Lauren Chapin, Elinor Donahue, Robert Young, Billy Gray, and Jane Wyatt
in an episode of Father Knows Best, created by Ed James, c. 1956.
A hArMonY In LIvIng
by garret Keizer
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
—William Blake, 1804
Two-edged sword
Even without a biography to go on, we would know that Leo Tolstoy [Moscow,
page 48] had a troubled household and a
blinding ego by the ridiculous line with which
he begins Anna Karenina: “happy families are
all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in
its own way.” In fact, as anyone can tell you
whose experience of the world goes beyond
the reading of nineteenth-century russian
novels, the truth is quite the reverse. Take the
safer course of confining Tolstoy’s generaliza-
tions to marriage, and observation still stands
them on their heads. Unhappy marriages are
all alike, with their interchangeable spats and
infidelities, their tritely plotted scenarios of
aggression and neglect. It is the happy ones
that vary, some couples inseparable except
with deep distress, others madly in love across
months and miles of absence; some virtually
Garret Keizer is a contributing editor to harper’s Magazine and the author of The Unwanted
Sound of Everything We Want. His last essay for Lapham’s Quarterly appeared in the Winter
2010 issue Religion.
