Tag: Peter De Vries

Puns Allowed:  Peter De Vries’s  “The Tunnel of Love”

Peter De Vries loved puns.  He was an American humorist and a prolific novelist. There is a quality of stand-up to his characters’ droll musings and dialogue.

Born in Chicago, Peter De Vries worked as an editor for Poetry magazine from 1938 to 1944.  At the urging of James Thurber, he moved to New York City to work for The New Yorker.  He was on the staff from 1944 to 1987, writing stories and touching up cartoon captions.   He was also a wisecracking novelist, and though some of his novels are funnier than others, I am a fan.

His best-selling novel, The Tunnel of Love, published in 1954, is very slight, silly, and goofy.  The loose plot crackles with jokes and gags, and I cackled at the absurdity.  There are even Latin jokes:  the narrator and his friends invent a homonym game called Looney Latin.

It was on one of the evenings soon after my return that we invented, a group of us, in a spate of extemporaneous mirth, something we called Looney Latin, the idea of which was, of course, later pirated and transposed into Gallic as Fractured French.  It was basically the same thing.  For example, a hic jacet was, we said, a sport coat worn by a person of provincial, or corny, taste; ad nauseam  meant a sickening industrial advertisement, and the like.

Not surprisingly, the clever narrator is De Vries’s doppelganger, a magazine art editor who buys cartoons and touches up the captions.   One of his most horrible jobs is rejecting the work of Augie Poole, a cartoonist who can’t draw.   He wants to buy Augie’s jokes, but does not want his cartoons. It is awkward, because Augie is his neighbor.

Augie is a moody guy, married to an actress, Isolde, who has given up her career.  She desperately wants a child but cannot get pregnant, so the Pooles sign up with an adoption agency, the Crib.  The narrator has qualms about Augie’s qualifications for fatherhood: he takes to his bed when Crib employee Mrs. Mash comes to their house to get references for the Pooles.  He knows that Augie plays the horses, Augie has borrowed hundreds of dollars from him and not repaid it, and Augie cheats on his wife with Cornelia Bly, a cubist artist who gets pregnant.

The narrator tries to clean up Augie’s mess:  he buys $1,000 worth of Augie’s jokes and takes the money to Cornelia to pay for the expenses. She and her three brothers are not perturbed by her pregnancy, and they are so intellectual that the conversation gets wackier and wackier.

But then the narrator, inspired by Augie’s bad behavior, goes out with a young woman while his wife is away.  The whole thing becomes a comedy of errors, because he does not actually want to sleep with her, but she is insulted that he doesn’t.  And then there are more worries…

Perhaps you can see where this is going. But it doesn’t actually go where you think it will.

I don’t want to leave you without an example of DeVries’s brilliant puns. In the following scene, the narrator is chatting to a dull woman at a party and  begins to tease her. 

“Have you lived in New England all your life since then?”

“All my life except three years when I was abroad.”

“Oh, you were a broad at one time.”

“In my twenties.”

“That’s the best time to be a broad,” I said.  “What’s it like, being a broad?”

Are you rolling your eyes?  It is funny, though.

Welcome to De Vries fandom!

A Satire and a Servant Problem: Peter De Vries’s “The Mackerel Plaza” & Winifred Peck’s “Bewildering Cares”

Have you heard of Peter De Vries (1910-1993), the New Yorker staff writer who was the author of numerous satiric novels? I wasn’t crazy about De Vries until I read The Mackerel Plaza, which was a Black Friday special.

This hilarious novel centers on Andrew Mackerel, the intellectual minister of the comically-named People’s Liberal Church of Avalon, Connecticut. Andrew, a recent widower, wants to remarry, but can’t even date, because his parishioners keep dedicating memorials to his late wife.

How can he meet women? Well, easily enough. He meets Molly Calico, an aspiring actress who works at the zoning board, when he files a complaint about a “Jesus Saves” billboard. He tells her he cannot write sermons with this monstrosity in view. Molly agrees it’s tacky, but thinks the common people need an easily comprehensible moral philosophy.  And she wonders what the Apostle Paul would say.  Andrew replies,  “I have no idea, but Oscar Wilde reminds us that while crime is not vulgar, vulgarity is a crime. ”  And that gives you an idea of the witty repartee.

The plot complications begin when he asks Molly out to dinner.  Because his parishioners are watching, they must sneak around bad neighborhoods.  And Hester, his sister-in-law, who moved in to be his housekeeper after his wife died, won’t let him forget her sister.  Andrew is astonished when Molly suggests Hester is in love with him and trying to scare off other women.  Is she right?

I very much enjoyed De Vries’s portrayal of the outrageously funny, conservative Mrs. Calico (Molly’s mother),  who reminds Andrew of Beatrix Potter’s Tabitha Twitchit.   She primly drinks tea and talks about the importance of roots, says the family is coming back (Andrew asks, “Are you expecting relatives?”), and announces, “Poetry went to the dogs under the Taft administration.”

De Vries reminds me vaguely of David Lodge–so funny!

DO YOU HAVE A SERVANT PROBLEM?

I recently read Winifred Peck’s Bewildering Cares, a charming novel in the form of the diary of a vicar’s wife.  It is one of those earnest, slightly comic English novels about a Brave Englishwoman Who Has Only One Servant and Too Many Committee Meetings.

Bewildering Cares is a cross between E. M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady and Jan Struther’s Mrs. Miniver. I also kept mixing it up with another cozy novel I read this month, E. M.  Delafield’s The Way Things Are.

In Bewildering Cares, the heroine, Camilla Lacey, describes her life during the spring of 1940.  She tells us her husband, Arthur, is the opposite of the stereotypical bumbling vicar:  Arthur is a tall, dark, clean-shaven, brilliant man who took a First in Greats before World War I. The Laceys live in a manufacturing town, where they deal with people of all classes.

Camilla’s work as vicar’s wife is divided between visiting the poor and sick, lunching with the nouveau riche, committee work—and the women in the committees are  difficult—and managing the enormous cold vicarage.

Camilla divides the housekeeping with her only servant, the loyal Kate.  They share the housework and cooking, but cooking is challenging because it is difficult to find good ingredients during the war.

Camilla writes,

I often wonder if other women who are taking to their own work in war-time are filled with the same stupefied admiration for domestic servants which I feel now. Unruffled, they seem to be able to leave milk on the boil while they answer the Laundry and oblige with 3s. 6 ¾ d., wipe the flour off their hands while they respond to the Rubbish, break off in whipping up an egg to polish and take up the shoes, and keep a kindly eye on the soup even while, at the basement gate, a gentleman is imploring them to view the writing-paper in his attaché-case.

There is a  plot:  when the curate, Mr. Strang, a pacifist, preaches against the war, everyone is up in arms.  The Laceys wish he’d be more tactful, but they manage to soothe ruffled feathers.  Plus Mr. Strang gets dangerously ill—that, in fact, is what saves him from the witch hunt!

This slight novel, published by Furrowed Middlebrow, is very entertaining, and is available as a very cheap e-book.