Mind over Matrimony by Mortimer Brewster, 1942
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23:51 GMT on 5 March 2004
Mostly unkown today, Mortimer Brewster was a widely read drama critic on the New York scene in the 1920s and 1930s, somewhat analogous to Terry Teachout today: smart, sharp-tongued, with a grander vision of what was possible than most of the producers of his day.
Also like Teachout, Brewster published a number of nonfiction books, a few of which were widely discussed. Along with accomplished biographies (he biographed Jerome K. Jerome, Jack London, and Frank Spearman among others) he put out volumes examining literary trends (his thrashing of Joseph Conrad and Modernism in general was a thing of legend; to Conrad he was unfair, to modernism perhaps too kind) and cultural institutions.
That last category is where he carved out his personal publishing niche. Brewster published, over the course of eleven years, five volumes devoted solely to arguing against the institution of marriage. These books each became more successful than the last and scandalized the guardians of High Culture, although the greater scandal was still to come.
Beginning with Wedded Bliss? (1931), and continuing through The Marriage Myth (1933), Engagement or Enslavement? (1934), Marriage: A Fraud and A Failure (1936), and ending several years later with the present volume, Brewster skewered the notion of lifetime monogamy and committment again and again, each time more stridently than before.
Although details of his life are sketchy on some points, it does seem that he was arguing out of principle rather than rationalizing his personal life. Though he was known to step out on the town in the company of different ladies at different times, there are no documented scandals of this nature in his personal life. No children, no jealous lovers, nothing that would get his life story onto VH1's Behind the Music today.
There was, however, scandal of a rather different nature, during which it emerged that Brewster himself was not the result of a marriage (though nobody except certain playwrights and actors actually called him a bastard), and that scandal is the reason for the publication of Mind over Matrimony.
Now if the name Brewster seems vaguely familiar, it should be, and we are coming to the reason right soon.
On Halloween Day in 1938, despite having four successful books to the contrary still in print, Mortimer Brewster got married. Prosaically enough she was the girl next door to the house where he grew up, Elaine Harper, the daughter of a reverend.
In the house where he grew up, in Brooklyn, lived his two elderly aunts, who had raised him along with his "brothers", Jonathan and Teddy. A few of you have now smacked your foreheads and exclaimed "Of course! The Brewster Sisters!"
For the rest of you, I suggest you hunt down the two early classics of True Crime books Bodies in the Basement: The Charity of the Brewster Sisters by Charles Uriah Farley, 1967, and A Brewster's Dozen: The Story of Jonathan Brewster, the World's First Round-the-World Serial Killer by Archibald Leach, Jr., 1971.
Halloween Day 1938 turns out to have been quite the eventful day. In addition to his marriage (in a courthouse, with a handful of witnesses), Mortimer Brewster also had his brother Jonathan return home and get arrested by the police, committed his brother Teddy to an insane asylum (voluntarily, it seems), and then his two aunts, Abigail and Martha (also voluntarily, it seems).
In 1939, due to unpaid back taxes, the City of New York seized the Brewster home in Brooklyn (Mortimer and Elaine were living in Manhattan at the time). In 1940, 14 bodies were discovered buried in the basement.
There was public hue and outcry, of course, and a target had to be punished. Jonathan was already on Death Row, Teddy, Abigail and Martha were tucked safely way in an asylum for the rest of their lives, which left Mortimer. Some say he got what was coming to him, others that he was a patsy.
The patsy line seems the more likely, given that he was living a highly successful life in the public eye for so many years. A charge of Obstruction of Justice, however, does not seem out of bounds from our perspective more than 60 years afterward.
Whatever the truth was, Mortimer and his wife Elaine paid for his trial out of their own finances, putting the entirety of the Brewster fortune in trust to keep his aunts and brother Teddy comfortable for the rest of their lives.
Which meant that, during the appeals process, they ran out of funds. Mortimer valiantly tried to keep the money flowing by writing from prison, book reviews and so forth, and there were royalties from his other books, but it was getting difficult for Elaine to meet legal bills just the same. She came across his draft for a fifth anti-marriage book, wrote an introduction and afterword herself, and shipped it off to be published. The advance saw them through and, in 1946, Mortimer was released from prison.
So what to make of this largely unedited volume? To modern eyes it can easily seem quaint: after all, the Free Love movement happened 40 years ago, and now marriage is a convenience, frequently entered into only with prenuptial agreements and an implicit understanding that "nothing is forever."
I think, however, that recent history would have displeased Brewster. His argument is not for the right to be a cad, but for an accomodation of the nature of masculinity. That such accomodation should only be made for such men as have proved themselves gentlemen of honor is implicit on every page, and the care and raising of children is dealt with explicitly in several chapters, with many practical approaches suggested. Not for Brewster was the path of the Deadbeat Dad.
Elaine's contributions are less lively — but then, she was never a writer. One gets the impression that she actually accepted Mortimer's views and would have lived with him under any arrangement he demanded. She certainly makes no apology for him for the seeming hypicrisy between his published views and his private life. And, not oddly for the time, she makes no mention of the scandals or trials.
After being released from prison in 1946, Mortimer and Elaine disappeared, not only from the national scene, but from the nation. A few reporters tried to track them down, but to no avail. Only recently has it come to light that he spent many years in postwar Japan, and later in Hong Kong, under his actual name of Mortimer Van Weyden. That his birth certificate did not come out at trial, showing that he was not in fact related to the Brewsters at all, is a curiosity. That no reporter unearthed it and searched for him under his proper name, a mystery.
More about that another time. For now, laugh.