Arts and Letters

Joseph Mitchell:
This tribute to Peter De Vries was written by Paul Theroux, who was an old friend of his. Paul Theroux can't be here to read it because he's traveling in Egypt. I also was an old friend of Peter’s and I've been asked to read Paul Theroux's tribute.

When Peter De Vries died we lost a way of looking at America, and yet because he was prescient, in the way the best satirists are, he gave us remarks and situations which would go on helping us to size up our world. The humorist too gives us words to live by. For example, just recently the Christian fundamentalist preacher Pat Robertson was reported to have bought the Ice Capades. Years ago, De Vries imagined such a situation, the Christian religion on ice, and even gave it a name, “The Christ Capades.”

I often see an old man with his nose in a book and think of De Vries writing, about a person “killing time—in self defense”; or see a woman with an interesting coiffure and remember the De Vries line about “the woman with the lunatic fringe”; or see someone in a tractor and recall the question, “Is he harrowing?” and the reply, “No. Just a trifle prepossessing.” And I cannot see the name of our fellow Academician Joyce Carol Oates without thinking of a desperate quip by an advertising man in a De Vries novel, “Let's call it Joyce Carol Oats—the thinking man's breakfast cereal.”

I realize that I am doing what reviewers used to do with a new De Vries book. His books were not reviewed in the usual sense of the term. The reviewer, knowing De Vries was a virtuoso, and that he could not be outdone, invariably dealt with the book by listing the jokes, describing the characters and situations. That was enough, and it was the reason such a review—being a selection from the book—was always a delight.

Peter De Vries had none of the anger that one traditionally associates with satirists; instead, he had passion and indignation. He was a combination of ferocity and grace; he was not a scourge but that often more effective reformer, a fun-poker. He was a wisecracking intellectual, a midwestern Calvinist who came to New York via Chicago and Poetry magazine. He had the best possible background for a satiric comedy—he was widely read not just in English literature but in philosophy and religion. Needless to say he wore his learning lightly. When I think of his erudition I am always reminded of a man in one of his novels explaining Einstein's Theory of Relativity in Brooklynese dese and dose.

Far from being a whimsical yarn spinner, he was the most autobiographical of humorists. Ten years ago, his doctor told him his heart was infibrillating, and in De Vries’s next novel so was the heart of his main character. He wrote about the anguish and the foibles of the commuters he saw on the train he took from Westport to Manhattan (where he worked two days a week improving the captions for New Yorker cartoons); he wrote about Chicago, about the clergy, about nine-to-fivers. While his range of references was global, his chosen territory was the suburbs, usually someone in hot water. He sometimes wrote about what he once called (I am paraphrasing) the most displaced of all displaced persons, the native son in a place to which newcomers have moved.

He was a romantic; he wrote endlessly about courtship rituals, the battle of the sexes; the marriage which is straying towards the rocks. He knew about wine and he wrote about that: “This chablis is, how shall I say, Kafkaesque” or “Tell the sommelier to take this claret away and bring us a six-pack of Schlitz.” His books were hilarious but they could also contain his own sorrows. After the death of one of his young children he fictionalized this heartbreaking event in his novel The Blood of the Lamb, where he wrote, “Time heals nothing—which should make us the better able to minister.”

There is no reason why De Vries had to witness a lightning bolt strike at first hand, but how else to explain the persuasiveness and originality of this description in Comfort Me With Apples?

…we were sought out by lightning. Our family of four… were all in the parlor at the time, and saw something nibble at the golden fringe of a scatter rug, run over mother's shoe-buckle, lap at wall plugs (not looking for an outlet, just foraging for metal), rummage in an open sewing kit, and browse along a shelf of books, leaving the gilt in some of the titles illegible. I remember thinking that in its career across the living room it seemed to resemble some whimsical and very wicked marmalade....

Nothing is truer to De Vries’s discernment of menace, or an occasion of sin, in something very homely than the phrase “wicked marmalade.”

He was reclusive, a family man, intensely proud of his children and of his wife's accomplishments as a writer. Apart from being a tourist in Europe he did not travel much. His solitariness made him a vigorous letter writer. But letter-writing is also the way shy or apparently laconic people hold conversations. Some people are too busy to be civilized—they even say as much: shouting apologies and boasting of their savagery. They want you to admire their energy or their money-making, their refusal to spare any time for you. Peter De Vries made no excuses and always took time.

He was a man of many gifts, but what I recall most clearly is his generosity to me. After I wrote an appreciative piece about his work, he got in touch. We exchanged letters for over twenty years. In his letters to me he responded to my books with insightful criticism—always positive, always curious. The fact that in age and background we were so different, and our books so dissimilar, seems to put an extra value on his praise. He granted me the greatest favor any older writer can bestow on a younger writer: he took me seriously. Looking over his letters I am amazed by the variety and range of the subjects we covered: T. S. Eliot’s poems “Marina” and “Ash Wednesday,” Wallace Stevens's “Sunday Morning,” Barnaby Rudge, Kerouac's On the Road, The Lamentations of Jeremiah, Christian hymns, Eugene O’Neill, Nabokov, Thurber (whom he called “the comic Prufrock”), American advertising slogans, the possible nuances in the words “thespian” and “sexagenarian,” the state of Connecticut and the state of the world.

He shared with the great literary satirists a strong moral sense. That also made him a sparkling correspondent, and his letters meant a great deal to me. But the greatest thing to me in our letters back and forth was the realization that such a friendship had triumphed over time and distance; and there are observations and questions that can be put only to another writer. In life, the most urgent letters usually go unanswered. That is why a good reply is a gift. A gift usually implies hope, optimism, and belief; and the most loving gifts are a form of sharing that does not obligate us but rather inspires greater generosity.

De Vries was an effective satirist because he was interested in everything. He could be pedantic, but he was never a snob. With Peter De Vries closely monitoring American culture, and commenting on it in a book every few years, we were in good hands. He mocked without being destructive, yet his joking improved us; his satire was never meant to diminish or belittle. On the contrary, his wit emphasized that (generally speaking) we are part of civilized society, and his humor proved that we were worth saving.