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

by Finder, Henry

  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

  DURING 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.

  Not long after she had disposed of the would-be Religion editor, she met a man named Lester Kranitt, who said he supported himself while writing his novel by working for a company called After Dinner, Inc. According to Kranitt, After Dinner, Inc. earned a great deal of money by providing after-dinner speakers with well-written speeches on any subject. “It’s really too sordid,” said Kranitt, smiling at the recollection. “I work for a very crude man who never says anything to me but ‘Hey, champ, can you knock me out eight hundred words on the place of foundation garments in our private enterprise system by six tonight?’ or ‘Hey, champ, why don’t you sit yourself down and work me up the two thousand words Eddie O’Brien will have to say at a testimonial dinner called Eddie O’Brien’s Twenty-five Years Behind the Wheel of a Five-Passenger Checker, by ten tomorrow morni
ng.

  Marlene listened to Kranitt for about ten minutes before recognizing him as a man who had once waited on her at Bloomingdale’s. She said, “Listen, champ, why don’t you knock me out fifty words on brushing off a phony.” If he had been a decent phony, she thought later, he would have at least quoted her a price for a brush-off speech.

  AFTER all these experiences, Marlene was understandably skeptical when, at a party at Bernie Mohler’s summer place near East Hampton, a young man named Roland Magruder answered her question about his occupation in the usual way. “What kind of writer?” she said, suspiciously. She could not believe that he had not heard how difficult she was to impress with this approach.

  “A freelance writer,” said Magruder, who was quite aware of how difficult she was to impress with this approach, and had even heard odds quoted on the matter.

  “What kind of freelance writer?” asked Marlene.

  “A sign writer.”

  “A sign painter?”

  “No,” said Magruder. “I write signs. Cities retain me to write signs on a freelance basis. I specialize in traffic work. ‘Yield Right of Way’ is a good example.”

  “Somebody wrote ‘Yield Right of Way’?” asked Marlene.

  “I wrote ‘Yield Right of Way,’ ” said Magruder, permitting a tone of pride to creep into his voice. “Do you think something like ‘Yield Right of Way’ writes itself ? Do you think it was written by the gorilla who installed the signs on the Expressway? He would have probably written ‘Let the Other Guy Keep in Front of Ya.’ Have you been going under the impression that ‘Vehicles Weighing Over Five Tons Keep Right’ was composed by Robert F. Wagner, Jr.?”

  “But these messages are obvious,” argued Marlene.

  “You would have probably said that it was obvious for Brigham Young to say ‘This is the place’ when the Mormons reached Utah, or for Pétain to say ‘They shall not pass,’ or for MacArthur to say ‘I shall return.’ I suppose you think those lines just happened to come out of their mouths, without any previous thought or professional consultation. I think, by the way, if I may say so, that my ‘No Passing’ says everything ‘They shall not pass’ says, and without succumbing to prolixity.”

  “You mean to say you’re being paid for writing ‘Stop’ and ‘One Way’ and ‘Slow’?” asked Marlene. She tried to include as much sarcasm as possible in her voice, but Magruder seemed to take no notice.

  “A certain economy of style has never been a handicap to a writer,” he said. “On the other hand, while it’s true that traffic signs are a vehicle that permits a pithiness impossible in most forms, I do longer pieces. ‘Next Train for Grand Central on Track Four’ is one of mine—at the Times Square subway station. There’s another one at the Times Square station that you certainly haven’t seen yourself but that I think has a certain flair: ‘This Is Your Men’s Room; Keep It Clean.’ I’ve heard several people talk of that one as the ultimate expression of man’s inability to identify with his group in an urban society.”

  That was almost too much for Marlene. She had found herself beginning to believe Magruder—his self-confidence was awesome, and, after all, who would have the gall to take credit for “One Way” if he hadn’t written it?—but bringing in sociological criticism was a challenge to credulity. Just then, Bernie Mohler passed by on his way to the patio and said, “Nice job on ‘World’s Fair Parking,’ Roland.”

  “What did you have to do with World’s Fair parking?” asked Marlene.

  “That’s it,” said Magruder. “ ‘World’s Fair Parking.’ It’s on the Expressway. Do you like it?”

  Before Marlene could answer, a blond girl joined them and asked, “Was that your ‘This Is Water Mill—Slow Down and Enjoy It’ I saw on Highway 27, Roland?”

  Magruder frowned. “I’m not going to get involved in that cutesy stuff just to satisfy the Chamber of Commerce types,” he said. “I told the town board that ‘Slow Down’ says it all, and they could take it or leave it.”

  “I thought your ‘No Parking Any Time’ said it all,” remarked a tall young man with a neat beard. “I’ve heard a lot of people say so.”

  “Thanks very much,” Magruder said, looking down at the floor modestly.

  “Oh, did you do that?” Marlene found herself asking.

  “It wasn’t much,” said Magruder, still looking at the floor.

  “You don’t happen to know who did the big ‘NO’ sign at Coney Island?” Marlene asked. “The one that has one ‘NO’ in huge letters and then lists all the things you can’t do in smaller letters next to it?” Marlene realized she had always been interested in the big “NO” sign.

  “I introduced the Big ‘NO’ concept at the city parks several years ago,” said Magruder. “Some people say it’s a remarkable insight into modern American urban life, but I think that kind of talk makes too big a thing of it.”

  “Oh, I don’t,” said Marlene. “I think it’s a marvellous expression of the negativism of our situation.”

  “Well, that’s enough talking about me,” said Magruder. “Can I get you another drink?”

  “I’m really tired of this party anyway,” said Marlene.

  “I’ll drive you home,” said Magruder. “We can cruise by a ‘Keep Right Except to Pass’ sign, if you like. It’s on the highway just in front of my beach house.”

  “Well, O.K.,” said Marlene, “but no stopping.”

  “I wrote that,” Magruder said, and they walked out the door together.

  1965

  PHILIP HAMBURGER

  CONTEMPORARY WRITERS VI: AN INTERVIEW WITH GRIP SANDS

  THE interview with Grip Sands, three-time winner of the coveted Alma M. Halloran Fictive Award (for his novels “Lud,” “Fust,” and “Drime”) was held at five-thirty one morning in his loft workroom-bedroom-living room on Manhattan’s lower East Side, within sight of the ever-poetic span of the Brooklyn Bridge. Sands works at night and sleeps by day, and the interview was conducted between the hours of his most intense concentration and his hours of rest. He appeared exhausted yet exhilarated. He is short, squat, and somewhat dishevelled, with thick eyebrows and piercing green eyes. He was dressed in black leather pants, a black leather jacket, and highly polished black boots. Sands and his boots are inseparable, as inseparable as Sands and the strange, private lexicon of obscenities he employs in ordinary conversation. Sands wears his boots everywhere—to literary conferences, to prize conclaves, and to bed. Bed consists of a mattress on the floor of the loft, with no pillow. The loft is sparely furnished: an unpainted worktable piled high with supplies of green copy paper, on which Sands writes in red ink, and, in one corner, a refrigerator. The floor of the loft was covered with crumpled mounds of discarded pieces of copy paper. They lent the otherwise barren room the appearance of being a mossy glen in a thick forest. Sands was seated on the mattress, reading galleys of his forthcoming fictive effort, “Zwer.” Several volumes of Proust were visible on top of the refrigerator, lying beside a half-eaten pomegranate.

  INTERVIEWER: You have been accused of a certain deliberate obscurity, not only in connection with the time continuum but with relation to the personnel of your novels. Your non-beings appear to have more life-force than your beings, and even at times to be interchangeable with them. What are you saying to us?

  SANDS: I should like very much to get my hands on the blarfs who accuse me of obscurity, much less deliberate obscurity. Their watchword would appear to be crand. I am saying what I am saying, and each driggle must figure the matter out for himself, depending on the time, the place, the barometric pressure, and the nearest horoscope. To read “Fust,” for instance, without a horoscope would be sheer groozle. And yet many try, and sink. I lay great store by horoscopes, mostly for their paramorphic value. They cut through the paninvisibility of non-being. We are left with the dark shadow of cartilage. The nub of the matter.

  INTERVIEWER: We know that each writer secretly whispers to himself in his innermost places, awake or asleep, that this time he
has touched the truth—zeroed in, you might say.

  SANDS: To me, eternity is eggshells. The whites are pure mag, and the yolks—well, I won’t even consider the yolks. They are beneath contempt. But the shells present an entirely different problem. We have the problem of poise—absolutely essential—and, with it, the delicate elaboration of personality, or, in the case of “Lud,” non-personality. One exudes. Otherwise, there is nothing—not even the void.

  INTERVIEWER: Do the city streets inspire you? I mean, do you prowl?

  SANDS: Inscrutably. Inscrutably, rather than haphazardly or continuously. The inspiration, once again, is eggshells. They rise beneath the feet and touch off myriad images. The prowling must be done under cover of darkness, and the feet themselves provide the motivation. One either senses this sort of thing or one doesn’t. The eggshells are everywhere, but one must feel them. Lower Broadway bleeds with eggshells. There the poise requires deftness, murim, and a calm spirit. If one is unhurried, collected, one is safe, one’s inspiration is safe. Jar the balance and there is a crack in eternity.

  INTERVIEWER: That would be irreparable?

  SANDS: Irreparable. There are no second chances. The wheel turns and stops—red or black, good or ill. And, of course, there is the question of money. The foundations and the grants help. I loathe them, and I loathe the gurds who sit in boardroom splendor and award them, but I never turn one down. The first grant is always the hardest. Then they pour in; some blick recommends me one year, I recommend the blick the next. It is a question of poise, almost vegetable. They say travel to England, France, Spain. I say no. I stay here. My terms. Fleep!