BETTER HALF OR BITTER HALF ?

BETTER HALF OR BITTER HALF ?
(On the wives of some famous men)





When we first joined college, my friends and I greatly enjoyed the anecdotes that we heard about great writers and statesmen. Some of these jokes concerned the wives of these great men. One was about Milton. “Milton got married and then wrote ‘Paradise Lost’. Later his wife died, and he wrote ‘Paradise Regained.’

Older Wives
Shakespeare as a young man of eighteen was courting Anne Whately who was sixteen. He visited her every day. Her house was at the end of a lane, and to reach it he had to pass the house of Ann Hathaway, who was twenty six. The buxom lady kept watching the strapping youth passing her house everyday. And then she started giving him the glad eye. The lusty Elizabethan responded, and doused the passions roused by Whately in the arms of Hathaway. They were discovered, and he was forced to marry the lady. They seemed to have adjusted well, and Shakespeare once proudly said, “Anne Hathaway, she hath a way.”

After hearing about this we started debating whether it was better to find wives older to ourselves. Some of my classmates who were sixteen or seventeen years old started eyeing girls in the final year BA/BSc, who would have been about nineteen or twenty. The girls ignored them and that was that. Not all women could be Ann Hathaway nor all Intermediate students William Shakespeare (or Villivakkam Shesappa Iyer as we called him).

Sir.Thomas More’s wife was seven years older to him, but she was not the Hathaway type. When More was in prison because he refused to fall in line with despotic rulers, his wife seemed to take the other side, urging him to give up his principles, and then walking off in a huff. She didn’t relent even when More went to the gallows.

True Companions
Dr.Livingstone’s wife insisted on accompanying him on his various hazardous journeys. She died during one such trip and Livingstone was shattered. “I tried to bow to the blow as from the Heavenly Father, who orders all things for us” he said. “I shall do my duty still, but it is with a darkened horizon that I again set about it.”

Thomas Carlyle and Michael Faraday had very happy and contented married lives. Carlyle said of his wife: “For forty years she was the true and ever-loving helpmate of her husband, and by act and word unweariedly forwarded him as no one else could.” Faraday said his wife had given him “the clear contentment of a heart at ease.”

Some wives have shown great resourcefulness in helping their husbands. The wife of Grotius insisted on sharing his prison cell when he had been sentenced to life imprisonment for opposing the government. She was permitted to go into town twice a week to get him books to read. The books grew in number until it was necessary to have a large chest to hold them. The sentries checked the chest very carefully and finding nothing but books, allowed it to be carried in and out of the prison. This led Grotius’ wife to plan a method of releasing him. She made him conceal himself in the chest. The chest was carried out of prison and the prisoner escaped into a neighbouring country.

When we read such anecdotes we were struck by the smartness of these wives. But our teenage minds also wondered whether these women were beautiful or not. We came across the line “Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder”. As Edmund Burke said of his wife, “She is not made to be the admiration of everybody, but the happiness of one.”

Everyone wants to get the right wife. But even there something may go wrong. Red Skelton, the actor, made this belated discovery on stage. “I married Miss.Right. I just didn’t know her first name was Always.”

You can’t get over this by saying “What’s in a name”.

J.

A COXCOMB AND A COPYCAT

(Meeting famous writers)




I had a friend who was very fond of cultivating the acquaintance of famous writers and artists. He sometimes brought them to my house, or we met in a club or a hotel.

On one such occasion a well known writer was brought to meet some friends. We noticed that the writer was rather vain about his achievements, and talked as though whatever he said should be the last word. The topic turned to drama, and I made some comments on what drama should be. The writer sneeringly said, “What do you know about drama.” This incensed some young men present who had worked with me in a series of dramatic productions, and they started yelling at the writer and making threatening moves. My friend and I pacified them and made them take their seats. The writer then said, “We are all friends here, OK? Friends, right?” And then he shook hands with the angry young men, and started talking about other things.

A bloated ego

A few months later my friend and I went to Madras on some business. As soon as we booked into a hotel room, my friend rang up the writer who said he would be visiting us sometime that morning.

After about half an hour we heard a commotion downstairs with the voice of the writer raised high. We rushed down to find him having an altercation with the clerk at the reception desk. “This man tried to stop me from coming to your room” the author shouted. “I just asked whom he wanted to see” said the clerk. “That’s my job.” “All right, All right” said my friend. “Come, let’s go up.”

But just as we were about to climb the stairs, the writer rushed back to the clerk yelling, “I am the greatest writer in India now, and you pretend you don’t know me!” “I don’t know you, Sir” said the desk clerk. “How dare you say that?” the author screamed. “The whole country knows me. I am the greatest writer alive.” “I don’t know you, Sir” said the clerk. “I don’t read books.” By then my friend and I managed to pull the great writer away from there. But as we went up the stairs the author continued to bellow, “I am the greatest, you bloody illiterate!” It took us some time to calm him down.

Once he had calmed down the author said, “I think I behaved very badly there.” “Yes” said my friend. The author rose from his chair saying “I think I’ll go and apologize to him.” But we prevented him from going down, since we knew that instead of an apology there may be another shouting match.

Some years later the writer mellowed down, and started moving with people in a more friendly manner.

Prize-winning plagiarism

When I first went to Madras to do my MA course in Madras Christian College, some friends and I made it a point to explore the various areas of the city and get acquainted with them. On one such outing, we were going through a narrow lane when we saw a nameplate bearing the name of a famous author. This person had shared the first prize of Rs.10,000 (a big amount those days) with another for his novel published as a serial in a popular magazine. I had read the novel and so was keen on meeting the writer.

We entered the compound and went up a couple of steps onto a verandah when I saw through the corner of my eye a man sitting on the verandah and writing. As soon as he saw us, he quickly took a magazine from the table and threw it underneath. I managed to catch a quick glimpse of the magazine, which happened to be ‘Collier’s’, a popular American journal, and I noted the cover picture. The writer talked to us for about half an hour, mostly boasting about his great originality and expertise as a novelist.

As soon as we left his house we went straight to the Moore Market where in a second- hand book shop we found the ‘Collier’s’ magazine that the author had tried to hide. It contained five stories. I read them all and then waited.

After a few weeks a popular Tamil magazine carried a story by the prize-winning writer which was a blatant copy of the ‘Collier’s’ story. I wrote to the magazine enclosing a cutting of the original story. But nothing happened.

Perhaps the prize-winning novel too was plagiarized stuff. What a disillusionment !




J.VASANTHAN