D-I-V-O-R-C-E or, John Milton on Splitsville

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1643, poet John Milton, who later wrote Paradise Lost, anonymously published The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the first of four tracts he wrote 1643-1645 in support of divorce against Canon law, which he believed was contrary to the true meaning of Scripture and the Gospel. If a marriage was not working it was to the good of both sexes for it to be dissolved. His argument was that unsuitable unions of couples ‘chained unnaturally together’ should be broken on the grounds of incompatibility, a radical idea in its time. It shocked his contemporaries.

Divorce in 17th century England was against the law. You married for life, a holy bond that only God could break by calling one of the parties home. If the union was contentious it was a marriage to the death.

Milton had a stake in the issue.  In 1642, at age thirty-three, he married  a seventeen year old girl, Mary Powell. She soon deserted him to return to her parents. Divorce was impossible, divorce and remarriage doubly so. You could legally separate but never dissolve the union. The only out was a church annulment but that involved admitting that the marriage was never consummated,  the husband was impotent, or the wife frigid, each a major public embarrassment. He argued that neither ecclesiastic or civil powers held authority in matters of marriage and divorce; it was a a strictly private affair.

John Milton.

But only for the man. Milton had no interest in granting women the power to divorce their husbands. Yet his definition of marriage as something more than a union for procreation (or remedy against fornication) was wholly modern if one-sided: "the apt and cheerful conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the evils of solitary life."

An unhappy couple, "mistak’n in their dispositions through any error, concealment, or misadventure"  was doomed to a "spight of antipathy to fadge together, and combine as they may to their unspeakable wearisomnes and despaire of all sociable delight." This violated  his belief in marriage as mutual companionship.

The 1643 first edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce sold out almost immediately; controversy then and now tends to promote sales. Attempts were made to ban the tract.  A second edition was issued in 1644, greatly enlarged by almost half and including a new Preface "To the Parliament of England with the Assembly." Two more editions appeared in 1645, reprints of the 1644 issue, one with an errata page, the other, possibly unauthorized, without one. The other three of Milton's Divorce tracts are The Judgment of Martin Bucer, Tetrachordon, and Colasterion. John Milton's model for the ideal marriage is manifest in the relationship between Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost (1667).

Gustave Doré, Adam and Eve in the Garden, Paradise Lost (1866).

In 1964, as the first kid on my block to come from what was then still quaintly called a "broken home," I was in the vanguard, a young, lone pioneer on the  frontier when the Greatest Generation decided things weren't so great and made a strategic retreat from the domestic battlefield to a separate peace. It was in the next year, 1965, that the divorce rate in the U.S. began its march toward doubling by 1975; I was an anxious point-man on recon before hostilities broke-out on a large scale.

Holy matrimony, Batman! In those days,  New York State, as so many others, made divorce a legal ordeal as wrenching as its emotional anguish. But there was an exotic, legit alternative. You could visit  pre-drug cartel Juarez in sunny Mexico, hang around for a few hours, have lunch. see the sights, pay a nominal court fee, and be granted a that's-all-there-is-to-it divorcio al vapor - evaporated nuptials. 

My mother was necessarily one such divorce tourist. I'm not sure whether it occurred during Mexico's Dia de los Muertos holiday but afterward my parents' marriage was officially dead and no one was celebrating except me. Consumed with guilt for bearing such a betraying sentiment (and for so much more), I  beat myself up like a human piñata for years afterward. And, in what became a family tradition, my own marriage ended in divorce, as did my sister's. For me, divorce was a rite of passage ceremony, an adult bar mizvah for the damned. When I walked out the door I dropped off a cliff.

Now, everybody's doing it; so what else is new? But forty-eight years ago my sister and I earned purple hearts for injuries incurred in the cross-fire, wounds that, for me, never bled until much later when the  effects of my parents' divorce finally spilled. When the  school psychologist - who I was sent to because I was truant for nearly three months straight - asked how I thought my parents' split affected me, I insouciantly replied, "not at all," the response of a kid who'd battened-down the hatches and hunkered-in until the storm passed but it never did.

As crippling as its aftermath was had my parents not split-up my outcome would have been so much worse before it got so much better. It might not have gotten better at all. I'm thankful to John Milton for his efforts at reformation.

In 1968, country-western diva Tammy Wynette spelled out what was still the broken love that dare not speak its name, below introduced by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, a married couple that only a six-shooter could separate but was never drawn and fired for the sake of their child, Trigger, who they stuffed as a keepsake after his death.

And now, as God said in Paradise Lost when He expelled Adam and Eve from  Eden, "Happy Trails!"*


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M[ILTON], J[ohn].  The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce; restor'd to the good of both SEXES, from the bondage of CANON LAW, and other mistakes, to the true meaning of Scripture in the LAW and GOSPEL compar'd: wherein also are set down the bad consequences of abolishing or condemning of Sin, that which the law of God allowes, and Christ abolisht not: now the second time revis'd and much augmented in two books: to the Parliament of England with the Assembly. London: Imprinted in the Year 1645.

Forth edition. Small quarto. [8], 72 pp, with the usual mispagination to pp. 69-78 in sheet G. Lackng errata.

Wing M2110. Coleridge, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Milton Collection in the Alexander Turnbull Library 17. Parker, Milton: A Biography, pp. 890-891.

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* Paradise Lost by John Milton. Newly Revised for a Popular Audience by T. Basil Leeves. Frostbite Falls: Wottsamatta U Press, 1989.
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Image of 1645 edition courtesy of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, currently offering this title, with our thanks.

Image of 1643 first edition courtesy of Rutgers University, with our appreciation.

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Death To The Fascist Insect!

By Stephen J. Gertz

It's Death To The Fascist Insect That Preys Upon The Life Of The People Day at Booktryst. On this day thirty-eight years ago, Patty Hearst was on the lam with the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).

She had, on April  3, 1974, announced that she was now one of them and had adopted the pseudonym "Tania." Now she was in prep for her debut, on April 15, as an urban guerilla bank robber. Death To The Fascist Insect Blah, Blah, Blah, was the SLA's mission statement, radical politics at its buggiest.

In its dehumanization and abstraction of the individual it's a line, however, that Joseph Goebbels would have been proud to call his own, except, of course, for the anti-Fascist part. No little irony there. No matter  the politics,  the wider the division the more they all begin to look, sound, and behave alike until you reach, as here, the absurdum ad reductio, a Fascist anti-Fascist motto that, out of context, reads as a parody of political propaganda. But no laughing matter. When  radical extremists act out individuals tend to die.

The Secularist's Adopted Grandfather
N.p., n.d. [ c. late 19th century].
Handbill with unattributed woodcut.
 
Flanking the woodcut is text reading,
"Secularists, are you proud of your Grandfather?"
and " We should respect our Parentage - Dr. Darwin."
A previous owner has inscribed the words,
"Orang Outang - horrid beast - I am not like you in the least."

And so on this day we celebrate polarization in American politics. It's poisoning our political landscape but makes for entertaining, if somewhat frightening, reading when radicals of both the Right and Left come out to play, commit themselves to their cause in print, and wreak havoc on rational discourse. The fright aspect is heightened when one considers that radical seems to have  become the new mainstream and moderate the new extreme. 

International Workmen's Association. North American
Section, Pacific Coast Division, Organizer's Circular.
[San Francisco]: International Workmen's Association, [c. 1881].

Buried in the text is an offer to members of a "scientific and
comprehensive course of chemistry," i.e. explosives training.

Coincidentally. Lorne Bair, the social and political history rare literature specialist, has just issued a new catalog, delightfully devoted, as usual, to the often strident and out there voices of yesteryear, reminding us that extreme political expression has always been a part of the American character, an All-Terrain Vehicle cycling though the American psychic velodrome. Now, however, the stakes are higher, and we need to get the poles back on the true American path, a bicycle built for two heading in one direction. Good luck and God help us all.

BOYCOTT Campbell's Cream of Exploitation Soup -
In Support of Mid-Western Farm Workers.
Toledo: FLOC [Farm Labor Organizing Committee], c. 1980s.

"Mmmm, Mmmm, [not so] Good."

When Campbell's Soup refused to negotiate with Ohio
farmworkers, a brilliant functionary of FLOC appropriated
Andy Warhol's classic pop image and created a propaganda
poster that sharply crystallized their message without
inflammatory slogans or wild-eyed declarations of evil.
The boycott worked. In 1986, Campbell's finally sat down
and entered into a collective bargaining agreement.

FAGAN, Myron C. Moscow Over Hollywood.
Los Angeles: R.C. Cary, 1948.

Josef Stalin looms over Tinseltown in this, the foundation
document of the Hollywood Blacklist, preceding the notorious
Red Channels by two years.

Note the cinematic chorus line, presumably singing and
dancing their hearts out during a performance of
The International while a sinister director looks on with
satanic satisfaction.

Protection To American Labor and American Industries.
New York: Ballin & Berman, 1888. Silk bandana.

Republican souvenir of the 1888 election, based upon
the campaign's Protection v. Free Trade issue.

Department of Strange Political Metamorphoses:
In 1888, the Republican Party was anti-Free Trade and pro-Labor.
Their Presidential candidate, Benjamin Harrison, won the election.

The Most Exciting Story of the Century Will Be Printed
in the Utica Saturday Globe.
Utica: Utica Saturday Globe, 1889.

The post-Civil War period saw more than one brand
of white-hooded racist. Here, the Utica, NY Globe advertises
a series of exposés based upon an undercover agent's
infiltration of The White Caps, a vigilante group based in
southern Indiana and contiguous counties in Kentucky and
Ohio. By 1900, the White Caps had disbanded or had been
hijacked by local Ku Klux Klan chapters, which, apparently,
believed that their territory wasn't big enough for the both of them. 
How can you tell them apart?

Is There a Pink Fringe in the Methodist Church?
If so, what shall we do about it?
Houston: The Committee For the Preservation of Methodism, 1951.

Exposé of the Methodist Federation for Social Action,
a faith-based organization following the precepts of
Jesus Christ, written by Methodist followers who
had forgotten them in the midst of paranoia.

WHARTON, Charles S. The House of Whispering Hate.
Chicago: Madelaine Mendelsohn, 1932. A presentation copy.

If only the current U.S. House of Representatives
kept their snarls at a whisper.

Actually, a memoir of three years imprisonment at Leavenworth.
But it might just as well been a memoir of three years imprisonment
in Congress, for most of us a fate worse than death.

491 years ago, on April 19, 1521, Martin Luther stood before the Diet of Worms and proclaimed in defense of his convictions, "Here I stand. I can do no other. May God help me. Amen." It is Western Civilization's preeminent statement on individual liberty, conscience, and thought.

Now, however, that eloquent declaration has become debased coin, its currency counterfeit in a culture that has gone mad with self-interest. Martin Luther has transmogrified into Sammy Davis singing I've Got To Be Me (Whether I'm Right. Whether I'm Wrong. What Else Can I Be But Who I Am)," the national conversation deep in schlock-infested waters, the  cacophony of political savagery the diet of worms in the U.S. Diet, leaving the rest of us undernourished.

It's the result of political movements that assert, as Sammy did in that anthem of juvenile yearning, "I won't settle down. I won't settle for less, as long as there's a chance I can have it all."

Calling Dr. Spock...

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All images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, Manuscripts & Ephemera, with our thanks.
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The Printer (1568)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Der Buchdrucker (The Printer).
From the "Ständebuch" (Book of Trades).
Frankfurt am Main, 1568.

Commonly known as the Ständebuch (Book of Trades), this, the first Latin edition of Panoplia, contains 132 woodcuts by Jost Amman, eighteen more than the first German edition of the same year.

The work is as much a social history as anything else. Social status plays a role but the primary emphasis is in praise of the handwork of the artisan class.

"In gathering, amending and amplifying a diffuse conglomeration of images Amman established a completely objective mode of picturing craft genre, free of contextual purpose other than the work itself. This is in marked contrast to both earlier religious and secular uses of genre scenes, and to contemporary low-life scenes, which, despite their probable antique origins, remained grotesque mimics of a limited range of social behavior. Amman’s pictures were intended as illustration for a curious public, as an informative record of local customs, and as a visual adjunct to a text which primarily encouraged the Protestant work ethic. They were not caricatures or vulgarizations, but semi-scientific documentation combining several old and serious methods of viewing daily labor. They thus isolated the work scene as autonomous branch of art, and gave it a new purpose as an independent subject. They act as a turning point between the religious genre of Peter Aertsen, or the low-life scenes of the Flemish and Italian satiric painters and popular printmakers, and the sober, realistic genre painting of the Carracci and their followers" (Rifkin, B.A. Introduction to the Dover Edition, New York, 1973, p. xxxix).

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SCHOPPER, Hartmann (1542-1595) and Jost Amman (1539-1591). Panoplia. Omnium illiberalium mechanicarum aut sedentariarum artium genera continens. Frankfort  am Main: (George Rab for Sigmund Feyerabend), 1568.

First edition in Latin. Octavo. 148 unnumbered leaves 132 woodcuts.

Adams S-703. Colas I, p. 35. Becker 13b.

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