by Kerr, Jean;
Colin is completely different. He has a lightness of touch and a dexterity that will certainly put him on top of the heap if he ever takes up safe-cracking. Equipped with only a spoon and an old emery board, he can take a door off its hinges in seven minutes and remove all of the towel racks from the bathroom in five.
Gilbert is only seventeen months old, and it’s too early to tell about him. (As a matter of fact, we can tell, all right, but we’re just not ready to face it.) Once upon a time we might have been taken in by smiles and gurgles and round blue eyes, but no more. We know he is just biding his time. Today he can’t do much more than eat his shoelaces and suck off an occasional button. Tomorrow, the world.
My real problem with children is that I haven’t any imagination. I’m always warning them against the commonplace defections while they are planning the bizarre and unusual. Christopher gets up ahead of the rest of us on Sunday mornings and he has long since been given a list of clear directives: “Don’t wake the baby,” “Don’t go outside in your pajamas,” “Don’t eat cookies before breakfast.” But I never told him, “Don’t make flour paste and glue together all the pages of the magazine section of the Sunday Times.” Now I tell him, of course.
And then last week I had a dinner party and told the twins and Christopher not to go in the living room, not to use the guest towels in the bathroom, and not to leave the bicycles on the front steps. However, I neglected to tell them not to eat the daisies on the dining-room table. This was a serious omission, as I discovered when I came upon my centerpiece—a charming three-point arrangement of green stems.
The thing is, I’m going to a psychiatrist and find out why I have this feeling of persecution… this sense of being continually surrounded. …
How to be a collector’s item
I was reading another volume of collected letters last night, and it sent me right back to worrying about that old problem. On what basis do you decide that your friends are going to be famous, and that you ought to be saving their letters? Naturally, you save everything you get from Ernest Hemingway and Edith Sitwell. But think of the smart boys who were saving Edna Millay’s penciled notes when she was just a slip of a thing at Vassar. What gets me is how they knew.
As sure as you’re born, I’m tossing stuff into the wastebasket this minute that Scribner’s would give their eyeteeth for twenty years from now. But you can’t save everybody’s letters, not in that five-room apartment. When I was young and naïve, last year, I used to file away mail if it seemed interesting or amusing. But that was a trap. For instance, I have a marvelous letter from my cleaning man explaining how he happened to break the coffee table. But clearly this is a one-shot affair. He’ll never be collected. You have to use a little sense about these things.
No doubt the safest procedure is to confine yourself to those friends who have demonstrated a marked literary bent. Even then, I wouldn’t collect anybody who didn’t seem a good risk. If you have a friend who is a novelist, you might play it very close to the ground and wait until he wins a Pulitzer prize. Of course, by that time he may not be writing to you any more. His correspondence will very likely be limited to letters to the Columbia Broadcasting System explaining why it isn’t convenient for him to appear on Person to Person.
If you have a friend who is a playwright, it’s simpler. You begin collecting him immediately after his first failure. As letter writers, playwrights are at the top of their powers at this moment. For color, passion, and direct revelation of character you simply can’t beat a letter from a playwright who has just had a four-day flop.
And sometimes you can see a talent bloom before your very eyes. I have one friend, a poet, who used to write nice little things about “the icy fingers of November” and “the strange stillness of ash trays after a party.” I admit I didn’t take him very seriously. But just last week he had a long poem in the Partisan Review and I didn’t understand one word of it. Well, let me tell you, I’m saving his letters now.
You’ve got to keep your wits about you. It would be terrible to think you were brushing with greatness and didn’t even notice. Oh, I’ll admit there are times when you just can’t be certain whether or not a friend has talent. In that case, just ask him. He’ll tell you. But here, too, some discretion is necessary. For example, I don’t give any serious attention to friends who get drunk at cocktail parties and announce they could write a better book than Marjorie Morningstar.
On the whole, I’d say that if you have a very promising circle of acquaintances who appear regularly in the newspapers announcing that their beer is Rheingold the dry beer and on the networks pouring out their little secrets to Tex and Jinx, your path as a collector is clear. Leave town. Otherwise, they won’t have any opportunity to write to you.
But who am I trying to fool with all this nonsense? Obviously, I’m not really worrying about my friends’ letters. What keeps me awake nights is the question of my letters, the ones I write. Are they being saved? Fat chance. I know my friends—it simply wouldn’t enter their scatterbrained heads that they ought to be collecting me. And poor Doubleday, how will they ever scrape together a book? Well, they won’t, that’s all, if I don’t take steps.
So I’m taking steps. From now on I keep carbons of every word I write, and to hell with my cavalier pen-pals. I’ve got a very decent sampling already:
Dear Mabel,
Johnny doesn’t seem to have a pair of socks without holes so tell him he has to wear one brown sock and one green sock. If he makes a fuss—tell him he can wear his long pants and they won’t show. And another thing, very important—it’s Gilbert’s turn to drink his milk out of the beer mug.
Mrs. K.
Joan, dear—
Well, we finally moved into Hilltop and what a magical place it is! High, high above the slate-blue waters of the Bay.
We have our very own special, sad, sighing wind. It seems enchanted and, we fancy, it is full of ghosts of Heathcliff and his Catherine. Promise you’ll come and see us. We’re always here.
Love,
Jean
The All-Season Window Corp.,
Mount Vernon, N.Y.
Dear Sirs,
Listen, are you going to come and put in those storm windows before we are blown out into the damn Sound? You said Monday and here it is Wednesday. We keep the thermostat up to eighty-five and still the toast is flying off the plates. And I had to put mittens on to type this.
I hope to hear from you soon or never.
Jean Kerr
Dear Phyllis,
Thank you, thank you, thank you—for an evening of pure bliss. Your book arrived yesterday morning and it hasn’t been out of my hands since. Much have I traveled in realms of gold—but truly, Phyllis, this is a coup. It needed to be said. As Sainte-Beuve once remarked, “Je ne sais quois pour dire.”
Gratefully,
J.
Mother darling,
I’m sorry I didn’t write to you for the last three weeks but we were picking out our Christmas card. I think your slogan for the Runyon Cancer Fund is excellent. I would by all means mail it in to the contest.
Not much new here except that for some reason Joan dropped in yesterday with her four horrible children—three of whom had harmonicas. Oh, and did you read Phyllis’ book? Yap, yap, yap over the same material. She seems to think she owns the seventeenth century. No, I haven’t seen Tab Hunter in Battle Cry, but if you say it’s a “must” I’ll have to catch it.
Love and kisses, J.
Treasurer,
Hellinger Theatre,
New York, N.Y.
Dear Sir,
What do you mean by returning my check and saying there are no seats available for My Fair Lady? I asked for two good seats on the first available Wednesday evening. Do you mean to suggest that down through the echoing corridors of time there will never be a Wednesday night on which two seats will be available? I don’t wish to inject an empty note of pessimism but even you, in the first flush and fever of success, must
concede that there is a possibility—at least in theory—that sometime, say in 1962, you might be willing, even anxious, to sell two seats.
In the meantime, I’m going to see Bells Are Ringing.
Outraged
Honey,
I seem to have lost my car key in Schrafft’s so will you please take a cab and go pick up the car which I left in front of Bloomingdale’s in New Rochelle? It’s in a no-parking area but I don’t think that matters because it’s raining and Peggy says they never check in the rain. There are a lot of groceries on the back seat and I don’t know what you’re going to do with the ice cream.
Love, J.
Funnell’s Market,
Dear Sirs,
Enclosed you will find a check for my February bill. However, I wish to draw your attention to one item which reads “Fifty cents’ worth of spiced ham @ 70 cents.” I am aware of rising costs and the resultant strain on independent grocers, but nevertheless when I order fifty cents’ worth of spiced ham I expect to get it @.50.
Yours cordially,
Jean Kerr
Dear Chris,
Daddy and I are going out to supper and I want you to pay attention to this list.
1. No Disneyland until your homework is done.
2. Get your bicycle and all those guns out of the bathroom.
3. Take a bath and be sure to put one cup of Tide in the water.
4. Don’t wear your underwear or your socks to bed.
5. Col says you swallowed his whistle. If you didn’t, give it back to him.
Love, Mommy
Mr. Ken McCormick,
Doubleday & Co.,
New York, N.Y.
Dear Ken,
Thank you for saying the letters were interesting, and I shall, as you suggest, try Random House.
As always,
Jean
P.S.: Will you kindly return this letter?
Greenwich, anyone?
The thing that worries me is that I am so different from other writers. Connecticut is just another state to me. And nature—well, nature is just nature. When I see a tree whose leafy mouth is pressed against the earth’s sweet flowing breast, I think, “Well, that’s a nice-looking oak,” but it doesn’t change my way of life.
Now I’m not going to stand here and run down trees and flowers. Personally, I have three snake plants of my own, and in a tearoom I’m the first one to notice the geraniums. But the point is, I keep my head.
However, I’ve been reading a lot lately, and it’s clear that I’m out of step. Most serious writers of stature (I consider a writer serious when he makes more than twenty thousand a year) are giving up their psychiatrists and going back to the land. You can’t pick up a book these days without getting all involved with the inspirational saga of some poor, harried writer who was making sixty thousand a year and taking the five fifty-one back to Larchmont, but it was all ashes—ashes.
Then he found this old abandoned sawmill in Connecticut that was three hours from the station and twenty minutes from the bathroom, and there he found contentment.
Right from the beginning the golden days were flowing to the brim with the real stuff of life and living. No matter that the maid quit because she wasn’t used to cooking over an open hearth. As soon as the wife opened a can of Heinz’s spaghetti, sprinkled it with marjoram, chervil, anise, and some dry vermouth, she once again felt the sweet fulfillment of being a mate and a mother. The children were no problem, because they had to walk eight miles back and forth to school and were scarcely ever around.
And Truth itself came knocking one morning, along about ten-fifteen. It was a pretty spring day, the buttercups were twinkling on the grass, and the only sound was the song of the whippoorwill until the chimney broke off and fell down through the dining-room ceiling, scattering beams, bricks, and mortar here and there and quite demolishing the French Provincial table.
Our writer came upon the wreckage on his way back from the well. Although he was dismayed at first, he took hold of himself and did what anyone else would have done in the situation. He went out and sat on the back stoop. Pretty soon a chicken came strolling by. He picked it up, and suddenly he became aware that it was warm and that it was making little cheeping sounds and that it was his chicken. He held it against his last clean shirt. Now he was lost, lost in the miracle of the warmth and the scratching and cheeping—even though, as I understand it, cheeping is not at all unusual in chickens. Forgotten was the hole in the roof, forgotten the dining-room table. He realized that nothing else really mattered: from now on it was going to be him and this chicken.
Well, you see how different we all are. I simply can’t think of a household disaster that would be in any way mitigated by the presence of a chicken in the back yard. And on the day the roof fell in, a smart chicken would keep out of my way. At a time like that, it would be nothing for me to go out and kick one in the tail feathers. But then I hate chickens, with their blank beady eyes and the silly way they keep shaking their scrawny little heads.
Formerly, when our writer lived in the sinful city, five o’clock was a nightmare of cocktail parties at which he could never get a martini that was dry enough (his own method with martinis seems to have consisted in keeping the gin locked away in a separate closet and walking past it once a week carrying a bottle of vermouth). Now five o’clock finds him up to his elbows in cows. “The Boy and I finished the milking, and there, in sight of the cows, we sat down with a pail of the rich, warm brew and refreshed ourselves.” Of course, he may only mean that they washed themselves in it, but doesn’t it sound like they drank it?
Then he adds, “My, how The Boy is shooting up. He is already an inch taller than The Girl.” I don’t know what gets into writers when they move to the country. They can’t remember the names of their children. Two weeks in the dew-soaked fields, and the best they can do is The Boy and The Girl. Notice, though, the way they keep tabs on the livestock. You’re always reading how “Lord Peter Wimsey got a nail in his hoof today,” or “Thank heaven, Edith Sitwell finally had her kittens.”
All is not work, work, work in Utopia. Oftentimes, in the evening after they have finished spreading the fertilizer, the writer and his wife sit on the fence—with a wonderful sense of “togetherness”—and listen to the magic symphony of the crickets. I can understand that. Around our house we’re pretty busy, and of course we’re not the least bit integrated, but nevertheless my husband and I often sit together in the deepening twilight and listen to the sweet, gentle slosh-click, slosh-click of the dishwasher. He smiles and I smile. Oh, it’s a golden moment.
But to get back to the writer. Even from his standpoint, there is one tiny flaw in all this bucolic bliss. What with setting the winter potatoes and keeping the cows freshened, he hasn’t done a lick of writing since he got there. Of course, he has kept a diary—and this becomes our only means of studying the effects of contentment on a writer’s style. The effects are awesome.
Here was our boy, writing lovely, depressing stories for the more advanced magazines. (I remember a typical one about a stout woman of fifty with an Italian haircut, who got very drunk in a club car and proceeded to tell a lot of perfect strangers why she wouldn’t give Harry a divorce.) Now listen to him:
“Up at five-thirty to help with the lambing.
“Saw a yellow-bellied snipwhistle.
“Oh, such excitement as there was today. The corn shucker arrived.”
Help with a lambing at five-thirty? That settles it. I won’t be a writer.
How to decorate in one easy breakdown
As a result of a recent impartial survey taken among the ladies at one table in Stouffer’s, I have discovered a number of significant facts about home decorating that I am perfectly willing to share.
The problem confronting the average harassed housewife today is not whether she’s going to decorate. Of course she’s going to decorate. The problem is when. I find that circumstances vary, but in general it is safe to list three situations in whic
h it is advisable to re-do the living room: (1) when you have the money; (2) when you don’t have the money but are planning to go on The $64,000 Question, where you will astonish all with your knowledge of rare bindings; (3) when you don’t have the money and there’s not a chance in the world you’re going to get the money but if you have to look at that speckled blue wallpaper one more day you will go smack out of your mind.
Having decided that you are going to go ahead with the project, you come up against the really ticklish question of how—in what color, in what style—you are going to do the room. It is at this point that many stout hearts decide to stay with speckled blue wallpaper. For it is a curious fact that even those women who ordinarily intimidate their closest friends by the instant and absolute conviction they bring to all subjects suddenly develop vast areas of insecurity the moment they have to say whether the ceiling should be painted lighter or darker than the walls.
I know one woman of unusually strong character who selected a college for her son in a single afternoon and who has always been able to plan a dinner for sixteen in five minutes. In a beauty parlor, when the manicurist asks her what color she wants her nails, she can glance at a rack of nineteen bottles of nail polish and announce “Carioca Pink” without a second’s hesitation.
