Crusts

By Richard Stengel

LIFE AFTER MARRIAGE: LOVE IN AN AGE OF DIVORCE

by A. Alvarez

Simon & Schuster; 269 pages; $14.50

As an aspiring writer in '50s London, A. Alvarez kissed by the book; his affections were literary. The novels, and the tempestuous marriage, of D.H. Lawrence became his literary and personal inspiration. When he met Frieda Lawrence's granddaughter, he instantly fell in love. Then reality began to edit illusion. When the first words his new wife spoke to him on their wedding morning were "You didn't cut off the crusts" (he had forgotten to trim the connubial toast), Alvarez thought: "It's the wrong script." Frantically, he turned page after page. Didn't Lawrence write that Grand Passion was part of the Great Tradition? Wasn't marriage a heroic endeavor? When, four years later, his marriage foundered, the writer felt that he had failed not only as a husband but as a literary critic.

In Life After Marriage, Alvarez uses his first marriage as the vehicle for a rambling meditation on the vagaries of love and separation. Like his previous work, a study of suicide, The Savage God, he treats a difficult and distressing subject in the symmetrical style of belles-lettres. Divorce, he remarks dryly, "transforms habit into drama," turning miseries into melodramatic history. Roman marriage, he observes, was a civil contract based on mutual affection. When that affection perished, the marriage, like any civil contract, could be dissolved by mutual consent. This sensible arrangement, according to Alvarez, was compromised by Christianity. The early church fathers elevated a simple civil contract to an immutable spiritual sacrament: "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." When marriage became holy, divorce became damnable.

Alvarez, however, seems less interested in cause than consequence. About half the book is taken up by narratives of "Divorces I Have Known." They are short stories told to him by friends, colleagues and garrulous strangers, tales of grieving women and domineering men, icy wives and bewildered husbands, doomed love, inexplicable marriages, and acrimonious separations. None of them has the immediacy of the author's angst and the ultimate drab effect is of trite case studies masquerading as literature.

A more appropriate title for the book might be Marriage II. "Divorces are made in heaven," quipped Oscar Wilde, and Alvarez agrees. His own divorce was a pre-emptive strike against despair. It enabled him, in time, to marry a Canadian psychologist, and live happily ever after. Alvarez concludes that marriage is really the platonic desire for the pursuit of the whole--minus, of course, the crusts.

-- By Richard Stengel

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