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

by Finder, Henry

  INTERVIEWER: Do you revise much?

  SANDS: As an exercise in the art of interregnum. The floor of the studio attests to the continuously heightened and renewed perceptions and non-perceptibles.

  INTERVIEWER: Do you mingle much with other writers?

  SANDS: Sparsely.

  INTERVIEWER: But you do mingle occasionally—conferences, creative-writing gatherings, and so on. Do you derive much inspiration, if any, from these encounters?

  SANDS: The average writer is a brape. I observe them to renew my contempt. And to replenish the wellspring. The fallow times, you know, are not kinsel. Bears do it. Inspiration often derives from one’s low opinion of those around one, so I occasionally drive to the gas station and ask the man to fill up the tank. Then back here to aloneness and the eternal, internal me. You are the first person I have talked to since beginning “Zwer,” and you may be the last.

  INTERVIEWER: “Zwer” has already evinced almost universal interest. Can you tell me something about it—its themes and goals?

  SANDS: In “Zwer,” the root is the branch. It will win all the prizes, but for all the wrong reasons. In “Zwer,” the personae ascend in descension. The interstices become the corpus. Form follows reason to the city limits, and then explodes with malevolent magnanimity. The bulldozers appear to triumph, but the squeak of the mouse is heard over the land.

  INTERVIEWER: Where would you say the novel in general is heading? I mean, this would come down, I suppose, to shape and form and content. You must have given this a good deal of thought.

  SANDS: The problem centers acutely on the extricular. Gravy boats, bronzed booties, canoes—that sort of thing. Try to avoid these tactiles and the novel will foist. Slowly at first, but with increasing blushes. That is one thing I am certain of, up to a point. Characters must become egressors. The costume is without meaning, the setting a mere ball of fire, and the dialogue quirp. People often halrow and urge you to try that one on your cigar box. I tell them to emerge, shed, blacken with soot. Cold cream is dodo. Definitely. “Zwer’s” most powerful scenes are illuminated with the passion of an underwater gazebo. The inundated summerhouse! It is a summing up, and nothing will ever be the same. Follow the green arrow and take the wrong turn. Most of them are rotten.

  INTERVIEWER: In other words, you are optimistic.

  SANDS: Insofar as the circle bisects the square and leaves it dangling. And with respect to the pastoral mutations. The rest is queel. But there are some bright spots—Lipton in Kansas City, struggling with his penetrobes, and poor Kenneeley being bitten alive in Algiers.

  INTERVIEWER: Kenya, I believe.

  SANDS: You are right. Kenya.

  INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me something of your origins?

  SANDS: Bridgeport was pure treem. The noxious workmen and their hard-boiled eggs. Puget Sound was drave, and New Orleans grob. Heady stuff. My parents were one-burner electric stove, here today and gone. St. Louis, Denver, the transcontinental bit, and then the breakaway. Collapse and recovery and the dusty road to the center. The self-initiated self. It came one night and knocked, and I said, “Enter.” And here I am.

  INTERVIEWER: A complete man?

  SANDS: Ragout.

  1967

  ROGER ANGELL

  IN THE DOUGH

  Virginia Hardy’s Story Writing Contest!

  Virginia Hardy’s Oven invites all patrons and friends to enter our Short Story Contest. At least one and as many as three stories will be selected each month for inclusion on Virginia Hardy’s Oven pie boxes. (We print and distribute over a million boxes per year!) The author of each story selected will receive a prize of fifty free pies at any Virginia Hardy’s Oven. Stories should be between 750 and 1250 words long, and, of course, suitable for general audiences. Please include a brief description of yourself suitable for our “About the author” section . . .

  —Notice on a pie box.

  Mrs. Ishbel Carrington Shute

  Fiction Editor

  Mother Melmoth Pastry Pantries, Inc.

  DEAR MRS. SHUTE:

  Am enclosing proofs of “Queen of Hearts” in haste to catch deadline. Please restore and stet the lines inexplicably deleted by you on galley 2, from “Now, in delicious disarray . . .” through “. . . a glimpse of regal bosom, charmingly dusted with an inadvertent dab of flour, that rose and fell, here within the sweet warmth of the summer kitchen, in quickened tempo. Knavish Jack, suddenly apant, stepped forward from the shadows,” etc., etc. These sentences, rough and hand-hewn though they may appear, are essential to the ensuing chase scene, and also serve to render the Queen less distant and, yes, more earthily female, thus preparing your readers for the sensual reconciliation after the recapture of the purloined tarts. Please, dear Madam, stay your avid blue pencil here, recalling that an artist has pondered, sampled, and weighed each staple noun, each zesty adjective, each pinch of comma in his desire to create beauty at once nutritious and lighter than air. Exactly, in brief, like one of your master bakers.

  Speaking of which, your payment for “Cherry, the Cobbler’s Daughter” arrived today. Thanks for home delivery. And for the Lemon Meringues—they are scrumptious! We still have twenty-one Squash pies and eleven Boston Cream left over, thanks to your other recent acceptances, so the children welcomed this change of menu.

  A new effort goes off to you tomorrow. I am dipping toe, tremblingly, into the icy seas of biography—the pie as history, so to speak.

  Yours ever, DUANE MCCONAKREE

  Mr. Duane McConakree

  Iowa City, Iowa

  MY DEAR DUANE (if I may):

  Tremble no more. You have triumphed afresh, huzza! Not since the initial felicities of “Horner!” (now in its sixth edition—Rhubarb), or perhaps since I first cast a furtive tear over the joys of your “Shoo-Fly: A Rustic Romance,” have I been so caught up, so held as I was by “Karl Robert Nesselrode, Lad of Old Russia.” You have done us honor once again, and payment of fifty pies (Chocolate Nesselrode, natch) goes to you out of tonight’s baking, plus a deserved bonus of thirty Old-Fashioned Southern Pecan. Don’t thank us, please. The privilege of presenting your seemingly inexhaustible œuvre upon our humble cardboard palimpsests is reward aplenty. I await your next

  Hungrily, ISH

  DEAR ISH:

  Enclosed find “Priscilla’s Punkins”—in time, I trust, for a quick closing on an appropriate mid-November pub. date. It seems a graceful effort, but I find it more and more difficult to judge. To tell the truth, I am bored to near dementia by this facility of mine, this Niagara of pastry puffs, but my weird old muse stands over me, rolling pin in hand, and I can but obey.

  Assuming acceptance again, may I request payment this time in a separate flavor? LaVerne and little Zachary hate pumpkin. Anent which, and at the risk of jarring our perfect author-editor symbiosis, I wish to suggest a modest but commonsensical alteration in this matter of payment. This morning, during a thorough inspection of the dangerously overloaded shelves in our kitchen and laundry room, plus the teetering contents of three second-hand cupboards now doing makeshift service on the sun porch, I counted thirty-eight remaining Nesselrode pies, twenty-two Pecan, one Squash, four Lemon Meringue, forty-nine and a half Rhubarb (not, in truth, a terribly popular item here), eleven kuchen, one and one-quarter Coconut Cream, fourteen Butterscotch Chiffon, and sixteen assorted stale, crumbled, or unidentifiable, which I confiscated. This accounting does not include the nine dozen–odd pies that LaVerne has unloaded, for the merest fraction of their value, on our Eagle Discount manager and other surly local merchants, in lieu of the more common form of specie. We are, in short, amassing a corner in pies, and the essential flavor I now crave is Old Legal Tender.

  These are sere times for writers of short fiction, God wot, but A. Daptable is my middle name. This hack, for one, is almost ecstatically grateful for the evidences of high literary seriousness to be found in (or on) your unusual publication. I write only in order to eat and to fill the four gaping maws within my nest,
and all I ask, Ish, is a little less damned efficiency in this process. The mantle of George Horace Lorimer has fallen on the shoulders of your chef, yet this seems an insufficient excuse for the conversion of my home into a museum of pâtisserie. I am attempting to phrase this proposal in businesslike terms, eschewing mention of the increasingly doughy complexion of my loved ones, the Zeppelin-like recent configuration of my once lissome LaVerne, and the piteous cries that arise from the family dining table when yet another meal commences, continues, and concludes with implacably wedge-shaped helpings.

  Send cabbage, Mother Melmoth! DUANE

  CHER MAîTRE:

  Accept the greeting, for you are not, as you have lately claimed, the Irving Wallace of Pie Writers but rather the Maupassant—nay, the Balzac. Truly, I had not guessed that our square, even busy, little journal was ready for a tale of miscegenation and the ironies of a postbellum plantation romance, but today’s submission, “Brown Betty,” has quite taught me otherwise. In short, a triumph! There is even more good news, for Howard Johnson’s has just chosen our Tarte aux Fraises (with your classic “Simple Simone” as text) as its Pie of the Month for August, which assures rich returns for all. By the way, our people in Accounting tell me that cash payments are a no-no, but they have promised to include three dozen Beef-and-Kidney in your next royalty, thus alleviating the little dietary problems you mentioned. Glad to be of help!

  Luv, ISH

  ISH:

  I give up. Can your treasurer be wholly unaware that it has been some little time since Western man inched out of the long darkness of the barter system and into the sunshine of freely redemptive currencies? Has he not had the news that U.S. Steel no longer pays its dividends in ingots? Has he ever tried settling his telephone bill with a half-dozen Banana Cream Tortes? Has he attempted to write lean, rivet-hard prose after a breakfast of Apricot Pan Dowdy (cold) and réchauffée Mince à la mode? I warn you, a man can be whipped just so far.

  LaVerne, displaying a mobility quite uncharacteristic of most siege howitzers, has transformed our driveway and garage into a used-pie lot (“Drive In ’n’ Nibble!”). Commercial response seems initially discouraging, but I am not absolutely sure about this, because the lady has not spoken to me these past three weeks.

  I enclose, God forgive me, three new efforts—my last to you for some little time to come. I am determined to widen my market or quit this mad métier utterly.

  DUANE

  DUANE DEAR:

  Your threats do not convince me, for genius is simply not free to opt out. Conrad and Dostoevski also railed against the lonely dark, and yet did their duty in the end. I can hardly choose among the three new contes (a baker’s dozen dozen’s–worth of fresh pies for thee!), but “A Tragedy in Custard” was certainly the most surprising. Who but you could wring pathos from the plight of a Keystone pie-thrower with bone chips in his elbow?

  Onward! ISH

  KABIBBLE:

  Back again, as you foresaw. My attempts to escape the thrall of piedom have come to nothing. I have the rejection slips before me—from the Hasta Luego Chili Corp., Hedda Gobbler Frozen Turkey Parts, Old Shiloh Bourbon, Tweetie-Cat Pet Dinners, etc. A clean sweep, even including my delicate Petrarchan sonnet, “Con Formaggio,” which came back on an instant ricochet from the Molto Buona Pizza people. Call me mad, for I am henceforth forever pied.

  I am at least alone. Last Thursday, at five in the morning, our garage departed the premises in an eruption of noise and flame strongly reminiscent of a Cape Kennedy liftoff. Talk about pie in the sky . . . Dawn disclosed the neighbors’ topmost tree branches and most distant shrubbery prettily festooned with parts of variously flavored tarts, cobblers, meringues, and down-home deep-dishes, the whole resembling a direct hit on a Sicilian antipasto-works. Not a bad metaphor, in truth: I take this as a veiled warning from some local pastry-shop owner possibly miffed at our new venture in cut-rate pie-peddling. Later in the morning, while attempting to nail some pie plates over a gaping hole in our roof, I witnessed the final and not unexpected decampment of Herself and the bairns in the family auto—off, I don’t doubt, in simultaneous search of a better-balanced diet and father. From my vantage point, the tableau resembled a Green Bay Packer making off with a shipment of medicine balls.

  Alone now. My brain is but mincemeat, my soul chiffon, yet still shall I fight my way free . . .

  D.

  DEAR DUANE:

  Do I detect a new, darker side to your prose? Why, I wonder. “Ludwig’s Journey,” for instance, has me a mite puzzled. It is, of course, a stunning theme: Ludwig, an ancient immigrant to our shores, forms an irresistible longing for one last slice of Bavarian Cream pie homemade in his own native Bavarian hamlet. Exchanging his life savings for a steerage ticket, he reaches Europe and then falls victim to a gang of ruffians in Le Havre, who rob him of his all. Nothing daunted, he presses on by foot, hobbling half the breadth of the Continent in hopes of that last one memorable mouthful. Winter falls, and our aged hero becomes lost in the Black Forest. He struggles on, the vision of Bavarian Cream before him. At last, he climbs the final mountain escarpment between himself and his goal, and is swept up in an avalanche that deposits him, more dead than alive, at the very door of his village piemaker.

  All well up to here, Duane. A crackerjack pie tale, in fact. But now you begin to lose me. With gnarled and frozen knuckle, Ludwig taps on the baker’s door. It opens. Prone, the battered old gentleman whispers his dear request. But what is this? “Nein,” says your baker bluntly. “Ve are all out off der Bavarian Cream.” Ludwig shrugs his shoulders and replies, “O.K. How about a slice of Pineapple-Cheese?” Finis. I mean, ? ? ?

  Well, Duane, we have had a knock-down, top-level edit hassle here, but thanks to your Ish, I must admit, “Ludwig’s Journey” will run as is. I persuaded the other minds here that the story represented a passing, Beckett-like strain in your otherwise unambiguous work, and that we owed you at least one such fugue. One, I might add, and no more. Obscurantism pushes no pies.

  ISH

  DEAR ISH:

  Sorry about that. I trust this will make amends—a simple retelling of Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.”

  DUANE

  DEAR DUANE:

  Welcome back, kind sir! Not one of us here had ever read or seen “Titus Andronicus,” and so hadn’t an inkling that it concludes, so surprisingly and pleasingly, in a pie-eating scene. I love old-fashioned blood-and-thunder mellerdrama. We are running it on our big Washington’s Birthday Cherry Special—a rush job in time for the holiday. Thanks and congrats!

  ISH

  P.S. It’s of no matter, but what is the flavor of that pie that the disguised Andronicus serves to Tamora in the final scene?

  MRS. SHUTE:

  I have before me a box of your Washington’s Birthday Cherry Special, with my little tale from the Bard well featured on the obverse. I feel again the deep satisfaction that sometimes overtakes even the most experienced author when he reads his own work and in all honesty must whisper to himself, “Oh, well done!”

  You ask—ha-ha!—for the recipe of Titus’s homemade, extremely deep-dish pie. I note—hoo, haw! gnick-gnick!—that you do not also inquire about the whereabouts of Tamora’s children, the rascally Chiron and Demetrius, who are so oddly and inexplicably absent from the dessert course. Think, Madam. Hmm: What is this new, tangy flavor? Can phylophagia push pies? How do you like them apples, Mother Melmoth?

  I have written my last! Today I begin my new permanent employment, as an artist with the graphic-arts division of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget.

  Ish, fare thee well.

  DUANE

  1972

  WOODY ALLEN

  SELECTIONS FROMTHE ALLEN NOTEBOOKS

  Following are excerpts from the hitherto secret private journal of Woody Allen, which will be published posthumously or after his death, whichever comes first.

  GETTING through the night is becoming harder and harder. Last evening, I had the uneasy feeling that some
men were trying to break into my room to shampoo me. But why? I kept imagining I saw shadowy forms, and at 3 A.M. the underwear I had draped over a chair resembled the Kaiser on roller skates. When I finally did fall asleep, I had that same hideous nightmare in which a woodchuck is trying to claim my prize at a raffle. Despair.

  I BELIEVE my consumption has grown worse. Also my asthma. The wheezing comes and goes, and I get dizzy more and more frequently. I have taken to violent choking and fainting. My room is damp and I have perpetual chills and palpitations of the heart. I noticed, too, that I am out of napkins. Will it never stop?

  IDEA for a story: A man awakens to find his parrot has been made Secretary of Agriculture. He is consumed with jealousy and shoots himself, but unfortunately the gun is the type with a little flag that pops out, with the word “Bang” on it. The flag pokes his eye out, and he lives—a chastened human being who, for the first time, enjoys the simple pleasures of life, like farming or sitting on an air hose.

  THOUGHT: Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.

  SHOULD I marry W.? Not if she won’t tell me the other letters in her name. And what about her career? How can I ask a woman of her beauty to give up the Roller Derby? Decisions . . .

  ONCE again I tried committing suicide—this time by wetting my nose and inserting it into the light socket. Unfortunately, there was a short in the wiring, and I merely caromed off the icebox. Still obsessed by thoughts of death, I brood constantly. I keep wondering if there is an afterlife, and if there is will they be able to break a twenty?