THALIA POPS HER GIRDLE:
HUMOR IN THE NOVELS OF PETER DE VRIES

"When they saw how tight the girdles were, they thought they’d split." This one-liner, a version of which Peter De Vries uses in three of his novels,¹ suggests the accomplishment of twentieth-century American humorists, such as James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, and De Vries himself. Thalia, muse of comedy, whose name comes from a Greek word meaning "to burst forth" or "flourish," has for too long been girdled by the devotees of her more prestigious sister, Melpomene, muse of tragedy. If comedy is the other side of tragedy, as De Vries has suggested,² there is little doubt that it is the back side, confined by an "armor plate corset" rather like Mrs. Punk’s in Reuben, Reuben.³ Perhaps Pete Seltzer’s advice to Tillie Shilepsky in Witch’s Milk is essentially that of De Vries: "Want to know something about yourself? Don’t wear a girdle. . . . I mean give the whollies a chance. . . . [You don’t] need to go around with it in a sling, tightening in the natural curves and flattening out the wherewithal. Let it breathe. . . . Let the merchandise gallop a little."⁴

Few American humorists since Mark Twain have done more to pop the stays, to enhance the position of comedy in American letters, than Peter De Vries. In each of his novels, spanning over forty years from But Who Wakes the Bugler? (1940) to Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (1983), there is the sound of stays popping, of "whollies" springing free of their "elastic prison" (RR, p. 202). And the latest news from De Vries is that "attempts to reach an agreement in the corset-stay-inserters strike have again collapsed."⁵

Though some of his characters—most notably Joe Sandwich in The Vale of Laughter and Harry Mercury in Through the Fields of Clover—have attempted to formulate a philosophy of humor, De Vries insists that he himself has none. At least seven philosophical explanations of why we laugh are discussed in six of the novels: the views of Plato, Aristotle, Bergson, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud, and Huxley. "Each definition explains some of what we laugh at," De Vries has said, leaving "an unaccounted-for overflow that reminds you of a fat lady trying to pack more into a girdle than it will legitimately contain."⁶ De Vries echoes his character Joe Sandwich, who says: "No single theory has yet managed to explain all varieties of mirth.

Nine-tenths of what we laugh at answers to Bergson, another nine-tenths to Freud, still another to Kant or Plato, and so on, leaving always that elusive tenth that makes each definition like a woman trying to pack more into a girdle than it will legitimately hold." Sandwich concludes by saying, "I do not mind admitting that my dream of glory is to fashion a girdle into which it can all be tucked" (VOL, p. 230).

At the risk of sounding as pretentious as Joe Sandwich—the kind of pretentiousness which is a favorite target of De Vries’s humor—I wish to try fashioning a girdle that might come closer to accommodating the amplitude of Thalia’s "whollies." In a broad sense (pun certainly intended), De Vriesian humor involves the disparity between, on one hand, that perfection for which man was intended, is expected to attain, and only sometimes aspires toward (the Kingdom of Heaven) and, on the other hand, that imperfection man actually achieves (the crumbling kingdoms of earth), the pleasures of which he continues to seek, often without success and satisfaction. "In a perfect world . . . there would be no laughter," Harry Mercury says in Through the Fields of Clover (p. 116), the reason being the absence of disparity. Similarly, there could be no humor of nonsense without "the grain of sense in it" (TFC, p. 87). Further, "laughter must have an honest root in reality," another of his characters says, "and that means a necessarily melancholy undercurrent."⁷

This element of disparity underlies the three major categories of De Vries’s humor—situational, rhetorical, and linguistic. Situational humor ranges from simple, zany slapstick (including what De Vries calls "japes"—practical jokes—and "didoes"—mischievous pranks named for Dido, who, on purchasing as much land as might be covered by the hide of a bull, ordered the hide cut in thin strips with which she surrounded a large area) to cogent irony, Horatian satire, and, for want of a better term, Black Humor.

The humor in "japes and didoes" derives from the disparity between propriety and impropriety, decorum and indecorum, dignity and the undignified. For example, an English prof at Polycarp College snipes with an air rifle at colleagues, "Three Little Prigs" from Harvard, peppering their shins with BB’s. Later he puts "Jesus Saves" stickers on their bumpers and pins with the same message on their overcoats. A boy of twelve, with new bow and arrow, shoots flaming Tampax through barn windows. Someone asks for a doggie-bag at a $100-a-plate Republican dinner. Joe Sandwich climbs on a neighbor’s roof to lay a plank across the chimney, makes calls

impersonating a disc jockey who tells people they have won free trips to places they have just visited, calls his wife and impersonates a policeman to report that her husband was just arrested for stealing metatarsal pads from a chiropodist, and ties a tasseled bell chord on his member and invites his wife to ring for service. The thrown pie, perhaps the oldest jape, becomes in De Vries a cake thrown in attempted catharsis at the crucified figure outside a church by a grieving father after his daughter dies of leukemia. In Sauce for the Goose, at a symposium on comedy, after an intellectual analysis of humor by a college professor a woman smacks him in the face with a custard pie—recipe.

The humor of De Vries’s ubiquitous irony lies in the disparity between appearance and reality, between impression or expectation and actuality. One of De Vries’s favorite bits of irony, appearing in four novels, is this: "He has decided to take unto himself a wife, but he hasn’t decided yet whose."⁸ The following are other examples of De Vries’s verbal irony: "No wonder you’ve got insomnia; all you ever do is sleep" (FP, p. 34); "I would have respected my father more if he had never had me";⁹ "I’m a self-disparaging egomaniac";¹⁰ "He was perfect but that was all you could say for him" (RP, p. 368). (Another figure "had no faults at all; he was just hopeless" CF & WM, p. 299). There is the man who reports his housefire by mail, a wife who saves trading stamps for a Reno divorce, an old lady who stitches obscene needlepoint (and a student pilot who writes obscenities in the sky), an androgynous youth at the mailbox reading a letter which begins, "Dear Sir or Madam," a failure-manqué who fails to make an unsuccessful attempt on his life, a man who feels post coital tristesse before making love, an electric chair in a Southern state condemned because it is unsafe, a man who catches a terrible cold from a faith healer, a doctor who hitchhikes to his patients, and so on.

Satire, ridiculing the foibles of human imperfection, involves disparity between the real and the ideal, the kingdom of earth and the Kingdom of Heaven. De Vries has distinguished between the satirist and the humorist, noting that "the satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive."¹¹ In Sauce for the Goose he refers to two classes of satirists: the "hard-mouthed" and the "softmouthed."¹² Both bring their prey back dead, but one mangles it more than the other. Perhaps the essential distinction here is that between the Juvenalian satirist—angry, bitter, caustic—and the Horatian satirist—gentle, suave, smiling. De Vries is the second of the

two. The objects of his satire are pretension, affectation, and disingenuousness in any form. His favorite targets are male-female relationships, "the battle of the sexes," and middle-class mores.

Another target is ecclesiasticism, particularly the Dutch Reformed Church of his youth. "Nothing proves the validity of the church so much," one of his characters says, "as its ability to survive its own representatives."¹³ In sixteen of his novels, De Vries satirizes Puritanism, that "deep-seated strain in the American conscience"— "up to now a strain on it" (GOH, p. 236). He pokes fun at Protestantism all along the spectrum—from Rev. Andy Mackerel of People’s Liberal¹⁴ and Rev. Shorty Hopwell of People’s Community, which has made divorce a sacrament,¹⁵ to the "catchall" Unitarian Church, where "the unaffiliated throw themselves for nuptial and thanatopsical events" (MM, p. 25), to the Episcopal Church, where "you curtsy before you sit down" (BOL, p. 155), to the Gospel Mission, whose urgings to repent have been spurned by Stan Waltz until he mistakes an explosion in a fireworks factory for the Second Coming and rushes to baptize himself under the kitchen tap (LMCW, p. 60).

A further target of De Vries’s satire is academia. For example, at Burwash, a highly advanced college in upper Minnesota, the Psychology and English departments grant credit for a nervous breakdown (CA, pp. 33-34, 53). Another college grants non-resident credit for pregnancy. A student is planning to petition the Sociology department to receive credit for her experience as a call girl (IHAS, p. 137). And at Polycarp College, Tom Waltz has the compulsive habit, carried over from teaching, that makes him instinctively grade everything, even sunsets:

Generally Pre-Raphaelist in feeling, they sometimes descend to the level of Corot, and bad Corot at that. At their worst they are sheer calendar art. I often tell Him as much. "The straightforward romanticism at which You persist is by now basically uncongenial to the modem temper, which aims rather at implication and understress, as I have told You before," I mentally jot by way of helpful comment on what I see now, "while the sun centered so exactly between Your banks of cloud (suffused with rose yet!) is quite contrived. This kind of sentimentalization of nature is simply unpalatable to contemporary taste." I then add the helpful criticism. "If You wish to pursue the pantheistic vein I would suggest study of some of the painters who have done so to their profit, and ours. The trees in the foreground are nicely executed, though of course reminiscent of Renoir. C–" (LMCW, p. 140).

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Still another type of situational humor in De Vries’s novels is Black Comedy with its disparity between sob and snicker, despair and hope, absurdity and meaning. In answer to a question about his opinion of Black Humor, De Vries replied, "Oh, another bumper sticker!" More recently he responded to a similar question with the remark, "There are times when I feel black and blue."¹⁶ But if we can get beyond the overused label, which De Vries says he wishes Andre Breton had never coined, there is much to be said about this considerable portion of De Vries’s humor. The notion that one can trace a clear movement from fun and farce in the early novels to increasingly bitter and Black comedy in later ones is untenable, for both appear in virtually all the novels.

Perhaps Pete Seltzer, in Witch’s Milk, epitomizes the Black Humorist, trying to amuse himself and his son, who is dying of leukemia, as Don Wanderhope in The Blood of the Lamb does to a lesser extent with his daughter, who also dies of leukemia, that seemingly interminable, terminal disease (GOH, p. 221).

In De Vries’s fiction a snicker often escapes while a sob gets caught in the throat. A brilliant scholar who prides himself for his reputation as a walking encyclopedia learns that he must have both legs amputated. A child shoots his parents and then asks for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan. A character in one novel fantasizes homicide and a character in another fantasizes suicide by the same method—thrusting a vacuum cleaner nozzle down the throat to suck out the vital organs into a sack of giblets. Another character attempts to commit suicide by running a hose from the exhaust pipe to the inside of his car. When the car runs out of gas, he tries to use the lawn mower, but the meager fumes give him only a nasty headache. Hank Tattersall, having locked himself out of his house, sticks his head through the doggie door to call for the mongoloid boy who lives with him, gets stuck, and freezes to death in the sub-zero weather. When a wife calls the fire department to report that their house trailer is on fire, she is told that neither of the two units is available, but the firemen suggest that perhaps she could drive this particular fire to the firehouse—which she does, tearing down the highway like a house afire, only to discover when she arrives that her mobile home is gone and her soused husband is incinerated on his cot.

Rhetorical humor, my second category, involves disparity between statements, as in "he said-she said" dialogue, rejoinders to lines fed by a straight-man or foil, what De Vries calls "the elastic snap of a retort" (EP, p. 92). One such interchange appearing in several

novels is this one:

"Can’t resist a pretty ankie, can you?"
"I’ve got my mind on higher things" (MP, p. 203; RR, p. 28).

Other representative examples include the following:

"Can you bear children?"
"I can bear children all right; it’s men I can’t bear."¹⁷

"Have you been sleeping with Rose Flamsteed?"
"Not a wink" (GOH, p. 266).

Another type of rhetorical humor involves the disparity between part of an assertion played off against another more surprising part, as in these descriptions: "She bore him two children—and a great deal of resentment" (TFC, p. 162). "Gertrude looked like a lesbian with doubts about her masculinity" (CF and WM, p. 238). "She was a woman of singular piety, whose birth gem was the brimstone" (IHAS, p. 27). "Here he was at thirty-six, having fought, bit, scratched, kicked, and clawed his way to the bottom" (FP, p. 168).

The element of surprise also plays a major role in what De Vries calls "perversely capsizing" (IHAS, p. 40) or "dislocating" (MW, p. 4) a cliché, resulting in "garbled proverbs" (RR, p. 110) or "rube-barbs" (CMWA, p. 150). For example, "The road to good intentions is paved with hell" (CA, p. 147); "A man should be greater than some of his parts" (IHAS, p. 153); "The hand that rules the cradle rocks the world" (LMCW, p. 8); and "I wouldn’t trust him with a ten-foot pole" (TEC, p. 176).

De Vries is also adept at witty epigrams, aphorisms which derive humor primarily from disparity between preconceived notions or concepts and alterations which surprise and sometimes shock. These are a few examples of De Vries "hitting the nail on the head with a saw," as he puts it in Comfort Me with Apples (p. 16): "Marriage is for people who want each other the worst way" (CF and WM, p. 135; ITC, p. 70; MM, p. 59). "We fall in love with a personality, but we must live with a character" (LMCW, p. 268; MW, p. 205). "Marriage has driven more than one man to sex" (TOL, p. 64). "Marriage decaffeinates sex, leaving us Sanka" (FP, p. 177). "A fellow has to pay for enjoying a woman’s lips by forever after taking her lip" (CMWA, p. 101). "A woman is like gazpacho—should be stirred from the bottom" (IHAS, p. 76). "I wouldn’t mind children if they would mind me" (GOH, p. 272).

My third category of De Vriesian humor—linguistic—also involves disparity, in this case between words and their referents, be-

tween denotations and connotations, between accepted usage and incorrect application, and between several different definitions and uses. Nearly every De Vries novel has a character suffering from some form of linguistic confusion: the man in the restaurant who says, "Oh, I see they’ve got the soup du jour today; that’s one of my favorites";¹⁸ the characters in two other novels who think "Existential" is the name of an insurance company (TOW, pp. 91–92; CF & WM, pp. 266–267), or the characters who think "prothalamium" is some kind of bottled gas (TFC, pp. 21), that Baudelaire was a refrigerator (CMWA, p. 17), that "sodomite" is some kind of mineral found on the moon (FP, p. 52), that "Afrodisiac" has something to do with colored people being highly sexed (GOH, p. 102), that "poltroon" is some kind of bridge (CA, p. 170), that a "megalopolis" is some kind of prehistoric animal (CF & WM, p. 200), that "Primatene Mist" is something primordial (CA, p. 24), and that "centurion" is some kind of mythological creature like a satyr (RR, pp. 279-280).

Closely related to this form of linguistic humor is "the constant Malapropese," as De Vries calls it in I Hear America Swinging (p. 154), best illustrated by Mrs. Wallop, who takes up where Mrs. Malaprop left off, and Frank Spofford, her male counterpart in Reuben, Reuben. There’s the woman who says she’s been married seventeen years and has never had an "organism" (TOW, p. 71) and the man who visits a sporting house and gets "one of them funereal diseases" (SFG, p. 33) (or in another novel "a sociable disease," ITC, p. 182). Sprinkled throughout the novels is a related form, "daffynitions," including these: seersucker—"one who spends all her money on fortunetellers" (TOL, p. 72); love—"the lotus that has turned into lettuce" (CMWA, p. 101); mating—"acts of congress" (IHAS, p. 5); stalemate—"a wife who has begun to pall" (CMWA, p. 149); auto-eroticism—"necking in cars" (VOL, p. 130); philanderer—"a man in two ruts instead of one" (MM, p. 121); ménage à trois—"triangles that get along" (IHAS, p. 52); marriage counselors—"ambulance drivers in the war between the sexes" (IHAS, p. 26).

De Vries proves himself "Lord of the Punjab," a phrase he uses in The Glory of the Hummingbird (p. 115). His constant "word play and language mangling" involve disparity between two denotations and uses, serving, as he notes in the same novel, as "a way of deflating communication of other people (seen as threats) to nursery gibberish" (p. 115). A representative De Vriesian pun is this one which appears in three novels in slightly altered form: the milkmaid

was upset when she sat down in the butter, because it put her behind in her work (VOL, p. 253); the maid’s slipping and falling on her waxed floor put her behind in her work (CMWA, p. 51); and the artist’s nude self-portrait put her behind in her work (IHAS, p. 93).

The double-entendre, of which De Vries is a master, is a perfect example of humor through disparity, in this case between the dual meanings, one decorous, the other risqu6 or indelicate. "You can imagine what it was like there in the dark; I felt a perfect ass" (GOH, p. 78). "I make friends easily; strangers take a little time" (CP & WM, p. 207). "Am I at home with women? Occasionally— when their husbands are away" (RR, p. 428). "Sometimes I think this leg is the most beautiful, sometimes the other; I suppose the truth lies somewhere in between" (BOL, p. 33). "Did you hear about the couple dancing too close together? Big navel engagement, lots of semen lost" (GOH, p. 202). "Women’s Lib is one of the seminal forces of our time" and "Male chauvinists should be put in a penal colony" (IHAS, p. 140). "She was so unsatisfactory in bed she became known as Lay Miserable" (SFG, p. 37) unlike another figure who is "a great lay, but she needs an editor" (MM, p. 80). "Voyeurs ought to get out more and mix with their peer group (RR, p. 367).

Other forms of linguistic humor used by De Vries are the mixed metaphor ("People in show business always have lots of irons in the fire but few of them ever jell," FP, p. 180), the spoonerism ("I’ll wend my maze, CMWA, pp. 37, 201) or the two-time favorite: "Lady Loverly’s Chatter," (TOW, p. 238; CF & EM, p. 142), and the use of highly connotative names, names "so right they have the ring of an adroitly timed thrust," as De Vries says of Pete Seltzer and Tillie Shilepsky (CP & WM, p. 189). There’s "Miss Cockenoe—a name anti-aphrodisiac to the point of mysticism" (VOL, p. 225). Others are the sensual Scotch poet Gowan McGland (Reuben, Reuben) (modeled in part after Dylan Thomas), Jim Tickier (Glory of the Hummingbird), Stew Smackenfelt (Forever Panting), championship lecher Dog Bokum (Sauce for the Goose), Joe Sandwich and his son Ham (The Vale of Laughter).

De Vries uses a related form of "naming" in Pete Seltzer’s euphemistic jabberwocky, his new erotic vocabulary. For example, the act of love he calls "thrunkling"—suggesting throbbing, rumpling, tumbling, grunting, humping, pumping, and even spelunking (CF & WM, p. 222). This passage describes Pete and Tillie in the act of "thrunkling": "Extolling her soft white yummels, he would bury his face in them, sometimes as though trying to achieve death

by suffocation. Or he would lip their little pink phelps as his hand strayed independently downward, across her dimpled woburn to her thrombush. . . . She sometimes got up in the morning with her whollies black and blue. . ." (CF & WM, pp. 223-224).

I suspect that Thalia’s "whollies" are getting black and blue from the girdle I’ve fashioned here. This girdle, too, is ripe for popping. Disparity does seem to underlie the humor of De Vries’ fiction in all its forms. And it is the basis of its significance, for it could well be said that De Vries feels in fun while thinking in earnest or, as he has said, "If it is outer humor it must be with inner seriousness."¹⁹ Or if, as one of De Vries’ characters says, the thrown pie is a "ritual," a "ceremony," then a joke itself is, "like a prayer, a device for resolving fear," as another character says (VOL, p. 39). De Vries may be a "lapsed Calvinist," as he has described himself, but like the "lapsed Catholic" he refers to in his Sauce for the Goose, "the umbiblical cord has not been completely cut" (SFG, p. 48). Perhaps Flannery O’Connor was correct in her statement that we can see the comical side of the universe only if we are secure in our beliefs.²⁰

The time is long overdue for Thalia to pop her girdle and show Melpomene who wears the pants in the family. Girdles are for critics and readers, if for anyone, not for muses and belletrists, and least of all for writers like De Vries, a humorist who best illustrates his own definition of the term as "one who does not laugh so much at mankind, as he invites mankind to laugh at itself."²¹ And laugh we do. For De Vries awakens the animal ridens within us, teaching us to laugh in the dark—a side-splitting, girdle-popping laughter.

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

    ¹Comfort Me With Apples (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company 1956), pp. 11, 139. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as CMWA. The Vale of laughter (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1967), p. 252. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as VOL. Forever Panting (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1973), p. 106. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as FP.
   ²Through the Fields of Clover (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1961), p. 34. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as TFC.
   ³(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1964), p. 108. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as RR.
   ⁴The Cat’s Pajamas and Witch’s Milk (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1968), p. 200. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as CP & WM.
   ⁵Madder Music (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1977), p. 94. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as MM.
   ⁶In a letter to me, July 2, 1981.
   ⁷Mrs. Wallop (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1970), p. 162. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as MW.
   ⁸Let Me Count the Ways (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1965), p. 15. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as LMCW. I Hear American Swinging (Boston: 1976), p. v. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as IHAS. FP, pp. 230-231. TFC, p. 229.
   ⁹The Glory of the Hummingbird (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1974), pp. 7–8. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as GOH.
   ¹⁰Consenting Adults, or The Duchess Will Be Furious (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1980), p. 221. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as CA.
   ¹¹"An Interview with Peter De ‘Vries," in Counterpoint, ed. Roy Newquist (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), p. 149.
   ¹²Sauce for the Goose (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1981), p. 14. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as SFG.
   ¹³The Blood of the Lamb (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1961), p. 210. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as BOL.
   ¹⁴The Mackerel Plaza (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1958). All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as MP.
   ¹⁵Into Your Tent I’ll Creep (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1971). All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as ITC.
   ¹⁶In a letter to me, July 2, 1981.
   ¹⁷The Tunnel of Love (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1954), p. 128. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as TOL.
   ¹⁸This joke appears in several novels: The Tents of Wickedness (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1959), p. 71. All subsequent references to this edition appear in the text as TOW; ITC, pp. 129, 134.
   ¹⁹Newquist, pp. 153–154.
   ²⁰"Novelist and Believer," in Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1961), p. 167. In another note included in this collection, O’Connor said, "All comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death" (p. 114). Measured against this criterion, the novels of De Vries are very good.
   ²¹Newquist, p. 151.