The Devil’s Tickets by Gary M. Pomerantz is a marvelous book about the game of bridge (the Puritans called playing cards the devil’s tickets) and the enterprise of marriage. The rules for both changed in the early half of the twentieth century, especially in America, and Pomerantz examines the connection between the wild popularity of bridge and the newly accepted sexuality and intelligence of women to explain what he calls “a new American age.” American capitalist energy, illustrated in the story of how one man infused bridge with sex and power to reach thousands of housebound and frustrated women and guarantee himself fame and riches, and American temper, told through the story of one fateful night of bridge and a bid gone wrong, resulting in murder, combine in this story of five couples and their marriages, unions that end in death or divorce but never in happily ever after.
In discussing bridge and marriage, the similarities are compelling: partners must work in union but not as mirrors of each other but rather as complements, each with their own role; communication is key but rarely straightforward, instead existing through coded expressions, unexpressed but implicit desires, and established patterns; and the final victory, though shared, is rarely evenly divided. Marriage, like bridge, builds on power struggles, frustrations, resentments, and ecstasies, as well as on shared beliefs and strategies. And finally, the magic of both marriage and bridge is just that, magic, unexplainable but profound. Pomerantz asks the question, Is there such a thing as a “perfect partnership”? In bridge or in marriage?
Certainly not in the five couples of the book, Myrtle Bennett and her husband Jack, whom she murders over a bridge game; Ely and Jo Culbertson who made bridge a national craze but Ely’s megalomania drove his family into misery and dysfunction; Lura and Jim Reed, older wife supporting her younger husband’s national political ambitions; Jim Reed and Nell Donnelly, the mistress and mother of his child whom he married once Lura finally died; and Nell and Paul Donnelly, her first husband whom she outshone in every way, including business acumen and sexual appetite, and whom she dumped the instant Jim was free of Lura.
Women in the first half of the twentieth century were freed from many household tasks, and gaining control over their sexual, political, and financial lives. At the same time, men were still hanging onto notions of superiority over and protectiveness (infantilization) of “their” women. Bridge brought men and women together over a table of equality, with repercussions felt far from the unfolded card table. A good companion book for this history is the novel by Braun Heywood, The Sun Field, which portrayed the evolving relationship between the sexes in 1920s New York (Heywood is actually mentioned in The Devil’s Tickets, along with Babe Ruth, fictionalized in The Sun Field).
The Devil’s Tickets is dense, full, and rich (just take a look at Pomerantz’s bibliography to see how much research went into this book). It is well-written and engrossing, flowing with information and insights and good old story-telling to mesh the stories of the five couples masterfully. Pomerantz brings their stories together in a fascinating social, political and sexual history.
