THE COMMON ROUND

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22021, 2 August 1933, Page 2

THE COMMON ROUND

By Wayfarer.

"Odskilderkins," said Panurge, "it seems that we are within two Fingers' breadth of Damnation. Is this one of the nine Comforts of Matrimony? " Francois Rabelais. It is a reflection which derives pertinence from the casual investigation entered upon at the instance of a correspondent .who writes: Dear "Wayfarer,"—You missed an opportunity for comment, surely, when you overlooked a telegram in the papers two weeks ago reporting divorce proceedings in the north where the grounds (wife's) were that her husband insisted on keeping a razor under the pillow. It seems that a divorce is becoming as easy to obtain in New Zealand as in the 1 United States, land of the free and easy and the speakeasy. What do you think yourself?—l am, etc., Fidelity. Thus provoked, we have thought quite a lot in a purely abstract way, approaching the subject, need we add, with our usual seriousness, as a sociological problem. Our findings are here revealed in no unseemly spirit of levity. Add to the method of cutting the matrimonial bond with a razor, which certainly commends itself as clean, quick, and certain, another enlightened divorce technique as revealed in a message from Auckland last February. A justice of the peace was the petitioner. In evidence he said he was married in Lancashire in 1888. There had been much trouble because of his wife's habit of taking the cat to bed with her. More than once it had kittens in the bed. The wife, in evidence, admitted that ehe let the cat sleep in the bed, but said her husband had not complained. The cat had kittens in the bed once or twice. Well, we all have our prejudices, and it would be difficult to convince a gatophobe that a feline of pronounced philoprogenitive tendencies (note how deftly we are raising this topic above mere gossip, imparting to it a coldly scientific scrutiny!) is a desirable sleeping partner. But wo must confess we are shocked to hear of a J.P. who is unable to preserve the peace in his own home. More recently the telegraph wires hummed with reports of the misapplied enthusiasm for acrobatics of a Gisborne athlete, who threw his hopes of matrimonial bliss through the ropes. Perpend:— ... a fragile girl, aged 19, told a remarkable story of domestic infelicity. Her husband is an amateur wrestler, and according to complainant's counsel cruelty commenced on Christmas Day , . . the defendant practising upon her holds he had learned in the art of wrestling. On one occasion he had given her an aeroplane spin, and recently after boxing with her he had picked her up and thrown her into a bath full of water. This is what comes of mixing pleasure with matrimony. The wise husband knows that, however eager he may be to convince his wife of his prowess on the links, in the rinks, or over - k the fences, the only efficacious way is not by physical demonstration but a transaction at the milliner's—after that he can laud himself to his heart's content and be sure of an audience. . . .

It is not, however, always the party with experience, of the esoteric arts — wrestling, athletics, shove ha'penny, and the rest —who breaks up the home. Not long ago the daughter of a famous American conjurer, who must have seen things thrown about all her life, sued for divorce in Pittsburgh. Her plaint against her husband was that . . . because she refused his backgammon advice, he hurled backgammon board, glasses, and a ginger ale bottle, and tore off her clothes before guests. ... If defendant's intention had been to prove that his proetidigitatorial skill was not inferior to that of his distinguished father-in-law (and in such cases we always like to put a pleasant interpretation on the facts \ he seems to have chosen an unfortunate manner of commenciner. The best conjurers, we believe, start modestly with a whirling ham-bone, say, and a couple of hardboiled eggs. In no circumstances should they attempt to juggle with heavy objects in public in the early stages of their career.

While most wives have no objection to physical demonstrations by the stronger sex,, if properly chosen-rcarry-ing the coal in from the back yard, for instance; moving the piano out of the alcove all over the room and then back again; fighting with big men because the little wife eays they insulted her, and so on—they have a curious prejudice against the logical transference of these displays of strength to their own person, in moments of matrimonial storm. Mr L. A. G. Strong shows us in one of his poems how unreasonable they may be:—■

Have I a wife? Bedaro I have! But we was badly mated: I bit her a great clout one night, And now we're separated. And mornings, going to my work, I meets her on the quay; " Good mornln* to ye, ma'am," says I, . "To Hell with ye! " says she. This is married life as, from" the court reports, we interpret it. If you hit a woman she accuses you of physical cruelty, if you don't she says you are neglecting her, and that constitutes mental cruelty. It is not enough that you should be cruel to be kind, for if you are kind she will accuse you of cruelty anyway.

But we are neglecting our correspondent's question regarding the comparative ease of obtaining a- divorce in New Zealand and the United States. In this country it is necessary to separate for three years, as the usual way preparing for a permanent parting, the other ground being physical infidelity. The law in the United States is not so easily stated, because the States differ in their requirements. But the ingenuous author of " Kiss and Tell" provides a little elucidation of the complicated system:—

Every State has different grounds, except Carolina. There the only way to get rid of a husband is to kill him. In Chicago you have to swear he eocked you in the jaw, while in Reno you can get a divorce if your husband is a back-seat telephone conversationalist. In Jersey you have to desert some old clothes in a furnished room for two years. Mexican divorces take a week, the delay being caused by the bad train service, and there is danger all along the road from the bandits who didn't

pass the bar examination. If any reader suspects 'that we are allowing this serious discussion to drift into the realm of fantasy, let him peruse " Getting a Divorce," a handbook to this popular American recreation written by a woman lawyer. In Carolina—she confirms our previous authority—there are no divorces, and in Maine "spouses are bound indissolubly together in the bonds of mutual infidelity"; according to an lowa decision " profanity bears much more proximately on the impairment of a woman's health than upon that of a man," while 'way down in Tennessee " mere acerbity of temper, occasional reproaches, or rude language on the part of the husband toward the wife . . . do not constitute sufficient ground for divorce."

And, in the interests of research, we take leave to. append one or two specimen cases showing this monumental system in operation. They are from the never-to-be-doubted columns of the newspapers:—

Mr Clifford Matthews, of Springfield, Missouri, has divorced his wife because she nagged him about his cooking. . . . Mrs Tileta Beaty has sued for divorce in Oklahoma City (Oklahoma) on the ground that her husband's fussing and nagging were spoiling her refined temperament. But if we kept on so, this column would be assuming the appearance of the Hollywood Divorce Gazette (if no paper of that title exists, someone should start one), and we have no wish to impinge idle chatter upon the sharpened intellectual faculties of our public.

In any case, Hollywood has a matrimonial agency and a divorce code all its own. Says Miss Estelle Taylor (Dcmpsey that was) : In Hollywood if you go out with your husband you are conspicuous; With another woman's husband you are wicked. With another woman you are unattractive; With a bachelor you are engaged; and if you stop at home you are morbid. What can one do? The answer is, of course, that you can go off to Reno and get a divorce. Not that that ends the trouble, for then you are immediately eligible for the matrimonial stakes again.

So much for the marriage aspect of the case. Let us now consider briefly the method by which, to use American, husbands and wives in Hollywood get that way. Says Miss Bobby Arnst, exwife of one Weissmuller, swimmer-cum-kinema hero:— You take a big kid like that and shove him _ into the company of the sharp-shooting women that you find in Hollywood, and it's like sending your country cousin to a pick-pockete' convention. Give the kid a physique like Johnny's, and it's like throwing a fatted calf into a cage of lions. Those Hollywood beauties are practised. They are as quick to go into action as a fire brigade. They see a man coming up the steps and before he can ring the door bell they have pasted on a pair of " phoney" silken eyelashes, shellacked their eyelids, and stoked up their perfume. . . . They hung upon him and told him .how wonderful he was. He just rolled his eyes once and Hollywood had him. He was putting coconut oil on his hair and straightening his eyebrows before you knew it.

It was bad enough for a man, really, when the lovely Loreleis sat beside the Rhine combing their golden tresses. But what man could prevent himself falling in when they bend chemical science to their adornment and, instead of waiting for their victims, adopt the tactics of a Royal Canadian policeman ?

Hollywood gives us a certain insight into the divorce by intent, but we must turn briefly to decadent Europe for the latest' example of divorce as a fine art —the divorce unconscious. This, it seems to us, is the most effective yet devised, since there can be no question of embarrassing resistance causing irritating delay. Perpend:— A Hungarian woman, suing her husband for alimony, was astonished to hear that she had been divorced several years before. Her husband is a professional hypnotist, and she asserts that he must have put her in a trance and then obtained her signed consent to the divorce. We introduced this subject with a highly classical quotation, and might fittingly, with the saintly odour of Hollywood's perfumed sharpshooters in our mind, conclude with another. Said Mahomet:— Above all things I like perfumes, and above all things I like women, but I like prayer even more.

This way only may safety from the superman be found.