Book Review by George Simmers: This is the novel that changed the law. Or, as A.P. Herbert explains in his foreword to the 1955 paperback, it paved the way for his entering parliament and introducing the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1937.
Before 1937, divorce was almost impossible. Only the rich could afford it, and the only ground for a decree was adultery. Desertion, ill-treatment, drunkenness – none of these were considered reasons to break up a marriage. The law seemed obsessed by adultery.
In Herbert’s novel, John Adam and Mary Eve were in a very recognisable situation. They had married young, and after a few years had discovered that they did not really get along together, She in particular had married young, and had now become a well-known actress; he on e other hand became a Civil Servant. Their lifestyles were incompatible.
First edition (1935)
When Mary falls in love with another man, she wants a divorce. Neither John nor Mary has gone to bed with another partner, but the divorce law demanded that one or other of them must pretend to have done so. It was customary for the husband to ‘behave like a gentleman’ and take the blame. by pretending to an adulterous affair, and John agrees to do so. Being an innocent he has no idea how to go about it. More or less by chance he discovers a secretarial agency whose lady typists have a sideline helping with divorces by pretending to be co-respondents. (Did such an agency exist, or is this Herbert’s happy invention? I’d like to know.)
Herbert gets good comic mileage out of the amenable typist’s stay at the hotel with John= playing cards; no ‘funny business’ allowed. (It is a situation that had earlier been farcically explored by Somerset Maugham in his play Home and Beauty (1919).) .
This is a novel where good intentions always lead to poor outcomes, and John’s generosity in tipping the chambermaid (the essential witness to their supposed adultery) makes her so well-disposed to him that she mistakes the situation entirely. She doesn’t want to give evidence that would put him in a bad light, and so when called to the divorce court as a witness, does not want to get him into trouble, so pretends she can’t identify him. Thanks to the chambermaid’s inappropriate kindness, the divorce does not go through.
After a while they try again. This time the pretend adultery is more successful, though no less excruciating. Mary gets a decree nisi, a temporary divorce that will not become absolute for six months, and is dependent on her good behavior. Unfortunately a spiteful authoress (whose play Mary had rejected) writes an anonymous letter to the divorce court, claiming that Eve had also committed adultery. By the law of the time, if both parties were adulterers, the divorce would not be granted. The King’s Proctor, the official in charge of such things, decides that he should investigate; Mary has to admit that she had spent the night with her friend – so no divorce.
Mary decides that so far they have tried to get a divorce by telling lies. She decides to tell the truth, putting herself at the mercy of the court by admitting her own adultery, and asking for the clemency of the court. She admits the one previous case of adultery, but claims that this was a single occasion it should not count against her.
Since Mary is a celebrated actress, the King’s Proctor feels that this is a delicate case. A private detective is set on Mary, following her on tour, to make sure that she is keeping to her vow of chastity. The detective, a ridiculously diligent character, spies on her, and absurd things happen in the hotel where she and her boyfriend are both staying (in separate rooms). Everything they do to make themselves look innocent makes them look guilty. The book ends rather grimly Eve’s attempt to ask for the court’s discretion fails (partly because a boil on his bottom has put the judge in a bad mood). The pair are still undivorced. Mary and her boyfriend will live in sin (though he has had to resign from his job at the ultra-puritanical BBC). John is in love with a woman – but she is a schoolmistress, so cannot afford to be unrespectable. They part, and on the final page of the book, John, in a state of irony, picks up a prostitute. This is the only sexual option that the moralistic law has left open to him.
The book is very much a novel with a purpose, and contains a lot of legal explaining, but A.P. Herbert (a star writer of Punch) has a clever comic touch, and the story is packed with amusing characters and situations, so that it works as very enjoyable entertainment, as well as reform propaganda.
The point made throughout is that the law, fixated as it was on adultery, forces people to be dishonest, and to lie. By 1937 Herbert had become an M.P.; he introduced the Act. He faced the opposition of moralists and Bishops, who argued that there should be no dilution of the sanctity of marriage. (In the novel, Herbert had dodged the religious issue by having John and Mary’s marriage a Registry Office one, so God was kept out of it.) It was partly because of what this best-selling novel had done to make the public think about the issue that limited reform of the divorce laws happened.
My edition of the novel is a 1955 Penguin. A.P. Herbert’s foreword says:
I do not claim that the walls of Jericho fell down because of he book; I cannot remember that it was ever mentioned in debate; but I think it had softened the climate of public opinion in which members of Parliament have their being, and so made it easier for many to support, or accept, a reform which had always been considered politically perilous.
This1955 edition was published when A.P. Herbert, no longer an M.P., was campaigning for what would become the 1957 reform of the Matrimonial Causes Rules, which made more logical and simplified divorce procedures, going further than his 1937 Act had allowed. The Bishops were still against it.
