Has anyone the area code for Stockholm? I need to call the Nobel Prize Committee, fast. I’ve got an idea. It’s time they added a new prize — one that, in my view, ought to have been instituted from the beginning of the Nobel Prizes in 1901.
It’s always been a bit capricious, the way the Nobel Prizes are set up. Prizes for physics and chemistry, for example, but not for mathematics, on which so many advances in physics and chemistry absolutely depend. Why a Nobel Prize in literature but none in music or visual art? Why a Nobel at all in economics, that most contentious and tendentious of subjects? And speaking of contentious and tendentious, what about the Nobel Peace Prize? When a friend of mine once asked Tom Lehrer why he no longer wrote brilliant comic songs, Lehrer told him that, ever since Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Prize, nothing seemed funny anymore.
The new prize I would like to see instituted by the Nobel Committee is one for marriage. As the Peace Prize is meant to encourage peace-making in a war-ridden world, so might the Nobel Prize for Marriage do likewise for matrimony, an institution that, all the statistics on divorce make plain, is itself in great peril. A Nobel Prize for Marriage would have, as they say in advertising, a fine reinforcing effect.
As for the grounds on which the prize ought to be given, these, it seems to me, are fairly self-evident. The prize ought to be given for sticking it out, for perseverance, for endurance, for — to capture it in a single, if hyphenated, word — long-suffering. (Not that, in marriage, short-suffering is any picnic. Consider the first five of the six wives of Henry VIII, short-sufferers all.)
To launch the Nobel for marriage, it might be best to begin by giving out a few prizes posthumously, to great long-suffering husbands and wives of the past. Countess Tolstoy, surely, ought to be an early winner, having had to listen to all the count’s utopian guff, to make sure that he didn’t give away the copyrights to Anna Karenina and War and Peace, to compose so-called fair copies of his many novels and religious tracts, and then, at the very end, to be put to the humiliation of his publicly deserting her in the hope of dying alone.
What about Prince Albert, whose lot could not have been an easy one? Victoria, true enough, wrote gushily in her diary about her German husband, especially after his death. But I keep thinking of that famous phrase of hers, “We are not amused!” Difficult to imagine she never used it on him. Did she ever use it to devastating effect, one wonders, in the bedroom? Put the prince consort down as a Nobel contender. Then there is the marriage of the Carlyles, Thomas and Jane, of whom Tennyson said, “By any other arrangement, four people would have been unhappy instead of two.”
Does Leonard Woolf qualify? Virginia Woolf, in her snobbery, was not above remarking on her husband’s Jewishness, establishing her social superiority over him. With the most fragile of egos, she required vast attention, solicitation, endless reassurance, all of which Leonard supplied. She was, in the end, of course insane. Did Leonard know this to begin with? And, knowing it, oughtn’t he, of all people, to have been afraid of Virginia Woolf? The man has to be reckoned a candidate for the prize.
I always thought that Lionel Trilling deserved a Nobel for marriage. Diana Trilling, his wife, combined neuroses with aggression. And now it turns out that we can add resentment to the mix. In her memoirs, all written after Lionel’s death, Diana portrayed her husband as a depressive, a drinker, a snob, a gloom-spreader of the highest power. In the course of doing so, she would seem to have made herself out as deserving of a Nobel for marriage. But my sense is that it was Lionel and not Diana who deserved the prize.
As for the other Diana, the late princess, ought she or her husband to be up for a Nobel? Diana had Camilla and that frightful mishpacha, the Windsors, to deal with — no small packet of aggravation there. Charlie, though, took on himself all the problems attendant upon acquiring a younger, somewhat air-headed wife, with eating disorders, wretched taste in men, and the rest. It was a marriage made in hell, which is always rich soil for the Nobel Prize for Marriage, and therefore a tough call.
But a piece of cake, if not exactly wedding cake, next to our own first couple. Everyone now knows what Hillary has had to put up with in Bill. Not yet known is what Bill has had to put up with from Hillary, but, even discounting the charmless speculations of Dick Morris (whose own wife, surely, is another, a very strong, candidate for a prize), it cannot be minor. No, in the First Couple we have the possibility for the first shared prize: two people, each put on the earth to make the other suffer, lengthily and intensely. Impressive stuff.
Let’s hear it for our laureates.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
