Let Me Tell You (19 page)

“No one mentions the fact that I also write books, as though it were not polite to talk about it.”

I loathe writing autobiographical material because if it's dull no one should have to read it anyway, and if it's interesting I should be using it for a story. No one whose life is completely dominated by four children should have to recall her own childhood; mine was pleasant and swift and easygoing, and very little of it remains in conscious memory. I regard the shiny new mess kit that my son has just gotten for camp and recall, suddenly, long hot weeks and bluejays and the unmistakable smell of a canvas sleeping bag, but I would not otherwise ever remember that I, too, went to camp. So much is happening right now, and the present goes by so imperceptibly; summers are shorter than they used to be, but it is pleasant to reflect that no one, any longer, is in a position to insist that I learn to swim.

I like to think that my mind is bent on sterner things now. Writing, for instance, used to be a delicious private thing, done in my own room with the door locked, in constant terror of the maternal knock and the summons to bed; now that I am so luckily grown up and independent, there is no one to knock on the door and save me from my excruciating labors. Although I flatly refuse to reveal the plans I had for the future when I was fifteen, I may say that they were realized in only one or two major respects. I would have regarded my present situation in many aspects as frankly incredible. There is, of course, no question in my mind but that I am better off this way.

Since ninety percent of my life went on in my head anyway, I cannot see any point in remembering odd concrete items. I grew up near San Francisco—which means a suburb, and trees, and having to stop playing prisoner's base when the streetlights went on in the evening, and sitting on a fence eating pomegranates with my dearest friend, whom I now remember very imperfectly. I remember going to all kinds of public grammar schools, and two different high schools, one in the West and one in the East, which brings back to me the sick inadequate feeling of standing in a hallway holding a notebook and wondering without hope if I would ever find the right room.

I recall how the entire chemistry class halted one afternoon while everyone went to the window to show me my first snowfall, and the increasingly rare letters to my dearest friends back home, and the high-heeled shoes. I went to college, and I remember the mail coming in the mornings, and my first fur coat, and the frightful embarrassment of seeing a story of mine in the college magazine—worse, I believe, than the first day in a gym suit—and when my son asks me, after all of this, what it is like in camp, or whether people really ever get homesick, I remember my first night in the college dormitory, and a girl named Laura something, and I can only tell him no, everything is always all right, somehow.

My husband reviews books for a living, and I would like to enter a protest. I know things are pretty hard these days, with the girls hanging around snatching the eligible males right out of the high school graduating classes, but I don't think I deserved a book reviewer. My mother raised me better, that's all.

I realize now, thinking back over the events of the last few years, that people marry book reviewers with the expectation that it is a temporary thing, that sooner or later the poor dear is going to find himself a better niche in life, such as selling vacuum cleaners. Book reviewing is just nothing for a healthy young woman to be married to. In the first place, a girl gets to reading. And then of course, there's everything else—“Reviewer's Complaint,” “The Earmarked Pen,” “The Development of the Theory of Universality in Art,” and all the rest.

In case there are any eager young women hanging on my every word, and even in case there are not, I'd better go right ahead and bore all you people who have heard this before many times, and give out with the warnings. Let me, for instance, give you a rough idea what we are up against, we reviewer wives.

Take “Reviewer's Complaint,” for instance. It starts from the theory that no book over five hundred pages long is worth more than three lines from any man's typewriter, and works from that into the theory that no book ever written is worth any number of lines at all, and eventually you find the reviewer turning the pages of the new bestseller rapidly, memorizing the names and the characters and the chapter headings, and then turning to see what Thompson in the
Times
had to say about it, and if there's anything worth disagreeing with him about. If there's nothing worth disagreeing with Thompson about, the reviewer is going to toss the book casually to his wife, and say, “Just read through this quickly tonight, will you, dear? Like to get another person's opinion before I commit myself on paper.”

After the wife has plowed through nine hundred pages of the new historical novel, she is going to come out with some such comment as this: “I like it all right, I guess, but it does seem sort of dull for nine hundred pages.”

Then her reviewing man will say, consulting his notes, “What do you think of this character…ah…Rosita?”

The wife thinks deeply, and answers: “Well, I don't know why she had to go and marry Cedric, I liked the other one much better.”

“Oh, did she
marry
Cedric?” the reviewer will say, writing it down. “When, about the middle of the book?”

“No, toward the beginning, and then she kept on going back to him and leaving him and going back to him and leaving him, and I don't see why the other one wasn't much nicer. After all, he had all the money, and did keep sending her those plans for the new railroad to approve, didn't he?”

“What railroad?” the reviewer will say. “I don't seem to remember much about that…” And so it will go on.

A few weeks later the doting wife will pick up a copy of the very literary weekly her husband is reviewing for and find his name attached to a review that begins: “Although this book is fundamentally good structurally, it has grave faults, and one might almost go so far as to classify it as dull. Take, for instance, the character of Rosita, the heroine of the book, very ably drawn, whose marriage early on to Cedric, her husband, strikes a false note and does much to weaken the artistic integrity, or wholeness, of the author's intention to bring out the history of the development of the railroad in this country, always a good and interesting subject to this reviewer, although unfortunately overshadowed in the present volume by the author's disagreeable weakness of character portrayal, which, in Rosita, the ably drawn heroine of the book, appears to be…”

And then the wife has to sit across the dinner table from her husband and say: “It's all so
true,
what you said in the review. I wish I had the brains to review books.”

Or consider “The Earmarked Pen.” This is something that any writer whose works appear with some regularity in any one periodical is apt to fall prey to, but I think that it is most insidious in the case of the book reviewer, who has, at best, a limited number of words at his disposal, and is prejudiced against more than half of those from the start. (Who, for instance, ever heard of someone calling a book just “good”? If a book is good, it is “eminently readable.”) Most reviewers, in fact, eventually find themselves with one or two, or at most three, personal words firmly established, like helpful relatives, in the book review as they write it; these are impossible to get rid of, and any attempt at substitution leaves the review uneasy and inclined to turn back on itself and bite.

Take, as an example, the word “heartrending.” My own reviewer is particularly attached to this word, along with “delectable” and, to a lesser extent, “invidious” (which he cannot distinguish from “insidious”) and “bailiwick.” I can recognize one of my husband's reviews at fifty yards because somewhere in it there is going to be a paragraph beginning: “One of the most heartrending factors in this work derives from the lapse on the part of the hero, Cedric, into an invidious cad, a type of man most unsuitable for a book emphasizing the delectable character of Rosita. Removed from his own bailiwick, that of wealth and luxury, Cedric gradually deteriorates into a heartrending wreck of a man, driving Rosita into madness with his invidious insinuations….” That is “The Earmarked Pen.” I have never seen a book reviewer (or a movie reviewer or a music reviewer or an art critic) who didn't catch it, once his first signed review brought in a check for two cents a word. There is no cure that I know of. I once gave my husband a dictionary of synonyms and a game of anagrams for his birthday, hoping they would help some. “Delectable,” he said, putting them back into the boxes, “positively heartrending.”

“The Development of the Theory of Universality in Art” comes right along with “The Development of the Theory of Style”; in other words, once he gets the idea it's his, he's got to pretty it up. Sooner or later your two-cents-a-word reviewer is going to turn around to his wife some evening, when she is sitting there quietly with
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
tucked inside the nine-hundred-page historical novel, and he is going to say: “Listen, I don't see any reason why all these guys should get so much money for these books they write; it seems to me that any one-page criticism is as good as any long novel ever written, and from now on I'm an artist too, see?” I call this “The Development of the Theory of Universality in Art,” because it starts from the assumption in the reviewer's mind that he is a writer too, only better, since reviewing can favor or condemn other artists. From that time on, the reviewer begins to think of himself as a stylist, and as a poet, too, if he can manage it.

And his reviews begin to sound like this: “When, in the course of pursuing his own heartrending and thankless brand of livelihood, the reviewer finds himself confronted with such an isolated, invidious, even incredibly desolate, comparison of his lot with that of such a delectably constructed piece of degradation as Cedric, it is not enough for one man occasionally to envy another: He must also be at some pains to suggest to himself the wicked, unhappily invidious bailiwick in which both are placed, that is to say, the
sine qua non
without which no book, and no reviewer, who necessarily builds from a book a new, finer, higher, and, in some cases, beautiful and lasting, form, can survive.” This is style. The poet-reviewer still gets his two cents a word, and the poet-published still gets his substantial royalties. This leads to some bitterness and eventual bad feeling, and finally review-articles beginning: “The fundamental ecological principle of art is this: No work of art, no matter how lofty, vast, or highly poetical, no matter how successful financially, can possibly expect ever to exist without the diligent application of the critic's heartrending assistance….”

All this time I haven't said anything about the
books.
That's the reviewer's wife's big problem, the books. Whether she sells them or whether she sends them to the library or whether she gives them to her kid sister, they pile up in the bookcases, in packing boxes, in the corners of the living room, all incredibly pathetic in their bright shiny dust jackets, all called “The Novel of the Year” or “The New Sinclair Lewis” or “The Finest Piece of Work This Young Author Has Yet Done.” And after a certain number of books beginning:

Rosita entered the room softly and closed the door carefully behind her. Was Cedric's presence here? Could he be? She breathed his name softly…“Cedric!”…and immediately, wonderfully, he answered! How achingly lovely, how ecstatic, it was, Rosita thought suddenly, blissfully. “Cedric,” she murmured again, “Cedric!” The heavy fragrance of roses filled the air, seeming to carry her words to him where he waited…there.

Or:

Rosie slammed the door behind her and walked over to the bed. Her high heels made a sharp clacking sound as she moved.

Ricky was asleep.

Bringing up her foot, she caught him heavily on the back of the head with her heel.

“Listen, ya punk,” she snarled, “I've taken enough from you, hear me? Sleep, sleep, sleep, all day long, and I'm working my fingers to the bone walking the filthy streets so you can have money to buy canned heat. Huh!”

Rosie laughed cruelly into Ricky's wide-eyed face.

“Huh!” she said.

As I say, after so much reading starting off like this, the reviewer's wife begins to wonder about it all. Maybe two cents a word isn't a living wage. Maybe vacuum cleaners aren't selling so well these days, but they're honest. Maybe she ought to have married Cedric. Maybe she'd better call the whole heartrending thing an invidious flop.

Ever since I met one of my grandmother's old cronies—the one with the evil eye—down on Sullivan Street the other day, I have had an uneasy feeling that I am being followed by something supernatural and malignant. Twice since then I have narrowly escaped destruction by fire, and in addition I have developed a particularly severe case of hives—out of season, I might add. In order to combat the superstitious fear that is beginning to prey on my mind, I stopped the other day in a secondhand bookstore and asked the young man on the high stool what would be good for Visitations. After some misunderstanding, the thought of which still makes me hot and cold all over, I procured a copy of a slim paperbound volume called
Pow-Wows: Art and Remedies for Man and Beast.

This is by way of testimonial for John George Hohman, who compiled the book. Since I first picked up your little collection, brother, I haven't needed another thing to keep me well and happy. From the very first remedy for mother-fits, right straight through to the punch line, the cure for wind-broken horses, it holds me. I tell you honestly that I couldn't stir out of my chair until I had finished it. Every page is packed full of thrills. Take, for instance, page 74, with its stirring recipe for destroying spring-tails or ground-fleas. Or page 62, which explains how to “Retain the Right in Court and Council.” Let me pass
that
one on to all you poor devils who fear the law as I used to. It must only be employed, I might point out, when the judge is not favorably disposed toward you. You must stand in court, courageous and unabashed, and say slowly: “I appear before the house of the Judge. Three dead men look out of the window; one having no tongue, the other having no lungs, and the third being sick, blind, and dumb.” O brethren, what a cure this has worked in me! No longer do I fear the light; the haunts of the underworld see me no more, lurking in the shadows and the hidden places. No indeedy!

Sometimes Mr. Hohman is pretty short with us neophytes, all things considered. For instance, on page 30—a particular pet of mine, since it also tells me how to make cattle return home and how to cause fish to collect—we have the plaintive request: “To Prevent Cherries from Maturing Before Martinmas.” To which Mr. Hohman replies smartly: “Engraft the twigs on a mulberry tree, and your desire is accomplished.” That's Hohman for you. No patience for the trivial.

Or take what we call “A Very Good Plaster,” on page 26. Mr. Hohman points out that he doubts “very much whether any physician in the United States can make a plaster equal to this.” Now it may bring the American Medical Association down on me in a fight to the finish, but I doubt also whether any physician could. You take two quarts of cider, a pound of beeswax, a pound of sheep tallow, and a pound of tobacco, and you boil it and dissolve it and strain it. The recipe doesn't say whether you wallow in it after that, or whether you use it in your fountain pen, or whether you take one jigger of it to a glass of plain water and lots of ice please, but I tried it with a pound of oleomargarine because the grocery was fresh out of sheep tallow and it didn't cure a thing.

Right now Hohman and I are having a lot of traffic with epileptics, always hanging around waiting for a good, quick cure. Hohman has several, provided the patient has never fallen into fire or water. Of course if the subject
has
ever fallen into fire or water he can take comfort from “A Safe and Approved Means to Be Applied in Cases of Fire and Pestilence” or “A Very Good Cure for Weakness of the Limbs, for the Purification of the Blood, for the Invigoration of the Head and Heart, and to Remove Giddiness, etc.” Or, as a last resort, he can desert the field completely and go in for dropsy, for which we have no fewer than eight cures. Finally, as a precaution against
every
thing troublesome, carry the right eye of a wolf with you at all times, hidden in your right sleeve. This last charm interests me particularly, but inasmuch as I wear loose sleeves most of the time, I can't get the right eye of anything to stay up them unless I have someone sew it in for me, and even then it would probably spoil the whole line of the shoulder.

And right near there, on page 78, there's a system for compelling thieves to return stolen goods that doesn't seem likely to fail: “Walk out early in the morning before sunrise to a juniper tree, and bend it with the left hand toward the rising sun, while you are saying: ‘Juniper tree, I shall bend and squeeze thee, until the thief has returned the stolen goods to the place from which he took them.' Then you must take a stone and put it on the bush, and under the bush and the stone you must put the skull of a malefactor.” I'm going to get back all the books I ever lost, if I can find enough skulls.

Who can tell what better world lies ahead, with John George Hohman leading the way—a world free from thieves, maledictions, lawsuits, and dropsy! A world where the cherries bloom on mulberry trees, and the good old-fashioned mother-fit has stolen off into the darkness! And in this clean new world, Hohman offers me, temptingly, the power “To Dye a Madder Red.” I entertain visions of the giddier whirl, the more achingly poignant delight, the superlative, the madder red; or, possibly, the drab little madder, so quietly enduring its colorless web of days, suddenly transformed into a creature of glamour, vitality. I have dreamt of contacting herpetologist Dr. Ditmars, and bargaining with him for a few dozen (pecks? gallons? pounds?) of madders, in return for which I would dye his vampire bats or his ant colonies red, the madder red.

In the minor matters, Hohman and I can string along fine together, curing a wind-broken horse here, destroying a spring-tail there, but it all ends ultimately in disillusionment and mutual bitterness. Sand, Mr. Hohman, that's what you've built on, sand. It's page 22 that showed me—page 22, with its remedy for mortification and all. Here there is a charm to “Prevent Wicked or Malicious Persons from Doing You an Injury—Against Whom It Is of Great Power.” This remedy is simply the phrases “Dullix, ix, us; Yea, you can't come over Pontio; Pontio is above Pilato,” to be repeated over and over until they do something. Now, I had occasion to use this charm recently, and even though it may sore disappoint John George Hohman, I feel that I ought to report my findings on it.

There is a certain Mrs. Quilter, who, besides being one of the least pleasant persons I know, has had the additional bad taste to move into a house next to mine. Not long ago she left a note in my mailbox saying that unless things got quieter fast around here she was going to complain to the police (perhaps this was due in part to a cat of mine that used to go out my back window and into hers—a long and perilous journey for a cat). Since I very rightly took no notice of her letter, a few days later I found another note from her saying that she was good and sick of the whole thing, and that it was more than human nature should be asked to stand, and that if she heard one more sound out of me (or, I suppose, my cat) she was going to Take Steps. Referring to Mr. Hohman, I wrote out the magic formula, “Dullix, ix, us; Yea, you can't come over Pontio; Pontio is above Pilato,” and dropped it into
her
mailbox. I thought that would be the end of it, but she came to the door last night, in curl papers, and said, Was this infernal racket actually going to keep on? “Dullix,” I said to her quietly, “ix, us; Yea, you can't come over Pontio; Pontio is above Pilato,” and I closed the door. This morning, the doorbell rang, and when I answered it, there was a policeman. “Well,” he remarked ominously, “what's this I hear about
you
?” “Dullix—” I said. “I hear you been annoying the neighbors again,” he said. “Well, well, well.”

Frequently, however—and this is the main reason I think Hohman and I perhaps weren't made for each other—I am made aware that maybe Hohman and his charms exist on a different level of culture from my own. And nowhere is this distressing fact borne home to me more tragically than in this recipe:

“You must go upon another person's land and repeat the following words: ‘I go before another court—I tie up my 77-fold fits.' Then cut three small twigs off any tree on the land; in each twig you must make a knot. This must be done on a Friday morning before sunrise, in the decrease of the moon unbeshrewedly.”

Now, leaving out the “unbeshrewedly,” which I don't pretend to understand, I think I have a pretty good idea of what would happen if I gave this charm a good try. Suppose I were subject to fits—77-fold ones—and I wanted a good, quick cure. The only person I know with land and a tree with twigs on it is a gentleman some six houses down the block who has a good-size window box with a rosebush. Say some Friday morning I feel a fit coming on, so I take my little book under my arm and head down the street. Clambering ungracefully into the window box, I begin: “I go before another court—”

At this point the gentleman owning the window box, whose name, as I recall from the tag on the rosebush, is Pelargonium Capitatum, will open the window noisily and peer out at me nearsightedly. “What the hell do you think you are doing in that window box?” he will say. “Oh, just trying to cure a fit,” I might toss off casually. Or perhaps I might say: “Well, I have this book by this guy and it says…”

In any case, if Mr. Capitatum is an impetuous man, he will by this time have left the window to go after a phone. Or, if he has the staying power, he will be saying: “What did you just say you were trying to do?” By this time I will have reached the part in my charm where I cut three small twigs off the tree, and when he lets this go by, I have him. Then I tie a knot in each twig, and if he is the man I vaguely remember him as being, he will tell me: “Say, I used to have a sister had a little boy had fits. Tried everything, but they never cured him that way. Doctor said—”

Any long story about someone's sister's little boy's fits is not best listened to in a window box; at this point I would feel constrained to slither down and say, “Well, I guess I'll go gargle a couple of aspirin in a glass of water,” and saunter off, leaving Mr. Capitatum with his story poised in midair, his rosebush fearfully knotted, and himself with what I should diagnose, from here, as a severe—or 77-fold—convulsion.

In case anyone is interested in joining us in our work (there is still much to be done; we haven't even touched on radioactive elements yet, or phobophobia, or the harmful substances contained in inhaled cigarette smoke), come right on over. I will be in the backyard, curing wind-broken horses and dyeing madders a madder red. And all my old superstitious fears will have been jauntily and unbeshrewedly laid to rest.