Without a Stitch in Time Read online

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 1943, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1956, 1959, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972 by Peter De Vries

  All rights reserved

  Originally published 1972 by Little, Brown and Company

  Paperback edition 2015

  Printed in the United States of America

  22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-17106-7 (paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-17123-4 (e-book)

  DOI: 10.728/chicago/9780226171234.001.0001

  Most of the material in this book was originally published in the New Yorker. “Part of the Family Picture” appeared in Harper’s Magazine, “The Last of the Bluenoses” in the London Daily Telegraph, “Exploring Inner Space” in Michigan Quarterly Review, “Mud in Your Eye” in the New York Times Book Review, “James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock” in Poetry, and “The Man Who Read Waugh” in Saturday Review.

  Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 72-5163

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  De Vries, Peter, 1910–1993, author.

  Without a stitch in time : a selection of the best humorous short pieces / Peter De Vries. — Paperback edition.

  pages cm

  “Originally published 1972 by Little, Brown and Company.”—Title page verso.

  ISBN 978-0-226-17106-7 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-17123-4 (e-book)

  1. Wit and humor. 2. Short stories, American. I. Title.

  PS3507.E8673W5 2015

  813'.52—dc23

  2014014266

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  WITHOUT A STITCH IN TIME

  A SELECTION OF THE BEST HUMOROUS SHORT PIECES

  by PETER DE VRIES

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

  Chicago and London

  PRAISE FOR DE VRIES, WITHOUT A STITCH IN TIME

  “Few writers have understood literary comedy as well as De Vries . . . and few comic novelists have had his grasp of tragedy.”

  Jeffrey Frank

  “At his best, De Vries can write as others breathe . . .”

  Los Angeles Times

  “Laughter of the mind and laughter of the heart . . . Without a Stitch in Time gets it all together!”

  New York Times

  “Marvelous . . . a major comic writer who tells us more about ourselves than we may be comfortable knowing, but we’d be a great deal poorer without him.”

  St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “. . . De Vries is in the high tradition of American humor, gamy, sharp-eyed, derisive, and at the same time with a kind of lyrical wink at command.”

  Alan Pryce-Jones, New York Herald Tribune

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  Peter De Vries (1910–1993) was born and raised in Chicago. He studied at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and at Northwestern, supporting himself with a variety of jobs that ranged from toffee-apple salesman to editor for Poetry magazine. During World War II, he served as a captain in the US Marines and returned home in 1944 to begin writing for the New Yorker. He then began using his incredible wit to create works outside of the magazine, writing twenty-three novels and a play, as well as novellas, essays, short stories, and poetry. His most notable works include The Tunnel of Love (1954), The Blood of the Lamb (1961), Let Me Count the Ways (1965), Reuben, Reuben (1964), and Witch’s Milk (1968); some of these have been adapted into films and Broadway plays. Still infamous for his quips and puns, De Vries has been praised as the “funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.”

  BOOKS BY PETER DE VRIES

  No But I Saw the Movie

  The Tunnel of Love

  Comfort Me with Apples

  The Mackerel Plaza

  The Tents of Wickedness

  Through the Fields of Clover

  The Blood of the Lamb

  Reuben, Reuben

  Let Me Count the Ways

  The Vale of Laughter

  The Cat’s Pajamas & Witch’s Milk

  Mrs. Wallop

  Into Your Tent I’ll Creep

  Without a Stitch in Time

  CONTENTS

  A Hard Day at the Office

  Slice of Life

  Flesh and the Devil

  Mud in Your Eye

  Afternoon of a Faun

  Interior with Figures

  Good Boy

  Tulip

  Every Leave That Falls

  Compulsion

  Scene

  A Crying Need

  In Defense of Self-pity; or, Prelude to Löwenbräu

  The High Ground; or, Look, Ma, I’m Explicating

  The Independent Voter at Twilight

  The Conversational Ball

  Adventures of a People Buff

  Heart

  Requiem for a Noun; or, Intruder in the Dusk

  The House of Mirth

  Split-level

  Till the Sands of the Desert Grow Cold

  From There to Infinity

  Overture

  Reuben, Reuben

  Touch and Go

  Fall Guy

  You and Who Else?

  Nobody’s Fool

  Block

  Double or Nothing

  Journey to the Center of the Room

  Different Cultural Levels Eat Here

  The Man Who Read Waugh

  The Art of Self-dramatization; or, Forward from Schrecklichkeit

  The Children’s Hour; or, Hopscotch and Soda

  The Irony of It All

  Laughter in the Basement

  Part of the Family Picture

  You Know Me Alice

  A Walk in the Country; or, How to Keep Fit to Be Tied

  The Last of the Bluenoses

  Scones and Stones

  Forever Panting

  James Thurber: The Comic Prufrock

  Exploring Inner Space

  WITHOUT A STITCH IN TIME

  A HARD DAY AT THE OFFICE

  I RECENTLY worked in an office where they had a number of those signs reading “Think,” the motto of the International Business Machines Corporation, which so many other business firms seem to be adopting. The signs became almost at once a bone of contention between my employer and me, though not because I was not responsive to them; I have always reacted unqualifiedly to wall injunctions, especially the monosyllabic kind. Confronted, for example, with the exhortation “Smile,” my face becomes wreathed in an expression of felicity that some people find unendurable, and as for “Keep On Keepin’ On,” I mean like one gander at it and it’s “Oh, I will, I will!” The “Think” signs, one of which was visible from my desk, so I saw it every time I raised my head, were equally effective. As a consequence, by midmorning of my first day on the job I was so immersed in rumination that the boss, a ruddy, heavyset fellow named Harry Bagley, paused on his way past my desk, evidently struck by a remote and glazed look in my eye.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

  “I was just thinking,” I said, stirring from my concentration.

  “What about?”

  “Zeno’s paradoxes,” I answered. “The eight paradoxes by which he tries to discredit the belief in plurality and motion, and which have come down to us in the writings of Aristotle and Simplicius. I was recalling particularly the one about Achilles and the tortoise. You remember it. Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise for, while he traverses the distance between his starting point and that of the tortoise, the tortoise advances a certain distance, and while Achilles traver
ses this distance, the tortoise makes a further advance, and so on ad infinitum. Consequently, Achilles may run ad infinitum without overtaking the tortoise. Ergo there is no motion.”

  “A fat hell of a lot of good this is doing us,” Bagley said.

  “Oh, I know Zeno’s old hat and, as you say, fruitless from a practical point of view,” I said. “But here’s the thought I want to leave with you. It’s amazing how many of our values are still based on this classic logic, and so maybe the semanticists, under Korzybski and later Hayakawa, have been right in hammering home to us a less absolutistic approach to things.”

  “Yes, well, get some of this work off your desk,” Bagley said, gesturing at a mulch of documents that had been thickening there since nine o’clock.

  “Right,” I said, and he bustled off.

  I fell to with a will, and by noon was pretty well caught up. But as I sat down at my desk after lunch, my eye fell on the admonitory legend dominating the opposite wall, and I was soon again deep in a train of reflections, which, while lacking the abstruseness of my morning cogitations, were nevertheless not wholly without scope and erudition. My face must have betrayed the strain of application once more, for Bagley stopped as he had earlier.

  “Now what?” he said.

  I put down a paper knife I had been abstractedly bending.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said, “that the element of the fantastic in the graphic arts is, historically speaking, so voluminous that it’s presumptuous of the Surrealists to pretend that they have any more than given a contemporary label to an established, if not indeed hoary, vein. Take the chimerical detail in much Flemish and Renaissance painting, the dry, horrifying apparitions of Hieronymus Bosch —”

  “Get your money,” Bagley said.

  “But why? What am I doing but what that sign says?” I protested, pointing to it.

  “That sign doesn’t mean this kind of thinking,” Bagley said.

  “What kind, then? What do you want me to think about?” I asked.

  “Think about your work. Think about the product. Anything.”

  “All right, I’ll try that,” I said. “I’ll try thinking about the product. But which one?” I added, for the firm was a wholesale-food company that handled many kinds of foods. I was at pains to remind Bagley of this. “So shall I think of food in general, or some particular item?” I asked. “Or some phase of distribution?”

  “Oh, good God, I don’t know,” Bagley said impatiently. “Think of the special we’re pushing,” he said, and made off.

  The special we were pushing just then was packaged mixed nuts, unshelled. The firm had been trying to ascertain what proportions people liked in mixed nuts — what ratio of walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, and so on — as reflected in relative sales of varying assortments that the company had been simultaneously putting out in different areas. I didn’t see how any thinking on my part could help reach any conclusion about that, the more so because my work, which was checking and collating credit memoranda, offered no data along those lines. So I figured the best thing would be for me to dwell on nuts in a general way, which I did.

  Shortly after four o’clock, I was aware of Bagley’s bulk over me, and of Bagley looking down at me. “Well?” he said.

  I turned to him in my swivel chair, crossing my legs.

  “Nuts, it seems to me, have a quality that makes them unique among foods,” I said. “I’m not thinking of their more obvious aspect as an autumnal symbol, their poetic association with festive periods. They have something else, a je ne sais quoi that has often haunted me while eating them but that I have never quite been able to pin down, despite that effort of imaginative physical identification that is the legitimate province of the senses.”

  “You’re wearing me thin,” Bagley warned.

  “But now I think I’ve put my finger on the curious quality they have,” I said. “Nuts are in effect edible wood.”

  “Get your money,” Bagley said.

  I rose. “I don’t understand what you want,” I exclaimed. “Granted the observation is a trifle on the precious side, is that any reason for firing a man? Give me a little time.”

  “You’ve got an hour till quitting time. Your money’ll be ready then,” Bagley said.

  My money was ready by quitting time. As I took it, I reflected that my wages from this firm consisted almost exclusively of severance pay. Bagley had beefed about having to fork over two weeks’ compensation, but he forked it over.

  I got another job soon afterward. I still have it. It’s with an outfit that doesn’t expect you to smile or think or anything like that. Anyhow, I’ve learned my lesson as far as the second is concerned. If I’m ever again confronted with a sign telling me to think, I’ll damn well think twice before I do.

  SLICE OF LIFE

  WHEN the elevator in which I had been mounting to my thirtieth-floor office after lunch stopped between the eleventh and twelfth floors, it stopped cold. The operator shoved his lever back and forth several times, but the car wouldn’t go up or down. “Broke,” he announced to me and my four fellow-passengers.

  There followed fifteen minutes of diagnostic bawling up and down the shaft between the operator and some unseen colleagues, and then certain rumblings and clankings commenced overhead and underneath, which I took to be remedial. The operator folded a stick of Juicy Fruit into his mouth and said, “It looks as if we’ll be here for a while.”

  “How long?” demanded a rectangular woman of forty, in snuff-colored tweeds and a brown corduroy hat of Alpine extraction.

  “That’s hard to say. They’ve got to rimify the bandelage that goes around the grims, then marinate the horpels on the rebrifuge,” the operator said — or words to that effect.

  “Damn!” said a thickset man, clearly an executive type, who was clutching a briefcase. I seemed to remember seeing pictures of him in the business sections of the metropolitan dailies. His name was Babcock or Shotwell or something. He and Tweeds were duplicates of impatience; she consulted a wristwatch in an absolute fume. “How long do you think it might be?” she inquired of the operator. “Hours?”

  He shrugged and smiled.

  “Or days,” threw in a tall youth, grinning. He leaned, hatless and negligent, against a wall of the car, reading an academic periodical.

  “Well, it might as well be days if it’s anything more than” — Tweeds shot back a cuff and glared anew at the watch — “than half an hour.”

  “Me, too,” said the executive. “I’ve got a conference starting in ten minutes that positively cannot be postponed.”

  “I have a lecture audience gathering two blocks away this very minute,” Tweeds said. “Oh, why did I have to pop in here first? Are they doing all they can?”

  “Probably,” said a handsome woman, brushing from her shoulder a pinch of rust that had sifted down through the ventilation louvers in the ceiling of the car. She was wearing a black suit and what seemed like a series of scarves. The operator had offered her his seat, on which she sat with her legs primly crossed.

  Such, then, was our cast of characters: a big shot, a lady lecturer, a casual youth, an enigmatic woman in black, an elevator operator, and myself, an office worker. In other words, what you always get in a group thrown together in a snowbound train or a marooned cabin or a petrified forest — a slice of life.

  As the minutes passed into an hour and the hour became two, I marked the rate of attrition on each of my co-victims. I knew that in a slice of life the crisis into which the characters are suddenly thrust affects each according to his inner self, which he thereafter faces with a new, and deeper, understanding. His whole life will be changed by the experience. But first he must be broken open.

  Shotwell or Babcock was the first to give. After watching him fidget for some minutes, I went over to him and said, “Why are you in such a stew to get to this meeting?”

  “I have to,” he said. “When I’m out of the office, everything goes to —”

  “That’s what y
ou like to think.” I smiled cannily.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, avoiding my eyes.

  “In how many years haven’t you taken a vacation?”

  “Fourteen,” he said, momentarily squaring his shoulders.

  “Fourteen years you haven’t dared to leave town for fear everything would go on running as smooth as —”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “— as silk. It wasn’t the other way around, as you’ve always tried to make everybody believe, especially yourself. Oh, everything’s going all right up there,” I said, following his panicky glance upward.

  “It isn’t, either! It’s not true!” he said. Dropping his briefcase, he seized the bars of the car door in both hands and, rattling it like a caged beast, bellowed to be let out. He was due at a think tank.

  I sprang swiftly into action. Swinging him around by the coat collar, I slapped him smartly across the chops several times. This brought shocked stares from the rest, but they must instantly have realized my action to be the attested one for staunching hysteria in situations of this kind, for no one spoke. “It is the irony of power that those who wield it become its victims, dependent on it themselves,” I told the magnate when I had brought him back to his senses. “If this experience helps you put away false pride, it will have proved a blessing in disguise. Learn that no one is indispensable — and find an enriching sense of the value of others.”

  I left the executive slumped on the floor, dazedly pondering my counsel, and slipped over to have a word with Tweeds. She was sitting on the floor herself by now. “I wonder how long they’ll wait for me,” she asked herself aloud.

  “Forget it. They’ve gone home,” I said. “It’s two hours.”

  “They can’t have gone. It was to be my most important lecture of the year.”

  “Important to whom?” I said, letting myself down beside her with the expression of stolid yet sensitive understanding of one from whom strength naturally flows. In low, confidential tones, I went on, “What hurts is the thought of their going home, or maybe off to a movie, without feeling they’ve missed much — idle women who came to hear you because they had nothing better to do. So it’s they who are important to you.”