10 - Peter De Vries: The Vale of Laughter

Peter De Vries: The Vale of Laughter
By Calvin De Vries

"What emerges from De Vries' comic vision is the sense that ambiguity is the form of all human action. And if we are 'saved,' it is from self-preoccupation and harshness. The way of 'salvation' is suffering, and its benefits are compassion and reconciliation."

THE most appropriate reason for reading Peter De Vries' books is for sheer pleasure and amusement. It is difficult, once removed, to do justice to the irony and laughter which cascade page over page in a surfeit of one-liners, situation comedies, satire, farce, and burlesque, which in turn often join in a denouement as hilarious as the episodic parts.

His material finds its context in the turbulence of marriage and the battle of the sexes, the ambiguities of good and evil, suburban culture, the assumptions of psychoanalysis, the crisis of religious faith. He tends to focus on interior and interpersonal stresses. Those who populate his novels are ordinary persons of good will, trying as best they can to deal with the faucet-dripping persistence of fate or fortune. Their alternating hopes and desperations prompt high-risk ventures which only accelerate the circumstances from which they wish to escape. Marriages are strengthened by philandering. Psychoanalysts ask preachers if they have accepted Christ as savior. Dogs become alcoholics. Agnostics have bizarre though temporary conversions. Instead of having a miraculous cure at Lourdes, a man contracts a mysterious illness. Most often the stories are narrated by one of the principal characters. De Vries does this with skill at impersonation, and his characters often betray their pretenses and unmask their ineptitudes by peculiarities of language and syntax.

I

De Vries was born in 1910 in an immigrant Dutch Calvinist home on Chicago's South Side, which he has described as "hermetically sealed" from life and culture. The religious impress of the home was furthered by the parochial schools of the Christian Reformed Church, concluding with Michigan's Calvin College. After a brief association

Calvin De Vries, who is not related to Peter De Vries, is the pastor of the Larchmont Avenue Church, a Presbyterian parish in Larchmont, New York. He holds degrees from Hope College and New Brunswick Theological Seminary, and previously has served parishes in Chicago, Washington, D. C., and Danville, Illinois.

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with Poetry magazine in Chicago, De Vries joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1944 and has been associated with it ever since, publishing poems, short stories, and serving on its editorial staff. He has written a total of nineteen books, two of which are collections of short stories. Although reactions to his books are diverse, he has established such a reputation that Orville Prescott has referred to him as "the most reliably funny comic novelist now at large."

De Vries has been reluctant to discuss his books in any analytical sense, and he has always been diffident in the face of questions of interpretation. In response to such queries, he has frequently said, "You don't ask a cow to analyze milk…. In a published interview with Roy Newquist (Counterpoint, Chicago, 1964), De Vries maintained that he did not pursue any conscious purpose but instead an unconscious instinct for the absurd; his writing, he said, should be judged in terms of the validity of this instinct for the absurd. One should be cautious, therefore, not to misappropriate De Vries by projecting into his material perspectives he has not intended. Considerable exposure to De Vries' books does not dispel all uncertainty as to what he intends to communicate beyond laughter and entertainment. But there are perspectives in his books which are sufficiently frequent and consistent to assume that his own persuasions are showing.

One is struck by the considerable material in De Vries in which religion is not only a vehicle for humor but in which questions are raised about the possibility of religious faith. No doubt this is related to De Vries' Calvinistic background: vigorous, authoritarian, scholastic in theological temper, and generally grim, frequently exclusive and argumentative. De Vries reacted negatively to this background, which he found harsh and without compassion. And like some of his characters, his own life has qualities of a reverse pilgrim's progress, an escape from a childhood described as painful. This religious background is boisterously illustrated in the opening scene of The Blood of the Lamb where there is a heated family argument over creation versus evolution. Such a passage suggests that De Vries is somewhat ambivalent about his Dutch Calvinistic heritage. As Benny in The Vale of Laughter says, "The thing about a background such as ours is that we can discard it intellectually without shaking its grip on us emotionally" (p. 47).

Some of the influences are more apparent than others. Calvinism has generally been iconoclastic toward much of culture, especially toward its idolatrous fixations. There is considerable gentle iconoclasm throughout De Vries' books, a satire that is congenial though unusually perceptive. De Vries makes us laugh and sometimes cry over the not-so-slick idolatries that mask our insecurities. Little escapes him. Traditionalists and libertarians, middle-western and eastern suburban parochialism, neurotics and psychoanalysts, Playboy and the Bible, parochial schools and Ivy League universities, women's activists and male chauvinists, hard-hats and stock brokers,

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believers and unbelievers, stand-patters and social rebels: none escapes De Vries' probing ironies, especially those who are pretentious, harsh, and lack self-recognition.

This perspective continues in his attitude toward human nature and morality. Though he is hardly a Calvinist, it is interesting to note his wariness about virtue, slickness, and self-confidence. In his books nothing really works as intended, and everything seems slightly out of joint. Ambiguity rather than goodness or badness is the most apparent quality of all efforts. While De Vries does not attack moral earnestness, he avoids traditional moral categories and spoofs the quid pro quo expectations of conventional morality. A suburbanite in temporary danger on a catamaran in Long Island Sound groans, "You live your life doing the right thing, never step out of line, oh, maybe pad the entertainment on your income tax a little or renew a magazine on a special offer intended for new subscribers only … and this is how you wind up" (Into Your Tent I'll Creep, p. 210).

The underlying view of human nature is in many ways traditional, as expressed by Stew Smackenfelt: ". . . the traditional conflict between flesh and spirit, as viewed by the Christianity now supposedly outmoded, isn't likely to ease up because we have scrapped the notion of sin and now speak instead of the ego and superego between them riding herd on something called the id" (Forever Panting, p. 3). De Vries is familiar with Freudian categories and has marvelous spoofs on psychoanalytical theory; for example, in The Tunnel of Love, Augie Poole verbalizes to a friend about his guilt feelings for his philandering (p. 68):

"You see, part of the idea is that I deserve the guilt … It wears off, and then I get to feeling guilty because I'm not feeling guilty."
"Why sleep around then, if it's that much trouble?. ."
"It's the only way of getting back the guilt."
"Why should you want to get back to it?"
"Because I feel I have it coming to me."
"What for?"
"For sleeping around."

The badness of formal goodness and the ambiguity of moral distinctions are unclothed in some of De Vries' funniest episodes. "Good Boy" is an autobiographical short story about a rigid Dutch schoolmaster, Van Dongen, obsessed with sin, and to whom the greatest virtue was the confession of guilt. Young De Vries soon perceives a behavioral route which will be to his advantage. He confesses to be the perpetrator of every prank in the classroom and becomes Van Dongen's favorite.

I remembered the fruits of repentance-the apple and the adulation and the maple chews-and my hand went up. "I did it," I said.

"Good boy!"

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He came down the aisle and laid a hand on my shoulder. "Why do you do these things?"
"Because I'm wicked to the core," I said.
"Good stuff " (Without a Stitch in Time, pp. 46 ff.)

If De Vries deflates traditional moral rigidities, he also describes the deceptions and destructiveness when moral distinctions are voided. The Cat's Pajamas is a descent into absurdity. In it Hank Tattersall becomes compulsive about failure and degradation, taking as his motto, "I stink, therefore I am" (p. 118). The story suggests a landscape devoid of moral and even pragmatic guidelines, and it ends in the most macabre death narrated in any of De Vries' books.

What emerges from De Vries' comic vision is the sense that ambiguity is the form of all human action. And if we are "saved," it is from self-preoccupation and harshness. The way of "salvation" is suffering, and its benefits are compassion and reconciliation.

II

Marriage and sexuality are subjected to the same wry irony and hearty humor as other areas of life. Wally Hines observes, "When we see what is embraced in a railway station we know man wants but little here below" (The Vale of Laughter, p. 234). And in Into Your Tent I'll Creep, Rose Piano comments to Al that marital pledges of eternal devotion are like "writing each other checks for a million dollars when most of us are lucky to have twenty-five cents in the bank" (p. 12). Rose and Al are married by the Reverend Shorty Hopwell, another of De Vries' ludicrously liberal ministers, who has made both marriage and divorce a sacrament "in keeping with the aim to make religion relevant to all of life." But despite the shenanigans and domestic comedy, one senses a persistent wistfulness in the soliloquies about marriage. In The Vale of Laughter, De Vries writes, "Strife between the sexes seems to me one of the pities of the world. People doing to each other what life does to both, and to us all, seems to me like the conduct of those two French noblemen who fought a duel on a battlefield on which enemy shells were raining" (p. 330).

The battle of the sexes is one of the most recurring themes in De Vries' novels. Men and women, though well-intentioned, bring their subliminal privacies to marriage which destine them to do and to say things which they tardily realize are destructive to the marriage. For instance, Stan Waltz in Let Me Count the Ways is sexually frustrated within and beyond marriage. One evening he discovers, quite by accident, that amorous inclinations for his wife Elsie are enhanced by window-watching her disrobe for bed. His "in the family" peeping concludes in front of an incredulous police sergeant. He is no more successful afield. An erotic escapade with Lena, a neighbor, is ludicrously and abruptly aborted when Stan, carrying her to a bed, cannot

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maneuver through a narrow door and drops her to the floor (pp. 68 ff., 97 ff.).

There is more than humor behind the frustrations of husbands and wives in finding a satisfying sexuality and companionship. It is dark humor because De Vries' material makes it clear that there is little else to set against life's intemperate ironies and tragedies other than the compassions of men and women for one another. "What was behind the botch of mating . . . Was there something inherent in the sex bond itself that made a mate an adversary?" So wonders Alvin Mopworth as his marriage dissolves in Reuben, Reuben (p. 433).

Through the Fields of Clover is an amusing walk through a wasteland of marriage and family life. The occasion for the story is Ben and Alma Marvel's fortieth wedding anniversary. A bumblingly traditional couple, the Marvel's marriage is aimless and propped up by inertia. Their children's marital efforts are a parody on modern marital innovations. One son, absurdly named Cotton Marvel in view of his antipathy to religion, has flubbed marriage and is an acknowledged homosexual. Elsie, one of the daughters, though in her third marriage, has always regarded sexual intercourse as an "unnatural act." The family celebration concludes with still another son, Bushrod, a doctrinaire social activist, seen in the rock garden amorously embracing Ruby, the black maid. When his wife remonstrates, he does a pompous put-down charging her with racial prejudice.

But it would be fatuous to cast De Vries as a marital moralist. Many of his male characters justify their extra-marital capers in words similar to those of Jim Tickler in De Vries' latest book, The Glory of the Humming Bird. ". . . Man isn't naturally monogamous…. Adultery has kept more marriages afloat than it has sunk" (p. 270). Yet De Vries always intimates a moral referent by making modernity's bewildering modifications of family life, as much as marriage itself, the objects of satire and irony. Marion Wellington says to Tom in Let Me Count the Ways, "You can't separate sex from love … try as we will with all this Dionysian stuff that's going around these days" (p. 284). And the battle of the sexes is set into a broader context when Stew Smackenfelt contends, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf sets down the pitched battle between husband and wife. But you've got to take The Odd Couple alongside that to get a balanced view … People get on each other's nerves, not just men and women" (Forever Panting, p. 273).

The Tunnel of Love has an interesting adjunct plot which supports the permanence of the family. Dick, the narrator of the story, often fantasizes about

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Moot Point, an imaginary retreat in Maine where he has sensuous romps. The flow of his experience plus family life increasingly put Moot Point into another perspective. And at the end of the book Moot Point is over-grown with weeds and in disrepair. There are plans underway for an actual summer home. "It won't be named

Moot Point, by a long chalk … This will be a strictly family affair, with youngsters romping on the lawn" (p. 246). But Dick's reference to the new home at the very end of the book, ". . . it's certainly a retreat for me," suggests that De Vries always has the last and ambiguous laugh.

III

The religious dimension in De Vries' books is traced out especially in the struggle between belief and unbelief. Is there a transcendent meaning in life? The answer, variously expressed, is negative. Sometimes the religious dimension is dealt with in boisterous spoofs. But the surfacing of the issue of belief versus unbelief in painful turbulences and tragedies suggests that the issue is more than a literary foil.

Anyone familiar with De Vries will remember with roaring laughter his delightful satire of religious institutions, representatives, and beliefs. The description of People's Liberal Church in The Mackerel Plaza (pp. 7-8) is a classic. Exurbia's acculturation of religion is treated with playful though unrelenting irony. When Reverend Shorty Hopwell of Into Your Tent I'll Creep shows signs of stress, Rose explains, "He's got religion, and that's bad in a minister … interferes hopelessly with his work" (p. 168). Another hilarious scene is the temporary conversion of Stan Waltz, prompted by the deafening nighttime explosion of a fireworks factory. Persuaded by his fundamentalist wife that it is the "second coming," Stan hastily baptizes himself under the kitchen's cold water tap.

Such episodes do not obscure the presence of basic questions about religion's affirmation of meaning in life. De Vries' attitude is basically that persons become expatriates from religious belief not because they prefer unbelief. Indeed, there seems to be a need for persons to believe. Our doubt and unbelief are forced upon us: grudging concessions that the ironies and ambiguities of experience make a structure of belief impossible. As Stan Waltz concludes in Let Me Count the Ways, "The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe" (p. 307). The religious establishment is irrelevant in De Vries' books because its preoccupations are other than dealing with this existential enigma.

To understand the mood of much of De Vries' material it may help to remind ourselves of his view of humor and its relationship to questions of meaning. For De Vries, irony and humor are indigenous to the human situation and one does not need to produce them. Furthermore, the serious and the amusing are not separate but are residual in the same circumstances. Life is often humorous and grim simultaneously, and irony is the most inescapable quality of the human situation.

If life is not one thing but always the confluence of the grim and the laughable, the tragic and the comic at the same time, then life belies any simple, monolithic meaning. It is always ambiguous, and how we

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see it depends largely upon our perspective. In any event, the way to meet life is not with rational propositions but with charitable and grinning stoicism.

As life is persistently ambiguous, so also is religious experience. It is one of belief and unbelief, of doubt and certainty, in the same moments. To take refuge in unequivocal certainty in face of life's mystery, or in despairing nihilism, is a mistaken reduction of life's ironies into a false simplicity. After a conversation with a physician about death, Don Wanderhope in The Blood of the Lamb reflects, "The superficial and the slipshod have the ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any of it in bland generalizations" (p. 111).

Most of De Vries' characters involved in the struggles of religious belief are neither traditionalists nor atheists. They are ambivalent, even "torn" people. The ambiguities of Tom Waltz's qualified return to religious faith are expressed by his father. "Maybe the whole thing is neurotic, maybe true faith. Certainly it is better than nothingness. Oh give us the hand of God, if only the back of it" (Let Me Count the Ways, p. 306).

For De Vries the dilemma of belief as over against unbelief cannot be resolved on a rational level. As one of his characters puts it, "Philosophy is the attempt to pick at a wet knot with boxing gloves." (The Tunnel of Love, p. 139). The resolution of life's mystery and ambiguity moves one through suffering, and suffering prompts within those capable of an appreciation of irony, a sense of compassion and concern for others. Insofar as life's imponderables find a resolution, it is not in comprehension but in relationships, the movement toward others in compassion.

If De Vries permitted more of a sense of transcendence one might argue that the implicit view of this struggle, though modified, is akin to the Christian view of life. For he is saying something similar to the evangelical who, in using the word "faith" as the key to the Christian life, contends that the resolution of mystery is not on the rational level but rather in terms of a trusting relationship: the placing of one's life, despite evil and suffering, in a position of trust under God. Such faith is seen as the beginning of biblical obedience, and the quality of such obedience is ultimately determined by its compassion and charity.

The closest De Vries comes to "transcendence" is a reflection by Joe Sandwich in The Vale of Laughter: "There is on this earth something called human worth, I believe. For this there must be some eternal, or universal, counterpart of which it is a manifestation, and which authenticates it, as the gold in Fort Knox certifies as valuable those tinkling coins" (p. 215). Yet, underneath the hilarity of De Vries' books is a perception profoundly influenced by the Christian vision of life. One must not be diverted by the uproarious nature of his material, nor make the judgment on the basis of a few books.

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IV

In strange ways there is a deeply spiritual feeling for the human situation in De Vries, illustrated by a closer examination of the last part of The Blood of the Lamb.

This largely autobiographical story is about Don Wanderhope, the son of immigrant Dutch parents in south Chicago. His early years begin a flight from home, and although Wanderhope achieves his desired success, the withering tragedies of later years make the achievements meaningless. The initial hilarity of the book is increasingly eclipsed by a series of six deaths: an idolized brother; a gentle girl who is a patient with Wanderhope in a tuberculosis sanitarium; his mother; and then his wife Greta, whose obsessive guilt is only deepened by religion and imperviousness to psychiatry, and who ends her life in the family's suburban New York garage. Next is Wanderhope's father, at whose grave he tarries in an unusually poignant scene. "Waarwel, lankmoedig moeder, waarwell. Melancholiek vader, waarwel. I leave you to the first flowers, and the tender stars of May" (p. 202).

Not long thereafter Wanderhope's college asks him for a statement on his philosophy of life, and he responds:

I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which his own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race. Philosophy can really give us nothing permanent to believe either; it is too rich in answers, each canceling out the rest. The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life "means" nothing. But that is not to say that it is not worth living . . . Man has only his own two feet to stand on … (p. 166).

It proves to be a bad omen, for Wanderhope's only child, a lovely preadolescent daughter, Carol, is diagnosed as having leukemia. The reader is now drawn into a searing, emotional description of the hopeless battle for her life across an eighteen-month period, some of it in a New York City hospital and some of it in their Connecticut home when remissions cruelly foster hope. Wanderhope's interior struggle ranges from hope to despair and back again. When one physician says to him at the hospital, "God bless you both," Wanderhope rejoins, "You believe in him?" And the doctor answers, "And in man, which is a hell of a lot harder" (p. 197). Wanderhope's tentative movement toward religious consolations during this period seems stronger by contrast with the belligerent bitterness of Stein, a companion father whose daughter is in the same ward as Carol. To the affirmation of God by another parent Stein retorts, "What baffles me . . . is the comfort people find in the idea that somebody dealt this mess. Blind and meaningless chance seem to me so much more congenial…. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair" (p. 207-8).

One day Wanderhope drives to the hospital supposing that a re-

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mission will permit him to take Carol home for a time. But a staphylococcus infection is ravaging the ward. In a wrenching scene Wanderhope stands alone and stricken at the foot of Carol's bed. His last words to her are, "The Lord bless thee, and keep thee; the Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee; the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace."

As Wanderhope stumbles grief-stricken out of the hospital he carries a cake be brought for Carol. Passing a tympanum figure of Christ above the entrance to a near-by church, be flings the cake upward, striking the Christ figure full face. In a daze he imagines seeing the figure wipe away the pastry with infinite patience, saying, "Suffer the little children to come unto me . . ." and then Wanderhope collapses "at the foot of the cross."

The significance of the incident has been debated. It is actually a classic illustration of the ambivalence of belief and unbelief, Wanderhope being as ambivalent as his name. The entire episode intermixes affection and antagonism for the Christ figure and illustrates precisely where De Vries sees those who seek after God. They are the ones who are uncomfortable with articulate beliefs but cannot find consolation in unbelief. Their lives are simultaneously a pilgrim's progress and regress. It is not that seekers stubbornly refuse to take the epistemological leap. Their concern is truth, and they are unable to plot its precise location.

One evening in the weeks that follow, Wanderhope is listening to some tape recordings when suddenly Carol's voice "comes on." During one of her remissions she taped an encouragement for her father, revealing that his philosophy of life statement for his college has given her strength for what she knows is ahead. As Wanderhope listens to Carol's voice and reflects on what be said in the statement, his tentative faith collapses. He cannot rely on religious consolations, recently surfaced, if Carol faced suffering and dying without them. After sleepless hours he takes rosary beads from his desk, a symbol of his provisional return to belief, walks outside and hurls them as far as he is able, saying, "How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star" (p. 242). "As to that other One, whose voice I thought I heard, I seem to be barred from everything it speaks in comfort. . ." (p. 244).

Once again, De Vries seems to be dramatizing the ambivalence of belief and unbelief. Wanderhope begins to return to religious faith and then without warning his belief is put to rout. He is encouraged by those who believe, and he grudgingly admires the stoic honesty of those who refuse to believe. Belief becomes not a fixed position but an oscillation between the magnetic fields of hope and despair.

VI

The resolution that Wanderhope finally experiences is not at the point of belief versus unbelief. Rather, it is the insight that the richness

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of life becomes available to those who are able to turn away from selfpreoccupation and move toward others in concern and compassion. "There may be griefs beyond the reach of solace, but none worthy of the name that does not set free the springs of sympathy. Blessed are they that comfort, for they too have mourned, may be more likely the human truth." (p. 246).

It is more than sheer coincidence that other De Vries characters express similar views near the end of other books. Hester says to Andrew Mackerel in The Mackerel Plaza:

"You go around Robin Hood's barn with your intellectual arguments … and there isn't a religion anywhere that can't be summed up in a phrase my mother was always fond of."
"Let's have it," I said, bracing myself as ever.
"To be as humane as is humanely possible. . ." (p. 260).

In another context, Tillie Seltzer prays, "Give us courage for our fears, the wisdom to survive our follies, and charity to bind up the wounds we inflict on one another" (The Cat's Pajamas and Witch's Milk, p. 291). In the same mood Stan Waltz reflects in Let Me Count the Ways:

It can be put in a word, the sum total of human truth and wisdom. Love. That is everything. We have simply got to learn to put up with this mortal stuff, to make do with one another. Only love enables us to go on. Simple love that asks no quarter, seeks not itself, is not puffed up. Loyal and abiding love, love that never stints, never begrudges. Love that helps us bear with one another and that makes us do for one another. . . (p. 114).

Compassion transcends the dialectic of rational and irrational dimensions in life. It is by our compassion, not knowledge, that life knows the gift of healing, and it is compassion that relates us to all that is finally important and certain: one another.

VII

Christopher Fry has said that comedy is not to be regarded as an escape from truth but rather as a "narrow escape into faith." That, I suggest, is the significance of Peter De Vries' writings from a religious perspective. A sense of irony and laughter saves us from the proud and closed rigidities of life which in turn shut out intimations of one another. Thereby irony and laughter serve as a narrow road to faith. If this "faith," as sensed in Peter De Vries' stories, is not the "faith of our fathers," then it is nonetheless a sensitive appreciation of life which participates deeply in the Christian vision of reality.

Books Written By Peter De Vries in
Sequence of Publication Date

But Who Wakes the Bugler? (Boston: Houghton, 1940).
The Handsome Heart (New York: Coward-McCann, 1943).
Angels Can't Do Better (New York: Coward-McCann, 1944).
No, but I Saw the Movie (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952).
The Tunnel of Love (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).
Comfort Me With Apples (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956).

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The Mackerel Plaza (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958).
The Tents of Wickedness (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959).
Through the Fields of Clover (Boston: Little, Brown, 196 1).
The Blood of the Lamb (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).
Reuben, Reuben (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964).
Let Me Count the Ways (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965).
The Vale of Laughter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967).
The Cat's Pajamas and Witch's Milk (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968).
Mrs. Wallop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970).
Into Your Tent I'll Creep (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).
Without a Stitch in Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972).
Forever Panting (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).
The Glory of the Humming Bird (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974).