The Tunnel of Love

by Peter de Vries

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 1949, 1951, 1953, 1954 by Peter De Vries

  Foreword © 2011, 2015 by D. G. Myers

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in 1954 by Little, Brown and Company

  Paperback edition 2015

  Printed in the United States of America

  22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN: 978-0-226-17347-4 (paper)

  ISBN: 978-0-226-17350-4 (e-book)

  DOI: 10.728/chicago/9780226173504.001.0001

  Parts of chapters 6, 11, 13, 15, and 17 of this novel have appeared, in somewhat different form, in the New Yorker.

  Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 54-6879

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  De Vries, Peter, 1910–1993, author.

  The tunnel of love : a novel / Peter De Vries ; with a new foreword by D.G. Myers. — Paperback edition,

  pages cm

  “Originally published in 1954 by Little, Brown and Company.”—Title page verso.

  ISBN 978-0-226-17347-4 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-17350-4 (e-book)

  1. Adultery—Fiction. 2. Marriage—Fiction. 3. Adoptive parents—Fiction. I. Myers, D. G. (David Gershom), writer of preface. II. Title.

  PS3507.E8673T85 2015

  813'.52—dc23

  2014014265

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  THE TUNNEL OF LOVE

  A Novel

  by

  PETER DE VRIES

  With a New Foreword by D. G. Myers

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

  Chicago and London

  Praise for De Vries, The Tunnel of Love

  “. . . one of the greatest satirists of this century, and also one of the most learned.”

  PAUL THEROUX

  “One of the funniest books to come along in any season.”

  Saturday Review

  “[The Tunnel of Love] is a humorous novel of the choicest order. Nothing as entrancing has come my way since ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’”

  C. ROLO, New York Times

  “Mr. De Vries may have created a new genre of fiction, which could be labeled tragifarce. While he amuses us with his clowning, throwing away gags that a lesser writer would have to hoard, he is a disturbing moralist with a sharp and uncomfortable perception of things as they are.”

  Atlantic Monthly

  “His is a wry and gentle humor that gets its effects through understatement and an essential sympathy with the confusions of well-meaning people caught in emotional difficulties.”

  New York Herald Tribune

  Biographical Note

  Peter De Vries (1910–1993) was born and raised in Chicago. He studied at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and at Northwestern, supporting himself with a variety of jobs that ranged from toffee-apple salesman to editor for Poetry magazine. During World War II, he served as a captain in the US Marines and returned home in 1944 to begin writing for the New Yorker. He then began using his incredible wit to create works outside of the magazine, writing twenty-three novels and a play, as well as novellas, essays, short stories, and poetry. His most notable works include The Tunnel of Love (1954), The Blood of the Lamb (1961), Let Me Count the Ways (1965), Reuben, Reuben (1964), and Witch’s Milk (1968); some of these have been adapted into films and Broadway plays. Still infamous for his quips and puns, De Vries has been praised as the “funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.”

  Foreword

  D. G. MYERS

  PETER DE VRIES may just be the best comic novelist that America has ever produced, and yet he seems to have disappeared from America’s literary consciousness. Comic novelists do poorly over the long run of literary history. Other than Mark Twain, Ring Lardner, and perhaps Dawn Powell, Americans have tended to discard their humorists after a generation. Josh Billings, Petroleum V. Nasby, Ambrose Bierce, George Ade, Finley Peter Dunne, Will Cuppy, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, Harry Golden, S. J. Perelman, H. Allen Smith, Leonard Q. Ross—these are names from a textbook, not living writers (except for a few hardened followers).

  Like many of the comic writers who were well known in their day, De Vries wrote for the New Yorker. Unlike many of them, though, he wrote novels, lots of novels—twenty-five in all. “Every good novel,” he said about The Tunnel of Love (1954), “must have a beginning, a muddle, and an end.” He thought of himself as a novelist, and so he kept writing and writing and publishing novels, nearly to the end. (His last novel, Peckham’s Marbles, appeared when he was seventy-six. He died in 1993 at the age of eighty-three.)

  De Vries also wrote a special kind of humor, filled with puns and plays on words and inversions of popular clichés and famous sayings. His literary reputation, in fact, consists mainly these days in lists of humorous quotations, which can be found all over the Internet. “People sleep with each other with their eyes open,” says the wife of De Vries’s narrator in The Tunnel of Love when she learns his best friend is committing adultery. “We know God will forgive our sins,” the narrator says in Comfort Me with Apples (1956), De Vries’s second novel. “The question is what he will think of our virtues.”

  De Vries developed a taste for verbal humor while working on a community newspaper in Chicago after leaving school. “The result,” he told an interviewer:

  I truly enjoy local, homespun philosophers. Right on top of that I actually did write Pepigrams [e.g., “To turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones—pick up your feet”], for use as wall mottoes and such. I got two bucks a Pepigram, and they got stuck in my blood.

  As funny as he is in his quotable throwaway lines, DeVries is not a standup comic in prose. His plots are twisting and ingenious, and he is even funnier in phrasing that twists and shapes a scene. Finding himself on a bus next to “some damn secretary-treasurer” of “something like an organization of madrigal buffs, or the Society for the Prevention of Deplorable Conditions,” the narrator of Consenting Adults; or, The Duchess Will Be Furious (1980) starts in chafing her:

  “Going far?” I said to the woman I’ll call Mrs. Fondue, striking up a “conversation.”

  “Just to Allentown.”

  “That’s a nice town. I once met somebody who lived there, and if he was typical of your element, it leaves nothing to be desired.”

  When she fails to catch his meaning, he begins to deliver an impromptu lecture about Albert Pinkham Ryder, the late nineteenth-century painter. He goes on and on about Ryder’s personal eccentricities (“he slept huddled beneath piles of threadbare overcoats on a floor heaped a foot and a half to two feet high, authorities differ, with assorted filth”) and the “mystic quality” of his paintings. “The woman now looked as though she was definitely going to bolt out of her seat and report me to the driver,” the narrator comments. “He would make a citizen’s arrest and hustle me to headquarters, where I would be lucky to get off with any charge less than aggravated erudition.”

  There was a sharpened edge to his humor, especially in his later work, that was not kindly. But De Vries was aware of what he was doing. In his antifeminist novel Sauce for the Goose (1981), he explains:

  Mrs. Dobbin had once read an article on humor in one of the magazines with smooth complexions, which analyzed satire by sorting its practitioners into two classes. Satirists were either softmouthed or hard-mouthed. They both brought their prey back dead, true, but some mangled it in purveyance while others did not. Retrievers . . . were soft-mouthed, so trained.

  De Vries never mangled his prey, bu
t it was sure to be dead when he brought it back. He began his career in the forties but did not find his rhythm until the midfifties, when he began to write about suburban Connecticut. The Tunnel of Love was his fifth published book but his first “mature” work. It is about a “third-rate artist in whom a first-rate gagman is trying to claw his way out.” Baffled in his efforts to create “serious” art, he jumps on the carousel of extramarital affairs. “Affairs are like watermelons,” the narrator remarks. “They leave more mess than they are worth.”

  The demands of “serious art” made De Vries itchy. “Any attempt to isolate the ‘serious’ from whatever you want to call its opposite is like trying to put asunder what God hath joined together,” he observed—a warning that did not deter critics from finding any number of messages and lessons in his fiction. “I have recently read a couple of serious-type articles about what I am actually up to,” he said, “and I can only conclude that my stuff is really over my head.”

  De Vries was a master of the comic religious novel, a subgenre of American literature that includes Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, J. F. Powers’s Morte D’Urban, Steve Stern’s The Frozen Rabbi, and Charles Portis’s Masters of Atlantis. De Vries himself was born into the Dutch Reformed Church. Standing in a direct line of literary descent from Nathaniel Hawthorne (with all of Hawthorne’s humor and none of his tragic insights, as he might have said), De Vries saw himself as the last of America’s Puritan writers—although he was a Puritan who could not keep a straight face. As the pastor admits in The Mackerel Plaza (1958), De Vries’s third novel, he is uncomfortable around some of his parishioners. Of one he says, “He had one characteristic that I always find it hard to cope with, piety.” De Vries has equal fun in dismantling the pretensions of liberal religion and its secular substitutes. The Tunnel of Love is his Scarlet Letter, in which adultery leads not to a consciousness of sin and repentance but to neurotic guilt and the delicious enjoyment of it.

  Everything changed for De Vries in September 1960 when his youngest child Emily died of acute lymphoblastic leukemia just a few days before her eleventh birthday. Two years later he transmuted tragedy into desperately funny sadness. The Blood of the Lamb (1961) is like nothing that De Vries—or anyone else, for that matter—had ever written before. It marked a change of direction, a change of tone, for De Vries. The later novels are much harder on their satirical targets, although De Vries never lost a sense of charity even toward those he found ridiculous. “There is an inevitable darkening, or sobering, that comes with the increasing realization that life is a tragedy,” he said six years after his daughter’s death, “which entails, however, no need to banish gaiety.” The need to readmit gaiety into life is reason enough to celebrate the reprinting of any other Peter De Vries novel, but especially The Tunnel of Love.

  This article appeared in a slightly different form in Commentary, September 27, 2011.

  Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

  T. S. ELIOT

  All the characters and incidents in this book are imaginary, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  One

  I DON’T know whether you’ve ever been interviewed by an adoption agency on behalf of friends bent on acquiring a child, or if you have, whether any doubts were in order concerning the qualifications of either of the prospective parents, or of yourself to judge, for that matter, and whether in that case you were realistic with the agency or romantic. I don’t know, either, what you would have done had you been in my shoes that Saturday afternoon the caseworker called to ask if I wished to offer any opinion on Augie Poole as paternal timber. “In my shoes” is a loose metaphor, for when she arrived I was not in them. I was stretched out flat in bed with symptoms for which no organic cause could be found.

  This in itself was answer enough. I tried to guard its significance from my wife, who didn’t know the half of what I knew and who only said to me, “Get up, lazybones,” as she pulled the slipping bedclothes off the floor or otherwise tidied up the premises for the approaching visitor. Her hands were not hyssop, neither was there meat and drink in them. Lazybones indeed! How I should have liked to deserve that charge rather than the one implicit in my prostration. A lazy man would simply have got up and gone through the motions of giving a reference, whereas some vestige of moral fiber in me caused me to malinger. The burden I bore was a complex one, involving both Augie and myself in a mess of matters quite intimately plaited. The Augie part of the hazard consisted in my knowing him, not only better than my wife did, but better than his own did. The ordeal under which I lay was one for which the name of the imminent caseworker struck me as abysmally apt: It was Mrs. Mash. That was enough to throw cold water on anything.

  My wife, at length, began to look as if she would like to throw some on me. However, she called Dr. Vancouver when I finally convinced her how punk I felt. He arrived an hour later.

  My symptoms were soon rehearsed: sore throat, heavy feeling in my chest, and feverishness. Dr. Vancouver took my temperature and found it normal. Then he examined my throat, peering down it gingerly and with great care not to get himself breathed on, for he is an awful hypochondriac. “There’s nothing in your throat,” he said. He chucked me under the chops with his fingertips. “Perfectly O.K. Let’s have a look at your chest.” I loosened my pajama coat, and he tappped my trunk in several places, holding his head averted. He tested it next with a stethoscope, telling me to look well away when I coughed. “I can’t find a thing anywhere,” he said at last.

  I watched the jaws of his alligator bag close on the stethoscope. He walked over to a chair in the far corner and sat down. Dr. Vancouver is a bald man with a ruddy complexion (like most hypochondriacs he is in perfectly satisfactory health) and a jutting nose. He has a double chin, except that he has none to begin with, which makes him rather all wattles from the mouth down. He crossed his legs and regarded me the length of the room, with such a bedside manner as the distance between us afforded. By habit he was hygienic even with patients from whom he was unlikely to catch anything.

  “Has anything been troubling you?” he asked. “Some situation you want to avoid?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said, reaching to my nightstand for a pack of cigarettes.

  “The human system is the greatest counterfeiting machine in the world. I mean in its ability to simulate symptoms. You say this feverish feeling, it’s as if the underside of your skin was tender. That’s a perfect description of fever, but remember you have the benefit of previous fevers to go by. Are you sure there isn’t a difficult situation you don’t want to face? Something you want to get out of?”

  “I just want to get out of bed,” I said. Let him make what he wanted of it. I could take myself with a grain of salt any time there was a necessity, which was more than could be said for anybody else in this room. It was peaceful in here and I wanted him to go away. He irked me. He was dressed to the nines in the kind of country “togs” you saw all over Avalon, Connecticut (where this was), with a pullover sweater under a jacket of barleycorn tweed, pebble-grain brogans, and no doubt a tartan cap on the hall tree, as though he had come on horseback to see me and not in his air-conditioned Buick.

  Sitting up, I leaned back against the headboard. “I feel kind of faint,” I said.

  “That’s from the rapid breathing just now when I examined your chest. Please cover your mouth when you cough.”

  “Why make such bones about someone there’s nothing o
rganically wrong with?” I put to him.

  “That’s not the point,” he answered irritably. “It’s no more than you’d ask of a person sitting next to you in a bus.”

  Not wanting him to go away angry—and sick as a dog as I was—I started to crack jokes. “I’ve always suspected that feeling-of well-being of mine was completely psychosomatic,” I said with a rather charming smile. “That underneath I was riddled with complaints.”

  Vancouver opened his black bag again and rummaged in it. “I try to combine the old and the new, what’s good in each,” he said tersely.

  “I know.” I appeared to have wounded him. Feeling, therefore, that I should redouble my efforts to make amends, I went on: “That’s the way to be—eclectic. So why don’t you give me some sulfa and molasses?”

  This had the peculiar effect of making him freeze up altogether. It’s hard to understand the resistance of some people to humor, which is after all only laughing at our little troubles and differences. Dr. Vancouver addressed my wife. “I’ll give you some pills for him to take. And see that he gargles every hour or so with either aspirin or salt water—I don’t care which. You’ve got the week end to rest him up in, so if he has got a slight cold or grippiness that ought to take care of it. If he doesn’t feel any better by the first of the week, give me a call then.”

  My wife saw him out. There was a huggermugger at the front door of which I caught only the repeated word “him.” Once I thought I heard “humor” in front of it. My wife returned. She stood in the bedroom doorway. Her hands still were not hyssop, neither was there meat and drink in them, though I had demonstrably eaten nothing since the night before. “You might get up and have a bite,” she said. “You ought to take one of the pills now, and I’ll fix you either the aspirin or the salt water to gargle with. Which would you like?”

  “Suit yourself,” I said “It makes no difference to me.” I closed my eyes and went on: “I’ll gargle on the hour. That way it’ll be easier to remember when to do it again. For you as well as me.” My plan was to humor her before she did that to me.