Those first couple of years we used to have the most incredible arguments. Proper plate-smashing, snarling, spitting, cat-and-dog sessions. Like Liz Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. For some reason Friday nights used to be our preferred evening for a bit of a dust-up. We’d spend an hour or two loading ourselves up with booze, then off we’d bloody well go.
Of course, I can’t for the life of me now remember what it was that so exercised us. Quite possibly just the uncontainable rage of two people suddenly confronted with the fact that this was it. This spouse, with their infuriating little habits and boundless ignorance. God, no! we must’ve been thinking. Not fifty years of this. Let me out!!
After two or three years our scraps died down a little. I’d like to say that we learned how to properly appreciate one another, but it’s just as likely we simply resigned ourselves to our miserable lot. We would still have the odd set-to now and again, just to keep our hand in, but we tended not to go in for so much of the histrionics – the whole yanking-down of curtains/upending of tables/etc. Why bother, when a couple of choice words or a well-timed grunt could do just as much damage? And by then we weren’t necessarily trying to provoke another round of screaming and shouting. All we wanted was to gently rake over the coals of deep despair.
If, five years into a marriage, you still don’t know how to get under the skin of your spouse – how to plug straight into one’s loved one’s battery of insecurities – then you really haven’t been paying attention. Similarly, when you’re on the receiving end, you learn soon enough how to tell real rage from rage’s impersonation. Real tears from the am-dram equivalent.
By the time we celebrated our tenth anniversary we barely fought at all. And I have to say I rather missed it. I missed caring that much, either way.
Speaking of Richard Burton, they had some idiot on the radio the other day being supremely dismissive about him. I can’t remember who he was. Some thrusting young critic, I imagine. But it rather struck me how it’s apparently quite acceptable these days to be perfectly pissy about Burton’s films and performances, which rather depressed me. I mean, did you have to be around at the time to appreciate the man’s talent? If you watch those films now, out of context, are they completely meaningless?
There’s no doubting that when you see a film with Burton in it you know pretty much what you’re going to get. But that’s why people bought their tickets. He had that ticking internal mechanism which meant you couldn’t take your eyes off him. James Mason was the same. You never hear people singing the praises of him either these days. And it makes me feel dreadfully old to be sticking up for actors who, not that long ago, were generally considered to be gods.
I have a cassette of Burton reading Under Milk Wood at home somewhere. I should’ve brought it with me. I never was that big a fan of Thomas’s poetry – all that maudlin, sub-Yeatsian babble rather gets on my nerves. But I do like some of his prose. And Under Milk Wood definitely works, in its own weird way. Thomas and Caitlin were another pair of proper scrappers. I once read someone’s account of visiting them out in the sticks. And how at dinner, after a couple of drinks, Thomas started picking on Caitlin, and she started having a go back, until finally the two of them dragged each other off to the kitchen and proceeded to knock seven bells out of one another. Caitlin finally emerged, triumphant, and limped back over to the table, pinning her hair in place, and said to their guest, ‘Well, thanks very much for coming to the aid of a lady.’ A minute or two later Thomas reappears, with a split lip and a black eye, and carries on where he’d left off. No doubt telling everyone what a genius he was.