cause of our advanced divorce rate. Gathorne-Hardy doesn’t mention Lasch, but in a chapter entitled ‘The Privilege Bulge’ he writes about the same ‘rage to grow’ – through yoga or through remarriage – which Lasch in his book finds so enraging. It all began, according to Gathorne-Hardy, who has a notable dislike of multiple causes, with the ‘Privilege Bulge Generation’, born in the 1930s and 1940s (his generation), and brought up under the influence of psychoanalytic ideas to expect the happiness that a childhood without repression was bound to bring. Forty years later they’re still expecting it; and as evidence Gathorne-Hardy cites the fact that ‘a major proportion’ of contemporary love stories have middle-aged heroes and heroines, which ‘as far as love goes is historically new’. Therapies designed to soothe and to enlarge proliferate; and ‘if marriage doesn’t lead to “growth”’, which after ten or fifteen years it may well not, the solution is simple: ‘dump it.’
Love is the last reason – ‘the entrancing delight of romantic love’. ‘Even the practical users of a marriage bureau aim to and “generally do fall in love”,’ Gathorne-Hardy says before asking the deep question: ‘What is this love they fall into?’ An English disease, Cobbett said: ‘it produces self-destruction in England more frequently than in all other countries put together.’ A romantic death wish, said Denis de Rougemont, whose book Passion and Society (1956) is the model for Gathorne-Hardy’s discourse on love from the Crusaders (‘a gang of vicious and often drunken thugs, murderers and fornicators’) to the novels of John Updike. In the old days – stretching from the 12th century to the Second World War – there was marriage and there was adultery (or thoughts of adultery): on the one hand, stability, a house and a dowry; on the other, longing, desire and despair. This distinction held society together, according to de Rougemont, who feared what would happen when it dis appeared. What has happened is that a large number of people get married more than once. ‘I don’t want you as a mistress; our lives just aren’t built for it,’ the hero of Updike’s Marry Me says to the woman who isn’t his wife. ‘Here there’s no institution except marriage. Marriage and the Friday night basketball game.’
Monogamy, not marriage, is under threat: ‘no matter how you phrase the statistics, one thing is clear – the institution of marriage itself still rests on a bedrock of statistical stability.’ Between the end of the 16th century and the start of the 19th, the average length of a marriage was twenty years (the figures are Peter Laslett’s). Today, couples who don’t divorce can expect to be together for forty or fifty years – ‘for a good number of people it is a great deal too long.’ In this context Gathorne-Hardy’s seemingly daft proposition, ‘divorce – the modern death’, can be seen to make sense. ‘Divorce him quick,’ I heard an American child say to his mother when he thought his father was about to drown. Marghanita Laski, discussing Colin Murray Parkes’s Bereavement in the LRB, commented on ‘his perverse avoidance of marital desertion as the obvious analogue to bereavement by death’, and added that in the first case the pain is ‘made worse by the knowledge that all the misery has been caused, not by chance, but by human choice’. On the other hand, pain caused by ‘human choice’ is easier to resist; there is even pleasure in doing so.
Gathorne-Hardy has no inclination to play down the many kinds of unhappiness that divorce can bring: here, at least, he is on home ground. He may not be sorry that ‘the grim, granite monogamy until death’ is on its way out – but the way looks pretty bumpy. He speaks of the ‘terrible fires of divorce’, of ‘the terrible cries of pain which rip through our late 20th-century prose’, of the ‘acute, almost physical pain the ripping apart can cause’, and quotes some of the ‘victims’, among them a crane-driver. ‘I’d be sitting up there in the crane,’ he says, ‘and suddenly I would burst into tears.’ It’s the only eloquent sentence in the whole book.
All the difficulties divorce entails are attended to, however cursorily, from the shame and embarrassment (especially for women, who, when they lose their husbands, are assumed to be longing for any creep’s attentions) to the unhappiness of children, many of whom – ‘rich and poor alike’ – never give up the idea that their parents will get together again: ‘The Times obituary of Alexander Onassis said that he and his sister had “always entertained hopes for a reunion between their parents”.’ Some of what Gathorne-Hardy says is idiosyncratic. He claims, for instance, that the misery is equal for the leaver (who is usually, though he doesn’t say so, the husband) and the left (i.e. the wife) – which seems unlikely and possibly self-aggrandising. Of the financial difficulties he remarks, ‘the most general, most concrete and one of the most painful results of divorce is an immediate crash in the standard of living,’ and then goes on to say that the middle classes suffer most in this respect. The ‘lowest-paid simply exchange one form of poverty for another’. As always, he is full of optimism. He discusses the loneliness, but also the useful things people can do to find new partners and new ways of life. Clubs for the divorced ‘sound fairly grim’, and also ‘petit-bourgeois’, but ‘on the whole they work’; communes have their silly side but can ‘help one-parent families through the most difficult years with their children’; even marriage bureaux aren’t to be scoffed at. Heather Jenner’s agency ‘has arranged 15,000 marriages’ – and several of her former clients have said they would ‘send’ their children to find partners in the same way. Taken together, these ‘developments’ are a good thing, some of them, he says, more often seen on television than subscribed to in real life, but nonetheless ‘a sign that we are at the start of something’. One more thing: the bad years can be creative. ‘Bertrand Russell produced during the harrowing period after his first marriage broke up the work for which he will always be remembered: the Principia Mathematica.’
One difficulty means more to Gathorne-Hardy than any of the others. In the old days before divorce really got going, couples whose marriages were slipping sometimes decided to have a child in order to acquire a common interest. It’s not like that any more. The majority of divorces occur within three years of marriage, or, to put it differently, no sooner is the child born than its parents decide to part. ‘Children tend to detract from rather than contribute to marital happiness,’ the sociologists say. Children interfere with their parents’ ‘growth’, Gathorne-Hardy says. So one child in three now lives with only one of his parents, usually his mother – and mothers can be mean. ‘The central injustice in divorce today is that of depriving fathers and their children of each other.’ It’s all right for the mothers: they have the child and ‘centuries of gossip-and-support traditions to call on’ – fathers ‘are often completely alone’. Some might say fathers in the main have jobs – but no matter. They also have their ‘growth’ to think about. Still, it’s true that in the vast majority of cases mothers are given custody of the children and that some exercise their bitterness by making it difficult for their former husband to see them: ‘The playwright Terence Frisby went to the high court to ask that his access – one afternoon a fortnight – should be extended to one a week. The judge turned the application down flat on the grounds, some mad fragment of jargon floating into his head, that he was “in grave danger of becoming too possessive”.’ The law, Gathorne-Hardy says, should be changed, and ‘the principle underlying the change should be that a child has an inalienable right to two parents, and that each parent has an equal right to see and have its child.’ It sounds all right but how could it be done? Partition? In the meantime, even without changing the law, ‘the situation would be immediately and immeasurably transformed for the better if a few mothers were sent to prison for denying children and fathers access to each other.’ A feminist, I suppose, would have to agree.
After the ‘terrible fires of divorce’, the ‘high blue sky of the future’ – i.e. remarriage. The psychoanalytic view is that second marriages are even less likely to succeed than the marriage(s) that preceded them.
According to Dr Edmund Bergler, for instance, ‘the chances of finding conscious happiness in the next marriage are exactly zero.’ (What about unconscious happiness – could one settle for that?) Statistics bear him out. Never mind, Gathorne-Hardy says: ‘Being a couple is naturally nicer.’ And if there has to be another divorce, there’s always the chance of yet another marriage. Besides, the pain is easier to bear the second time round. What’s nice about Gathorne-Hardy is that he seldom says a discouraging word. Whatever’s happening it’s for the best. ‘A profound and exhilarating sense of power, of lifting vision, of release’ is within reach. ‘Seventy-three per cent of strongly religious women are now orgasmic all the time.’
Book reviewed:
Love, Sex, Marriage and Divorce by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy
Patty and Cin
‘I grew up,’ Patricia Hearst says, describing what life had once been like for the granddaughter of Citizen Kane, ‘in an atmosphere of clear blue skies, bright sunshine, rambling open spaces, long green lawns, large comfortable houses, country clubs with swimming-pools and tennis courts and riding horses.’ It must have been a nice life, and would look pretty in the cinema, but heroines endear themselves by their difficulties and until the SLA kidnapped her Patricia Hearst’s only difficulty was that she was a bit short. Five foot two – not a dwarf, but her girlfriends were taller. ‘Most things came easily to me,’ she says a little later, ‘sports, social relationships, schoolwork, life. I had only to apply myself to them and I found I could do them well, to my own satisfaction.’ Is she trying to tell us that it was especially brutal of the SLA to intervene in a life that ran so smoothly, or is it that she wants us to know that she wasn’t some kind of neurotic who could be expected to crack up in difficult circumstances?
She may have been rich but she wasn’t laid back. Her mother was strict, a ‘Southern lady of the old school’, and the girls (five of them) didn’t smoke, drink, take drugs or ‘go out anywhere’ in jeans. Her father taught her how to use a gun. She trusted her parents and they trusted her. When some teachers found fault with her she refused to apologise – she knew they were wrong and her father agreed. It was, she insists, a normal and happy childhood, the implication being that if she seemed later to turn against her family, it was very much against her will. It’s true these ‘gracious’, almost perfect parents had a tendency to moralise, but she soon learned to ‘tune out while seeming to participate’ – a trick of some importance in her later life. Today her book is wholesomely dedicated to ‘Mom and Dad’ – a touch that puts one in mind of Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home.
When she was 17, she fell in love with one of her teachers (‘I suppose I threw myself at him but I hoped not in any obvious way’), a young man of 23, called Steven Weed – not a name that would necessarily wish fame upon itself. He won a teaching fellowship at Berkeley, and she went with him, enrolling as an undergraduate, eventually to do art history – ‘I had been surrounded by art all of my life.’ It was then 1972; the student rebellions of the previous decade, ‘abhorred’ by her mother ‘for trying to destroy the traditional values that make America great’, had ‘withered away’: ‘when a young socialist forced a leaflet into my hand in Sproul Plaza, I took special delight in dropping the message into one of the dozens of nearby trash cans.’ She and Mr Weed rented a flat together, ‘a bright sunny duplex in a nice neighbourhood’; and it was there, at nine o’clock on the night of 4 February 1974, that the SLA found her, dressed only in her pants, bathrobe and alpaca slippers.
She was tied up, gagged, blindfolded and taken away. Her destination was a cupboard, six and a half feet long, where she was to remain, blindfolded, for 57 days. After she’d been there a couple of hours, the cupboard door opened and the leader of the gang introduced himself: ‘I am general field marshal of the Symbionese Liberation Army. My name is Cin.’ (‘Sin,’ she thought – ‘these people must be evil incarnate.’) His speech, part General Westmoreland, part urban guerrilla, was a sort of post-Vietnam gobbledegook. The SLA, he said, had declared war against the United States: a war of the poor and oppressed against fascism. She should consider herself ‘in protective custody’ and would be treated according to the Geneva Convention. The first thing the SLA had to see to were her manners. ‘If you gotta go pee,’ one of them told her, ‘say “I gotta go pee”; if you gotta go shit, say “I gotta go shit.” That’s the way poor people talk.’ Other combat units had taken other prisoners that night, they said: the SLA was a huge army with important international connections. It wasn’t long before she came to believe that this might well be true. She was told of secret agents eavesdropping in restaurants ‘to hear first-hand the troubles and the problems voiced by the people’; of SLA medical units practising ‘battlefield surgery by going out in the woods and shooting dogs in order to learn how to administer to gunshot wounds’; of summer camps where children were taught to handle machine guns. When she was released from the cupboard, she asked about the other units:
The question surprised them and they all seemed to look to Cin for an answer. After a moment’s hesitation, his face cracked and he burst out laughing.
‘What other units? This is all there is, baby. We’re the army. You’re looking at it.’
They all laughed at the big deception.
It was an army of eight soldiers, three men and five women. Some of them, unlike Patricia Hearst, had a sense of humour, of a kind.
The SLA had made itself known in California by murdering a black school superintendent – a choice of victim that made them look like idiots to other left-wing groups with which they were in competition. It’s unlikely that they had a precise idea of what they might achieve by ‘arresting’ Patty Hearst, as they put it, but no one could say that she wasn’t a suitable candidate for a kidnapping. In the event, what she did for them probably exceeded even their wild expectations. Like all such groups, they longed for publicity. Once they had persuaded her to speak on their behalf, they could rely on every news bulletin in California giving its version of what the SLA had done that day. She was well aware of her contribution – ‘with me in their clutches, the SLA was a household word’ – and, as time went by, was glad to have a contribution to make. Financially, she proved less useful. Their first idea of what to do with her had been to have her ask her father to provide 70 dollars’ worth of food for every poor person in the state. It would have cost him 400 million dollars and even he couldn’t manage that. Cin, who, as always, was in charge, found this hard to believe. ‘This man with little or no education was clearly over his head in dealing with million-dollar projects’ is Patty Hearst’s rueful comment on the episode. When eventually terms were agreed and the food was distributed, the SLA still wasn’t pleased. No one gave them credit for their generous thought; the food, they said, was being thrown at the people – ‘one woman had been hit by a turkey leg and seriously injured.’ They reached the conclusion that her father was trying to force them to kill her.
Sitting in her cupboard, Patty Hearst found it hard to know what to make of the SLA. Their reactions were unpredictable and mostly violent; Cin claimed to be instructed by God and they were obsessed with the idea of their own death. However, they kept threatening to kill her first, and the one thing she was certain of was that she didn’t want to die: ‘I wanted to get out alive and see them all sent to jail … for what they were doing to me.’ It didn’t take her long to realise that getting out alive meant co-operating with them and she didn’t hesitate to do so. Harangued all day long about the evils of capitalism, she ‘accommodated’ her thoughts ‘to coincide with theirs’. Only once does she say that she regrets not having been more strong-minded:
I wish I could say now that I stood up well under Cin’s interrogation, that I refused to reveal vital information, that I lied and fooled him … Terrorised, threatened constantly with being hung from the ceiling for being an unco-operative prisoner … I only wanted to co-operate and not to make them angry at me. I was afraid and weepy, hardly the heroine.
/> Her tone of voice, for the most part, is defensive, and sometimes priggish, as if answering those critics who said of her when she was released that she’d been all too eager to do whatever the SLA asked of her. She writes both about herself and about the SLA with an alienating gracelessness and her story has been ‘querulously’ received (Joan Didion’s word) by American reviewers who felt that she hadn’t told the whole truth. It could simply be, however, that what happened to her, and her response to it, was more complicated than she is able now (or was old enough then) to deal with. Writing about her early life, she says, ‘I thought I knew what was right and what was wrong for me,’ which suggests that she was less interested in what was right and wrong in general; and talking about the SLA’s attempts to re-educate her, she says: ‘Actually, I did not really care one way or another about any of the things they told me. I had always been apolitical and still was.’ Had she cared more, she might have kept a better grip on herself. On the other hand, she might not have survived.
The failure of the food programme – by which was meant its shabby treatment in the media – may have been taken by the SLA as evidence that ‘the fascist corporate state’ wasn’t interested in negotiating her release. But now it turned out that they didn’t feel like killing her either: ‘You’re kinda like the pet chicken people have on a farm – when it comes time to kill it for Sunday dinner, no one really wants to do it.’ A possible alternative was found: if the rest of the SLA agreed, she might be allowed to join them. She was given a torch and a supply of books – Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, Marx, Engels, the SLA Codes of War – and was tested on her reading of them. They became more friendly, changed her code name from ‘Marie-Antoinette’ to the more affectionate ‘Tiny’, gave her cigarettes, told her she could ‘fuck any of the men in the cell’. Sex, they said, wasn’t ever compulsory, but ‘if one comrade asked another, it was “comradely” to say yes.’ That day, the young ‘Cujo’ followed her into the cupboard; they took off their clothes, ‘he did his thing’ and left; she thought about the others listening in the room outside. She had long since given up any hope of being released or rescued alive – ‘I had lived in fear of the SLA for so long that fear of the FBI came naturally to me’ – and as each member of the cell in turn questioned her about her sincerity in wishing to join them, she became increasingly ingenious in telling them what they wanted to hear. Asked to record a message that had been written for her, denouncing her parents and praising the SLA, she did so ‘with vim and vigour’. For the SLA it was a triumph. For her the whole business of proving herself a convert to their cause was another instance, though she doesn’t quite say so, of being able to do what was required of her, easily and to her own satisfaction.
Human Relations and Other Difficulties Page 10
