PETER DE VRIES:
THE CASE FOR COMIC SERIOUSNESS

Craig Challender

Distressingly little has been written about Peter De Vries, former editor of Poetry magazine and now associated with the New Yorker,who has written eighteen books over a period of more than thirty years. Not that Mr. De Vries has been unsuccessful; for the most part his books have done well, with both the critics and the reading public. Beginning with The Tunnel of Love in 1954, the De Vries formula—a capable, often masterly prose, a sudden, far-ranging wit, an immense readability—has produced, with heartening regularity, the so-called "comic novel" that Edmund Fuller has called "almost a sub-genre of our fiction."¹ Indeed, since the early nineteen-fifties Peter De Vries, with one major exception, has made his mark largely as a comic writer, a novelist who can always be counted on to give us a literate laugh. The typical critical response for each new De Vriesian effort has been sincere, albeit polite, applause.

The title of serious writer, however—implying, not sobriety or pontificality but rather serious artistic intent—has in large part been denied Mr. De Vries. Ironically, many critics have been most disgruntled with De Vries’ most serious work, The Blood of the Lamb; moreover, they somewhat unfairly amplify their reservations about the novel into more general criticisms of De Vries the writer and thinker. Granville Hicks furnishes a representative example in the beginning of his review of The Blood of the Lamb: "Peter De Vries is a novelist who has often made me laugh and, it now turns out, can make me cry, and yet he is one for whom I have only a limited respect."² And Fuller, while calling the novel "a touching cry of the heart, a shout of protest against the universe,"³ dubs the religious and philosophical reflections of the book’s protagonist, Don Wanderhope, "shallow and sentimental"⁴ and adds that "there is a nagging suspicion that Mr. De Vries may think them [Wanderhope’s musings] profound."⁵

Other reviewers have shown the same ambivalent reaction to The Blood of the Lamb, while heaving a collective sigh of relief when its author turned to writing "funny" books again.⁶ Such a reaction is disconcerting, not only for its dismissal of a fine novel, but also for its consignment of Mr. De Vries to the stature of a "gag writer" (a view buttressed, no doubt, by De Vries’ position as cartoon editor for the New Yorker), a producer of puns but not profundity; in short, a consignment to the ranks of the second-rate. Yet it is apparent in any study of De Vries’ books that there is a theme which he has been underscoring more and more pointedly: an existential view of the world as essentially nonsensical, in the bleakly

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literal meaning of "nonsensical"; thus, as depictions of human experience, the arbitrary labels "tragic" and "comic" are rendered equally meaningless. From this position comes the De Vriesian dictum: only through an outlook which inseparably mingles tragedy and comedy can a human being make sense, such as it is, of his existence.

W. H. Auden, a poet with an artistic sensibility strikingly similar to De Vries’, has commented, "What no critic seems to see in my work are its comic undertones. Only through comedy can one be serious";⁷ and De Vries himself has talked at length about the twin problems of "serious" and "comic":

I don’t use words like "serious." They’re like "cultured." You know. "She was a cultured person." Anyway, it’s false to life to separate elements from counterparts with which they are inseparably mingled in reality. You can’t be talking about the serious and comic separately and still be talking about life, any more than you can independently discuss hydrogen and oxygen and still be dealing with water.

I think good writers represent this basic fact. Nobody has been funnier than Mark Twain or Thurber. Robert Frost understood (and exemplified) this principle beautifully, I think. He says somewhere ... something about how if we want to be charming or bearable the way is almost rigidly prescribed: if it is with outer seriousness it must be with inner humor; if it is with outer humor it must be with inner seriousness.

There are writers—and you can have them—who think that all you have to do to write a serious book is to lack humor. They are sorely mistaken—as mistaken as those benighted cut-ups who think that all you need to write nonsense is to lack sense.⁸

Both men are talking about the same thing; and neither lacks humor or sense.

Such an integrated view of tragedy and comedy, and such attempts as Auden and De Vries use to exemplify it, are not new in literature, of course. Like Polonius in that most serious of tragedies reciting his ridiculous . . . "tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral,"⁹ there are "experts" in De Vries’ books who expound on the assumptions behind "tragedy," "comedy," and "why we laugh": the self-styled wit, the professional comedian, the eloquent agnostic, the college professor. They are the mistaken tragedians and the "benighted cut-ups" Dc Vries mentions in his interview—the people who foolishly try to separate the elements of life that De Vries maintains are inseparable. Moreover, De Vries’ characters who "know," without exception, lack the very things they pride themselves in having: wisdom (or even perceptiveness), real

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humor, and most importantly, genuine sympathy for other human beings. Rarely—The Blood of the Lamb is one of those moments—the De Vriesian "expert" acquires a painful self-knowledge; more often, we as readers see the "expert" remain unaware of his limitations or steadfastly refuse to acknowledge them. Don Wanderhope and Joe Sandwich are distinctly different protagonists, but each closes out his book as a helpless, rather absurd creature in a world that does not make much sense.

To see specifically what kind of a "seriously comic" world Peter De Vries has created, let us explore two of his novels that, from the serio-comic standpoint, counterpoint each other: The Blood of the Lamb (1961) and The Vale of Laughter (1967). The earlier book, as mentioned before, is De Vries’ lone attempt (so far) into something approaching starkly unadorned tragedy; The Vale of Laughter is a fairly typical example of his comic novels of the sixties.

Following on the heels of Through the Fields of Clover, a book abounding in the familiar suburban banter, bumbling characters, and "all’s well" outcome—in short, the kind of novel De Vries had perfected during the decade of the fifties—The Blood of the Lamb does indeed seem a radical departure for him. It is a book about insanity, disillusionment, loss, death—all presented in a more straightforward vein than the author has ever done before. The book is heavily autobiographical.

Don Wanderhope, the son of a Dutch immigrant, is the inheritor of the stern Calvinistic faith of the Dutch Reformed Church, and of the anguish that comes from questioning such a faith. ("Wanderhope" has obvious connotations; the Dutch wanhoop from which it comes means "despair.")¹⁰ His father, a loud-mouthed pariah in the Dutch community because of his open doubting, eventually goes insane; Don’s older brother Louie, whom he idolizes, dies of pneumonia. In growing up and having a young man’s usual carnal affairs, Don is caught in bed with Greta Wigbaldy, an agnostic colleague, and condemned to marriage; he is saved when he discovers he has tuberculosis. In the asylum he falls chastely in love with an inmate there, only to have her die of consumption and heart disease on the operating table. Released, Don returns to his family and periodically visits his father, still in a mental institution, only to discover Greta there, too, the victim of a nervous breakdown. Wanderhope woos her, wins her, and they have a daughter, Carol. When the child is six, Greta, subject to increasingly severe bouts of depression and alcoholism, commits suicide. At ten, Carol is discovered to have leukemia. At twelve, she is dead.

Although it is in the latter chapters dealing with Carol that the book is weightiest, there are serious episodes in the earlier part too—as there are flashes of humor even among the most touching aspects of Carol’s ordeal:

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The Blood of the Lamb The Blood of the Lamb is not, finally, a grim book. However, the sense that De Vries achieves, one of painful bewilderment, is more in evidence than his usual comic pathos. The bewilderment arrives early, when Louie dies:

All the theologies inherent in the minister’s winding drone came down to this: Believe in God and don’t put anything past him. Or another thought formed itself in the language of the streets in which the boy had learned crude justice and mercy: "Why doesn’t He pick on somebody his size?"¹¹

And it persists, deepening into despair:

"Now have I permission to despair, my Lord?" . . . "How ludicrous can grief become?" . . . "That birthday party in the playroom for Johnny Heard. Leukemic children with funny hats. How slapstick can tragedy get?" (p. 226)

The more familiar De Vries humor shows itself in Don’s adolescent seductions among "the bushes of Chicago’s splendid park system" (p. 22) as he recites, "in the language of the streets," James Joyce to his lover of the moment: "Who goes amid de greenwood I Wit mien so virginal?" (p. 32). In a later incident Don and his father, a garbage collector, jump from their truck when it rolls backward down a hill and into a sea of garbage. To their dismay, they sink in up to their chests. Looking back on this, Wanderhope is reminded of a forthcoming play by Samuel Beckett, in which

the sole action . . . was to consist in philosophical exchanges between two characters buried to their chins in garbage cans. This was precisely the condition in which the following colloquy took place, save the principals’ being engulfed in a valley of abomination rather than individual containers of it.

"Think we’ll make it?"

"Have to hold still, Pa. Wait till help comes."

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help," my father quoted in a dramatic change of heart, at the same time scanning the horizon for trucks He will save Israel, and that right early."

"Feel around for something solid. But easy." (pp. 50-51)

Indeed, the last sentence provides a motif for the whole first part of the book; throughout the opening pages we see the flippant charm of previous De Vriesian "heroes," like Chick Swallow in The Tents of Wickedness or Andrew Mackerel in The Mackerel Plaza, "Do you believe in a God?" asks Rena, Wanderhope’s love in the tubercular ward. He replies, "With nothing certain, anything is possible" (p. 103). He speaks far truer than he knows.

Wanderhope at last reaches some semblance of peace and maturity in his relationship with his daughter: "any sanctity into which my foolish

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years at last emerged . . . is not fleshly [love], but paternal" (p. 123). It is here the story perceptibly deepens. Wanderhope, with only a kindly housekeeper and Carol near him, begins more earnestly to reseek the faith of his childhood through his daughter. But his philosophy of life is an uneasy one:

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 it is not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque "mean," or a rainbow or a rose? A man delights in all of these, knowing himself to be no more—a wisp of music and a haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third. (pp. 166-67)

The glibness, the facility with words, is still there; but within this muted context, it is difficult to say Wanderhope is "shallow."

Then leukemia strikes and his trial begins. He emerges from it a humbled man. It is his dead daughter who delivers the telling blow; on tape, she recites Don’s philosophy of life, prefacing it with: "I might as well say that I know what’s going on. What you wrote gives me courage to face whatever there is that’s coming, so what could be more appropriate than to read it for you now?" (p. 241). He has influenced his dying child with his poetic stoicism; Don Wanderhope finds himself set in minute relief against the universe.

Near the end of the book, Wanderhope speaks harshly; perhaps it is utterances like the following that prompt Mr. Fuller’s "shallow and sentimental" judgment:

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, like a treeful of rotten fruit. . . . Man is inconsolable, thanks to that eternal "Why?" when there is no Why, that question mark twisted like a fish hook in the human heart. "Let there be light," we cry, and only the dawn breaks. (pp. 242-43)

The taut, snappily comic lines of the earlier De Vries are gone, certainly; but to label such a passage "sentimental" is to overlook writing that is as beautifully wrought as it is void of sentimentality. The highlight of this passage—essentially, an unmetered poem—is the image of the question mark. Subtly, economically, De Vries turns it upside down, creating a fish

hook, and achieving an almost Donnean effect. He does it again in the last sentence of the novel: ". . . the recognition of how long, how long is the mourner’s bench upon which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship, all of us, brief links, ourselves, in the eternal pity" (p. 246).

Finally, in a scene—what shall we say? poignant? affecting? at least, not sentimental or shallow—Wanderhope describes his final moments with Carol:

Then I touched the stigmata one by one: the prints of the needles, the wound in the breast that had for so many months now scarcely ever closed. I caressed the perfectly shaped head. I bent to kiss the cheeks, the breasts that would now never be fulfilled, that no youth would ever touch. "Oh, my lamb."

As for the dignity of man, this one drew forth a square of cloth, and, after honking like a goose, pocketed his tears. (pp. 234, 236)

Wanderhope’s anguished "Oh, my lamb" reminds us of the title of the novel, and of the fact that The Blood of the Lamb is, again in the metaphysical sense, a pun, at once grotesque and ineffably touching. This is a major De Vries performance, on a par with the best of his wryest, most tightly controlled comic writing.

De Vries returns to comedy in his 1967 effort, The Vale of Laughter, but with a difference. More than in any of his previous novels, De Vries has achieved his sought-after middle ground, the successful coupling of serious and "comic." And he does it through a character named Joe Sandwich.

"Call me, Ishmael," Joe says at the beginning of the book. "Feel absolutely free to call me any hour of the day or night at the office or at home. . . ."¹² More breezily irreverent than Chick Swallow, less self-conscious than Don Wanderhope, Sandwich shows De Vries’ increasing tendency to place the major emphasis on his narrator and less on the plot. Even more than Wanderhope, Joe finds himself buffeted by the experimental extremes—ludicrous situations which bounce him from one grotesquerie to another; he is "sandwiched" between events at once sobering and hilarious. But while Don alternates between bewilderment and rage at the ironies he cannot control, or even understand, Joe laughs at them.

From the beginning Joe is, as he puts it, one of God’s clowns (p. 15). He is special. His witty "irreverence" disguises the fact to most of his friends that he is as taken aback by the world as Don Wanderhope when he wonders how slapstick tragedy can get. Joe, however, has more intelligence than the early Wanderhope, and more honesty, too; he is not content to reply on a sophomorically stoic philosophy. Instead, he adopts a pose

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which he feels suits better—that of the slapstick clown. Like earlier De Vriesian characters, he puns; but unlike his predecessors, Joe puns with an urgency. The world refuses to make sense, so he laughs at it—and at himself.

Joe begins his story by telling us about his father, who is morbidly preoccupied with what his last words will be; they take the form of "Jesus H. Christ!" after a terrific lightning flash during a thunderstorm. Then the elder Sandwich apparently suffers a heart attack. Joe continues:

When asked about the circumstance of his passing, I was naturally pressed for details about his last words. I freely related the ejaculation with which he had taken leave of this life, omitting the middle initial which struck me as irrelevant. "Thank God," my mother said, clasping her hands in gratitude. . . . "He made his peace at the end." I saw no point in correcting her interpretation of the facts, which it was not for me to say was right or wrong anyway, the line between profanity and prayer being as fine as it is.
. . . You might say my mother’s own "Thank God" was an exclamation on the order of my father’s, and his as heartfelt an outcry as hers. So why split hairs? Everything torn from the breast must be one to Him who made the heart it houses. (pp. 31-32)

Still a church-goer, Joe has nothing but good deeds to report during confession; Father Enright charges him with the sin of pride, and assigns him two Hail Marys. He quits the Church only to develop neuroses—he chews his food in multiples of twelve, he gets in and out of the bathtub seven times, he develops elaborate patterns to avoid walking past the church. Finally Joe’s cousin Benny Bonner, a hopeful psychiatrist, analyzes Joe’s problem in a significant conversation. The ceremonies of religion, he says, are neurotic. Furthermore, he couples this neurosis and Joe’s antic sense together:

"I think there you have the same basic need to discharge anxiety by making a joke of it. What have we laughed at so far? Exhaustion, arthritis, locomotor ataxia, paresis, and insomnia. A joke is, like prayer and handwashing, a device for resolving fear." (pp. 38-39)

Joe’s life continues, and so do the funny things that happen to him, or rather, things that Joe insists on making funny. He marries an ample girl named Naughty McNaughton who is frigid; he is made a stockbroker in her father’s firm and discovers that watching the ticker tape makes him seasick. Driven to an affair with a Mrs. de Shamble, Joe finds out she has a Puritan core; for penance they rake leaves at the local Y.M.C.A.

When Naughty recovers from Joe’s dalliance, she and he finally have a child, conceived in a welter of needles, tubes and dials, for Naughty uses

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the occasion to take data for a research project studying sexual fulfillment in marriage. Always ready to bed Naughty, Joe nevertheless has reservations:

as I approached the bed, tripping over strands of rubber vinework, I felt like some computer-age Dionysus, enacting a rite propelling us onward into a future in which the machines would do the actual screwing for us, and consciousness be refined into some kind of abstract numerical bliss, through which we would float eternally as through a heaven of pure equation. Pi in the sky, don’t you know. (p. 173)

Young Ham (short for Hamilton) Sandwich is helped into the world by his father. Naughty’s delivery is difficult, and Joe, by reciting her silly names from his vast "name collection," literally convulses her into labor.

Midway through The Vale of Laughter the narrative shifts to Wally Hines, a college psychology professor, and the difference is telling. Deeply concerned with Why We Laugh—he is writing a dissertation on the subject—Wally takes his humor seriously, and he is basically a humorless character. A good example of this is his "Advanced Sike" class—a class that contains Joe Sandwich.

With the alacrity with which students can spot a chance to sidetrack you and waste valuable classroom time, Pepperrell switched us onto the mystery of artistic motivation in general, and the contradictions posed by that most polarized of all creatures, the writer. Sensing this to be worth ten minutes or so I gave the beggars their heads for that long. At which time Horton . . . said that "In the end, whatever sets the artist in motion remains a mystery. Not even the psychoanalysts can tell us. We’ll never know what makes Sammy run." "Or Saul Bellow," piped up Sandwich, causing a burst of idiotic laughter. Analyzing humor can be difficult with a clown in the class. (p. 251)

Theorizing is about as far as Wally goes. It is for Joe to make the theories work.

The climax of the novel is the death of Joe Sandwich. He and Wally (whom he has cuckolded) stage a bicycle race on a timed obstacle course they have created out of a section of town. Wally goes first, then loans Joe his lighter, sturdier English bike to be fair. Racing down "Sonofabitch Hill," Joe is unable to find the brakes; he back-pedals desperately, ignoring the calipers on the handle bars. As Wally watches in horror, Joe hits a curb, flies off the bike, and sails over a wall into Lover’s Leap—a one hundred-foot drop.

He disappeared in his dramatic crouch, like a jockey, retaining to the last moment the hardriding derring-do in which he had

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descended the hill, so that his departure had a certain style to it, a valedictory vainglory, an undeniable dash. He seemed to be riding when he no longer had any mount under him, in a wild, free apotheosis that was the last image of him we had. In his green shirt, he was himself like a wreath flung handsomely into space, into a summer air through which it would sail forever as we watched.

We looked at one another in blank incomprehension. Our minds not yet functioning, we did not believe what we had seen. It was a mere visual event, a picture not yet developed. . . . We remained frozen in time for the duration of several seconds, figures ourselves having only visual existence. Then two or three youngsters rushed pell-mell down the hill toward the pay binoculars, fishing in their pockets for dimes. (pp. 323-24)

Such an ending, even granted the pretentiousness of the speaker, does not induce us to unrestricted laughter. The De Vriesian series of zany events not only loom out of control in this book but enforce themselves more emphatically on Joe Sandwich: "He back-pedaled in an antic dream, frantically trying to make the brake catch in an axle mechanism where there was no brake" (p. 323). Beneath the frenetic tempo of the puns and the ridiculously apt similes is a sense of urgency, a need to tell us something, but a need couched in terms of an ultimately gentle humor. Shortly before Joe’s narrative ends, he is talking with Fido, a fellow employee at the stock brokerage firm:

Fido sipped again and set his cup on the desk. "When did you first realize you were a clown?" he asked.
    "When I laughed at my aunt’s funeral. No. It was when I cried at my mother’s wedding. Tragedy and comedy are basicaily the same, did you know that, Fido?... They have a common root, Do you know what it is?"
    "What?"...
    "Desperation. Or so Benny Bonner says...
    "It’s all la vie. You know—life. . . . A man got killed on the Thruway the other day in an accident he got into trying to fasten his safety belt. Is that sad or funny?"
    "Ask him. He knows as well as I do."
    "An excellent answer, Fido. You don’t know. It shows you’re an intellectual, basically. When Benny was in high school he organized that mass meeting to protest student apathy, and four people showed up. Sad or funny?" (pp. 210-11)

Joe’s question is more than rhetorical, just as the slapstick pose he adopts is more than merely a pose; taken together, both comprise a statement which illustrates the predicament in which he finds himself. For

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Joe Sandwich, and for De Vries’ characters generally, life is a serious and a ludicrous business. Moreover, as De Vries maintains in his interview, neither the seriousness nor the ludicrousness can be separated from each other. Joe’s "line between profanity and prayer" is not only fine, it is intangible—it is, in effect, nonexistent, and the world that he and other De Vriesian characters inhabit is a crazily catholic one. In De Vries’ books, suicide and insanity appear alongside candy store robberies; broken marriages and broken lives are given equal billing with broken noses. It is a world of gamuts: his characters die deaths ranging from Carol’s languishing leukemia, to Mrs. Yutch’s literal choking with laughter (on a chicken drumstick), to Hank Tattersall’s freezing in a snowstorm (with his head caught in a one-way dog door), to Cowan McGland’s suicide (by hanging himself in his orthopedic harness).

Moreover, if De Vries’ world is often incomprehensible ("sad or funny?"), the attempts of many of his characters to make sense out of it are both pathetic and funny. De Vries suggests that much of life’s seriousness can be mitigated somewhat, or at least be made tolerable, with humor; but ironically, if we take ourselves and our humor too seriously, we become funny in a way we did not intend—we become freakish ourselves, absurd people alienated from the very situation which we are trying to put into a rational focus. Even the names for De Vries’ "rationalizers"—Wally Hines, Don Wanderhope, Andrew Mackerel, Hank Tattersall, Chick Swallow—doom them from the start. It will not do to analyze humor, for humor is too inseparably a part of the situation (and hence the problem) itself.

It is De Vries’ refusal to become doctrinaire about the function of humor (despite the increasingly plainer talk of some of his characters like Joe Sandwich) that makes his fiction significant. One of his finest achievements is the inclusion of the "serious" and the "comic" in a single, unforgettable image, utterance, or scene; they are both of these qualities equally—and simultaneously. De Vries’ books are studded with such scenes. They range in intensity from the subtle, deflationary ending of Through the Fields of Clover:

She heaved a sigh, thinking of all they’d been through, of all of the Twentieth Century that had been brought to their old door. What was happening in and to the world, including supposedly rock-ribbed New England Massachusetts?
    "What are we coming to?" she wondered aloud.
    "Connecticut," said Ben Marvel, who had been watching the signs.¹³

to a scene in which Don Wanderhope, desperately drunk following Carol’s death, heaves a cake, Mack Senett fashion, at a statue of Christ (one of

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Carol’s friends has already expounded earlier, in connection with old motion picture comedies, on the "ritual" of pie-throwing):

Then my arm drew back and let fly with all the strength within me. . . .
    It was miracle enough that the pastry should reach its target at all, at that height from the sidewalk. The more so that it should land squarely, just beneath the crown of thorns. Then through scalded eyes I seem to see the hands free themselves of the nails and move slowly toward the soiled face. Very slowly, very deliberately, with infinite patience, the icing was wiped from the eyes and flung away.... Then the cheeks were wiped down with the same sense of grave and gentle ritual, with all the kind sobriety of one whose voice could be heard saying, "Suffer the little children to come unto me . . . for of such is the kingdom of heaven." (p. 275)

"Sad or funny?" Joe’s question crops up again and again in De Vries’ books, and at length we begin to see that this ambivalent state of things is not merely a De Vriesian predicament, but the human one. Hank Tattersall, freezing to death in his ignominious dog door position, is the recipient of a parting pun from his Doppelgänger: "Well, your end is in sight, Tattersall . . . I think we can safely say that."¹⁴ Tillie Seltzer, languishing inside a "local sanitarium," ends her novella with a wry "Thank God I’ve got Pete Seltzer to see me through the disillusionments of marriage" (p. 303). The world is unpredictable, incomprehensible; our attempts to order it are necessary, futile, funny. That a man with such a view has been dismissed largely as a "gag writer" is as ironic as anything that happens to the characters in his books. Joe Sandwich’s plunge over Lover’s Leap serves beautifully as a final example of the "sad or funny?" vision of Peter De Vries: "The stuff is there—there it is—now it’s up to you to make whatever judgment you wish. ... That’s the way I look at it."¹⁵

How are we to look at it? Humanity as either a jockey sans horse, or as a funereal wreath sailing forever through the air—in either case the drop, when it comes, is still one hundred feet. Another trip to the De Vriesian pay-binoculars is what we want, as we return to the library—or perhaps the bookstore—fishing in our pockets for dimes.

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NOTES

    ¹Edmund Fuller, "Life and Don Wanderhope," New York Times Book Review, March 18, 1962, p. 4.
    ²Granville Hicks, "The Blood of the Lamb by Peter De Vries," The Saturday Review, 45 (March 24, 1962), 19.
    ³Fuller, p. 37.
    ⁴Ibid.
        ^{5Ibid.
    6This critical relief was not exactly a welcoming of a prodigal De Vries back to the verdant pastures of comedy; but even though a goodly number of reviews of De Vries’ book following The Blood of the Lamb, Reuben, Reuben (1964), were receptive, their praise constituted a tacit damning of the author’s bona fide seriousness. Hugh McGovern, for example, in the February 22 issue of America opines that "any writer who reflects honestly what he sees about him is going to offer us some galling stuff to swallow. In Reuben, Reuben, Peter De Vries does just that. And he does it with such craftsmanship, insight and objectivity that the bitterness is almost pleasant." And in England the Times Literary Supplement (August 27) agrees, saying: "so long as Mr. De Vries is enjoying himself all is well, for his enjoyment is very infectious. When he is not the reader must bear with him patiently and trust in his remarkable bouyancy. He is after all a fairly rare phenomenon." Even Roderick Jellema, an editor more aware of De Vries’ achievements than most, says of a still later book, Let Me Count the Ways (1965), in the August 28 issue of The Saturday Review: "Agony was predominant in The Blood of the Lamb, zaniness in The Tunnel of Love. Achieving in his latest novel a harmony of the two, De Vries penetrates with greater clarity the odd dimensions of the modern spiritual predicament."
    7John Bradshaw, "Holding to Schedule With W. H. Auden," Esquire, 73 (January, 1970), 139.
    8Roy Newquist, Counterpoint (New York, 1964), pp. 153-154. There is a correction concerning the second paragraph of this quotation. In a subsequent letter to me, Mr. De Vries explained: "The remark in the Newquist interview came out garbled in his published book. What I said, in connection with the serious-comic twins, was, ‘Nobody has been funnier than Faulkner, nor has anybody a better grasp of the human predicament than Thurber or Mark Twain.’ A typist in transcribing the tape must have dropped a line and it came out the way you (and other people) have quoted the quote. Perfectly comprehensible, but not very interesting."
    9William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. Willard Farnham (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1957), II, ii, 387-390.
    10Roderick Jellema, Peter Dc Vries: A Critical Essay (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1966), p. 40.
    11Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1961), p. 25. All further direct quotations from this work will be noted by page number within the text of this essay.
    12Peter De Vries, The Vale of Laughter (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967), p. 7. All further direct quotations from this work will be noted by page number within the text of this essay.
    13Peter De Vries, Through the Fields of Clover (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1959). p. 275.
    14Peter De Vries, The Cat’s Palamas and Witch’s Milk (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968), p. 185. All further direct quotations from this work will be noted by page number within the text of this essay.
    15Peter De Vries, personal letter to Craig Challender, September 25, 1970}