Review: Reflections of a Beginning Husband

Reflections of a Beginning Husband by Edward Sandford Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Reflections" is very much what this is. It's fiction, not the author's own story (he'd been married for a good many years by the time it came out, and while he and the narrator were both lawyers, the author started out as a writer and editor and became a lawyer later on). But the proportion of reflection to events is extremely high, so it's not a typical novel with a plot, more a slice-of-life book with a lot of musing.

If the musing hadn't been interesting, it would therefore have failed badly, but I did find it interesting. The setup is that the narrator, Peregrine Jesup, is in his early years of working as a lawyer, and isn't making much money, but convinces his beloved Cordelia French, the daughter of a wealthy man, to marry him anyway rather than waiting until he can keep her in the style to which she's accustomed. She's amenable, and they get on fine in a small apartment with simple food and not as much socialising as they have been used to. His parents are also well off, and both sets of parents approve of the match and are generally supportive, as are others like an older family friend who eventually takes Jesup into partnership at the end of the book. Meanwhile, the couple have a child.

That's pretty much it for events. The reflection on those events covers a number of topics. There's the relationship between men and women; Peregrine enjoys talking with Cordelia and respects her intelligence, and they have an alliance, not the War of the Sexes that's so common in American humour. There's the question of education for women. There's the question of women's suffrage, which had been around for a while (it's 1907) and would not be resolved in the US at a national level until 1920; Peregrine and Cordelia are dubious about how much difference it will really make to politics, and don't immediately buy the "natural justice" argument for it either, though they're far from settled in their minds. There's politics in general, in which Peregrine thinks he's a conservative, but not the kind that wants others to be ground under his heel; he's in favour of prosperity being more widely distributed, and is uncomfortable with the fact that, as a lawyer, he mostly works for wealthy people and their interests.

Prosperity, and what it means, is another theme (one that I'm interested in), and different attitudes to money - how much is enough, progress being driven by people wanting more of what it can buy, and the higher importance of non-material values. Peregrine and Cordelia are churchgoers, I think Methodists, though it's never made completely clear, and while it isn't a Christian book as such, Christian ideas do come in at various points.

I've given it my "comedy" tag, but it's more "humour" than "comedy," and even then pretty light. It's mainly the good-hearted tone and the wry observations about humanity that give it that feel.

It's very quotable, and I highlighted a lot of passages. I'll restrict myself to one:

"As things are, the country is run, after a fashion. The wheels do turn, and production and distribution are accomplished. To be sure, the wheels screech more or less, and the production is pretty wasteful compared with what the professional economists say it might be, and the stream of distribution runs so lumpy that it makes you laugh; but a fair proportion of the Lord’s will seems to be done, and hopeful people calculate that the proportion is increasing, though you might not always think so to read the progressive periodicals."

All of which is still true today.

While, naturally, I didn't agree with everything the author said in his reflections, he held his conclusions lightly and didn't insist on anything dogmatically, and it was interesting to get a window into the mind of one person (who represented, more or less, others of his type) at a historical moment when change was already rapid and the First World War hadn't yet hardened people.

Something I notice in a lot of the contemporary books I read is that the people who write them don't have much of a grasp on the idea that different times and places have held different ideas from theirs without being completely evil and wrong, and I wish more of them would read books like this and expand their perspectives. It's cozy and optimistic in tone, and for me the biggest fault is that it stops abruptly and without warning after the chapter in which Peregrine is given his partnership. Perhaps the author felt that this change was large enough, and disconnected enough from the domestic focus that he'd mostly been keeping, that it made a natural stopping place.

I probably mainly enjoyed it because it muses on topics that interest me too, but it's warm and easy-going and insightful, and if you don't mind it having very little plot per thousand words and find the thoughts of someone in 1907 worth thinking about, I recommend it to you.

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