Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1927-03-14
SPEAKING OF DIVORCE
n Authorized Intervene with FANNIE HURST Dromott
BY ZOE BECKLEY.

IS LII this talk" says Fannie
n Hurst, looking more beautiful
than ever in a red silk smock against
a background of typewriter and lit
tered desk, about whether divorce is
a curse or a blessing, whether we
should make marriage harder to en-
ter and easier to escape from, or
which is right, the Catholic idea or
the Jewish idea or the Protestant idea
or the Oriental idea--all this talk, /
say. is beside the mark.
THE matter is with marriage it
self. AS it exists today 1t is a sag
ging, leaky, ramshackle old structure
which we keep on trying to patch up
and live in simply because our ances-
tors lived in it and passed it on to us
1--WE suffer all sorts of aches, pains
and miserieS from it. yet we never
dig down and get to the root of the
trouble, which lies in human nature
itself. We leave that out of our cal
culations altogether. We make mar
of the ideal home, the beauty of love
and the blessing of children, while
marriage under modern conditions is
destructive of these very things.
I'VE say the ideal human relation
ship is of man and a woman living
tremendously and usefully together.
Yet everything in our way of living
tends to make it a feat of endurance.
If not an impossibility. All you have
to do is look around at your friends
and acquaintance and to read the
newspapers to see that marriage is
pretty nearly complete failure. If it
were not for two things-will power
and fhypnotism-99 marriages in
100 would end in divorce -
The cure for this situation, Miss
Fannie admits, is some undertaking.
And who is she, she modestly asks, to
attempt to adjust the worlds affairs?
Still. she has adjusted her own so
well that we can't help thinking she'd
make a good marital engineer for
quite a portion of humanity.
y \ 4
It was Fannie Hurst, you remem-
Der, who startled us all some nine
years back by casually mentioning
that she had married, but would no
more think of living in the same home
as her husband than she would comb
her haid in public or sleep on the door
step.
And so Fannie Hurst, novelist and
playwright, and Jacques Danielson,
musician, have gone quietly on being
happy busy, interested. free, indie
pendent and entirely enviable for all
these years, and appear to be going
right on like that to the end Of the
chapter.
because l have found a plan that
works for me-" continues the author
of "Lummox, "Stardust." "Humor-
esque." "Mannequin" and Heaven
knows how many other novels, stories
and plays, st doesn't mean it will
work for everybody. But it certainly
averts some Of the biological difficult
ties that beset the conventional mar
riage.'
Right here we stopped studying the
cameo outline of Miss Hurst'S nose
against the dark paneling of her
workroom and asked what biological
difflculties" meant. She plopped back
on the divan with a bit of hopeless
gesture, but tackled the job.
well, one of them is the shortness
of love life Most biologists agree
that the average is five years.
After that sex becomes more or
less subordinate to other interests.
Love turns into a sort of fondness.
The thrill langu4shes. and unless
something else is substituted-some
interest, some intellectual or emo
tional bond--the marriage fails.
Under favorable conditions love
life would be longer. But under mod
ern conditions, where we huddle to-
gether in tiny apartments. or strain
too hard to keep up with the rush
of things, or have too many chill
dren, or poverty and sickness TO
fight, it's lucky II our love life
lasts that long.
"Yet those who oppose divorce
won't take account OF this. They
won't face any of the biological
facts. They want us to go on liv-
ing by a code that was outworn when
women ceased being slaves and were
discovered to have brains and capac-
tiles equal to mems.
We suggested that women who