Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (32 page)

No literary executor is going to get his hands on
that
notebook.

I am sorry to say that this rather vacant item of thirty-six years ago is the most orderly exhibit in the pitiful clump of notes I have been able to discover. Most of my other material is written in pencil on sheets of yellow copy paper that have been folded over twice, a practice common with newspaper reporters but highly irritating to literary executors. Let us take the notes in order, beginning with the top sheet, which just happens to be the top sheet, since no effort has been made at organization on behalf of chronology, significance of implication, or anything else.

The first sheet, then, bears the following, in pencil, near the top of the upper left quarter: “Digital. b. donna. stramoneum (Jimson weed). Horn quicksilver. Germander. Aloes. Aloes yourself.” The flippancy of the final phrase, “Aloes yourself,” suggests that the piece to which this note obviously has reference was not written in a serious mood. Either that or the author’s mood changed between the time he made the note and the time he actually wrote the piece.

We come now to the longest of the notes, and the only one instinct with a sense of affirmation. There are twenty-five sheets here, one of them foxed, or stained with cider, perhaps, and all of them folded only once. The pages are not dated; nothing ever is. The chirography has a curious smudged or sat-on appearance; there are only twenty words to a page, and again the author’s mood and intent seem ambiguous. The manuscript that grew out of this plot summary was blown out to sea from a Hamilton-bound ferryboat just off Watford Bridge, Bermuda, on April 8, 1947. There was, of course, no carbon copy. Certain editorial symbols have been employed for purposes of clarification, and where words were not clear, they have, quite simply, been guessed at. Question marks have been parenthesized after such words. Perhaps the reader will wish to hazard interpretations of his own. That is his privilege. The notes, in full, follow:

“Middle-aged novelist has been unable to think of anything to write about for eleven years. Name Julian Gordon. Wife Catherine Poe Gordon, aged 37. Mr. Gordon, 48, quit writing same age wife now is. Julian picks up copy Harpers Bazzaar (sic) at Tass (?) agency. Reads swell short story filled with strange new beauty and signed Candace Poe. It turns out to be work of Mr. Gordon’s wife, who’s been secretly knitting little plots, keeping ’em from husband. Somebody has to make Jack (?) for the family, after all. He can’t stand having his wife writing without help from him. Big scene. Julian sarcastically says no female writes without using ‘it was as if’ all the time. Real rift begins when he finds her hangout over garage and reads sheet in ivory-colored typewriter. Tells her at dinner she can’t use sentence ‘The wind ran scampering up the street like a laughing boy.’ You’ve got to use either ‘ran’ or ‘scampered,’ can’t use
both
for C. sake. She sore. Big scene. Rift widens. To his dismay Julian watches Cath. go more and more Bazzar (sic). She says she is going to rename their country place Greensleeves because look nice on station wagon door. He says by God over his dead body or somebody’s dead body. 15 collar 33 or 34 sleeve B. Brothers blue button-down. Sox 111⁄2. [Note: This appears to be a personal memo, without reference to the plot outline.] Julian, who is still on Ch. 6 of novel begun 1936, discovers Cath. has sold several pieces to mags. in one month and is in correspondence with Cerf, Finkelhoff (?), and Warner Brothers. Julian Gordon announces he intends to buy Smith & Wesson .38 police special on ground that everybody under 21 is out to get him. Says children shooting adults down like dogs all over U.S. J. really means this, but sees wife thinks he is going crazy and decides play part of maniac to hilt. Says sees large silver fish float through bedroom. Says hears horns of elfland f.b. Says Louise Glaum (?) keeps phoning. Decides this crazy make believe just what needs to break ice jam in Ch. 6 of his novel, but finds to horror that Cath. has begun writing same plot in story for Harper’s B. Terrible scene. Jul. says Smitty won’t let her steal his plot. She says he’s terrible to frighten her with fake insanity. He says she’s horrible to use his supposed condition for H. Bazaar. Cath. buys vicious fawn-colored boxer as protection against J. and Smitty, who she suddenly realizes is S. & W. pistol. Wonderful scene in garage studio while he cleaning gun and she typing and boxer growling. She certain he intends shoot her ‘accidentally.’ Cath. suddenly cries, ‘Get him, Greensleeves!’ She has called the boxer Greensleeves, too, and now sets him on Gordon Julian (sic). Nuts to Gordon nuts to Cath. nuts to you nuts to me. Nuts to all the sons of butchers (?)” That is all there is to the only really interesting item in the Thurber collection.

THERE are a few more odds and ends, or, to be exact, odds and beginnings, but we need scrutinize only three. The first goes, “The beaver is a working fool, who went to manual-training school.” I have never been able to fit this in anywhere. The second says, “Guinea pigs fight when empty milk bottles are clicked together.” They do, too, but I wrote that up for
PM
in the summer of 1941, and there is no need to go into it here. The third reads, “The American Woman. $1,300 emerald cigarette lighter.” Since the word “woman” is capitalized, this obviously does not refer to any particular woman to whom I intended to give a thirteen-hundred-dollar emerald cigarette lighter. Furthermore, I haven’t got that kind of money. There was probably an idea for a story in this note when I set it down, but I don’t see it now. If you do, you can have it—the idea, I mean. The note itself has been destroyed, along with everything else, except the plot outline of “Greensleeves.” I may take a swing at that story again one of these days, now that the fawn-colored boxer is all the rage.

1949

MICHAEL J. ARLEN

ARE WE LOSING THE NOVEL RACE?

A
S
if things weren’t bad enough already, word has just reached me that the Russians have recently published a 1,600-page novel. If you don’t think 1,600 pages is a lot of novel, try reading “Ivanhoe” sometime. (And don’t start telling me you’ve already read “Ivanhoe.” I know you, and you probably haven’t read “Vanity Fair” or “Don Quixote,” either.) “Ivanhoe” is only 430 pages long, and it once took me five and a half months to read it, not counting time out for Christmas vacation and the measles. It may not even be as long as that, since I seem to remember that some of the pages had been printed over twice, although, now that I think of it, maybe they were just written twice. At any rate, the new novel is a good 334 pages longer than the latest James Jones book, “Some Came Running,” and a full 432 ahead of the second-seeded American entry, “Atlas Shrugged,” and I think the figures speak for themselves.

The Russian book is called “Kamenny Poyas,” which means “The Stone Belt,” or “The Stone Ring,” depending on how you feel about these matters. It was written by a man named Fedorov, and published in Sverdlovsk, in 1956. Fedorov had already made something of a name for himself in and around Sverdlovsk on the strength of a two-volume book he’d tossed off a year or so earlier. But he’s never made much of a dent on the international scene, and one can hardly wonder why. You don’t write 1,600-page novels by hanging around
espresso
bars all day and then appearing in TV panel discussions of the Irish Question until God knows when at night.

Unfortunately, the Russians have been very poor sports about releasing any detailed information on the book (you know what poor sports the Russians can be sometimes), but from the little we know of the dimensions of the Sverdlovsk presses and the standard weight of Ukrainian paper (I am here indebted to Professor Joachim Lip for his monumental study), we can make a safe guess that the gross weight of “Kamenny Poyas” runs to somewhere between 4.5 and 4.6 pounds. Our own en-tries are shamefully puny by comparison. The Jones book and “Atlas Shrugged” weigh in at exactly 2 lbs. 11 oz., and neither seems likely to be able to clear even the three-pound mark in any operational edition.

Of course, some of us have been saying all along that the Russians could do it, and when I say “us,” don’t think I am trying to rub it in, but a man gets a little tired shouting himself hoarse in the market place all day long. We’ve all known they had the manpower over there, and anyone who’s ever tried running for a bus with a copy of “Anna Karenina” or “War and Peace” in his raincoat pocket must certainly have realized it was just a matter of time until they hit their full stride.

The situation is particularly discouraging in light of the Jones book, which almost all of us up to now have regarded as just about the heaviest novel anybody could be expected to produce under existing conditions. When word of “Kamenny Poyas” really gets around, the Scribner people will probably try to claim that “Some Came Running” was written largely for experimental purposes and that James Jones could actually have done a much longer or heavier book if he’d only put his mind to it. In fact, I hear that over at Random House a spokesman has already confused the issue by declaring that Miss Rand “wasn’t really trying” with “Atlas Shrugged.” In the storm of criticisms and recriminations that followed this statement, it was quickly amended to read that Miss Rand “wasn’t really trying
for length,
” but public confidence has already been severely shaken, and reassurances by Bennett Cerf to the effect that it’s still the second-longest novel in the free world aren’t likely to make things any better.

The alarming side to all this is that not so long ago we were second to none in our ability to produce novels of exceptional length and weight. Rare were the years, even in the thirties, when Tom Wolfe ever fell below 600 pages, and toward the end of his life he was turning out solid two-pounders with the regularity of a drop forge. And who will ever forget the magnificent 2 lbs. 11 oz. attained by Marguerite Steen with “The Sun Is My Undoing,” or the beautiful impression of sheer weight one received when first lifting a copy of “Gone with the Wind”? More recently, the “younger crop,” as I like to call them—Thomas B. Costain, Herman Wouk, and Dr. Frank G. Slaughter—have all been edging toward the two-pound mark and giving every indication of going beyond it at any moment. Now it’s probably too late to pin our hopes on
them.

What has happened is that we have plain frittered away our lead. The Russians have closed the gap and passed us. Heads will almost certainly roll at Scribner and Random House, but I see no point now in looking around for somewhere to place the blame. At their current rate of progress, the size of the novels the Russians will be turning out in a few years should be absolutely staggering. The immediate reaction in our own country will doubtless be “Why worry? Let the Russians worry; they’re the ones who are going to have to read the things.” But this is sheer complacency and escapism on our part. The Russians finally have a heavier novel than we do, and we might as well face up to it.

1958

CALVIN TRILLIN

ROLAND MAGRUDER, FREELANCE WRITER

D
URING
the first week of summer, at a beach party in East Hampton, a portly man wearing tan Levis and a blue-and-white gondolier’s shirt told Marlene Drentluss that he was a “socio-economic observer” currently working on a study entitled “The Appeal of Chinese Food to Jewish Intellectuals.” Marlene had already suggested that the rejection of one dietary ritual might lead inevitably to the adoption of another when it occurred to her that he might not be telling the truth. Later in the evening, she was informed that the man was in fact the assistant accountant of a trade magazine catering to the pulp-and-paper industry. She was more cautious a few days later, nodding without commitment when a man she met at a grocery store in Amagansett said he spent almost all of his time “banging away at the old novel.” A few days later, she saw his picture in an advertisement that a life-insurance company had taken in the
Times
to honor its leading salesmen in the New York–New Jersey–Connecticut area. She eventually decided that men automatically misrepresent their occupations in the summer on the eastern end of Long Island, as if some compulsion to lie were hanging in the air just east of Riverhead. The previous summer, in another Long Island town, everybody had said he was an artist of one kind or another; the year before that, in a town not ten miles away, men had claimed to be mystical wizards of the New York Stock Exchange. Around East Hampton, she seemed to meet nobody who did not claim to be a writer. When Marlene drove past the Sunday-morning softball game in East Hampton, she was fond of saying—even though she was invariably alone—“There stand eighteen freelance writers, unless they’re using short-fielders today, in which case there stand twenty freelance writers.” Marlene was beginning to pride herself on her cynicism.

Occasionally, she met writers who were not freelance writers, since they were employed by some magazine or newspaper, but they all said that their jobs meant nothing more to them than a way to finance their real writing—and they demonstrated this fact with stories about their office heresies. One of them—a slim young man who said his real writing was “a children’s book for adults about a boy and girl in Carl Schurz Park”—told Marlene that he wrote the Religion section for
Time
and that he drove the editors to distraction by putting the word “alleged” before all questionable religious events, so that he would write, “The Gospels were written fifty years after the alleged Crucifixion,” or “The Jews wandered in the wilderness for forty years after the alleged parting of the Red Sea.” Marlene realized that the alleged writer did not in fact write the Religion section of
Time
when she finally placed his face as belonging to one of the countless Wall Street wizards she had met two summers before. It turned out he was neither a Wall Street wizard nor a Religion writer but a salesman who tried to sign up young executives for the Alexander Hamilton Business Course. Marlene was not surprised. A week later, she dismissed with one loud guffaw a young man who said he conquered the anonymity of the
Times
News of the Week in Review by spelling out “
LOOK, MA, IT’S ME, IRV
” vertically with the first letter of the first word in each paragraph of his stories.