Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker

by Finder, Henry

  1931

  JAMES THURBER

  THE INTERVIEW

  WONDERFUL place you have here,” said the man from the newspaper. He stood with his host on a rise of ground from where, down a slope to the right, they could see a dead garden, killed by winter, and, off to the left, spare, grim trees stalking the ghost of a brook.

  “Everybody says that,” said George Lockhorn. “Everybody says it’s a wonderful place, to which I used to reply ‘Thank you,’ or ‘I’m glad you think so,’ or ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ At fifty-eight, Price, I say what I know. I say that you and the others are, by God, debasing the word wonderful. This bleak prospect is no more wonderful than a frozen shirt. Even in full summer it’s no more wonderful than an unfrozen shirt. I will give you the synonyms for wonderful—wondrous, miraculous, prodigious, astonishing, amazing, phenomenal, unique, curious, strange. I looked them up an hour ago, because I knew you would say this is a wonderful place. Apply any of those words to that dahlia stalk down there.”

  “I see what you mean,” said Price, who was embarrassed, and began looking in his pockets for something that wasn’t there.

  “I have known only a few wonderful things in my fifty-eight years,” said Lockhorn. “They are easy to enumerate, since I have been practicing up to toss them off to you casually: the body of a woman, the works of a watch, the verses of Keats, the structure of the hyacinth, the devotion of the dog. Trouble is, I tossed those off casually for the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch man, or the Rochester Times-Union man. It’s cold out here. Shall we go inside?”

  “Just as you say,” said the interviewer, who had reached for the copy paper and the pencil in his pocket, but didn’t bring them out. “It’s bracing out here, though.”

  “You’re freezing to death, without your hat and overcoat, and you know it,” said Lockhorn. “It’s late enough for a highball— Do you drink cocktails?”

  “No, sir. That is, not often,” said Price.

  “You’re probably a liar,” Lockhorn said. “Everybody replies to my questions the way they think I want them to reply. You can say that I say ‘everybody-they;’ I hate ‘everybody-he.’ ‘Has everybody brought his or her slate?’ a teacher of mine, a great goat of a woman, used to ask us. There is no other tongue in the world as clumsy as ours is—with its back to certain corners. That’s been used, too—and don’t make notes, or don’t let me see you make notes. Never made a note in my life, except after a novel was finished. Plot the chapters out, outline the characters after the book has been published.”

  “That is extremely interesting,” said Price. “What do you do with the notes?”

  They had reached the rear of the house now. “We’ll go in the back way,” said Lockhorn. “I keep them around, tuck them away where my executor can find them if he’s on his toes. This is the woodshed. We’ll go through the kitchen. Some of my best character touches, some of the best devices, too, are in the notes. Anybody can write a novel, but it takes talent to do notes. We’ll go through this door.”

  “This is wonderful,” said Price. “I’m sorry. I mean—”

  “Let it stand,” said Lockhorn. “Wonderful in the sense of being astonishing, curious, and strange. Don’t take the chair by the fire,” he added as they reached the living room. “That’s mine.”

  LOCKHORN dropped into the chair by the fireplace and motioned his guest into another. “Can I use that about the notes?” asked Price. “Mr. Hammer wants something new.”

  “Make us both a drink,” Lockhorn said. “That’s a bar over there. I drink bourbon, but there’s Scotch and rye, too.”

  “I’ll have bourbon,” said Price.

  “Everybody has what I have,” Lockhorn growled. “I said Scotch, and the Times-Union man had Scotch; I said rye, and the Post-Dispatch man had rye. No, you can’t use that about the notes. Tell it to everybody. Beginning to believe it myself. Have you gained the idea in your half hour here that I am a maniac?”

  Price, noisily busy with bottles and glasses, laughed uncomfortably. “Everybody knows that your methods of work are unusual,” he said. “May I ask what you are working on now?”

  “Easy on the soda,” said Lockhorn. “Martha will raise hell when she finds me drinking. Just bow at her and grin.”

  Price put two frightened squirts of soda in one glass and filled up the other. “Mrs. Lockhorn?” he asked, handing the strong highball to his host.

  “What is this man Hammer like?” Lockhorn demanded. “No, let me tell you. He says ‘remotely resembles,’ he says ‘flashes of insight.’ He begins, by God, sentences with ‘moreover.’ I had an English teacher who began sentences with ‘too.’ ‘Too, there are other factors to be considered.’ The man says he’s read Macaulay, but he never got past page six—Hammer, that is. Should have gone into real estate—subdivisions, opening up suburbs, and so on. This English teacher started every class by saying, ‘None of us can write.’ Hadn’t been for that man, I would have gone into real estate—subdivisions, opening up suburbs, and so on. But he was a challenge. You can say my memoirs will be called ‘I Didn’t Want to Write.’ ” Lockhorn had almost finished his drink. “I’ll have to see a proof,” he said. “I’ll have to see a proof of your article. Have you noticed that everybody says everything twice? They say everything twice. ‘Yes, they do,’ you’ll say. ‘Yes, they do.’ Only contribution I’ve made to literature is the discovery of the duplicate statement. ‘How the hell are you, Bill?’ a guy will say. ‘How the hell are you, anyway?’ ‘Fine,’ Bill will say. ‘Just fine.’ ”

  “That’s very interesting,” said Price, and, feeling that his host expected it, he added, “That’s very interesting.”

  Lockhorn held out his glass and Price carried it back to the bar. “The Times man, or whoever it was,” Lockhorn went on, “put down that one of the things I regard as wonderful is the feminine anatomy. You can’t get ‘body of a woman’ in the papers. The feminine anatomy is something that can be touched only with the mind, and you’ll notice that in my list everything can be touched by the hand. A watch a man never held would not be wonderful.”

  “That’s true,” said Price, speculating on the factual aspect of devotion.

  “There is only one thing I’ve never told an interviewer,” Lockhorn said, after a pause. “I’ve never told any interviewer about the game. ‘Don’t tell the man about the game,’ Mrs. Lockhorn always says. ‘Promise me you won’t tell the man about the game.’ Let me ask you one thing—why would Martha ask me not to tell you about the game if there were no game?”

  “She wouldn’t, of course,” said Price, taking a long slow sip of his drink to cover his embarrassment. The two men drank in silence for a while. “My second wife left me because of the game,” Lockhorn said, “but you can’t print that, because she would deny it, and I would deny it.” Lockhorn took a great gulp of his drink and stared into the fire again. Two minutes of silence went by, during which Price found himself counting the ticks of the clock on the mantelpiece. “My memory is beginning to slip,” Lockhorn said, “but if you print that, I’ll sue Hammer’s pants off. Maybe I’ll sue his pants off anyway. Sunday editors are the worst vermin in the world. If you use that, credit it to Mencken. I don’t know why the hell you boys want to interview me. I’ve said a great many sharp things in my life, but I can’t remember which ones are mine and which ones were said by Santayana, or John Jay Chapman, or Bernard De Voto. You can say my memory is slipping—maybe it will arouse pity. I’m the loneliest man in the United States.” Lockhorn had finished his drink very fast, and he got up and walked to the bar. Price’s eyebrows went up as he heard the heavy slug of bourbon chortle into the glass. “Martha’ll be sore as a pup,” Lockhorn said with an owlish grin. “Just touch your forelock to her. You can’t argue with her. She’s my fourth wife, you know. The others were Dorothy, Nettie, and Pauline, not necessarily in that order.” He came back to his chair and flopped into it. Price began to listen to the clock again. Lockhorn’s head jerked up suddenly. “G
oing to call my memoirs ‘I Had to Write,’ ” he said. “You can put that in your piece if you want to.”

  WHEN Mrs. Lockhorn came into the room, smiling her small, apprehensive smile, Price had just handed his host a seventh highball. “This is Pricey,” said Lockhorn. Price, who had jumped to his feet, stood bowing and grinning at his hostess. She barely touched him with her smile. “One for the house,” said Lockhorn, holding up his drink.

  “It’s early,” said Mrs. Lockhorn. “It isn’t five yet.”

  “I must be going,” Price said. “May I make you a drink, Mrs. Lockhorn?”

  “No, thank you,” she said, in a tone that corked the bottles.

  “Nonsense,” said Lockhorn. “Sit down, Pricey. I’ve never, by God, known anything like the female timetable. They live by the clock. The purpose of 6 P.M. is to unlock their inhibitions about liquor. Sexual intercourse is for holidays—”

  “George!” said Mrs. Lockhorn sharply.

  Price began to babble. “Well, I guess it was us men—we men—who actually set a schedule for drinking, with that business about the sun over the yardarm, wasn’t it, Mr. Lockhorn?”

  “Sun over your grandma’s thigh,” said Lockhorn irritably, looking at Price but aiming the phrase at his wife. “Who called tea ‘the five o’clock’? Women, French women. They don’t even believe a man should smoke until he puts on his tuxedo. We are a prisoner of the hours, Pricey, and you know it.” Price flushed and became vastly conscious of his hands.

  “Finish your drink,” said Martha Lockhorn to Price. “My husband is going to finish his, and then I’m afraid he must rest. The new book has taken a great deal out of him.”

  “You’re goddam tootin’ he’s going to finish his,” said Lockhorn, his fingers whitening on his glass, “and don’t third-person me. Sit down, Pricey. We’re just getting started.” Price sat stiffly on the edge of his chair. He saw that Mrs. Lockhorn, who had moved behind her husband’s chair, was trying to communicate with him by a shake of her head and a glance at the bar. “Don’t let ’em third-person you, Pricey,” said Lockhorn sternly. “Next comes the first person plural—they first-person-plural you to death. Then you might just as well go to bed and die. You might just as well go to bed and die.”

  “I hope he hasn’t been entertaining you with imprecations all afternoon,” said Mrs. Lockhorn.

  “Oh, no indeed,” exclaimed Price, picking up his glass and setting it down.

  “She loves the happy phrase,” said Lockhorn. “She spends more time on phrases than most women do on their hips.”

  “Don’t be tiresome, George,” said Mrs. Lockhorn. She turned to Price. “You see, he has been interviewed constantly,” she told him. “It seems as if there has been an interviewer here every day since his novel came out. You all want something different, and then it never comes out the way he says it. It’s all twisted and ridiculous.”

  “I hope to avoid that sin,” said Price, noting that the famous author had closed his eyes but still kept his tight grip on his glass.

  “He’s terribly tired.” Mrs. Lockhorn’s voice was lowered to a whisper, as if they were in a sickroom. “He worked four years on ‘The Flaw in the Crystal.’ Some of the reviews have hurt him deeply.”

  “It’s selling wonderfully,” whispered Price.

  Mrs. Lockhorn made a gesture with her hands, but its meaning was lost on him.

  The novelist opened his eyes and quickly finished his drink. “I’ll tell you some other wonderful things,” he said. “A woman crying, children calling over the snow—across the snow—dogs barking at a distance, dogs barking far off at night.” He put his empty glass on the floor and groped in the air for more wonders with his right hand. “Things I’ve wanted to do,” he went on. “You can use this, Pricey. Bat baseballs through the windows of a firescraper from a lower roof across the street, spend—”

  “Skyscraper,” said Mrs. Lockhorn.

  To Price’s secret delight his host, after a slow stare at Mrs. Lockhorn, repeated with great authority, “Firescraper.” He winked at Price. “I want to spend the night in Ovington’s,” he said. “I want to open a pigeon. All my life I’ve wanted to cut a dove open, looking for the goddamnedest omens in the history of the world. Like the Romans performing the ancient assizes. I want to find two hearts in one of the sons of bitches and go crying through the night, like another Whozis, ‘Repent, ye sinners, repent. The world is coming to an end.’ ”

  “George,” said Mrs. Lockhorn, “the newspapers can’t print things like that.”

  Lockhorn didn’t hear her. He picked up the glass and drank the trickle of ice water in it. “Go down, ye sinners, to the sea,” he said, with a wide gesture.

  “Talk about your book,” said his wife. “The newspapers want to know about your book.”

  Lockhorn looked at her. “They are all the same, Pricey,” he said, “and they differ as the waves differ. Only in height. The blood of the dove, as they say, Pricey. I’ll tell you about the book, drunk as I unexpectedly am, or get.”

  “He’s terribly tired,” cut in his wife.

  “Spiritual hope!” bawled Lockhorn, so loudly Price started the ice tinkling in his glass. “Spiritual hope is my tiny stock in trade, to quote the greatest master of them all.”

  Mrs. Lockhorn, observing that the newspaperman looked puzzled, said, “He means Henry James,” and then, to her husband, “I think he spoke of his small trade, George.”

  “The greatest master of them all,” said Lockhorn again. “I always begin with a picture, a visual picture. Woman standing in the doorway with the evening sun in her hair. Dying rays of the evening sun in her hair, as Hockett would put it.”

  “Hockett?” asked Price, realizing, with a small cold feeling in his stomach, that he was not going to have anything to write.

  “Your boss,” said Lockhorn.

  “Oh, Hammer,” said Price.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Mrs. Lockhorn.

  The author jiggled what was left of the ice in his glass. “The women write backwards,” he said, “beginning with their titles—‘Never Dies the Dream,’ ‘Lonely Is the Hunting Heart.’ ”

  “It’s ‘The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,’ ” said his wife, but Lockhorn waved her away.

  “I’m tired of the adult world seen through the eyes of a little girl,” he said. “A woman forgets everything that happens to her after she is fourteen. I, too, have lived in Arcady, Pricey, but I’m tired of viewing the adult world through the great solemn eyes of a sensitive— What is that word like nipper?”

  “Moppet?” asked Price.

  “Sensitive moppet,” said Lockhorn, closing his eyes, and sinking deeper in his chair.

  Price attempted to make a surreptitious note on his copy paper.

  “You can’t use that,” whispered Mrs. Lockhorn. “He’s talking about one of his closest women friends.”

  The interviewer put his pencil and paper away as his host opened his eyes again and pointed a finger at him. “Henry James had the soul of an eavesdropper,” he said. Price gave a laugh that did not sound like his own. “Everything he got, he got from what he overheard somebody say. No visual sense, and if you haven’t got visual sense, what have you got?”

  Price stood up as if to go, but Lockhorn waved him down again and grinned at his wife. “Pricey, here, has invented some remarkable game, Martha,” he said. “Tell Martha about your game, son. It’s all we’ve talked about all afternoon.”

  Price swallowed.

  “What sort of game is it?” asked Martha.

  “It’s nothing, really,” gurgled Price. He stood up again. “I must be running along,” he said.

  “Sit down for a moment,” said Mrs. Lockhorn. “George, you better lie down awhile.”

  To Price’s astonishment, the novelist got meekly to his feet and started for the door into the hall. He stopped in front of Price and stuck an index finger into his ribs, making a skucking sound with his tongue. “Is love worse living?” he said, and went
out into the hall and closed the door behind him. He began to stomp up the carpeted stairs, shouting, “Dorothy! Nettie! Martha!”

  Price, swallowing again, idiotically wondered what ever became of Pauline.

  “As you see, he’s really worn out,” said Mrs. Lockhorn hastily. “He’s not as young as he used to be, of course, and I wish he’d give up writing. After all, he’s written eighteen books and he has a comfortable income.”

  From far upstairs Price heard a now faint shouting for the lost Pauline.

  “Are you sure you won’t have another drink?” asked Mrs. Lockhorn, not moving from the edge of her chair.

  “A quick one, perhaps,” said Price. “Just half a glass.”

  “Surely,” said Mrs. Lockhorn with the hint of a sigh, taking his glass. “Bourbon?”

  “Scotch, if you don’t mind,” said Price.

  She made it very small, and very weak. “I know that you will use discretion,” she said. “George has become a little reckless in some of the things he says, and I hope you were able to tell the truth from the things he just makes up.”

  Price finished half his drink. “I’m afraid I really haven’t got anything,” he said miserably. “Perhaps you could tell me something I could use.”

  Mrs. Lockhorn looked mysterious. “There are some wonderful things about the book,” she said. “I mean about the way he wrote it and what had to be done by the publishers. He had actually written, word for word, a chapter from one of his earlier books into the new one. He hadn’t copied it, you understand. It was simply there in his memory, word for word.” Price got out his pencil and paper, but his hostess lifted her hand. “Oh, mercy!” she said. “You can’t possibly print that. He would be furious if he found it out.”