Ah, you will be saying, is there a new Leonard Cohen album out?
No, you are heavily mistaken. I found this sentence last week opening a riveting little volume, called Don'ts For Wives. Seventy-three tiny pages, a primer of worldly wisdom that all husbands should have tattooed into their worthless chests.
Blanche Ebbutt wrote this book in 1913, and the facsimile edition I have is its ninth printing.
Indeed, the slightly deranged contributor who furnished Wikipedia with Ebbutt information said the sentiments herein read as pertinently today, nearly 100 years later, as they did then..
Is it pertinent in 2012?
I'll say. Boy, look no further than this finger-wagger : "Don't let your husband sharpen lead pencils all over your drawing-room carpet. He will be none the happier for it, and the carpet will suffer, as will the maid's temper. It is mere thoughtlessness, a little instruction will induce him towards the hearth or the waste-paper basket. Husbands are only grown-up children in such matters."
How many divorces have resulted from indiscriminate lead-pencil-sharpening in the drawing-room?
I know of seven.
You out there probably know of many more.
Food. Crucial. Food is the only branch growing out of the marriage cliff a wife can cling to as she hurtles towards the rejection valley below.
"Feed the brute well, much depends on the state of his digestion."
So true, and so often forgotten by wives.
Blanche goes further - "Don't talk to your husband about anything of a worrying nature until he has finished his evening meal."
How often have husbands been so interjected whilst scoffing their sausages and tomato sauce?
Goodness gracious, I get husbands coming to me every day with this one.
But beware foolish feeding.
"Two or even three meat meals a day tend to make the world look very black to the middle-aged.
"The over-flowing teapot is as bad."
I drink tea all day long, but I am a husband not a wife. Please don't let tea be the thing that makes the world go black.
Blanche also uses food when slipping into metaphor, which she does all the time. On the oft-talked-about topic of wives needing to shore themselves up intellectually to keep the marriage ticking its tock, she begs the wife not to vegetate as she grows older, especially if she lives in the country.
"Some women are like cows, but there is really no need to stagnate."
I'm willing to bet serious money that Hillary Clinton has demanded this line goes on her gravestone.
My wife has mentioned from time to time, "I like a good, stone-faced three-day silent sulk".
She says this as if it is a bad thing. Pfft. All men born under Cancer The Crab sulk like tuataras. Blanche deals briefly with wives sulking.
"Don't sulk with your husband, a sulky wife is as bad as a termagant".
Oh, I wish my wife would sulk. I would cut off three toes if I could call her a termagant.
Mrs Ebbutt - she MUST be a Mrs - is not as perfect as all the above suggests; she occasionally gets a little mixed up.
"Don't keep the house so tidy that your husband is afraid to leave a newspaper lying about . Few men have such a sense of order as most women."
And yet later in the book - "Don't have a spring-clean any oftener than your special nature renders it absolutely necessary. Men hate to find a house in disorder."
Maybe the wife should leave the house to the maid.
And finally, the marriage-killer, other women. Blanche implores wives not be jealous, to let their husbands see other women so their marital compliments will have a comparative factual basis. But wives must never flirt with other men.
"It is like playing with tigers and edged tools and volcanoes all at once."
Blanche Ebbutt only wrote one other book. Don'ts For Husbands.
I am searching for it everywhere.
- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
