What to read if... you're getting married

If spring is the time when the young person's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, it's also the time when the happy couples start getting hitched.

What books to recommend to anyone embarking on one of life's great, and more reckless adventures? With the Western world’s divorce rate soaring, a terse “good luck, chaps,” could seem the most appropriate response. Dr. Johnson (more later) epitomises it as “the triumph of hope over experience,” (to be fair, he was referring to second marriages; but, that could also be the experience of observation; and, as you can see, the implicit comment on marriage isn't exactly a rousing endorsement…). The general interference is that you're going to need the big guns here.

Maybe start with W. Stanley Moss’s Ill met by Moonlight. In 1943, he and Patrick Leigh Fermor came up with a plan to kidnap the commander of the German forces occupying Crete, General Kreipe, and bring him to Cairo. It was a wild, crazy, daring, courageous plan, and the odds were against them bringing it off successfully; yet, with the support of the Cretan partisans, that's exactly what they did. (It also offers interesting divagations on the unexpectedness of other people, including common ground where one least looks for it.¹) Food for thought. A good partnership, grit and back-up are useful foundations for achieving the impossible.

Helpfully, the title² of Moss’s book refers to a famous warring married couple, Oberon and Titania (king and queen of the fairies); so you might as well check out Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream while you're here. This apparent dandelion clock of a comedy, charmingly gift-wraps some hard and unattractive truths about marriage and relationships. (There are also two about-to-be-married human couples, Hermia, Helena, Demetrius and Lysander, who in Shakespearean fashion keep changing around.) Titania and Oberon’s squabbles and one-upmanship are painfully recognisable (as well as plenty of unreasonable behaviour, jealousy - including illicit administration of psychotropic drugs - and exemplification of the difficult truth that, in a relationship, having right on your side is not enough). There's the off-putting nature of neediness in a relationship, the unkindness it can trigger; the utter craziness of full-blown romantic obsession - constant, illuminating little spikes of reality, that provoke recognition without drawing blood. Delightful, funny, and with the merest wisp of melancholy.

The novel, fairly early in its development, started examining marriage, specifically unhappy or unsuccessful ones. If you feel like a visit to Jane Austen territory after the happy ending, you might try Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (clever woman yoked to foolish man); Susan Ferrier’s Marriage (marriage and - single female independence - through two generations of women, starting with the mother’s elopement (plus lapdog) as a young girl); or Emily Eden's The Semi-Attached Couple (the unknowableness of others, even - especially - when one's in love; and the difficulties this causes. Also, the benefits of a common aim in marriage, even an external one: there's some rather amusing politicking).

But, if you want to just cut to the chase, then it's Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), obviously. From one of the most famous openings ever (“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”), Tolstoy examines human relations, politics, life, in forensic detail, through the prismatic focus of a shifting slate of couples: Oblonsky and Dolly, Anna and Karenin, Anna and Vronsky, Vronsky and Kitty, and Kitty and Levin. Rich, vivid, stylistically radical (cinematic jump cuts; stream of consciousness), this is the work to upend all your assumptions about the style and remit of the nineteenth century novel. Hyper-real, mimetic and kinetic, this is the novel as multimedia immersive experience.³

It also offers a bleak endorsement of Johnson's “I know not whether marriage be more than one of the innumerable modes of human misery. When I see and reckon the various forms of connubial infelicity -” and runs with it, never shying away from the sheer difficulty of negotiating this complex territory for those involved. General critical consensus seems be that the pairing of Kitty and Levin is intended to provide a more optimistic counterpoint; but this is to be seduced by Tolstoy's capacity to inspire empathy, as in his superb evocations of Levin’s shyness and jealousy. An attentive examination of these, reveals a relationship constantly prey to Levin’s jealousies and insecurities. He’s possessive of Kitty, resentful of her social life and pleasure in society, of her closeness to her family; and he tries to isolate her from all these, in the name of love. We see Anna’s unhappy ending; but another (maybe less overtly dramatic, but equally devastating) is implicit in Tolstoy's depiction of Kitty and Levin.

Since we're being clear-eyed and unsentimental here, now would be a good time for more Samuel Johnson, specifically Chapters 28 and 29 of The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (you might even read the whole thing, it's not long, and addresses and discusses the pursuit and possibility of happiness generally - something worth considering before making any major commitment. Also, if you have any affection for the word “serendipity”: you - literally - heard it here first⁴). Rasselas and his sister discuss marriage in all its gory detail; but Johnson is so concise - “a youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought to by artifice, find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together”⁵ - that he manages to cover the ground comprehensively in one-and-a-half chapters.

OK. Coming up for air and just before you call the whole thing off (Yes, let's!), time for something more encouraging. Greenery Street⁶ Dennis Mackail) is a minutely detailed description of the first year of a happy marriage. It renders uneventfulness with such subtlety that it's completely absorbing, the narrative veined with gentle humour; and, in contrast to Johnson's bleaker analysis, shows the small ordinarinesses of life as contributing to happiness, the sharing of them to the construction of a happy marriage. In the background, like a faint, distorted echo, is the lightly sketched image of a parallel marriage wobbling off the rails: a reminder of both how easy it is for relationships to fracture, and the truism that happy is the marriage that has no history (pretty much impossible, obviously).

Of course, groundwork is all-important before launching any major enterprise. William Congreve's The Way of the World is aggressively cynical, harsh and crudely witty about sex (and money, the other great driver of so many relationships, especially when marriage was one of a very limited range of career options for women⁷); which makes the love match between his hero and heroine Mirabel and Millamant genuinely affecting. Millamant is beautiful, witty, clever and independent; gives as good as she gets; and instigates what's possibly the first modern version of the pre-nuptial agreement (contractual stipulations before marriage were a given for the long period in which marriage was seen as a strategy within the family business, an entity beyond the passions that lead to four bare legs in a bed). She and Mirabel design it together; and, in thrashing out its template (gossip, tea-drinking, and the infliction of uncongenial friends are all covered), acknowledge what’s important to them; and define their expectations of married life, with the implication of its future success. One sentence sums up everything a prospective couple needs to bear in mind: “Let us be very strange and very well-bred, just as if we were not married at all.”

Finally: “I cannot be persuaded but that marriage is one of the means of happiness.” Even Johnson admitted (a little grudgingly, perhaps) some value in marriage in the end. So, less of a forlorn hope, more of a wild, reckless, crazy adventure. Which is quite cool. And kind of where we came in really.

1. Not in any way an apology for Nazism.

2. “Oberon: Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania”, Act II, Scene I.

3. And if you’ve only recently closed AK but are in the mood for more Tolstoy,

Simon Haisell

is currently conducting a “Slow Read” of War and Peace, with extras - you know, Anna Scherer, party animal, and so on (OK, party animal is a slight exaggeration…). A great way to have a conversation about the book.

4. To be precise, you’re present for its gestation.

5. Ah, the 18thc! Age of the constant (preferably classically balanced) epigram.

6. Interestingly, P G. Wodehouse loved it.

7. cf Charlotte Lucas’s “[P]leasantest preservative from want” in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen.