Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  We salute, as well, the generosity of all those who helped us assemble this collection with their unstinting, if at times heated, advice (in a few instances, to be honest, “advice” is the word only if you stipulate that General MacArthur advised Tojo to surrender). We cannot list every counselor, but we’re particularly grateful to Leo Carey, whose comic sensibility is as finely tuned as a cello (a finely tuned cello, that is to say), and who has, rather precociously, become a redoubt of institutional memory; Susan Morrison, who has culled and edited the magazine’s Shouts and Murmurs—and nurtured its writers—for more than a decade; and Adam Gopnik, who conveyed the dire threats of an Old Testament prophet should a certain Thurber piece be left out (we chose not to discover whether his omniscience is matched by omnipotence). Andrea Walker gamely foraged through The New Yorker’s half-a-billion-word archives, searching, sorting, reading, organizing, and juggling logistical challenges with an agility that would do NASA proud. We’re grateful, as well, to the magazine’s deputy editor, Pamela Maffei McCarthy, not least for arranging this book’s publication, cunningly persuading Random House that, in return, it should pay The New Yorker a little something, rather than the other way around. Lynn Oberlander and Andrew Avery sorted through rights and permissions; Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey helped keep everything on track; Greg Captain lent a hand with the cover image. At Random House, Jennifer Hershey, Julia Cheiffetz, Millicent Bennett, and Evan Camfield helped turn a big messy stack of wrinkled, coffee-ringed photocopies into a tidily bound volume with a cover and everything, shipped to bookstores across the land. All these men and women did their part. Now it’s your turn.

  There’s a story, possibly true, about the producer of a sitcom who once summoned a pair of staff writers to berate them about a script they’d just handed in. “The show’s supposed to be funny, and this just isn’t funny,” the producer said. “There’s not a laugh in it.” The writers, taken aback, protested that the script had some of the funniest writing they’d done. With the producer’s sufferance, they started to read it out loud. A page into it, the producer was convulsed with laughter. By the end of the first scene, he had fallen out of his chair and onto the floor, in helpless paroxysms, wildly signaling the writers to stop. At last, the producer recovered his breath, heaved himself back onto his chair, and grumbled, “Well, sure, if you’re going to read it like that.” Aside from begging your indulgence for this volume’s inexplicable omissions, casualties of the spinning bottle, we have very few requests to make of you, the reader. You should feel free to dip into this anthology randomly, to read it backward, to give it a home next to a porcelain commode. (Better there than on a high shelf.) All we ask is that you read it like that.

  COUPLES

  JAMES THURBER

  THE BREAKING UP OF THE WINSHIPS

  THE trouble that broke up the Gordon Winships seemed to me, at first, as minor a problem as frost on a windowpane. Another day, a touch of sun, and it would be gone. I was inclined to laugh it off, and, indeed, as a friend of both Gordon and Marcia, I spent a great deal of time with each of them, separately, trying to get them to laugh it off, too—with him at his club, where he sat drinking Scotch and smoking too much, and with her in their apartment, that seemed so large and lonely without Gordon and his restless moving around and his quick laughter. But it was no good; they were both adamant. Their separation has lasted now more than two months. I doubt very much that they will ever go back together again.

  It all started one night at Leonardo’s, after dinner, over their Bénédictine. It started innocently enough, amiably even, with laughter from both of them, laughter that froze finally as the clock ran on and their words came out sharp and flat and stinging. They had been to see Anna Karenina. Gordon hadn’t liked it very much: He said that Fredric March’s haircut made the whole thing seem silly. Marcia had been crazy about it because she is crazy about Greta Garbo. She belongs to that considerable army of Garbo admirers whose enchantment borders almost on fanaticism and sometimes even touches the edges of frenzy. I think that, before everything happened, Gordon admired Garbo, too, but the depth of his wife’s conviction that here was the greatest figure ever seen in our generation on sea or land, on screen or stage, exasperated him that night. Gordon hates (or used to) exaggeration, and he respects (or once did) detachment. It was his feeling that detachment is a necessary thread in the fabric of a woman’s charm. He didn’t like to see his wife get herself “into a sweat” over anything and, that night at Leonardo’s, he unfortunately used that expression and made that accusation.

  Marcia responded, as I get it, by saying, a little loudly (they had gone on to Scotch and soda), that a man who had no abandon of feeling and no passion for anything was not altogether a man, and that his so-called love of detachment simply covered up a lack of critical appreciation and understanding of the arts in general. Her sentences were becoming long and wavy, and her words formal. Gordon suddenly began to pooh-pooh her; he kept saying “Pooh!” (an annoying mannerism of his, I have always thought). He wouldn’t answer her arguments or even listen to them. That, of course, infuriated her. “Oh, pooh to you, too!” she finally more or less shouted. He snapped at her, “Quiet, for God’s sake! You’re yelling like a losing prizefight manager!” Enraged at that, she had recourse to her eyes as weapons and looked steadily at him for a while with the expression of one who is viewing a small and horrible animal, such as a horned toad. They then sat in moody and brooding silence for a long time, without moving a muscle, at the end of which, getting a hold on herself, Marcia asked him, quietly enough, just exactly what actor on the screen or on the stage, living or dead, he considered greater than Garbo. Gordon thought a moment and then said, as quietly as she had put the question, “Donald Duck.” I don’t believe that he meant it at the time, or even thought that he meant it. However that may have been, she looked at him scornfully and said that that speech just about perfectly represented the shallowness of his intellect and the small range of his imagination. Gordon asked her not to make a spectacle of herself—she had raised her voice slightly—and went on to say that her failure to see the genius of Donald Duck proved conclusively to him that she was a woman without humor. That, he said, he had always suspected; now, he said, he knew it. She had a great desire to hit him, but instead she sat back and looked at him with her special Mona Lisa smile, a smile rather more of contempt than, as in the original, of mystery. Gordon hated that smile, so he said that Donald Duck happened to be exactly ten times as great as Garbo would ever be and that anybody with a brain in his head would admit it instantly. Thus the Winships went on and on, their resentment swelling, their sense of values blurring, until it ended up with her taking a taxi home alone (leaving her vanity bag and one glove behind her in the restaurant) and with him making the rounds of the late places and rolling up to his club around dawn. There, as he got out, he asked his taxi-driver which he liked better, Greta Garbo or Donald Duck, and the driver said he liked Greta Garbo best. Gordon said to him, bitterly, “Pooh to you, too, my good friend!” and went to bed.

  The next day, as is usual with married couples, they were both contrite, but behind their contrition lay sleeping the ugly words each had used and the cold glances and the bitter gestures. She phoned him, because she was worried. She didn’t want to be, but she was. When he hadn’t come home, she was convinced he had gone to his club, but visions of him lying in a gutter or under a table, somehow horribly mangled, haunted her, and so at eight o’clock she called him up. Her heart lightened when he said, “Hullo,” gruffly: He was alive, thank God! His heart may have lightened a little, too, but not very much, because he felt terrible. He felt terrible and he felt that it was her fault that he felt terrible. She said that she was sorry and that they had both been very silly, and he growled something about he was glad she realized she’d been silly, anyway. That attitude put a slight edge on the rest of her words. She asked him shortly if he was coming home. He said sure he was coming home; it was his home, wasn’t it? She told him
to go back to bed and not be such an old bear, and hung up.

  THE next incident occurred at the Clarkes’ party a few days later. The Winships had arrived in fairly good spirits to find themselves in a buzzing group of cocktail-drinkers that more or less revolved around the tall and languid figure of the guest of honor, an eminent lady novelist. Gordon late in the evening won her attention and drew her apart for one drink together and, feeling a little high and happy at that time, as is the way with husbands, mentioned, lightly enough (he wanted to get it out of his subconscious), the argument that he and his wife had had about the relative merits of Garbo and Duck. The tall lady, lowering her cigarette-holder, said, in the spirit of his own gaiety, that he could count her in on his side. Unfortunately, Marcia Winship, standing some ten feet away, talking to a man with a beard, caught not the spirit but only a few of the words of the conversation, and jumped to the conclusion that her husband was deliberately reopening the old wound, for the purpose of humiliating her in public. I think that in another moment Gordon might have brought her over, and put his arm around her, and admitted his “defeat”—he was feeling pretty fine. But when he caught her eye, she gazed through him, freezingly, and his heart went down. And then his anger rose.

  Their fight, naturally enough, blazed out again in the taxi they took to go home from the party. Marcia wildly attacked the woman novelist (Marcia had had quite a few cocktails), defended Garbo, excoriated Gordon, and laid into Donald Duck. Gordon tried for a while to explain exactly what had happened, and then he met her resentment with a resentment that mounted even higher, the resentment of the misunderstood husband. In the midst of it all she slapped him. He looked at her for a second under lowered eyelids and then said, coldly, if a bit fuzzily, “This is the end, but I want you to go to your grave knowing that Donald Duck is twenty times the artist Garbo will ever be, the longest day you, or she, ever live, if you do—and I can’t understand, with so little to live for, why you should!” Then he asked the driver to stop the car, and he got out, in wavering dignity. “Caricature! Cartoon!” she screamed after him. “You and Donald Duck both, you——” The driver drove on.

  The last time I saw Gordon—he moved his things to the club the next day, forgetting the trousers to his evening clothes and his razor—he had convinced himself that the point at issue between him and Marcia was one of extreme importance involving both his honor and his integrity. He said that now it could never be wiped out and forgotten. He said that he sincerely believed Donald Duck was as great a creation as any animal in all the works of Lewis Carroll, probably even greater, perhaps much greater. He was drinking and there was a wild light in his eye. I reminded him of his old love of detachment, and he said to the hell with detachment. I laughed at him, but he wouldn’t laugh. “If,” he said, grimly, “Marcia persists in her silly belief that that Swede is great and that Donald Duck is merely a caricature, I cannot conscientiously live with her again. I believe that he is great, that the man who created him is a genius, probably our only genius. I believe, further, that Greta Garbo is just another actress. As God is my judge, I believe that! What does she expect me to do, go whining back to her and pretend that I think Garbo is wonderful and that Donald Duck is simply a cartoon? Never!” He gulped down some Scotch straight. “Never!” I could not ridicule him out of his obsession. I left him and went over to see Marcia.

  I found Marcia pale, but calm, and as firm in her stand as Gordon was in his. She insisted that he had deliberately tried to humiliate her before that gawky so-called novelist, whose clothes were the dowdiest she had ever seen and whose affectations obviously covered up a complete lack of individuality and intelligence. I tried to convince her that she was wrong about Gordon’s attitude at the Clarkes’ party, but she said she knew him like a book. Let him get a divorce and marry that creature if he wanted to. They can sit around all day, she said, and all night, too, for all I care, and talk about their precious Donald Duck, the damn comic strip! I told Marcia that she shouldn’t allow herself to get so worked up about a trivial and nonsensical matter. She said it was not silly and nonsensical to her. It might have been once, yes, but it wasn’t now. It had made her see Gordon clearly for what he was, a cheap, egotistical, resentful cad who would descend to ridiculing his wife in front of a scrawny, horrible stranger who could not write and never would be able to write. Furthermore, her belief in Garbo’s greatness was a thing she could not deny and would not deny, simply for the sake of living under the same roof with Gordon Winship. The whole thing was part and parcel of her integrity as a woman and as an—as an, well, as a woman. She could go to work again; he would find out.

  There was nothing more that I could say or do. I went home. That night, however, I found that I had not really dismissed the whole ridiculous affair, as I hoped I had, for I dreamed about it. I had tried to ignore the thing, but it had tunnelled deeply into my subconscious. I dreamed that I was out hunting with the Winships and that, as we crossed a snowy field, Marcia spotted a rabbit and, taking quick aim, fired and brought it down. We all ran across the snow toward the rabbit, but I reached it first. It was quite dead, but that was not what struck horror into me as I picked it up. What struck horror into me was that it was a white rabbit and was wearing a vest and carrying a watch. I woke up with a start. I don’t know whether that dream means that I am on Gordon’s side or on Marcia’s. I don’t want to analyze it. I am trying to forget the whole miserable business.

  1936

  PETER DE VRIES

  THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

  THE collaboration known as marriage could, I think, be profitably extended from the domestic to the social sphere, where a man and wife might brighten their contribution to, say, the give-and-take of dinner-table conversation by preparing a few exchanges in advance. “It’s simply the principle of teamwork,” I told my wife in partially describing the idea to her one evening as we were dressing to go to dinner at the home of some friends named Anthem. “For instance, tonight, Sue Anthem being as hipped as she is on family trees, we’re bound to talk relatives at some point. Well, I’m going to tell about my seagoing grandfather who’s so wonderful. In the middle of it, I’ll pause and take up my napkin, and then I’d appreciate it if you’d ask me, ‘Was he on your mother’s side?’ ” (I planned to answer, “Yes, except in money matters, when he usually stuck up for my father.” This wasn’t much, but I was feeling my way around in the form, trying to get the hang of it before going on to something more nearly certifiable as wit.)

  Dinner ran along the lines I had foreseen. Sue Anthem got off on kinship, and I launched my little account of this wonderful grandfather. I paused at the appointed moment and, glancing at my wife, reached for my napkin.

  “I keep forgetting,” she came in brightly. “Was he your maternal grandfather?”

  “Yes, except in money matters, when he usually stuck up for my father,” I replied.

  A circle of blank looks met my gaze. I coughed into my napkin, and Sue picked up the thread of the discussion while I reviewed in my mind a couple of other gambits I had worked out with my wife, on the way over. One of these concerned a female friend, not present that evening, whom I will cut corners by calling a gay divorcée. She had just announced her engagement to a man so staid that news of the match took everyone who knew her by surprise. “Now, if the thing comes up, as it probably will,” I had coached my wife, “say something about how you’ve only met him a few times but he seems a man of considerable reserve.” I intended then to adroitly add, “Which Monica will get her hands on in short order.” I expected that to go over big, the divorcée being a notorious gold-digger.

  The gossip did get around to her soon after it left the subject of relatives, and my wife came in on cue punctually enough, but her exact words were “He’s such a quiet, unassuming chap.”

  This time, I had the presence of mind to realize the quip was useless, and check myself. Another misfire followed almost immediately. In preparation for possible discussion of Italy, where Monica and her
fiancé planned to honeymoon, I had primed my wife to tell about her own visit to the Gulf of Spezia, where the drowned Shelley had been washed up. “In a way, you know, he was lucky,” I had planned to comment. “Most poets are washed up before they’re dead.” She told her story, but used the words “where Shelley was found,” thus washing up that mot.