Robert Cohn's divorce

Robert Cohn's divorce is the turning point that releases him from his first marriage and redirects his life toward travel, literary ambition, and a new relationship with Frances. It is not presented as a clean act of liberation: Cohn delays leaving because he believes it would be cruel to deprive his wife of himself, then experiences her departure with a miniature-painter as a healthful shock. The divorce thus exposes the mixture of moral scruple, passivity, money, and emotional dependence that governs his attempts to leave one domestic arrangement and enter another.

Marriage, Money, and the Impulse to Leave

Robert Cohn entered marriage after a difficult passage from privileged youth into painful self-consciousness. A member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York and, through his mother, of one of the oldest, he had not been made to feel different at military school, where he played a very good end on the football team. Princeton changed that confidence. He became bitter, took his feelings out in boxing, and left with a flattened nose and an acute awareness of himself. He was married by the first girl who was nice to him.

The marriage lasted five years and produced three children. Cohn's financial position also altered during it: he lost most of the fifty thousand dollars left by his father, while the balance of the estate went to his mother, and he became hardened into a rather unattractive mould under domestic unhappiness with a rich wife. The marriage therefore joined emotional strain to an unstable economic situation. Cohn possessed family money and social privilege, but the evidence presents him less as an autonomous household authority than as someone repeatedly shaped by stronger domestic and financial relationships.

The Reversal of the Separation

Cohn had made up his mind to leave his wife, but he did not act for months because he regarded departure as too cruel a deprivation for her. His reason for remaining was therefore framed as an obligation toward the wife he wanted to leave. The delay makes the eventual divorce less a triumph of decisive will than the outcome of a reversal he did not control.

Before Cohn could carry out his plan, his wife left him and went off with a miniature-painter. Because he had been preparing himself to leave while refusing to do so, her departure struck him as a healthful shock. The event changed the emotional value of separation: what had seemed an act of cruelty became an imposed release, and the humiliation or loss involved in being left also freed him from the burden of choosing. The divorce was then arranged, converting the marital rupture into a formal legal conclusion.

From Divorce to Expatriate Life

After the divorce, Cohn went out to the Coast. In California he entered literary circles and, with a little of the remaining fifty thousand dollars, began backing a review of the Arts. The magazine began publication in Carmel-by-the-Sea and ended in Provincetown. Although Cohn was initially regarded purely as an angel and his name appeared on the editorial page only as a member of the advisory board, he eventually became the sole editor. The venture gave him an authority he discovered he liked because it was his money and his decision-making power that sustained it.

When the review became too expensive and he had to give it up, the pattern established by the divorce continued: Cohn moved from one structure of dependence into another, using inherited resources to pursue a desired life but remaining exposed to its financial limits. The failed magazine did not end his literary aspirations. Instead, it left him with other problems and helped set the conditions for his involvement with Frances, a forceful woman who had hoped to rise with the magazine and who took him in hand.

Frances and the New Domestic Pressure

Cohn was sure that he loved Frances, even though the relationship was marked by an imbalance of control. When she saw that the magazine was not going to rise, she became somewhat disgusted with him and decided to obtain what remained available while there was still something to get. She urged him to go to Europe, where he could write. The move therefore combined literary opportunity with Frances's practical response to the collapse of the magazine.

Cohn and Frances came to Europe, where she had been educated, and stayed for three years: the first in travel and the last two in Paris. During those years Cohn had two friends, Braddocks, his literary friend, and Jake Barnes, his tennis friend. His social world consequently formed around companionship outside the domestic relationship, even as Frances remained the person who directed the course of his life.

Toward the end of the second year, Frances discovered that her looks were going and changed her attitude toward Cohn. What had been careless possession and exploitation became an absolute determination that he should marry her. The demand places Cohn's divorce inside a larger cycle rather than presenting it as a final escape from marriage. He had left a wife after hesitation and shock; he now faced pressure to formalize another relationship, with Frances's changing appearance and diminishing prospects intensifying the demand.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

Cohn's mother settled an allowance of about three hundred dollars a month on him after the divorce. This support made his expatriate existence possible, but it also underscores that his freedom remained materially conditioned by family money. During two and a half years, he reportedly did not look at another woman and was fairly happy, although, like many people living in Europe, he would rather have been in America. He read many books, played bridge and tennis, boxed at a local gymnasium, and discovered writing.

He wrote a novel that was not as bad as critics later called it, though it was still a very poor novel. The combination of writing, sport, reading, travel, and financial allowance suggests a life opened by divorce but not settled by it. The formal end of the first marriage gives Cohn mobility, yet his subsequent conduct repeats the central tension of the episode: he seeks freedom while allowing other people, money, and moral obligations to determine the shape of his choices. In that sense, the divorce is both an ending and a displaced beginning, the legal threshold through which Cohn enters the unstable emotional and expatriate world that follows.