The 50s
Page 72
the rare-hairs market in Kashan, and yet
you could not have a choicer pet.
They join you as you work,
love jumping in and out of holes,
play in water with the children,
learn fast, know their names,
will open gates and invent games.
While not incapable
of courtship, they may find its
servitude and flutter too much
like Procrustes’ bed,
so some decide to stay unwed.
Camels are snobbish
and sheep unintelligent,
water buffaloes neurasthenic,
even murderous,
reindeer seem overserious.
Whereas these scarce qivies,
with golden fleece and winning ways,
outstripping every fur bearer—
there in Vermont quiet—
could demand Bold Ruler’s diet:
Mountain Valley water,
dandelions, carrots, oats;
encouraged as well, by bed
made fresh three times a day,
to roll and revel in the hay.
Insatiable for willow
leaves alone, our goatlike
qivi-curvi-capricornus
sheds down ideal for a nest.
Songbirds find qiviut best.
Suppose you had a bag
of it; you could spin a pound
into a twenty-four- or five-
mile thread—one, forty-ply,
that will not shrink in any dye.
If you fear that you are
reading an advertisement
you are. If we can’t be cordial
to these creatures’ fleece,
I think that we deserve to freeze.
—Marianne Moore
September 13, 1958
He stood still by her bed
Watching his daughter breathe,
The dark and silver head,
The fingers curled beneath,
And thought: Though she may have
Intelligence and charm
And luck, they will not save
Her life from every harm.
The lives of children are
Dangerous to their parents
With fire, water, air,
And other accidents;
And some, for a child’s sake,
Anticipating doom,
Empty the world to make
The world safe as a room.
Who could endure the pain
That was Laocoön’s?
Twisting, he saw again
In the same coil his sons.
Plumed in his father’s skill,
Young Icarus flew higher
Toward the sun, until
He fell in rings of fire.
A man who cannot stand
Children’s perilous play,
With lifted voice and hand
Drives the children away.
Out of sight, out of reach,
The tumbling children pass;
He sits on an empty beach,
Holding an empty glass.
Who said that tenderness
Will turn the heart to stone?
May I endure her weakness
As I endure my own.
Better to say goodnight
To breathing flesh and blood
Each night as though the night
Were always only good.
—Louis Simpson
January 24, 1959
This moth caught in the room tonight
Squirmed up, sniper-style, between
The rusted edges of the screen;
Then, long as the room stayed light,
Lay here, content, in some cornerhole.
Now that we’ve settled into bed,
Though, he can’t sleep. Overhead,
He throws himself at the blank wall.
Each night, hordes of these flutterers haunt
And climb my study windowpane;
Fired by reflection, their insane
Eyes gleam; they know what they want.
How do the petulant things survive?
Out in the fields they have a place
And proper work, furthering the race;
Why this blind, fanatical drive
Indoors? Why rush at every spark,
Cigar, head lamp, or railroad warning,
Break a wing off and starve by morning?
And what could a moth fear in the dark
Compared with what you meet inside?
Still, he rams the fluorescent face
Of the clock, thinks that’s another place
Of light and families, where he’ll hide.
We ought to trap him in a jar,
Or come like the white-coats with a net
And turn him out toward living. Yet
We don’t; we take things as they are.
—W. D. Snodgrass
June 13, 1959
The car is heavy with children
tugged back from summer,
swept out of their laughing beach,
swept out while a persistent rumor
tells them nothing ends.
Today, we fret and pull
on wheels, ignore our regular loss
of time, count cows and others,
while the sun moves over
like an old albatross
we must not count or kill.
There is no word for time.
Today, we will not think
to number another summer
or watch its white bird into the ground.
Today, all cars,
all fathers, all mothers, all
children and lovers will
have to forget
about that thing in the sky
going around
like a persistent rumor
that will get us yet.
—Anne Sexton
August 29, 1959
A NOTE BY JONATHAN FRANZEN
HE FIFTIES WERE a key decade in the evolution of American magazine fiction. Earlier in the century, there had been a large stable of magazines to which writers like Katherine Anne Porter and F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a fine living by selling short stories. Later in the century, The New Yorker was preeminent; placing a story in its pages was the grail of budding writers, the ultimate validation. By the end of the century, the magazine essentially had the commercial market for short fiction to itself.
It was also in the fifties that “the New Yorker story” emerged, quite suddenly, as a distinct literary genus. What made a story New Yorker was its carefully wrought, many-comma’d prose; its long passages of physical description, the precision and the sobriety of which created a kind of negative emotional space, a suggestion of feeling without the naming of it; its well-educated white characters, who could be found experiencing the melancholies of affluence, the doldrums of suburban marriage, or the thrill or the desolation of adultery; and, above all, its signature style of ending, which was either elegantly oblique or frustratingly coy, depending on your taste. Outside the offices of The New Yorker, its fiction editors were rumored to routinely delete the final paragraph of any story accepted for publication.
The heyday of “the New Yorker story” coincided so neatly with the tenure of William Shawn, who succeeded Harold Ross as editor in 1952 and presided until 1987, that it might instead be called “the Shawn story.” The one story from the Ross era in this volume, Roald Dahl’s “Taste,” is written in an older and more conventional register. Its setting—the dinner party of a parvenu stockbroker—is still recognizable and relevant today, but its high-concept premise and its O. Henry ending hark back to the decades when magazine fiction supplied the sort of popular entertainment now considered television’s province. The fifties put an end to that, and “the New Yorker story,” with its emphasis on sentence craft and its rejection of neatly tied-up endings, can be understood, in part, as a retreat from the pressure of commercial
TV, a retrenchment in provinces beyond the reach of visual media.
In the fifties, and for a long time afterward, The New Yorker didn’t identify its fiction as fiction. The author’s name appeared only at the end, in small capital letters, the same way the magazine’s journalists and critics were credited. What began, perhaps, as an affectation of Harold Ross’s became an emblem of the magazine’s definition of itself: the writing literally came first, the author’s ego-bearing name last. Although fiction in those days was usually given pride of place at the front of the magazine (rather than being secreted near the back, as is the case today), the number of short stories varied from issue to issue, which left it to the reader to determine whether the text in front of her was fiction or nonfiction. The respect the magazine thereby accorded fiction writers—the implication that what mattered about a piece was its sentence-by-sentence excellence, not its genre, not the weight of its subject matter—was part of what made The New Yorker the place every young American story writer dreamed of being published.
“The New Yorker story” was a stereotype, of course, and inevitably an unfair one—Shawn ran dozens of shtetl stories by I. B. Singer and Irish country stories by Frank O’Connor, and he devoted most of one issue to the experimental novel Snow White, by Donald Barthelme, who at the time was not well known. But it was “the New Yorker story,” as it developed in the fifties, that became the model for aspiring writers, because it seemed to be the key to getting into the magazine, and by the seventies the model was so dominant that it generated mockery and backlash. Too many stories about mopey suburbanites. Too many well-off white people. A surfeit of descriptions, a paucity of action. Too much privileging of prose for the sake of prose, too little openness to rougher energies. And those endings? A style repeated too often devolves into a tic. After Shawn retired and the magazine’s fiction section became more of a free-for-all, more multivalent and multiethnic, “the New Yorker story” began to look like a form in well-deserved retirement—a relic of an era when subscribers had still had the patience and the time, in New Canaan, in Armonk, on a beach in the Hamptons, to read slow-moving stories in which nothing much happened at the end.
It’s therefore instructive to reread John Cheever’s “The Country Husband,” published in 1954. It’s to Cheever, even more than to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, that we owe a core-cultural suite of images of the fifties: the fathers working in Manhattan, the commuter trains, the autumn leaves on suburban lawns, the overwhelmed young mothers, the willfully forgotten war, the drinking. Along with John Updike and Ann Beattie, Cheever was the paradigmatic “New Yorker story” writer. “The Country Husband” is set in an affluent Hudson Line suburb, concerns an obscurely troubled marriage, contains many paragraphs of precise description, and ends obliquely. Even if you’ve never read it, you might think you’ve read it all before. But you haven’t, because Cheever was a true writer, which is to say, a writer who had skin in the game. Even as he was laying down the very template for “the New Yorker story,” in 1954, he was chafing against the confines of the stereotype, exploiting the fact of these confines by letting his main character chafe against them, and thereby implicitly justifying the template.
The story’s main character, Francis Weed, superficially recalls James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, from an earlier New Yorker decade: the domesticated middle-class man yearning for adventure. But Thurber’s story, though it’s written with charm and warmed by empathy, is basically an extended prose version of a thirties New Yorker cartoon; the humor is gentle and draws on stock cultural assumptions. This older humor was still present in the cartoons running alongside “The Country Husband” in 1954—in one of them, a housewife has dented her husband’s car—but the fiction writer, Cheever, was registering an altogether different level of suburban desperation. Where Walter Mitty waited meekly for his wife and imagined heroics, Francis Weed survives an emergency plane landing and contemplates rape. What lurks beneath his unsatisfying life as a father and husband isn’t fantasy. It’s true chaos, and Weed’s creator seems to know it intimately. Cheever’s careful, ironic descriptions of Weed’s neighbors and domestic life read like litanies of torment. The most appealing figure in the story is a neighbor’s dog, Jupiter, who recognizes no boundaries and leaves destruction in his wake. “The Country Husband” is a reminder of why “the New Yorker story” became so dominant. In a country recovering from one war and entering others, living under a nuclear shadow, awaiting large-scale social upheavals, no scream could do justice to the American middle-class predicament. Only understatement could.
While Cheever and Updike were creating the main template for “the New Yorker story,” regional variants were flourishing. We have here Eudora Welty’s tour de force “No Place for You, My Love,” which consists so entirely of description that not even its two (nameless) main characters seem to know what they’re doing in it. “Below New Orleans there was a raging of insects from both sides of the concrete highway, not quite together, like the playing of separated marching bands”: the setting is a long way from Cheeverland, but the quality of the writing isn’t. Welty was The New Yorker’s favored fictional voice from the South, Mavis Gallant her cooler-eyed counterpart from expat Paris, Harold Brodkey the sui generis reporter from the two frontiers of St. Louis and over-the-top narcissism. Vladimir Nabokov makes a welcome appearance, with the hilarious opening chapter of his novel Pnin, to confirm his status as the grand master of linguistic dexterity and childhood memory. Nadine Gordimer is here, too, writing about South African injustice with an irony so brutal that it hurts.
Finally, at the end of the decade, Philip Roth storms into the magazine with his early story “Defender of the Faith.” Loosely written, lacking in vivid description, linear in plot, unambiguous in ending, “Defender” is the least “New Yorker story” in this volume. It’s a story in a hurry to get somewhere, because its author himself was in a hurry. Roth had discovered such a large and untapped store of fictional fuel—had found in himself such a capacity for honesty about the American Jewish experience, the self-hatred, the tribal loyalties—that his stories came out of him in a rocketlike jet. Even as he was arriving at The New Yorker, his trajectory was taking him away from it and into the wider spaces of the novel. “Defender” is an exceptional blast, illuminating not only the direction that American fiction would take in the sixties but, by implication, the many modes of fifties writing—Mailer, Gaddis, Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor—that weren’t represented in the magazine. It’s a testament to the vitality of fiction in the fifties that so much could be left out and still leave so much brilliance.
Roald Dahl
HERE WERE SIX of us to dinner that night at Mike Schofield’s house in London: Mike and his wife and daughter, my wife and I, and a man called Richard Pratt.
Richard Pratt was a famous gourmet. He was president of a small society known as the Epicures, and each month he circulated privately to its members a pamphlet on food and wines. He organized dinners where sumptuous dishes and rare wines were served. He refused to smoke for fear of harming his palate, and when discussing a wine, he had a curious, rather droll habit of referring to it as though it were a living being. “A prudent wine,” he would say, “rather diffident and evasive, but quite prudent.” Or, “a good-humored wine, benevolent and cheerful—slightly obscene, perhaps, but nonetheless good-humored.”
I had been to dinner at Mike’s twice before when Richard Pratt was there, and on each occasion Mike and his wife had gone out of their way to produce a special meal for the famous gourmet. And this one, clearly, was to be no exception. The moment we entered the dining room, I could see that the table was laid for a feast. The tall candles, the yellow roses, the quantity of shining silver, the three wineglasses to each person, and, above all, the faint scent of roasting meat from the kitchen brought the first warm oozings of saliva to my mouth.
As we sat down, I remembered that on both Richard Pratt’s previous visits Mike had played a little betting game with him over the
claret, challenging him to name its breed and its vintage. Pratt had replied that that should not be too difficult, provided it was one of the great years. Mike had then bet him a case of the wine in question that he could not do it. Pratt had accepted, and had won both times. Tonight I felt sure that the little game would be played over again, for Mike was quite willing to lose the bet in order to prove that his wine was good enough to be recognized, and Pratt, for his part, seemed to take a grave, restrained pleasure in displaying his knowledge.
The meal began with a plate of whitebait, fried very crisp in butter, and to go with it there was a Moselle. Mike got up and poured the wine himself, and when he sat down again, I could see that he was watching Richard Pratt. He had set the bottle down in front of me so that I could read the label. It said, “Geierslay Ohligsberg, 1945.” He leaned over and whispered to me that Geierslay was a tiny village in the Moselle, almost unknown outside Germany. He said that this wine we were drinking was something unusual, that the output of the vineyard was so small that it was almost impossible for a stranger to get any of it. He had visited Geierslay personally the previous summer in order to obtain the few dozen bottles that they had finally allowed him to have.
“I doubt anyone else in the country has any of it at the moment,” he said. I saw him glance again at Richard Pratt. “Great thing about Moselle,” he continued, raising his voice, “it’s the perfect wine to serve before a claret. A lot of people serve a Rhine wine instead, but that’s because they don’t know any better. A Rhine wine will kill a delicate claret, you know that? It’s barbaric to serve a Rhine before a claret. But a Moselle—ah!—a Moselle is exactly right.”
Mike Schofield was an amiable, middle-aged man. But he was a stockbroker. To be precise, he was a jobber in the stock market, and, like a number of his kind, he seemed to be somewhat embarrassed, almost ashamed, to find that he had made so much money with so slight a talent. In his heart he knew that he was not really much more than a bookmaker—an unctuous, infinitely respectable, secretly unscrupulous bookmaker—and he knew that his friends knew it, too. So he was seeking now to become a man of culture, to cultivate a literary and aesthetic taste, to collect paintings, music, books, and all the rest of it. His little sermon about Rhine wine and Moselle was a part of this thing, this culture that he sought.