Assorted Prose

 
FOREWORD

I
N THE TEN YEARS
that I have written for a living, I have published a certain amount of non-fictional prose; this book collects all of it that I thought anyone might like to reread. Several baseball fans have asked me to put the “Williams article” in permanent form. My wife’s aunt once expressed a fondness for a paragraph of mine on Grandma Moses. Another woman declared herself peculiarly moved by “The Unread Book Route.” Otherwise, these pieces have been assembled here on my own initiative, as one more attempt to freeze the flux of life into the icy permanence of print.

Concerning the first section: I wish that there had been enough parodies and humorous sketches to make a book of their own. My first literary idols were Thurber and Benchley and Gibbs; these few
feuilletons
are what remains of my ambition to emulate them. They were written between 1956 and 1961, when I was young at heart. I leave it to the percipient reader to deduce, where appropriate, that Eisenhower was still President and that Robert Frost was still alive.

From August of 1955 to March of 1957
The New Yorker
paid me to gad about, to interview tertiary celebrities, to peek into armories, and to write accounts of my mild adventures for its insatiable department “The Talk of the Town.” Who, after all, could that indefatigably fascinated, perpetually peripatetic “we” be but a collection of dazzled farm-boys? When New York ceased to support my fantasies, I quit the job and the city, though from time to time since, revisiting, I have made contributions to “Talk,” as well as intermittent editorial “Notes and Comment.” In sifting through the yellowing batch of my anonymous offerings, I
have eliminated all those that, by mention of brand names, might give comfort to any public-relations outfit and tried to retain those paragraphs with some flavor, touch, or lyric glimpse of the city in them. The long “fact” pieces on pigeons and Antarctica I kept because they represent some honest research work. “Old and Precious,” besides being typical of the “visit” pieces I did by the dozen, supplied some crockery to a poorhouse fair of my own. The editorial comments seem a kind of collaboration between my own voice and a voice more confident than mine—more assured of the liberal verities, more serenely facetious.

“Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” was a five days’ labor of love executed and published in October 1960. For many years, especially since moving to greater Boston, I had been drawing sustenance and cheer from Williams’ presence on the horizon, and I went to his last game with the open heart of a fan. The events there compelled me to become a reporter. Without much altering the text, I have added, as footnotes,
^*
some additional information not then available to me.

The fourth section contains six items that at the least have as common denominator a first-person narrator. The first and longest was composed at the invitation of Mr. Martin Levin, for a collection of seven boyhood accounts, one to a decade; the number of boyhoods dropped to five, but a book did appear, published by Doubleday, and quickly disappear. Howard Lindsay, Harry Golden, Walt Kelly, and William K. Zinsser were the other boys. Though there are some tenderly turned passages, my reminiscence in general, I fear, has the undercooked quality of prose written to order, under insufficient personal pressure. The next two pieces, about uncles, are really short stories that took so long to get into print that they lost their place in line and must lodge forever here. The publicational history of the “The Lucid Eye in Silver Town” is especially devious. Written, rejected, and set aside in 1956, it was revived and revised eight years later for a
Saturday Evening Post
“Special New York Issue” and, shortly thereafter, for reasons that a trip to Russia did not clear up, was reprinted, abridged, in the June 21, 1964, number of
Pravda
. The other three accounts do not claim to be untrue. The eclipse occurred on July 20, 1963.

Of the books reviewed, some (the Sillitoe, the Aiken, the Agee, the Hughes) sought me out while others (the Salinger, the Spark, the Nabokov) were sought out by me. The Barth article, like the Williams piece, was written in acknowledgment of a debt, for Barth’s theology, at one point in my life, seemed alone to be supporting it (my life). The theory of rhyme set forth in “Rhyming Max” is possibly totally wrong-headed; though on rereading it I was, curiously persuaded anew. Mr. Warner Berthoff, a professorial friend, suggested to me on a postcard that pronounced meter and rhyme are dancelike; and perhaps there is a rigidity which is not comic, the rigidity of ecstasy, of rite. But rhyme, I would say, with our present expectations of language, aspires to this intensity vainly. On the other hand, my expressed doubts about de Rougemont’s theories of Occidental love have faded in importance for me. His overriding thesis seems increasingly beautiful and pertinent; corroborating quotations leap to my eyes wherever I read:

 
CONTENTS