The Dud Avocado (36 page)

I didn’t dream it or invent it or imagine it. I couldn’t have. There were things—two things in particular—that I just couldn’t have made up. The jazz club blowing its lullaby through the night across the empty street, and the way he trembled when he came over to take me.

When I woke up this morning I found myself staring at rows and rows of books. My first thought was that I’d gone stark raving mad with my library obsession at the station in Chicago, and that I was now hallucinating in a loony bin. Max was sitting beside me in a dressing gown.

“It’s a library,” I whispered.

“Yes, it’s the library. Since I was always in here just before I went to sleep I decided last year to move my bed and things in as well. How are you?”

I stretched. “Wonderful!”

“Hungry?”

“Oh golly, yes.” I suddenly remembered we hadn’t eaten a thing since the chicken sandwiches yesterday.

“I’ll see what I’ve got in the kitchen.”

“Catch,” he said, returning with two oranges. “I’m afraid that’s all there is.” We ate the oranges lying next to each other on the bed. I looked at his dressing gown. “Plain blue,” I said. “No leopard skin?”

He grinned. “It’s a little too early in the morning, isn’t it? Anyway, that’s for Them. D’you know what I mean?”

I said I did.

We finished the oranges and he kissed me.

“I’m tired of living in sin with you,” he said after a while. “Let’s get married. Then I can take you to Japan with me.”

I lay very quietly, not daring to say anything. I was afraid it was just cheap chatter. I was afraid he was kidding me. I mean why me? Why
me?

“What’s the matter? What is it?”

“This can’t be happening to me,” I said.

“Don’t you like me?”

“I love you. If you hadn’t existed I would have had to invent you.”

“Don’t you believe it. I invented myself. What’s wrong? Please tell me, darling.”

“It’s too good. There must be a catch.”

He sat up. “As a matter of fact, there is,” he said seriously. He started to go on, but I stopped him. “Hand me my slip, will you?” I said. “I think I’ll take this on my feet, if you don’t mind.” I put it on and began pacing around the room. “O.K. Spill it, old sport. It’s the not knowing that kills me,” I said gloomily.

He had that same troubled look I’d seen last night. “I’m illegitimate,” he said.

I stopped dead in my tracks. “Oh, no! But how exciting! How perfect! How absolutely glamorous!”

“Well, thank you, Sally Jay.” He didn’t bother to hide his relief. “Yes, I suppose it is. I’m glad you think so, anyway. My family—that is, the aunts and uncles who brought me up—took a rather different view. They’re on my mother’s side. I took my mother’s name.”

“What: was she like?”

“I don’t know. She died soon after I was born. A rather wild young thing apparently, dashing off to the Continent for la vie de boherne as they called it in those days. Got mixed up with all those crazy godforsaken artists and actors and that lot. She was a lost soul to her family. A wicked wicked girl.”

“And your father?” A look of uncertainty flickered across his face. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “How stupid of me. Of course, you never knew who he was, did you?”

“But I do. The aunts told me when they thought I was old enough. It was in the contract.”

“Who was it?”

“Brace yourself,” said Max.

I was standing at the back of a chair. I gripped it hard with my hands and then I leaned down over it. I don’t know why. To
keep the circulation flowing or something. “Who was it?” I repeated.

“Stefan.”

“Yeow!” I nearly toppled over. I sat down weakly. “But why didn’t you say so? Why didn’t he? I just don’t get it.”

Max laughed. “Stefan admit to a grown-up son? In the presence of a pretty girl? You have a lot to learn about us Hungarians, baby,” he said in Stefan’s voice.

So now all I have to do is decide what sort of clothes to buy for Japan. They’ll be all wrong anyway, I suppose. Perhaps I’ll dye my hair black to get into the swing of things. Then we have to get married—the two years are almost up, so Uncle Roger shouldn’t mind my contacting him to be best man. And then I have to go to Rockefeller Center to get a new passport. An entirely new passport.

But isn’t it the end, the very end?

I mean Japan for a honeymoon. It’s so cool. It’s so chic. It’s so suave and so sleek and exotic. It’s the end, it’s the
end
…! It’s the last word.

It’s zymotic.

I look back in wonder at
The Dud Avocado:
in wonder at its initial reception and at the many times it’s been reissued—for years it was even republished alongside of every new book of mine that came out. I look back in wonder at the 1950s. The dull conformity of those years as they are generally imagined is something I don’t recognize. I look back in wonder at London in particular, where whole areas destroyed during the Second World War still lay in rubble. But London was in the midst of a renaissance for artists. In literature and playwriting the Angry Young Men were making their splash and new young actors like Richard Burton, Peter O Toole, Albert Finney, and Peter Finch were coming into their own. London was an orderly place where it was safe to take risks. Optimism was the rule of the day and I was there.

I’d come to London as a young actress from a year in Paris escaping my family and waiting to be discovered. I had a wonderful time though my career was almost invisible. I wonder now that I still nurtured the impossible dream in the face of reality. In London, aside from bit parts, I was unlucky in my career but I was lucky in love. There was a theatrical club much frequented by all the young lions on their way up. They all gathered to eat inexpensively and be made blissful by the lethal house cider. It was there I met Ken Tynan, recently down from Oxford, and already the enfant terrible of Britain’s drama critics. Mutually magnetized, we
married three months later. I sent a wire to my parents in New York: “Have married Englishman. Letter follows.” I was madly in love with him and stepped happily into the Wonderland of his fame.

There was an abundance of what we call both humorously and respectfully Big Personalities. Ken knew many of them and those he didn’t wanted to know him. It interested them that he was married to an American and that they had an adorable baby, Tracy. Not long after she was born, and I’d just come from playing a twelve-year-old girl, opposite a real twelve-year-old actress on BBC TV, I knew it was time to pack it in. Ken asked, why didn’t I write a novel? I’d never written anything except some short stories at college. He thought I could do it and I wondered if I could. He told me not to show it to him until it was finished because he wouldn’t know my intent.

I’d been regaling people about my times in Paris and as I did something strange happened within me. As I rattled on about all the mishaps I’d encountered there, like ending up at a police station because I was caught in first-class in the Metro with a second-class ticket (they let me go because they said my French accent was so good), I heard myself talking in a voice that wasn’t mine—but was. I felt I knew this girl and I knew some of her adventures in Paris.

One day, Sally Jay Gorce appeared, fully formed. I opened a notebook and wrote, “I was walking down the street when suddenly …” I thought, where is my heroine going, and why is she walking at noon down the boulevard Montparnasse in an evening dress? The answer presented itself: she was on her way to meet her Italian lover, but instead ran into an American friend she found herself attracted to. I look back in wonder how it went, slowly but steadily. I wrote most of what became
The Dud Avocado
in the living room, hunched over a typewriter on my knees. This caused me to have that most unsympathetic of all ailments, a bad back. But I look back in wonder that not far from where we lived was the Dorchester Hotel, which had an inexpensive women’s Turkish bath, complete with massage, where I could go whenever my spine screamed for it.

Halfway through writing the book, I still had no title. It came wonderfully into being when I complimented my host at a party on his flourishing avocado plant. I said, I’d kept trying and failing with my own avocado pits. Someone said, what you’ve got is a dud avocado, and Ken said, that’s a good title for a novel. I thought, this title is mine, and it was. Ken and I had the same agent, and for a publisher we decided on Victor Gollancz, who was so good with first novels. Wonderfully, he accepted it, but with several caveats. He didn’t like the title. It sounded like a cookbook. He also wanted me to write under my married name. I said no to both. He accepted. He decided it needed a subtitle, “La Vie Amoureuse of Sally Jay in Paris.” I said, Oh no, no! He said, this was the first time in his experience that an unknown writer had complained about a book cover. However, he did put on the book’s jacket that the subtitle was the publisher’s. Ken read it in proof and said, “You’ve got a thumping great best-seller here.” Curiously, the first thing I felt was relief. I believed him. No one could predict how a play or novel would be received by the public like Ken could. And only then was I set free to let excitement take hold of me.

The reviews were excellent and the book quickly went into a second printing. Then one night Ken came home and threw a copy of the book out the window. “You weren’t a writer when I married you, you were an actress,” he said angrily. Obviously his colleagues had been riding him because of the attention I was receiving. I was shattered. The next day, he said, “I’ve been rereading your book. There’s love on every page.” And then he gave me a beautiful red leather-bound copy of it with the inscription: “From the Critic to the Author.” Looking at it I felt a pang. I wondered if it was his admission of what I’d done that he had not.

To my wonder and, it appeared, his annoyance, the book wouldn’t go away. The Big Personalities weighed in. Soon after its publication Irwin Shaw wrote to me praising it. Terry Southern, calling me “Miss Smarts,” said I was “a perfect darling.” Gore Vidal phoned one morning saying, “You’ve got the one thing a writer needs: You’ve got your own voice. Now go.” Ernest Hemingway said to me, “I liked your book. I liked the way your characters all speak
differently.” And then added, “My characters all sound the same because I never listen.” All this, and heaven too. Laurence Olivier told me that now that my book was making a lot of money we could elope and I could support us.
The Financial Times
ran an item which read, “Such and such stock: No dud avocado.” Groucho Marx wrote me, “I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed
The Dud Avocado
.… If this was actually your life, I don’t know how the hell you got through it.” When people ask me how autobiographical the book is I say, all the impulsive, outrageous things my heroine does, I did. All the sensible things she did, I made up.

My success took another road. I complained to Rod Steiger, “The book’s hardly been out and everyone wants to know what I’m going to write next. I mean, don’t I get to rest on my laurels?” In fact I had no idea of writing a second novel. “No,” said Rod, answering my question. “Succeeding only means you get another chance to try to do it again.”

I thought about it, and then Ken said to me, “If you write another book, I’ll divorce you.” I sat down and started my second novel and wondered that I knew its beginning and its end. I put it aside to write a play which went on in London. And I started to do a lot of journalism in America which I enjoyed, all the more because I had such wonderful editors at
Esquire, New York
magazine,
Vogue
, and
Cosmopolitan
. I went back to my novel and finished it. It was published to good reviews but now there were a couple of stinkers. I tore them up and flushed them down the toilet. I’d become a writer.

In 1964 Ken and I got divorced. Well, we did bad things to each other. Now, some three decades later, I look back in gratitude at him: I look back in wonder.

—E
LAINE
D
UNDY
December 11, 2006

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1958, 2007 by Elaine Dundy.

Introduction copyright © 2007 by Terry Teachout

All rights reserved.

Cover photograph: Erwin Blumenfeld,
Lying Nude, New York,
c. 1962; copyright © the Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld; photography courtesy Modernism, Inc., San Francisco

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dundy, Elaine.

The dud avocado / by Elaine Dundy ; introduction by Terry Teachout.

p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

1. Americans—France—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.U466D83 2007

813'.54—dc22

2007010955

eISBN 978-1-59017-413-5
v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
www.nyrb.com
or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014