Life being what it is, I don’t see why everybody doesn’t develop an ulcer,
Particularly Mrs. Martingale, the wife of a prominent pastry cook from Tulsa.
He had risen to fame and fortune after starting as a humble purveyor of noodles,
So he asked her what she wanted for her birthday and she said a new Studebaker and he thought she said a new strudel baker and she hated strudels.
So all I know about life is that it has been well said
That such things can’t happen to a person when they are dead.
—Ogden Nash
January 15, 1949
At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ochre dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.
—Elizabeth Bishop
February 19, 1949
Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.
Now that I have your face by heart, I look.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music’s cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.
—Louise Bogan
October 15, 1949
A NOTE BY ZADIE SMITH
Writers are conflicted about “Zeitgeist.” Sharing a sensibility with your literary generation is, to a working writer, pretty much an annoyance: vanity demands you sound like no one but yourself. Yet, as the decades pass, having sounded like your peers—having channeled, however unconsciously, the spirit of the age—is what will tend to secure your spot in anthologies like this one. And being remembered, placed, and ranked, these are things that all but the most independent writers come to worry about, eventually—perhaps a little more than they should. Even the great individualist Vladimir Nabokov was glad when publishers sent him anthologies (“homing pigeons really, for all of them contain samples of the recipient’s writings”). Although, when called upon—by no one but himself—to rate the stories in 55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, 1940–1950, he gave only two an A+: his own and Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (which was not available for inclusion here). Nabokov had a theory that you could only ever expect, from any anthology, “two or three first-rate stories.” I think that honest readers, writers, and publishers would probably agree with that strike rate. But most of us derive a lot of enjoyment from stories in the B+ to A grade range and, if we are students of the craft, learn something from them, too. Personally I find it hard to learn a lot from A+ stories, much as I love and admire them. Not easy to glean tips on construction when gazing upon a thing so perfect, with no visible joins, like a naturally occurring crystal.
Nabokov is Nabokov and Salinger Salinger. Let’s leave them for a moment at the top of the class. Now, what about everybody else? Is there a voice of the forties? Well, how the hell am I meant to know? Isn’t that something a fella oughta, well, consider for himself? I mean, if he really wants to understand anything? Oh, I’m not saying you can’t hear a certain rhythm in the dialogue, a self-conscious snap and crackle in the way some of these stiffs speak. I suppose I’ve got ears just like anybody. And I guess if you really wanted you could sure as hell chalk it up to the beloved memory of a half-dozen movie idols of the period, like Spencer Tracy, say, or good old Jimmy Stewart; but it might just as well be the intimate echo of soldiers wisecracking in some abandoned hay barn not far from Omaha Beach, or—if you want to get really smart about it—the long shadow of the newly imported Dr. Freud, interpreting everybody’s private dreams and poking all around in a fella’s private business like a goddam sneak.…
Dialogue was the thing, in the forties. Many of the writers in this anthology did some work in Hollywood, and almost all of them found their work adapted for film, sooner or later, though the results rarely satisfied. It’s one thing to have gabbing fools safely embedded in the adamantine marvel of your prose, but take away the adamantine and what’s left? A lot of fools, gabbing. I find I want to say “holy fools.” A robust sense of morality hangs over these stories. They are almost all engaged with—to steal the title of another Shirley Jackson story, not included here—the possibility of evil. The demented young man in Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” would surely find biblical connections throughout, starting with the titles (“Graven Image,” “Act of Faith”), and proceeding to the various Old Testament parallels within the stories themselves. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Let he who fears the Babelian hordes listen in on John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio.” Meanwhile, over in England, V. S. Pritchett takes Jacob’s ladder and turns it into a domestic incident: resentful stepdaughter removes stepmother’s staircase to Heaven.
Of course, there was a war on, and devilish behavior was everywhere. When you see that righteous little man in Carson McCullers’s “The Jockey,” calling out a bookie, a trainer, and “a rich man” as they sit down to an e
laborate meal in a hotel restaurant (“You libertines”), the incident, small as it seems, takes on a peculiar magnitude. Here is the jockey, angry for his crippled jockey friend. And here are all the little men of this world sent off to risk life and limb at the behest of the rich and powerful. It’s the same controlled ethical disgust you find in Shirley Jackson’s notorious vision of small-town ritual murder. The evil that men do. But registered in an oblique style, and all the more forceful for it. Those “Patterns of Love” admired by William Maxwell (and published two months to the day after victory in Europe)—are we to take them as the first, uncertain steps toward a peaceful, humane future? In that sweet and subtle story, a lonely man, Arnold, is visiting a happy family, the Talbots, who in turn are always “visiting” him in his guest house, along with the family dog, a Great Dane, name of Satan. The two younger sons often fight. But not always:
Once Satan was admitted to the little house, it became quite full and rather noisy, but John Talbot appeared and sent the dog out and made the children leave Arnold in peace. They left as they had come, by the window. Arnold watched them and was touched by the way Duncan turned and helped George, who was too small to jump. Also by the way George accepted this help. It was as if their hostility had two faces and one of them was the face of love. Cain and Abel, Arnold thought …
Only one of these stories, Irwin Shaw’s, looks directly at the face of Cain, but in it we join the noncommissioned officers Seeger, Welch, and Olson after the action, at the end of the war, Shaw being interested in what we would these days call “post-conflict trauma.” Trauma itself—now such a familiar tool in the writer’s arsenal—was, in the forties, still something to be wrangled with, fresh theory rather than (generally) accepted fact. For E. B. White the talking cure is not to be taken too seriously (“ ‘Ever have any bizarre thoughts?’ asked the doctor.… Ever have any bizarre thoughts? What kind of thoughts except bizarre had he had since the age of two?”). Nabokov’s opinions on the subject, meanwhile, are well known, and his perfect gem of a story, “Signs and Symbols,” is another repudiation of the Freudian habit of placing, as Jessamyn West puts it elsewhere in this book, the mysteries of life in an orderly manner:
She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.
My italics. If I could gather these writers of the forties under one banner it would be their shared desire to protect faulty, small, vulnerable, and yet beautiful phenomena from the forces of destruction. E. B. White wants to save the second tree on the corner—“saturated with the evening, each gilt-edged leaf perfectly drunk with excellence and delicacy”—from the deadening theories of his therapist. Elizabeth Taylor wants to protect the first shoots of new love as they grow out of somebody else’s grave. Cheever, like all writers, wants to preserve the voices of passing strangers. And Frank O’Connor—despite his present reputation as a writer of neat little tales that all end in epiphany—wants to tell a shaggy-dog story that allows for the possibility that an “insignificant little gnat” like Freddie or Stevie Leary can yet continue to exist, if only because they have been remembered, by the narrator, “with extraordinary vividness.” People forget, and time is violent, and sometimes the “times” are violent, too, in the nonmetaphorical sense. In the forties, the left-hand column of the human ledger was long, longer than seemed possible. Still, these writers found a few luminous things to put down for us on the other side, and we have not yet forgotten the favor.
E. B. White
“Ever have any bizarre thoughts?” asked the doctor.
Mr. Trexler failed to catch the word. “What kind?” he said.
“Bizarre,” repeated the doctor, his voice steady. He watched his patient for any slight change of expression, any wince. It seemed to Trexler that the doctor was not only watching him closely but was creeping slowly toward him, like a lizard toward a bug. Trexler shoved his chair back an inch and gathered himself for a reply. He was about to say “Yes” when he realized that if he said yes the next question would be unanswerable. Bizarre thoughts, bizarre thoughts? Ever have any bizarre thoughts? What kind of thoughts except bizarre had he had since the age of two?
Trexler felt the time passing, the necessity for an answer. These psychiatrists were busy men, overloaded, not to be kept waiting. The next patient was probably already perched out there in the waiting room, lonely, worried, shifting around on the sofa, his mind stuffed with bizarre thoughts and amorphous fears. Poor bastard, thought Trexler. Out there all alone in that misshapen antechamber, staring at the filing cabinet and wondering whether to tell the doctor about that day on the Madison Avenue bus.
Let’s see, bizarre thoughts. Trexler dodged back along the dreadful corridor of the years to see what he could find. He felt the doctor’s eyes upon him and knew that time was running out. Don’t be so conscientious, he said to himself. If a bizarre thought is indicated here, just reach into the bag and pick anything at all. A man as well supplied with bizarre thoughts as you are should have no difficulty producing one for the record. Trexler darted into the bag, hung for a moment before one of his thoughts, as a hummingbird pauses in the delphinium. No, he said, not that one. He darted to another (the one about the rhesus monkey), paused, considered. No, he said, not that.
Trexler knew he must hurry. He had already used up pretty nearly four seconds since the question had been put. But it was an impossible situation—just one more lousy, impossible situation such as he was always getting himself into. When, he asked himself, are you going to quit maneuvering yourself into a pocket? He made one more effort. This time he stopped at the asylum, only the bars were lucite—fluted, retractable. Not here, he said. Not this one.
He looked straight at the doctor. “No,” he said quietly. “I never have any bizarre thoughts.”
The doctor sucked in on his pipe, blew a plume of smoke toward the rows of medical books. Trexler’s gaze followed the smoke. He managed to make out one of the titles, The Genito-Urinary System. A bright wave of fear swept cleanly over him, and he winced under the first pain of kidney stones. He remembered when he was a child, the first time he ever entered a doctor’s office, sneaking a look at the titles of the books—and the flush of fear, the shirt wet under the arms, the book on t.b., the sudden knowledge that he was in the advanced stages of consumption, the quick vision of the hemorrhage. Trexler sighed wearily. Forty years, he thought, and I still get thrown by the title of a medical book. Forty years and I still can’t stay on life’s little bucky horse. No wonder I’m sitting here in this dreary joint at the end of this woebegone afternoon, lying about my bizarre thoughts to a doctor who looks, come to think of it, rather tired.
The session dragged on. After about twenty minutes, the doctor rose and knocked his pipe out. Trexler got up, knocked the ashes out of his brain, and waited. The doctor smiled warmly and stuck out his hand. “There’s nothing the matter with you—you’re just scared. Want to know how I know you’re scared?”
“How?” asked Trexler.
“Look at the chair you’ve been sitting in! See how it has moved back away from my desk? You kept inching away from me while I asked you questions. That means you’re scared.”
“Does it?” said Trexler, faking a grin. “Yeah, I suppose it does.”
They finished shaking hands. Trexler turned and walked out uncertainly along the passage, then into the waiting room and out past the next patient, a ruddy pin-striped man who was seated on the sofa twirling his hat nervously and staring straight ahead at the files. Poor, frightened guy, thought Trexler, he’s probably read in the Times that one American male out of every two is going to die of heart disease by twelve o’clock next Thur
sday. It says that in the paper almost every morning. And he’s also probably thinking about that day on the Madison Avenue bus.
· · ·
A week later, Trexler was back in the patient’s chair. And for several weeks thereafter he continued to visit the doctor, always toward the end of the afternoon, when the vapors hung thick above the pool of the mind and darkened the whole region of the East Seventies. He felt no better as time went on, and he found it impossible to work. He discovered that the visits were becoming routine and that although the routine was one to which he certainly did not look forward, at least he could accept it with cool resignation, as once, years ago, he had accepted a long spell with a dentist who had settled down to a steady fooling with a couple of dead teeth. The visits, moreover, were now assuming a pattern recognizable to the patient.
Each session would begin with a résumé of symptoms—the dizziness in the streets, the constricting pain in the back of the neck, the apprehensions, the tightness of the scalp, the inability to concentrate, the despondency and the melancholy times, the feeling of pressure and tension, the anger at not being able to work, the anxiety over work not done, the gas on the stomach. Dullest set of neurotic symptoms in the world, Trexler would think, as he obediently trudged back over them for the doctor’s benefit. And then, having listened attentively to the recital, the doctor would spring his question: “Have you ever found anything that gives you relief?” And Trexler would answer, “Yes. A drink.” And the doctor would nod his head knowingly.
As he became familiar with the pattern Trexler found that he increasingly tended to identify himself with the doctor, transferring himself into the doctor’s seat—probably (he thought) some rather slick form of escapism. At any rate, it was nothing new for Trexler to identify himself with other people. Whenever he got into a cab, he instantly became the driver, saw everything from the hackman’s angle (and the reaching over with the right hand, the nudging of the flag, the pushing it down, all the way down along the side of the meter), saw everything—traffic, fare, everything—through the eyes of Anthony Rocco, or Isidore Freedman, or Matthew Scott. In a barbershop, Trexler was the barber, his fingers curled around the comb, his hand on the tonic. Perfectly natural, then, that Trexler should soon be occupying the doctor’s chair, asking the questions, waiting for the answers. He got quite interested in the doctor, in this way. He liked him, and he found him a not too difficult patient.
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 71
