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Overview
Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia—the school of John Updike and Cheever—this work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting and hyper-literate cast of characters.
A corruptible chicken farmer fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism, small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De Vries’s well-read suburbanites. Noted as much for his verbal fluidity and wordplay as for his ability to see humor through pain, De Vries will delight both new readers and old in this uproarious modern masterpiece.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226170732 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| Sales rank: | 966,366 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Peter De Vries (1910–1993) was born in Chicago to Dutch immigrant parents. His father wanted him to join the clergy, but after attending Calvin College and Northwestern University, De Vries found work as a vending-machine operator, a toffee-apple salesman, a radio actor, and an editor at Poetry magazine. His friend and mentor James Thurber brought him to the attention of the New Yorker, and in 1944 De Vries moved to New York to become a regular staff contributor to the magazine, where he worked for the next forty years.
A prolific author of novels, short stories, parodies, poetry, and essays, he published twenty-seven books during his lifetime and was heralded by Kingsley Amis as the “funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic.” De Vries was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983, taking his place alongside Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and S. J. Perelman as one of the nation’s greatest wits.
Read an Excerpt
Reuben, Reuben
A Novel
By Peter De Vries
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1964 Peter De VriesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-17073-2
CHAPTER 1
GIVEN A LITTLE MONEY, education and social standing, plus of course the necessary leisure, any man with any style at all can make a mess of his love life. And given these, plus a little of the right to self-realization that goes with modern life, a little of the old self-analysis, any woman with any gumption at all can make a shambles of her marriage. Statistics show it every day. Romantic confusion, once the privelege of a few, is now within reach of all. Even of me, a chicken farmer. I'm not going to say "mere chicken farmer" like you might expect, because in the first place I lack the humility for it, and in the second there's nothing mere about running a poultry ranch in Connecticut, as they now call them there. Nothing could be less mere, as the facts will show.
I was born here in Woodsmoke, but not this Woodsmoke. I no longer recognize the place. I'm that most displaced of all displaced persons, your native son in a modern town. My father was the last of our line to live his life out without being made an alien in his birthplace by immigrants turning it into a tentacle of New York. Good thing he went out with his time, as he would of had strong emotions on the subject—The Losing of the East. We were not taken captive into Babylon—Babylon came to us—but our harps hang on the willows just the same.
My father was a man of feeling who always wanted his family to show their feelings for each other too. That was why he started a sociable little custom we observed every morning without fail. We always shook hands at breakfast. None of your half-hearted shakes neither, but firm grasps to show how glad we were to see one another again after a good night's sleep. "Morning, Ma. Good morning, Grace. Luther." The hearty pumping went on across the steaming victuals till everybody had shaken hands with everybody else, and then we sat down. In falling in with this we three children were naturally following the example set by my parents whenever they met, like at a railroad station or bus depot. They always shook hands warmly.
"I don't hold with reserve. Reserve is for Scandinavians," my father said. "If we can't express the emotions God give us then we don't deserve them. We're only on loan to one another, so let's show our feelings while we can." These were orders none of us would dream of disobeying, as the other main way he had of showing his feelings was to bust you one in the jaw. He busted more guys in the jaw than you could shake a stick at, and the rest he shook a stick at. I mean the heavy hickory cane he always carried on the walks around town that became more and more familiar a sight as my brother Luther and I got old enough to pitch in on the farm.
My father always wrung the chickens' necks to induce death, but after he passed on hisself my brother and I modernized the farm somewhat. We used axes, together with one them automatic plucking machines. Now days they have an electric knife for the small phlebotomy there's still no substitute for, but the automatic plucker is still in operation. I can hear it humming away downstairs as I sit and write this. After Luther left to go into insurance in Hartford, I ran the farm myself until I was in my fifties, when my wife died. Then I passed it along to my son George and his wife Mary, who I now live with in the same old farmhouse, occasionally waiting on trade in the salesroom off the kitchen. At least they think I live with them, though a glance at the property title might show its the other way around. So they try to tolerate me, except when I think of it first and tolerate them. Anyhow. I hope to sell parts of this that I'm batting out to some magazine before it becomes a book, preferbly the Yale Review, as Yale would of been my alma mater if I'd had any choice. I hadn't even finished grammar school when my father was snatched away (very suddenly, through the medium of pneumonia) and I had to pitch in on the farm. Luther finished high school by taking evening courses in Bridgeport, eventually bettering himself into insurance. My sister Grace and her husband live in Akron. I never enrolled in nothing again except for an evening class in creative writing, also in Bridgeport, some years back. I wrote a theme for the class describing my father:
"My father was a rangy man with a long face and the brightest blue eyes you ever see, so it was a shame they were not better lined up than they were, for in that department he resembled Ben Turpin. One eye was always gazing at the other in wrapped admiration. That and wiry hair that stood up straight, like a fright wig, give him a look like one them drawings that are done by disturbed children in your better schools, that are suppose to show conflict."
The teacher of this composition class said my tribute to my father was touching, and that the style was certainly a relief from all this writing that is so polished but dead? He seemed to think it might ruin my individuality if he started giving me pointers, a responsibility he didn't want to take. "Get out of this class and stay out," he said, "flee for your life." There was nothing more he could do for me.
I bad farewell to literary pursuits until in my sixties, when I am taking it up with a vengeance for many reasons. One is that with the farm being run by my son and daughter-in-law I have some leisure time at last. Another is that there is now in our Woodsmoke a multi-million-dollar correspondence school for writers. Its a booming industry called the Successful Writers School, and I figured I would give them a chance to help me over the hump like they claim they can in their ads, else let them mfr. pool cues. But the main reason I take pen in hand is that now I have something to say. My message in a nutshell is the one I have hinted at the very start: I am a D.P. in my own back yard. What's more—and this is the essence of what I've decided to try and put down—I got displaced by staying put.
I stayed on at the old homestead and saw the town where I was born grow from 1800 neighbors to 20,000 strangers—strangers who regard me as the outsider. I'm the foreigner, ever hear the beat? How many miles does the average commuter clock up in a lifetime without going nowheres? Seventy-five thousand? The equivalent of three or four times around the world? Well if I'd pulled up stakes in my prime and plunked down in the middle of Belgium I wouldn't be half as uprooted as I am right now sitting in the bedroom where I was born, gazing out the window—at what? One church, so modern they're thinking of making divorce a sacrament—or so the story goes. And why not? As Mrs. Punck says, you only get married the first time once. One superette (you got it, a regular size grocery store). One repair garage with the slogan "We specialize in American cars." I realize the humor of that ain't unconscious—the proprietor is a satirist I'm just letting do a little of my work for me. You can picture for yourself the imports whizzing by the farmhouse now, the high-powered sports jobs that sociologists tell us are status signs and psychologists claim are sex symbols. You know all that, and how it goes. Men used to shoot jaguars now they drive them, sometimes fast enough to kill deer on the Massachusetts Turnpike. They are also whizzing past the real supermarket where the food is so sanitarily packaged after being sprayed with various and Sunday poisons. Out there are also the subdivisions named, by God, after what the contractors had to eradicate to build them—Birch Hills (named after the grove bulldozed away preparatory to laying the foundation), Vineyard Acres after the rows of Concord grapes plowed under to make way for them. Of course old Mrs. Ponderosa's corner vineyard still stands, visible to me from another window, but that also overlooks a development called Punch Bowl Hollow. Last but not least, there is this writing mill that I am banking on to get me off the ground, else let them go into billiard equipment. The stock of the school, which also boasts a twin factory for turning out artists, is now traded over the counter and may go on the Big Board. It has the largest building in town, a huge modern plant with a warehouse for incoming and outgoing lessons, up-to-date furnishings and a spacious lounge where lecturers come to speak on different subjects like "The Decline of Fiction" and "Whatever Happened to Style?" to supplement the courses.
A smattering of persons comes to mind who aren't commuters but who are part and parcel of the culture the term stands for and I must try to come to grips with. Like the art teacher in the local school who is so highly thought of because she don't have the kids draw; the piano teacher who instructs them through playing cords that certain colors remind them of; and the architect who designed the new church where they're thinking of solemnizing divorce after being inspired by a snail shell. And the Lesbian psychiatrist now living in the old Abernathy place who has written a best seller called Symbolism in Everyday Life. I have come to know her well. She has flat heels, her hair skun back in a bun, and a standing week-end order—one capon.
You will recall how the ancient Romans of old use to feel around in birds insides for omens about what the future held in store? Well thats the business I been in for forty years. For forty years I been rummaging in chickens interiors while the shape of things to come walked in the front door to buy what I had killed and was now dressing. I should say for half of that time really, because I can seem to remember the exact day, around 1940, when the cast of characters began to change, the exact hour even. Suddenly instead of the bakers and cobblers and carpenters wives we Spoffords had been selling poultry to since the turn of the century there began coming in the door the kind of women who put "ish" behind everything and "sort of" in front of it. "What size fowl did madam have in mind? How many pounds?" "Sort of fivish." Then the chaps who shop in pairs, that know only too well how to cook what their buying. And on Saturday mornings generally the husbands of the ish women, men in tweed jackets that the elbows of are libel to be vulcanized.
Now Woodsmoke has been called the appendix of Madison Avenue. Those are the birds who made it that—the last mentioned. They go to town every day and back carting one them leather reticules to offices where they sit thinking up slogans to make us buy the kind of bread that when you squeeze it it stays squeezed? That you'd as leaf eat cotton battin? Am I coming in loud and clear? Well at noon they'll knock off for one them exhausting three hour lunches at restaurants with names like Villanova and The Forum of the Twelve Caesars, that give you the absolute creeps along the lines above suggested, as you think, Well the Vandals are at the gates all right, we're beginning to decline if not yet fall. Are you reading me out there? Am I coming in strong? Not to mention the fact that you and I pay for those banquets since they are tax deductible. What they do over lunch I don't know unless its think up some more slogans like "From the depths of a tranquil monastery comes the secret of a superb relish" to be run under a picture of some guy from the model agency praying in a ski parka with the hood well up around the ears for extra reverence and his hands folded. Or maybe firm up a variety TV show containing, oh, a girl with a song on the Hit Parade, a juggler, and one them cerebral comedians they call them. You know, the far out kind who impersonate linoleum and lint, Monday and Denver, while the Russians get ahead of us in everything.
It don't impress me none that the new element here are professional New Englanders. Professional New Englanders are all from the Middle West, the South and New York, ever see one from Maine? So hence I'm not impressed that they buy houses with Revolutionary bullet holes in the front door and collect pewter mugs with glass bottoms that legend has it are glass in order that American troops could see the enemy approaching while they kwaffed their ale in taverns, and maybe even open restaurants theirselfs with menus in olden type saying Roaft Thankfgiving Turkey with Mafhed Cheftnuts and Prime Ribf of Beef with Yorkfhire Pudding and Horferadifh Fauce $8.50. I juft get a little fed up if all. And a little anxious when I realize with a jolt that this culture to which I'm a D.P. must suddenly be regarded as the one into which my granddaughter was born.
Suddenly its her what-do-you-call-it. Milieu.
CHAPTER 2GENEVA WAS ALWAYS a quiet girl, who like most quiet people could periodically come out of her shell to raise worse hell than you get from people who make a general practise of asserting themself, like me. (I'm tall and angular as a carpenter's rule, with a lantern jaw and eyes the color of grass stains. Well thats over with.) Geneva was always strong and sturdy, with hips that swayed like a bell when she walked, and big round eyes the color of butterscotch. Her gold hair fell to her shoulders, when it wasn't tucked up inside one of her father's cloth caps, because she could not abide braiding it or her mother bear to have it cut. When Geneva was twelve her mother did agree to having it cut off, first braiding it into one thick plait which now hangs framed behind glass in her mother's bedroom between the picture of Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple and the famous photograph of Teddy Roosevelt where the light is bouncing off his glasses?
Geneva was looked down on by her peers as they call them now, but not then, the other farm folk and grocers wives and daughters, for wearing dungarees. Till the New Yorkers began moving in and dungarees become shiek. It was the ish women I first see come into the salesroom for chickens wearing pants, sometimes with a mink coat on too. I never stood in aw of them no matter how they showed their superiority, upside down or right side up. One of them, admiring the look of the farm one fine spring morning, started quoting Tennyson at me. Which got my goat, as I knew she thought she was talking down to a clodhopper. "Reading Tennyson," I says with a air of aphorism, "is like drinking liqueur. Your likelier to get sick on it than drunk." Then I stuck my tongue out at her, just before she turned around from the window out of which she had been gazing. She started to chat about her daughter Lila, only yesterday a waif in pigtails bicycling up to the farm to fetch the week end's order, now a graduate of Carnegie and through acting school and working in a famous Broadway producer's office. "She'll be directly under Mr. Slatkin," the woman said. "Most of the time anyway," I thought to myself, knowing them New York producers all right. This mother likes to brag how helpless the girl is, she's so artistic. "She can't cook, she can't sew, she can't type, she can't nothing," the woman says, and I says, "Well that's talent."
Geneva always pitched in with the chores, even the slaughtering. My wife and I use to kill only once a week in the old days, when we had a small trade. (I lost my wife very quickly, through the medium of ruptured appendix. I don't glorify the old days blindly—the fact that there were no antibiotics then ain't one of the things that make me hanker for them.) With Woodsmoke solidly a suburb of New York, business tripled and now George and Mare kill twice a week. While we disliked on sight the new element that could make a curio out of a 1st family like us, we knew that to expect Geneva to be unaffected by what was now her environment would be folly and bucking progress. So I said nothing. But I sure thought a heap when the girl I only yesterday dandled on my knee come home from high school one afternoon when I was stretched out on the parlor sofa taking a snooze and sat down on my stomach. It was the new sophistication. She had so much makeup on her eyes she could hardly keep them open. Which no doubt give her the sleepy siren look no doubt intended by all the calcimine.
"Tad Springer and I have got charge of panel discussion in Social Slops tomorrow," she said, in between eating an apple. "The subject is 'Preparation for a World of Strife.'"
"What will you do?" I asked as well as I could with the weight on my middle. "How will you handle the meeting?"
"Probably throw hot tar on the kids. That ought to prepare 'em."
My heart went out to her. I knew she was playing a role, trying the new sophistication on for size. That it didn't fit by a mile only added to her appeal—which I hoped in the end the right man would see behind all the camoflage. She kind of rolled those butterscotch eyes away, using the bored manner to cover up the embarrassment she was really feeling at the way she was acting. Our Geneva was as ripe and yellow as the Grimes Golden she was sinking her teeth into. I thought to myself, You'll go far baby, provided you just stay where you are. This brittle stuff ain't for you. It ain't your speed. The squeeze on my gut finally made my nose bleed, bringing the discussion to an end.
But I remember something odd. I remember a sensation I had then, of wanting to know more about the tendencies that were infecting our Geneva. It come from nowhere, as those inspirations often do. According to a story I read in a newspaper column, Thornton Wilder claims he got the idea for The Skin of Our Teeth while watching Hellzapoppin, a show I never saw but which apparently had a lot of shenanigans with the audience. Anyhow when somebody come down the aisle and laid a chicken in his lap he said to hisself, "Wilder, your going to write a play." When Geneva sat on my stomach eating an apple and talking about throwing hot tar on the kids in Social Slops I says to myself, "Spofford, your going to write a book. Your going to take a closer look at this society that made you a D.P. in your own back yard. You may even get mixed up in it. Your going to eat of the fleshpots of Egypt." Which struck me as odd, as I have always believed in plain dealing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reuben, Reuben by Peter De Vries. Copyright © 1964 Peter De Vries. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Spoffard
McGland
Mopworth