The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
Copyright © 1961 by Peter De Vries
Foreword © 2005 by Jeffrey Frank
All rights reserved.
First published in 1961 by Little, Brown & Company.
University of Chicago Press edition 2005
“I’m a Little Teapot,” written by Clarence Kelley and George Sanders.
Copyright © 1939, renewed 1967, Marilyn Sanders Music LLC.
All rights reserved. Protected under international copyright conventions.
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14388-0 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-226-14388-0 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14917-2 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Vries, Peter, 1910–1993.
The blood of the lamb / by Peter De Vries.
p. cm
ISBN 0-226-14388-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Sick children—Fiction. 2. Children—Death—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3507.E8673B5 2005
813’.52—DC22
2005002714
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
The Blood of the Lamb
by Peter De Vries
With a new Foreword
by Jeffrey Frank
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
CHICAGO | LONDON
To Jan, Jonny and Derek
Contents
Foreword by Jeffrey Frank
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Foreword by Jeffrey Frank
Peter De Vries once observed that “comedy deals with that portion of our suffering that is exempt from tragedy.” Few writers understood literary comedy as well as De Vries and few comic novelists had his grasp of tragedy. The determination and artistry with which he approached these subjects made him hard to categorize, and never more so than in his sixth novel, The Blood of the Lamb.
De Vries was certainly a very funny man, consistently and inventively; a number of his coinages long ago found their uncredited way into the language, among them “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be” and “Deep down, he’s shallow.” In 1956, after the publication of his second novel, Comfort Me with Apples, Kingsley Amis wrote in the New York Times Book Review that De Vries was “the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic,” and soon enough, reviewers were comparing him to Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Ring Lardner, and Max Beerbohm.
But if humor is perishable—boy, is it perishable!—much of what De Vries wrote has a feeling of permanence; his antennae for absurdity and his verbal intelligence (like Nabokov, De Vries was reared listening to another language, the Dutch that his parents spoke) have outlasted the jokes. In many of his novels, he went over the territory explored by, among others, John Updike, John Cheever, and Richard Yates—marriage and sex, work and family, and all the agonies and pleasures of suburban life in the mid-twentieth century. He wrote about admen and furniture movers, writers, clergymen, and academics. De Vries’s men and women were not always perfectly drawn, but they were just as sad and baffled as, say, Updike’s Richard and Joan Maple or Yates’s Frank and April Wheeler. Looking back at De Vries’s work (over nearly fifty years, he wrote some two dozen novels, along with parodies, poetry, short stories, and essays), one can see more clearly that his writing was informed as much by sorrow as by wit, and by the idea, as he put it, that “the rarer human sensibility becomes, the closer it gets to the logic of insanity.” And sometimes sorrow won out.
On the dust jacket of Comfort Me with Apples is a photograph of a smiling man with dark hair who appears to be in his mid-forties (De Vries was born in 1910), his arms crossed in an authorial pose. He’s wearing a dark tie and a tweed jacket, with a handkerchief poking out of his breast pocket, and the picture was taken at what appears to have been a good time in the writer’s life. The De Vries family had settled in Westport, Connecticut. Among their friends and neighbors were J. D. Salinger, John Hersey, and Robert Penn Warren. De Vries was on the staff of the New Yorker, thanks in part to the sponsorship of James Thurber, who had become a close friend. There was another element in this image of contentment: in the lower left of the jacket photograph is a blonde girl, De Vries’s daughter Emily, who was then about six, looking pleased with herself, as if she had just sneaked into the picture. It’s the only such photograph of the author in the company of someone else, and what is unsettling about this familial portrait is our knowledge that four years later Emily would be dead, of leukemia.
If it is difficult to think about De Vries without his puns and wisecracks, it is impossible to do so apart from this central event, or from his most autobiographical novel, The Blood of the Lamb, which deals with the death of a child. The descriptions of her sickness and dying are as unsettling as anything in modern literature. There were still bursts of laughter, although darker than in any other De Vries book. (At one point, the narrator’s father rants, “Black light! Antimatter! It’s all around us. We’re all headed for it!” and adds, “The only thing that keeps me from killing myself is the will to live.”) Otherwise, the sadness that fills the novel would have been unbearable.
When The Blood of the Lamb was published in 1961, the year after Emily’s death, it came as a shock to De Vries’s readers, accustomed by then to a few hours of amusement. His two previous books had been the parody-rich Tents of Wickedness (dedicated to James and Helen Thurber) and Through the Fields of Clover, a generational saga dedicated “To Emily with love.” By then, his daughter was mortally ill, and De Vries made no secret of his despair when he confided to friends. In the summer of 1959, he wrote in a letter to Salinger, “we are now asked to consider a universe to which beautiful children and villainous single cells that destroy them are of equal significance—or indifference.” He went on, “One trip through a children’s ward and if your faith isn’t shaken, you’re not the type who deserves any faith.” And in what he called a “half alcoholic screed,” he said, “I too have moments of faith, or assurance, or beauty—or maybe just lapses in nihilism. In the morning I’m capable of hearing the music of the spheres—it’s when the stars come out that I first hear the howling of eternal nothingness.”
Like De Vries, the narrator of The Blood of the Lamb was raised in Chicago in a strict religious family (the De Vrieses were Dutch Reformed). There was more overlap with the author’s life: a stay at a sanatorium for tubercular patients, a father who went a little crazy, a sibling who died young. It was also a novel filled with the forebodings of its narrator, Don Wanderhope, about an ailing lover, about his Chicago family, and, finally, about his daughter:
What, I thought to myself as I gazed at [her], if anything should happen to that creature? Looking back, we seem to detect clairvoyance in certain moments of apprehension, but mine were no more than pass like a chill over the heart of any parent watching his treasure asleep in bed or taking off down the road on a bicycle.
The novel spills over with angry admonitions. To
a doctor treating his daughter, improvising chemotherapy in its infancy, Wanderhope asks, “Do you believe in God as well as play at him?” As the end draws near, he says, “So death by leukemia is now a local instead of an express. Same run, only a few more stops. But that’s medicine, the art of prolonging disease.”
De Vries had brought a comical desperation to his earlier books; in The Blood of the Lamb, the desperation is as raw and painful as Wanderhope’s mood when his daughter is well enough to briefly leave the hospital: “The happiest man in New York that night was a father heading for home through flashes of lightning and gusts of blinding rain with a doomed child on the front seat beside him.”
In no other novel was De Vries so personal, although, unlike his protagonist, a widower with one daughter, Peter and his wife, Katinka Loeser, had three other children: two sons, Jon and Derek, and a daughter, Jan. (Katinka Loeser’s short stories were published in several collections; her account of Emily’s death, “Whose Little Girl Are You?” appeared in the New Yorker at about the time of her husband’s novel.) And in no other novel did De Vries speak so directly to his readers: “Happiness mellows us, not troubles; pleasure, perhaps, even more than happiness. The sentimental saw belongs among those canards that include also the idea that wisdom comes with age. The old have nothing to tell us; it is more commonly we who are shouting at them, in any case.”
In De Vries’s early books, one was carried along by his gags, his gift for spotting cant, fatuousness, and snobbery. His best sentences were dazzling, and his ear for bad prose was infallible. After The Blood of the Lamb, De Vries’s fiction had another kind of mirthfulness. He remained a master of loopy plots and malapropisms—“I’ve been married seventeen years and never had an organism,” one character tells an advice columnist—and an observer of spoiled middle-class white America, a place populated by comfortable yet perpetually ill-at-ease heroes. And he could still be enormously funny, in novels like Reuben, Reuben, The Vale of Laughter, The Cat’s Pajamas, and Witch’s Milk. But with these later novels, it was as if De Vries wanted to announce a final break from the community of American humor writers like Benchley, Perelman, and his beloved Thurber, with whom he had often been grouped.
Throughout The Blood of the Lamb, there is a perpetual sense of dread—no doubt a condition of his life. His daughter Jan once gave him a set of oils, and he subsequently painted a tiny man surrounded by enormous dark clouds. At the New Yorker, where he continued to work a couple of days a week until the early eighties as a cartoon doctor (a job that no longer exists), he is recalled as a tall, quiet, witty man, who usually ate lunch by himself. His youngest son, Jon, remembers going to clean out his father’s office at about that time and finding what he called “the uniform”—a tan London Fog raincoat—hanging by the door. “It was there when I got there,” his father told him.
His last novel, Peckham’s Marbles, came out in 1986, and after that he stopped publishing altogether. It was as if he knew he was saying goodbye to his readers in the novel’s Gatsby-like concluding lines: “For we are all swimmers ephemerally buoyed by what will engulf us at the last; still dreaming of islands though the mainland has been lost; swept remorselessly out to sea while we spread our arms to the beautiful shore.” Katinka Loeser died in 1991, and a Westport friend recalls that De Vries became something of a recluse in the years just before his death on September 28, 1993.
“Nonsense is such a difficult art!” De Vries once wrote, and to contemporary readers he is in many ways a mystifying figure, perhaps because he used laughter to disguise so much while letting so much poke through—especially his feelings of desolation and his sense of foreboding. In a letter to Thurber after Emily’s death, he wrote:
Your words are of the kind that remind us that words are not necessary, that we are all side by side through all these things without it having to be said. We needn’t look far for the cue to courage. When Emily no longer had any spine left she supported herself on her sternum. We can do no less. We all have to climb out of the pit of desolation, or what is more likely, manage to live in it, planting our flowers among the ashes and squirting them with our gaiety.
The Blood of the Lamb was dedicated to his three surviving children—“Jan, Jonny and Derek.” After that, the dedication page in his novels was left blank.
—Jeffrey Frank is an editor at the New Yorker. His novels include The Columnist and Bad Publicity.
one
My father was not an immigrant in the usual sense of the term, not having emigrated from Holland, so to speak, on purpose. He sailed from Rotterdam intending merely to visit some Dutch relatives and friends who had settled in America, but on the way over suffered such ghastly seasickness that a return voyage was unthinkable. He lay for a week in steerage while the worst storm in recent Atlantic memory flung him about his bed and even to the floor. Faces turned green under scarlet sunburns were his sole unsympathetic company; Italians breathed garlic on him, Germans beer and wine. When at last they disembarked, he fell on his knees and kissed the American soil for no other reason than that it was not open water. To face that again was simply out of the question. He canceled his return passage and sent to the Netherlands for his belongings. Thus was added Ben Wanderhope’s bit to that sturdy Old World stock from which this nation has sprung.
For the term “fearless voyager” could, indeed, be applied to my father from an intellectual standpoint. A restless, questing spirit soon had him in seas identifiable, among the Chicago Calvinist Dutch Reformed with whom he sought his portion, as those of Doubt.
“Take the story of the alabaster box of precious ointment,” he said one evening to my Uncle Hans, an Iowa clergyman visiting us that summer on what turned out to be a busman’s holiday. My uncle ground his teeth; he would greatly have preferred strolling around the block with a cigar in them, amusing the neighborhood children by wiggling his ears, which he could do with amazing virtuosity, one at a time as well as jointly. Especially galling was a believer backslidden from having too diligently searched the Scriptures, as the Scriptures themselves enjoined. “It stands in one Gospel that it happened in the home of a Pharisee in a city called Nain, and that ‘a woman who was a sinner’ poured it on his feet. In another that it was in Bethany in the home of Simon the leper and that the woman poured it on his head. John says the woman was Mary and that Lazarus was at the table, which it’s pretty funny the other writers didn’t mention if it’s true. One place you read Judas Iscariot objected to the waste, another that all the disciples did. Now if the Bible is infallible how can it contradict itself?”
“The trouble with you, Ben, is … how shall I say it?” My uncle paused characteristically for the right words, which he found with characteristic precision. “You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.”
“That was neatly put,” my brother called from an adjoining bedroom where he was dressing for a date. Now nineteen, Louie had lost his faith during his medical studies at the University of Chicago. “You have a way with words, Uncle Hans.” I was twelve at the time, and unaware of irony, but I can see Louie well enough now, grinning into the bureau glass as he knotted his necktie.
My father comes clearly to mind, too, drinking bootleg whiskey while a steady flow of grimaces contorted his face. His lips puffed and receded, his dense white eyebrows moved up and down and even, I think, sideways, separately maneuverable like my uncle’s ears. What was odd, even a trifle sinister, about this constant facial play was that its sequences bore no observable connection with what was being said to him, or even, for that matter, by him, issuing rather—to the extent that one can be sure about such things—from what he was secretly thinking. His features behaved as a man’s will who is talking to himself, which, indeed, he did in no small degree, even during the course of conversations.
Neighbors had by now begun to drop in to pay respects to the “dominee” in our midst, staying to watch his performance in this theological first aid and to shower concern on the man who required it. My father reveled in o
thers’ pity; he basked in being felt sorry for and in being worried about, with an almost voluptuous pleasure. Believers watched the Doubter with awe as they lifted their cups of coffee, taken in discreet preference to the strong drink, which was in any case offered in a manner designed to ensure rejection: “You don’t want a shot, do you, Jake? Naw. You, Herman? Naw.” Whenever I read those family reminiscences written by people obviously priding themselves on antecedents of great color, I smile secretly at the memory of my father gargling with bourbon in the winter months as a throat protective; using, for chewing tobacco, cigar stumps from which the charred ends had been scissored; and lubricating the door hinges with oil left over from sardine tins—such was his parsimony.
“The thing we must do,” said my uncle, “is ignore the promptings of the Devil—”
“I figured this out myself.”
“—who tempts the mind, och ja, Ben, as much as the flesh, and we must emulate Christ, who reminds us that things are hidden”—my uncle twisted in his chair to fire this barb into the open bedroom where Louie was dressing—“from the wise and prudent and revealed unto babes and sucklings.”
“Neatly put” came again archly from in there.
“How about me?” my father said, resenting any shift in attention from himself. “How about me in doubt and turmoil? That’s all well and good, Hans, but what I’m trying to say is, one error in the Bible and the doctrine of infallibility goes to pieces. It’s all or nothing.”
“Then take it all, Ben,” my uncle said. “We must put away the pride of the flesh, of which the reason is a part, and accept salvation as we accept a mystery. For he who finds himself shall lose himself, and he who loses himself shall find himself. Like I said Sunday.”
“And the virgin birth. We get that in a chapter where the lineage is traced through Joseph. How can those two things be true?”
The Blood of the Lamb: A Novel Page 1
