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

by Finder, Henry

  Whether such works can be relied upon in the kitchen is of little consequence. Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any passing browsers, that we are practicing cooks; but, in all honesty, a cookbook is something that you read in the living room, or in the bathroom, or in bed. The purpose is not to nurture nightmares of suckling pig, or to lull ourselves into a fantasy of trimly bearded oysters, but simply to baste our rested brains with common sense, and with the prospect of common pleasures to come. Take this romantic interlude from “’Tis the Season: A Vegetarian Christmas Cookbook,” by Nanette Blanchard: “Turn down the lights, light all the candles you can find, throw a log on the fire, turn up the music, and toast each other with a Sparkling Grape Goblet.” Oh, oh, Nanette. On the other hand, what could be sweeter than to retire with “Smoke & Spice,” by Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison, whose High Plains Jerky would be an ornament to any barbecue? Those in search of distant horizons could always caress their senses with “The Art of Polish Cooking,” in which Alina Zúera´nska offers her triumphant recipe for “Nothing” Soup (Zupa “Nic”), adding darkly, “This is an all-time children’s favorite.”

  If I could share a Sparkling Grape Goblet with anyone—not just any cook but any person in recorded history—it might well be with Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Magistrate, mayor, violinist, judge, and ravenous slayer of wild turkeys during his visit to America, Brillat-Savarin is now remembered for “The Physiology of Taste,” which was first published in 1825. There is a good paperback version, translated by Anne Drayton, but devotees may wish to seek out the translation by M. F. K. Fisher herself; it has now been reissued in a luxurious new edition, with illustrations by Wayne Thiebaud. To say that “The Physiology of Taste” is a cookbook is like saying that Turgenev’s “Sportsman’s Sketches” is a guide to hunting. “When I came to consider the pleasures of the table in all their aspects, I soon perceived that something better than a mere cookery book might be made of such a subject,” Brillat-Savarin writes. It is a perception that few have shared; the closest modern equivalent, perhaps, is in the work of A. J. Liebling, a man whose delicately gluttonous writings on food keep wandering off (when he can tear himself away) into such equally pressing areas as Paris, boxing, and sex. Brillat-Savarin, like Liebling, gives few recipes, though he muses on innumerable dishes, on the scientific reasons for their effect on the metabolism, and on the glow of sociable well-being that is their ideal result. He sprinkles anecdotes like salt, and he defines and defends gourmandisme (“It shows implicit obedience to the commands of the Creator”), following it through the various stages of delight and surfeit to its logical conclusion. There is a chapter on “The Theory of Frying” and a wonderful disquisition on death, embellished with gloomy good cheer: “I would recall the words of the dying Fontenelle, who on being asked what he could feel, replied: ‘Nothing but a certain difficulty in living.’ ”

  The lasting achievement of Brillat-Savarin is that he endowed living with a certain ease. Intricately versed in the difficulties of existence, he came to the unorthodox conclusion that a cookbook—a bastard form, but a wealthy, happy bastard—could offer the widest and most tender range of remedies. I’m not sure whether he knew how to fold the wings of a chicken akimbo, and if you’d handed him a snow pea and told him to stuff it he would have responded in kind; but it takes someone like Brillat-Savarin to remind us that cooking need not be the fraught, perfectionist, slightly paranoid struggle that it has latterly become. His love of food is bound up with a taste for human error and indulgence, and that is why “The Physiology of Taste” is still the most civilized cookbook ever written. I suspect that Brillat-Savarin might have been bemused by Martha Stewart, but that he would have got on just fine with Ed Debevic and his Burnt Meatloaf.

  I sure wish that he had been on hand for my terrine of sardines and potatoes. There I was—apron on, gin in hand, closely following the recipe of the French chef Raymond Blanc. All went well until I got to the harmless words “a piece of cardboard.” Apparently, I needed cardboard to lay on the terrine mold; the cardboard then had to be covered with “evenly distributed weights” for twelve hours. Weights? Cardboard? Twelve hours? They weren’t listed with the ingredients. I had my sardines; I had my twenty capers and my freshly grated nutmeg; but I had no cardboard. Frankly, it would have been easier to kill a turtle.

  That’s the trouble with cookbooks. Like sex education and nuclear physics, they are founded on an illusion. They bespeak order, but they end in tears.

  1995

  MARTIN AMIS

  TENNIS PERSONALITIES

  I HAVE a problem with—I am uncomfortable with—the word “personality” and its plural, as in “Modern tennis lacks personalities” and “Tennis needs a new star who is a genuine personality.” But if, from now on, I can put “personality” between quotation marks, and use it as an exact synonym of a seven-letter duosyllable starting with “a” and ending with “e” (and also featuring, in order of appearance, an “ss,” an “h,” an “o,” and an “l”), why, then, “personality” and I are going to get along just fine.

  How come it is always the old “personalities” who lead complaints about the supposed scarcity of young “personalities”? Because it takes a “personality” to know a ̶0;personality”? No. Because it takes a “personality” to like a “personality.”

  Ilie Nastase was a serious “personality”—probably the most complete “personality” the game has ever boasted. In his memoir, “Days of Grace,” Arthur Ashe, while acknowledging that Nastase was an “unforgettable personality,” also recalls that Ilie called him “Negroni” to his face and, once, “nigger” behind his back. Ilie, of course, was known as a “clown” and a “showman”; i.e., as an embarrassing narcissist. Earlier this year, his tireless “antics” earned him a dismissal and a suspension as Romania’s Davis Cup captain (“audible obscenities and constant abuse and intimidation”). Ilie is forty-seven. But true “personalities” merely scoff at the passage of time. They just become even bigger “personalities.”

  Jimmy Connors: another total “personality.” Imagine the sepsis of helpless loathing he must have inspired in his opponents during his “great runs” at the U.S. Open. There’s Jimmy (what a “personality”), orchestrating mass sex with the Grandstand Court. It’s great for the mild-mannered Swede or Swiss up at the other end: he double-faults, and New York goes wild. Jimmy was such an out-and-out “personality” that he managed to get into a legal dispute with the president of his own fan club. Remember how he used to wedge his racket between his legs with the handle protuding and mime the act of masturbation when a call went against him? That’s a “personality.”

  Twenty-odd years ago, I encountered Connors and Nastase at some P.R. nightmare in a Park Lane hotel. Someone asked these two bronzed and seersuckered “personalities” what they had been doing with themselves in London. “Screwing each other,” Nastase said, and collapsed in Connors’ arms. I was reminded of this incident when, last fall, I saw an account of a whistle-stop tour undertaken by John McEnroe and Andre Agassi. Questioned about their relationship, Agassi described it as “completely sexual.” Does such raillery inevitably come about when self-love runs up against mutual admiration? Or is it part of a bonding ritual between “personalities” of the same peer group?

  By turning my TV up dangerously loud, I once heard McEnroe mutter to a linesman (and this wasn’t a Grand Slam event but one of those German greed fests where the first prize is something like a gold helicopter), “Get your fucking head out of your fucking [personality].” Arthur Ashe also reveals that McEnroe once called a middle-aged black linesman “boy.” With McEnroe gone, it falls to Agassi to shoulder the flagstaff of the “personalities”—Agassi, the Vegas traffic light, the “Zen master” (B. Streisand) who used to smash forty rackets a year. And I
don’t think he has the stomach for it, funnily enough. Nastase, Connors, McEnroe, and Agassi are “personalities” of descending magnitude and stamina. McEnroe, at heart, was more tremulous than vicious; and Agassi shows telltale signs of generosity—even of sportsmanship.

  There is a “demand” for “personalities,” because that’s the kind of age we’re living in. Laver, Rosewall, Ashe: these were dynamic and exemplary figures; they didn’t need “personality” because they had character. Interestingly, too, there have never been any “personalities” in the women’s game. What does this tell us? That being a “personality” is men’s work? Or that it’s boys’ work?

  We do want our champions to be vivid. How about Pete Sampras, then—so often found wanting in the “personality” department? According to the computer, Sampras is almost twice as good as anyone else in the sport. What form would his “personality” take? Strutting, fist-clenching, loin-thrusting? All great tennis players are vivid, if great tennis is what you’re interested in (rather than something more tawdrily generalized). The hare-eyed Medvedev, the snake-eyed Courier, the droll and fiery Ivanisevic, the innocent Bruguera, the Wagnerian (and Machiavellian) Becker, the fanatical Michael Chang. These players demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to have, or to contain, a personality—without being an asshole.

  1994

  JOHN UPDIKE

  CAR TALK

  A HUMAN being has vocal cords, a tongue, teeth, and, for expressive reinforcement, eyes and hands; a car has nothing but its horn and lights. Yet cars do talk; they can say “Howdy!” (a brief, deft toot) and “I hate you!” (a firmer, sustained blast) and “Do it!” (a flicker of the headlights). As their drivers are sealed ever more inaccessibly into a casing of audiotapes, cell phones, and deafening air-conditioning, automobiles for the sake of their own survival are evolving increasingly complex speech patterns. There is a distinct difference, to the attuned ear, between the highly respectful honk used in a service station during an annual car inspection in response to the command “Sound your horn” and the just perceptibly more urgent, less deferential beep that announces to the inhabitants of a domicile that a summoned taxi or car-pool van impatiently awaits.

  Meaning is, as with other languages, a matter of context. The polite, minimal sounding of the horn—the automotive equivalent of a throat-clearing—that declares simple presence (“Howdy!”) in nonthreatening circumstances becomes, while one is passing on a four-lane highway an automobile that has an aura of wanting to change lanes with an abrupt swerve, more admonitory—something like “Watch it, buddy, you’ve got two tons of moving metal right here in your blind spot!”

  If no response is indicated, the same utterance, more insistently intoned, takes on a suggestion of rebuke and heightened anxiety: “Hey, you’re riding me into the median strip!” And if the swerve does take place, within inches of one’s front fender, a strengthened intonation moderates the meaning to, roughly, “You crazy blind idiot, go back to driving school!” Then, if no penitent reverse-swerve or apologetic slowing communicates regret, the next level of volume declares, “You bastard—you cut me off! Drivers like you should be in jail, and I’d ram you right in your vanity plate if I didn’t hate fussing with the insurance agent and weren’t already late for the dentist!”

  As with birdsong and insect stridulation, impressive amounts of information are packed into virtually indistinguishable sounds. In city traffic, one moderate toot, not quite deferential, informs the car ahead at an intersection that the light has changed from red to green. “Let’s go, daydreamer!” might be a translation. The same toot, amplified by a few decibels, points out to a truck being slowly unloaded that double-parking is illegal and obstructive, or to a taxi that passengers should not be unloaded in the middle of the avenue. Another few decibels suggest to an errant pedestrian, “I’d be within my rights to run you over, and my brother-in-law’s a lawyer,” or to a messenger on a bicycle, “Having thin wheels, Lycra shorts, and a Walkman on your head doesn’t make you immune to the laws of physics. Someday you’re going to get flattened, and don’t look for me among the mourners!”

  The highest, most prolonged volume of the horn transcends communication and expresses—at, say, the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel—frustration to the point of insanity. The noise can be read as existential protest, a frantic desire on the part of automobiles to opt out of their very condition of car-ness, as cattle at the chute of the slaughterhouse moo to be released from their condition of steer-ness.

  Car lights, too, say more than they used to. Having the controls on a stalk behind the steering wheel has considerably enhanced their eloquence. Flashed lights, for instance, once only hinted that a police car was lurking around the corner, but now, flicked demurely, say “Do it” and “Thank you,” much as the Italian word prego says both “Please” and “You’re welcome.”

  Headlights lit in broad daylight used to mean, “We’re all in a funeral procession. Don’t muscle in.” But now such headlights, enlarging in the rearview mirror, cry out, “Here I come, hell for leather, and no doubt crazed on drugs!” Red tail-lights, braked into luminescence, can mean not only “I’m braking” but “Stop tailgating, I beg you!” The latter can be reacted to before it is consciously understood. As in many, even more highly evolved languages, signifiers can signify their opposites: at night, high-beam lights in your eyes mean either that the offending driver has forgotten to switch to the low beam or he is telling you that you have. Even turned-off lights can say something: in a locked car parked in your favorite curbside spot, the message reads, “Tough luck, kid. I got here first.”

  1997

  VERSE

  E. B. WHITE

  CRITIC

  The critic leaves at curtain fall

  To find, in starting to review it,

  He scarcely saw the play at all

  For watching his reaction to it.

  1925

  SONG TO BE DISREGARDED

  I wrote six poems

  With love for a theme;

  I slept six nights

  With love for a dream.

  I’ve read them over,

  And dreamt them again:

  Never give a lover

  A bed or a pen.

  1928

  TO A PERFUMED LADY AT THE CONCERT

  Madam, the pervasive scent

  Rendering your person smelly

  Formed a thick integument

  Round the music of Corelli.

  Lost on me the Sarabande.

  Lady odorous and rare,

  You were such a proper noseful

  All the brasses of “La Mer”

  Seemed by contrast quite reposeful.

  Lost on me the muted trumpet.

  Baby drenched in fragrance vile,

  Scent in public may be legal

  But it blanketed the guile

  Of a piece like “Eulenspiegel.”

  Lost on me was Dicky Strauss.

  Madam reeking of the rose,

  Red of hair and pearl of earring,

  I came not to try my nose,

  I was there to try my hearing.

  Lost on me the whole darn concert.

  Madam! Lady! Baby doll!

  This is what the world objects to:

  Must you smell up all the hall

  Just to charm the guy you’re next to?

  You were lost on him already.

  1932

  SONG OF THE QUEEN BEE

  “The breeding of the bee,” says a United States Department of Agriculture bulletin on artificial insemination, “has always been handicapped by the fact that the queen mates in the air with whatever drone she encounters.”

  When the air is wine and the wind is free

  And the morning sits on the lovely lea

  And sunlight ripples on every tree,

  Then love-in-air is the thing for me—

  I’m a bee,

  I’m a ravishing, rollicking, young queen bee,

  That’s me.


  I wish to state that I think it’s great,

  Oh, it’s simply rare in the upper air,

  It’s the place to pair

  With a bee.

  Let old geneticists plot and plan,

  They’re stuffy people, to a man;

  Let gossips whisper behind their fan.

  (Oh, she does?

  Buzz, buzz, buzz!)

  My nuptial flight is sheer delight;

  I’m a giddy girl who likes to swirl,

  To fly and soar

  And fly some more,

  I’m a bee.

  And I wish to state that I’ll always mate

  With whatever drone I encounter.

  There’s a kind of a wild and glad elation

  In the natural way of insemination;

  Who thinks that love is a handicap

  Is a fuddydud and a common sap,

  For I am a queen and I am a bee,

  I̵7;m devil-may-care and I’m fancy-free,

  The test tube doesn’t appeal to me,

  Not me,

  I’m a bee.

  And I’m here to state that I’ll always mate

  With whatever drone I encounter.

  Let mares and cows, by calculating,

  Improve themselves with loveless mating,

  Let groundlings breed in the modern fashion,

  I’ll stick to the air and the grand old passion;

  I may be small and I’m just a bee

  But I won’t have Science improving me,