Where Marital Guide-books Go So Sadly Astray . . .

From time to time I go into a bookshop and (not yet having lost, even at forty, all traces of adolescent curiosity) pick up an attractive paperback entitled either Sex in Modern Society, by John Q. Doppelganger, or perhaps The Sexual Role of Woman in Marriage, by Marjorie Flab, a qualified doctor with two husbands and three children.

I know before I look at them precisely why these books have been published – not to give some new information to you or me, since everything that is written in them has been written a thousand times in other books – but for the eminently practical purpose of bringing more money into the households of the struggling authors and their equally struggling publishers.

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The word ‘sex’ on the title page guarantees, I suppose, a sale of eight thousand copies.

In our heart of hearts we all feel a little ignorant and unhinged regarding this fascinating topic. There might be something we don’t know yet and ought to know.

Though I have learnt never to buy such books (I merely leaf through them studiously while the bookshop-keeper glares at my back), I haven’t the faintest objection to other people getting information from them. Nobody’s purity could possibly be corrupted by such polite works.

When I think of a couple of plays I myself wrote recently, in which the characters speak New Zealand pub language, it makes me blush – I am sure neither Professor Doppelganger nor Dr Flab would sit through more than one act of any of them. They are pure-minded people.

It is not the corruption of purity that I fear; it is rather the corruption of the intellect of their readers by a number of subtle misreadings of the chart of human life. And it is these misreadings which I now propose to discuss, from an unregenerate Catholic viewpoint.

It seems to me that the clinical approach to married life has its disadvantages. Undoubtedly one is likely to get more useful information from it than from an abstract treatise by some highly intelligent theologian who imagines that most married people are thinking consciously all the time about their Saviour and the sacramental life of the Church.

But clinical statements about sex seem to me generally to miss the bus; and indeed the word ‘sex’ itself has always made me want to laugh – why should a three-letter word be more accurate than a four-letter one – like ‘love’, let us say? Does ‘sex’ walk or talk or smile at you?

I think that ‘sex’ does not in fact exist, except in the bad or good dreams of clinicians; and those who think it does exist are thinking much too abstractly about a sacred and concrete matter which has a thousand facets and possibilities.

The total lack of a sense of humour in such guidebooks seems to me one of their greatest liabilities. Since Adam ate the apple there have always been incongruities and minor misfortunes in the encounter of man with woman or woman with man – the moment when you step on the step that isn’t there and go for a sudden skate.

I like to think that one of the reasons that God created two sexes instead of one is that He too has a sense of humour and wished to share some of His jokes with the human species.

The atmosphere of the marital guidebook is often, even at its best, reminiscent of those long European films – Hiroshima Mon Amour is a good example – in which the hero follows the heroine down an endless street with advertising hoardings on either side of it, both in deadly earnest while the audience feel a constant heightening of tension that actually proceeds from boredom.

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Such dramatic statements are in the final analysis works of comedy; and the comedy comes from the fact that the characters are silly and solemn enough to regard the erotic dimension as the whole of life. One longs for the hero to slip on a banana skin or for the heroine to catch her toe in the hem of her dress – a happening unfortunately impossible in the era of mini-skirts.

In my opinion the regular reading of stories from Rabelais or Boccaccio, or a modern sexual humourist such as John Cheever, would supply what these guidebooks so conspicuously lack. The trouble is, of course, that they are written by Puritans.

A clinical approach is the way the Puritan (with whose dilemma I do indeed sympathise) overcomes his or her basic horror of the spiritual and organic mystery we have unwisely elected to call ‘sex’ – and a clinical approach cuts out a sense of humour from the very start.

The guidebook writers are without exception idealists. Again and again, in between the passages of clinical detail, one will find passages such as this:

Nobody who has not experienced the perfect harmony that can exist between husband and wife, if they both follow the Doppelganger (or Flab) routine of mutual introspective hygiene, can really imagine what it is like. A husband longs to possess his wife, tenderly and with a sacred reverence, for to him she represents the perfect image of womanhood to which he is irresistibly drawn. A wife longs for the tender embrace of her husband. The mingling of their two souls and bodies in the supreme happening of their lives is indeed the only possible human experience of paradise. . . .

I do not deny that some married couples may find considerable physical and spiritual joy in each other’s company and that even the least compatible couples have their good moments, if they would leave off grouching long enough to consider the matter; but the claim of the guidebook writers is different from this.

Like some Hindus, they regard sexual love as the door to Divine illumination; and while I have the greatest respect and liking for this particularly human activity, and would not be prepared to reject utterly even this assumption, I think it would be a mighty tricky road to travel on.

I am not prepared to equate a temporary mutual happiness, in itself a clear enough indication of the friendship and mercy of God, with the Beatific Vision to which all men consciously or unconsciously aspire.

Women are, I think, particularly vulnerable to this kind of idealist propaganda. Some poor girl who has just finished washing her husband’s dirty socks for the umpteenth time may pick up one of Dr Flab’s books and say suddenly to herself, ‘Where is the harmony and the ecstasy? Where is the Cape Canaveral take-off? It’s never like this between me and Jack. . . .’

And instead of deciding that the book contains a great deal of nonsense, she may begin to think: ‘Ah, but it could be like that with George. Dear, dear George – why did I ever let him go out of my life? . . .’ I’ve always felt page 518 that most women who go off the rails are influenced by some such idealist propaganda.

When reading such books one has, I think, to make a fairly clear mental distinction between Christian and pagan love.

That matrimonial genius, Saint Thomas More, used to beat his children savagely (with a feather duster) when they were naughty. And when his wife nagged him he used to kiss and praise her until she became what he told her she was.

Yet when it became apparent that he would have to die for the Faith, he did not seem to have any real doubt where his duty lay. In prison he composed a profound and witty treatise showing (among other things) that it is better to die on the scaffold than in one’s bed. And he joked with the executioner before his head was cut off.

Imagine, though, the claustrophobic and neurotic ‘cosiness’ of the More household if Thomas had said to his spouse, even without words: ‘Dear wife, I renounce this unreasonable Master who is asking me to die for Him. Not that I would rather obey King Henry – of course not! – nobody can call me a State-worshipper. But you are my goddess and my first and only duty in the world is to look after you; and I can’t do that without a head to think with. . . .’

That situation is one that no Catholic could justly accept. Yet I think it is often implicitly in the marital guidebooks.

There is a natural human tendency to idealise members of the opposite sex. Some degree of idealisation in marriage may help to make life smoother, as long as it is tempered with an opposite humour and realism; as people in a play know that it is a play, and so enjoy the role they are called on to act out.

But I find often embedded in the marital guidebooks the notion that a chronic idealisation of the wife by the husband is the only possible basis of married happiness; that the true barometer of success in marriage is the degree of emotional and physical satisfaction enjoyed by the wife – and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a lout and a barbarian.

This rather biased argument is brought forward most of all in support of the practice of contraception. The writer will suggest that no woman who fears pregnancy can possibly have a happy sex relation with her husband, and then go on to say that the only possible answer to the problem is the practice of contraception.

Frankly, I feel that the ‘happiness’ the writers are describing is wholly a natural state and that a Christian, while not under-rating it, is bound to look beyond it.

The one stable point to which all the signs in the guidebooks point is a woman enthroned as a neo-pagan goddess in the centre of her household, enjoying all possible manifestations of spiritual and emotional and physical ‘happiness’ – and I think that this ‘happiness’ is in fact achieved only in dreams and fantasies.

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Indeed, I have no quarrel with sexual ideals as such. If I found an adolescent son or daughter reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover I would leave them to it – only pointing out that the work is a remarkably beautiful fantasy. I would be glad that they were acquiring some sexual ideals from a literary source. But the problem is quite different when works of science and sociology embody similar fantasies, and the readers mistake them for real.

The chief danger comes when a married person begins to contrast a known reality with an imagined alternative. The Christian is in love with reality – he would prefer a real ulcer to an imaginary rose – but the pagan is too often in love with fantasy.

There are various obscure ways in which God sandpapers the souls of those who are trying to love Him. Sometimes He may offer us anguish and calamity and tell us only that His grace is sufficient for us. The charms and peaks of the Christian life bear hardly any relation to the cosiness described by the marital guidebooks.

The question one has to ask oneself after looking at such books generally boils down to this: ‘Am I a Christian or a pagan?’

It is perhaps worth stating that I, too, am a feminist. It delights me that so many women in our times are writing books, making excellent pottery for their own and other people’s households, and conversing on equal terms with their husbands or masculine friends.

It is a new world, and enlivening, even if it has its obvious dangers. I wish for all women, as for myself, whatever self-realisation is congruent with obedience to the will of God.

I think the marital guidebooks are particularly dangerous to women; but they can cause harm to men as well.

A good while ago I read such a guidebook by Van der Velde. Parts of it are funny, parts of it are informative, and parts of it are extremely sentimental. I took it too seriously, and for a year at least became quite a burden to my spouse.

If there is any single principle that leads to success in marriage, I suspect it runs something like this: ‘Never try to change the other person. If you are dissatisfied, then get to work on yourself.’

But I did try the impossible: to change the real person to whom I was joined in matrimony into an imaginary figure drawn partly from the pages of Van der Velde. Naturally enough my efforts made both of us unhappy.

What put me back on the rails again was reading another and quite different document – the papal encyclical Casti Connubii. There I found laid out very clearly what my duties were as a Catholic husband and father. A great deal of it was quite new to me.

When I began to try to carry out the papal injunctions, as far as my circumstances permitted, the temperature and climate of my marriage steadily improved. Indeed, I would describe myself now as a happily married man; page 520 and though I do not dare to speak for my wife, I have heard her sometimes singing in the kitchen. If I were still taking my directions from the pagan marital guidebooks I doubt if we would still be living under the same roof.

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