CASUAL

...Put the prince consort down as a Nobel contender...

...Does Leonard Woolf qualify...

...But a piece of cake, if not exactly wedding cake, next to our own first couple...

...Diana Trilling, his wife, combined neuroses with aggression...

...She was, in the end, of course insane...

...It was a marriage made in hell, which is always rich soil for the Nobel Prize for Marriage, and therefore a tough call...

...Victoria, true enough, wrote gushily in her diary about her German husband, especially after his death...

...Consider the first five of the six wives of Henry VIII, short-sufferers all...

...It’s time they added a new prize—one that, in my view, ought to have been instituted from the beginning of the Nobel Prizes in 1901...

...Virginia Woolf, in her snobbery, was not above remarking on her husband’s Jewishness, establishing her social superiority over him...

...Why a Nobel at all in economics, that most contentious and tendentious of subjects...

...I always thought that Lionel Trilling deserved a Nobel for marriage...

...And speaking of contentious and tendentious, what about the Nobel Peace Prize...

...What about Prince Albert, whose lot could not have been an easy one...

...Why a Nobel Prize in literature but none in music or visual art...

...Did she ever use it to devastating effect, one wonders, in the bedroom...

...Did Leonard know this to begin with...

...Not yet known is what Bill has had to put up with from Hillary, but, even discounting the charmless speculations of Dick Morris (whose own wife, surely, is another, a very strong, candidate for a prize), it cannot be minor...

...Diana had Camilla and that frightful mishpacha, the Windsors, to deal with —no small packet of aggravation there...

...To launch the Nobel for marriage, it might be best to begin by giving out a few prizes posthumously, to great long-suffering husbands and wives of the past...

...Impressive stuff...

...Difficult to imagine she never used it on him...

...When a friend of mine once asked Tom Lehrer why he no longer wrote brilliant comic songs, Lehrer told him that, ever since Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Prize, nothing seemed funny anymore...

...The new prize I would like to see instituted by the Nobel Committee is one for marriage...

...Countess Tolstoy, surely, ought to be an early winner, having had to listen to all the count’s utopian guff, to make sure that he didn’t give away the copyrights to Anna Karenina and War and Peace, to compose socalled fair copies of his many novels and religious tracts, and then, at the very end, to be put to the humiliation of his publicly deserting her in the hope of dying alone...

...Let’s hear it for our laureates...

...As for the grounds on which the prize ought to be given, these, it seems to me, are fairly self-evident...

...As for the other Diana, the late princess, ought she or her husband to be up for a Nobel...

...But my sense is that it was Lionel and not Diana who deserved the prize...

...But I keep thinking of that famous phrase of hers, “We are not amused...

...The man has to be reckoned a candidate for the prize...

...Then there is the marriage of the Carlyles, Thomas and Jane, of whom Tennyson said, “By any other arrangement, four people would have been unhappy instead of two...

...Everyone now knows what Hillary has had to put up with in Bill...

...And, knowing it, oughtn’t he, of all people, to have been afraid of Virginia Woolf...

...And now it turns out that we can add resentment to the mix...

...No, in the First Couple we have the possibility for the first shared prize: two people, each put on the earth to make the other suffer, lengthily and intensely...

...A Nobel Prize for Marriage would have, as they say in advertising, a fine reinforcing effect...

...In the course of doing so, she would seem to have made herself out as deserving of a Nobel for marriage...

...As the Peace Prize is meant to encourage peacemaking in a war-ridden world, so might the Nobel Prize for Marriage do likewise for matrimony, an institution that, all the statistics on divorce make plain, is itself in great peril...

...Charlie, though, took on himself all the problems attendant upon acquiring a younger, somewhat air-headed wife, with eating disorders, wretched taste in men, and the rest...

...In her memoirs, all written after Lionel’s death, Diana portrayed her husband as a depressive, a drinker, a snob, a gloom-spreader of the highest power...

...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...

...Prizes for physics and chemistry, for example, but not for mathematics, on which so many advances in physics and chemistry absolutely depend...

...The prize ought to be given for sticking it out, for perseverance, for endurance, for—to capture it in a single, if hyphenated, word—longsuffering...

...With the most fragile of egos, she required vast attention, solicitation, endless reassurance, all of which Leonard supplied...

...Not that, in marriage, short-suffering is any picnic...

...It’s always been a bit capricious, the way the Nobel Prizes are set up...