Bring out the meaning of the following proverbs and comment on them in connection with the problems discussed in the unit

1) A good husband makes a good wife.

2) A good wife makes a good husband.

3) All are good lasses, but whence come the bad wives?

4) Beauty lies in lover’s eyes.

5) Extremes meet.

6) Faint heart never won fair lady.

7) Faults are thick where love is thin.

8) Love will creep where it may not go.

9) Love laughs at locksmiths

10) Love lives in cottages as well as in courts.

11) Marriages are made in heaven.

12) No herb will cure love.

Think of a good translation of the following quotations and give your comment on them.

1) Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond (Thomas Love Peacock).

2) Marriage is like life in this – that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses (Robert L. Stevenson).

3) The value of marriage is not that adults produce children – but that children produce adults (Peter De Vries).

4) If happiness were uninterrupted and well-being universal, these things would cease to be happiness and well-being and become merely boredom and daily bread and Daily Mail (A. Huxley).

5) If you fight for yourself, only you can win. When you fight for your marriage, you both win (Paul Persall).

6) It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all (A.L. Tennyson)

7) Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own and another’s spiritual growth (M. Scott Peck).

8) If you wonder where your love went, you forgot that you are the one who makes it (from Reader’s Digest)

9) After the verb to love, to help is the most beautiful verb in the world (Bertha von Suttner).

10) Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of eternal passion. That is just being ‘in love’, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burnt away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other … and when all the pretty blossom has fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two (from Captain Corelli’s Mandoline).

11) Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward in the same direction (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

12) Why can’t a woman be more like a man? (from G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion)

Points for discussion

1) What do you think is the best foundation for marriage? What is the proper way to pick a mate?

2) Speak about marriage of convenience, its pros and cons.

3) What makes marriage a lasting and fulfilling union?

4) A white wedding: Is it still part of modern European culture?

5) Express your point of view on intermarriages.

6) Speak about the role of in-laws in family life.

7) Describe the recent tendencies in marriage and family life and give your own evaluation of them.

8) Speak about the present day status of men and women in marriage, social life and politics.

9) Comment on the main fruits of the Women’s Liberation movement.

Write an essay on one of the following topics.

1) Marriages are made in heaven.

2) Laws of lasting love.

3) Love is the blessing of your life.

4) Love in a cottage: English and Russian vision.

5) Advice to newlyweds.

6) The New Man and the New Lad.

7) The Feminist movement: Is it a blessing or a curse?

UNIT IV

PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIP

GENERATION GAP

JUVENILE DELINQUENCY

Text 1

RICH MAN, POOR MAN

(an extract)

With his German blood, Mary Jordache thought. As Jordache came in from the kitchen, carrying the roast goose on a platter with red cabbage and dumplings. Immigrant. She didn’t remember when she had seen her husband in such a high mood. The surrender of the Third Reich that week had made him jovial and expansive. He had devoured the newspapers, chuckling over the photographs of the German generals signing the papers at Rheims.

Now, on Sunday, it was Rudolph’s seventeenth birthday, and Jordache had decreed a holiday. No other birthday in the family was celebrated by more than a grunt. He had bought Rudolph a fancy fishing rod, God knew how much it cost, and had told Gretchen that she could keep half her salary from now on instead of the usual quarter. He had given Thomas the money for a new sweater to replace the one he said he had lost. If the German army could be brought to surrender every week, life might be tolerable in the home of Axel Jordache. “From now on,” Jordache had said, “we eat Sunday dinner together”. The bloody defeat of his race, it seemed, had given him a sentimental interest in the ties of blood.

So they were all seated at the table, Rudolph self-consciously the focus of the occasion, wearing a collar and tie, and sitting very erect, like a cadet at table at West Point; Gretchen in a lacy, white shirtwaist looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, the whore; and Thomas, with his gambler’s dodgy smile, all neatly washed and combed.

Thomas had changed unaccountably since V-day, too, coming right home from school, studying all evening in his room, and even helping out in the shop for the first time in his life. Their mother permitted herself the first glimmerings of timid hope. Perhaps by some unknown magic, the falling silent of the guns in Europe would make them a normal family.

Mary Jordache’s idea of a normal American family was largely formed by the lectures of the nuns in the orphanage and later on by glances at the advertisements in popular magazines. Normal American families were always well-washed and fragrant and smiled at each other constantly. They showered each other with gifts for Christmas, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and Mother’s Day. They had hale old parents who lived on farms in the country and at least one automobile. The sons called their father sir, the daughters played the piano and told their mother about their dates, and everybody used Listerine. They had breakfast, dinner, and Sunday lunch together and attended the church of their choice, and took holidays at the seashore en masse. The father commuted to business every day in a dark suit and had a great deal of life insurance. None of this was completely formulated in her mind, but it was the misty standard of reference against which she compared her own circumstances.

Both too shy and too snobbish to mix with her own neighbors, the reality of the life of the other families who lived in the town was unknown to her. The rich were out of her reach and the poor were beneath her contempt. By her reckoning, hazy and unsystematic as it was, she, her husband, Thomas, and Gretchen, were not a family in any way that she could accept or that might give her pleasure. Rather they were an abrasive group collected almost at random for a voyage which none of them had chosen and during which the best that could be hoped for was that hostilities could be kept to a minimum.

Rudolph, of course, was excepted.

Axel Jordache put the goose down on the table with satisfaction. He had spent all morning preparing the meal, keeping his wife out of the kitchen, but without the usual insults about her cooking. He carved the bird roughly, but competently and set out huge portions for all, serving the mother first, to her surprise. He had bought two bottles of California Riesling and he filled all their glasses ceremoniously. He raised his glass in a toast. “To my son Rudolph, on his birthday,” he said huskily. “May he justify our hopes and rise to the top and not forget us when he gets there.”

They all drank seriously, although the mother saw Thomas make a little grimace. Perhaps he thought the wine was sour. Jordache did not specify just which top he expected his son to rise to. Specifications were unnecessary. The top existed, a place with boundaries, densities, privileges. When you got there you recognized it and your arrival was greeted with hosannahs and Cadillacs by earlier arrivals.

Rudolph ate the goose delicately. It was a little fatty to his taste and he knew that fact caused pimples. And he ate sparingly of the cabbage. He had a date later in the afternoon with the girl with a blonde pigtail who had kissed him outside Miss Lenaut’s house and he didn’t want to be smelling of cabbage when he met her. He only sipped at his wine. He had decided that he was never going to get drunk in his whole life. He was always going to be in full control of his mind and his body. He had also decided, because of the example of his mother and father, that he was never going to get married.

He had gone back to the house next to Miss Lenaut’s the previous day and loitered obviously across the street from it. Sure enough, after about ten minutes the girl came out wearing blue jeans and a sweater and waved to him. She was just about his age, with bright-blue eyes and the open and friendly smile of someone who has never had anything bad happen to her. They walked down the street together and in half an hour Rudolph felt that he had known her for years. She’d just moved into the neighborhood form Connecticut. Her name was Julie and her father had something to do with Power Company. She had an older brother who was in the Army in France and that was the reason she kissed him that night, to celebrate her brother’s being alive in France with the war over for him. Whatever the reason, Rudolph was glad that she had kissed him, although the memory of that first brush of the lips between strangers made him diffident and awkward for a while.

Julie was crazy about music and liked to sing and thought he played a marvelous trumpet, and he had half promised her that he would get his band to take her along with them to sing with them on their next club date. She liked serious boys, Julie said, and there was no doubt about it, Rudolph was serious. He had already told Gretchen about Julie. He liked to keep saying her name. “Julie, Julie…” Gretchen had merely smiled, being a little bit too patronizingly grown-up to his taste. She had given him a blue-flannel blazer for his birthday.

He knew his mother would be disappointed that he wasn’t going to take her for a walk this afternoon, but the way his father was behaving all of a sudden, the miracle might happen and his father might take her out for a walk himself.

He wished he was as confident about getting to the top as his father and mother were. He was intelligent, but intelligent enough to know that intelligence by itself carried no guarantees along with it. For the kind of success his mother and father expected of him you had to have something special – luck, birth, a gift.

He did not know yet if he was lucky. He certainly could not count upon his birth to launch him on a career and he was doubtful of his gifts. He was a connoisseur of others’ gifts and an explorer of his own. Ralph Stevens, a boy in his class, could hardly make a B average overall, but he was a genius in mathematics and was doing problems in calculus and physics for fun while his classmates were laboring over elementary algebra. Ralph Stevens had a gift which directed his life like a magnet. He knew where he was going because it was the only way he could go.

Rudolph had many small talents and no definite direction. He wasn’t bad at the horn, but he didn’t fool himself that he was any Benny Goodman or Louis Armstrong. Of the four other boys who played in the band with him, two were better than he and the other two were just about as good. He listened to the music he made with a cool appreciation of what it was worth and he knew it wasn’t worth much. And wouldn’t be worth much more, no matter how hard he worked on it.

As an athlete, he was top man in one event, the two-twenty hurdles, but in a big city high school, he doubted if he could even make the team, as compared with Stan O’Brien, who played fullback for the football team, and had to depend upon the tolerance of his teachers to get marks just good enough to keep him eligible to play. But on a football field O’Brien was one of the smartest players anybody had ever seen in the state. He could feint and find split-second holes and make the right move every time, with that special sense of a great athlete that no mere intelligence could ever compete with. Stan O’Brien had offers of scholarships from colleges as far away as California and, if he didn’t get hurt, would probably make All-American and be set for life.

In class, Rudolph did better in the English Literature tests than little Sandy Hopewood, who edited the school paper and who flunked all his science courses regularly, but all you had to do was read one article of his and you knew that nothing was going to stop Sandy from being a writer.

Rudolph had the gift for being liked. He knew that and knew that was why he had been elected president of his class three times in a row. But he felt it wasn’t a real gift. He had to plan to be liked, to be agreeable to people, and seem interested in them and cheerfully take on thankless jobs like running school dances and heading the advertising board of the magazine and working hard at them to get people to appreciate him.

So, his gift for being liked wasn’t a true gift, he thought, because he had no close friends and he didn’t really like people himself very much. Even his habit of kissing his mother every morning and evening and taking her out for walks on Sundays was planned for her gratitude, to maintain the notion he knew she had of him as a thoughtful and loving son. The Sunday walks bored him and he really couldn’t stand her pawing him when he kissed her, though, of course, he never showed it.

He felt as if he was built in two layers, one that only he knew about and the other which was displayed to the world. He wanted to be what he seemed but he was doubtful that he could ever manage it.

Although he knew that his mother and sister and even some of his teachers thought he was handsome, he was uncertain about his looks. He felt he was too dark, that his nose was too long, his jaws too flat and hard, his pale eyes too light and too small for his olive skin, and his hair too lower-class dull black. He studied the photographs in the newspapers and magazines to see how boys at good schools like Exeter and St. Paul’s dressed and what college men at places like Harvard and Princeton were wearing, and tried to copy their styles in his own clothes and on his own budget.

He had scuffed white-buckskin shoes with rubber soles and now he had a blazer but he had the uneasy feeling that if he were ever invited to a party with a group of preppies he would stand out immediately for what he was, a small-town hick, pretending to be something he wasn’t.

He was shy with girls and had never been in love, unless you could call that stupid thing for Miss Lenaut love. He made himself seem uninterested in girls, too busy with more important matters to bother with kid stuff like dating and flirting and necking. But in reality he avoided the company of girls because he was afraid that if he ever got really close to one, she would find out that behind his lofty manner he was inexperienced and clownish.

In a way he envied his brother. Thomas wasn’t living up to anyone’s estimate of him. His gift was ferocity. He was feared and even hated and certainly no one truly liked him, but he didn’t agonize over which tie to wear or what to say in an English class. He was all of one piece and when he did something he didn’t have to make a painful and hesitant selection of attitudes within himself before he did it.

As for his sister, she was beautiful, a lot more beautiful than most of the movie stars he saw on the screen, and that gift was enough for anybody.

“This goose is great, Pop,” Rudolph said, as he knew his father expected him to comment on the meal. “It really is something.” He had already eaten more than he wanted, but he held out his plate for a second portion. He tried not to wince when he saw the size of the piece that his father put on the plate.

(by Irvin Shaw)

Exercises

1. Look up the following references for relevant cultural and historical information: The Third Reich, Rheims, West Point, V-day, Mother’s Day, Listerine, California Riesling, Cadillac, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Harvard, Princeton.