Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (61 page)

The villain’s next foray is more heartening. He manages to overpower Smith and Petrie by some unspecified means (undoubtedly the “rather rare essential oil” that Smith says he has met with before, “though never in Europe”) and chains them up in his noisome cellars. The scene wherein he twits his captives has a nice poetic lilt: “A marmoset landed on the shoulder of Dr. Fu-Manchu and peered grotesquely into the dreadful yellow face. The Doctor raised his bony hand and fondled the little creature, crooning to it. ‘One of my pets, Mr. Smith,’ he said, suddenly opening his eyes fully so that they blazed like green lamps. ‘I have others, equally useful. My scorpions—have you met my scorpions? No? My pythons and hamadryads? Then there are my fungi and my tiny allies, the bacilli. I have a collection in my laboratory quite unique. Have you ever visited Molokai, the leper island, Doctor? No? But Mr. Nayland Smith will be familiar with the asylum at Rangoon! And we must not forget my black spiders, with their diamond eyes—my spiders, that sit in the dark and watch—then leap!’ ” Yet, having labored to create so auspicious a buildup, the author inexplicably cheats his suspense and lets it go for naught. No sooner has Fu-Manchu turned his back to attend to a poisoned soufflé in the oven than Kâramanèh pops up and strikes off the prisoners’ gyves, and the whole grisly quadrille starts all over again. Smith and Petrie, without so much as a change of deerstalker hats, nip away to warn another prospective victim, and run full tilt into a covey of
phansigars,
the religious stranglers familiar to devotees of the
American Weekly
as Thugs. They outwit them, to be sure, but the pace is beginning to tell on Petrie, who observes ruefully, “In retrospect, that restless time offers a chaotic prospect, with few peaceful spots amid its turmoils.” Frankly, I don’t know what Petrie is beefing about. My compassion goes out, rather, to his patients, whom I envision by now as driven by default to extracting their own tonsils and quarrying each other’s gallstones.
They’re
the ones who need sympathy, Petrie, old boy.

With puff adders, tarantulas, and highbinders blooming in every hedgerow, the hole-and-corner pursuit of Fu-Manchu drums along through the next hundred pages at about the same tempo, resolutely shying away from climaxes like Hindus from meat. Even the episode in which Smith and Petrie, through the good offices of Kâramanèh, eventually hold the Doctor at gun point aboard his floating laboratory in the Thames proves just a pretext for further bombination about those filmy greenish eyes; a shower of adjectives explodes in the reader’s face, and he is whisked off on a hunt for certain stolen plans of an aero-torpedo, an interlude that veers dangerously close to the exploits of the indomitable Tom Swift. The sequence that follows, as rich in voodoo as it is innocent of logic, is heavily fraught with hypnosis, Fu-Manchu having unaccountably imprisoned a peer named Lord Southery and Kâramanèh’s brother Aziz in a cataleptic trance. They are finally revived by injections of a specific called the Golden Elixir—a few drops of which I myself could have used to advantage at this point—and the story sashays fuzzily into its penultimate phase. Accompanied by a sizable police detail, Smith, Petrie, and a Scotland Yard inspector surprise Fu-Manchu in an opium sleep at his hideout. A dénouement seems unavoidable, but if there was one branch of literary hopscotch Rohmer excelled in, it was avoiding dénouements. When the three leaders of the party recover consciousness (yes, the indispensable trapdoor again, now on a wholesale basis), they lie bound and gagged in a subterranean vault, watching their captor sacrifice their subordinates by pelting them with poisonous toadstools. The prose rises to an almost lyrical pitch: “Like powdered snow the white spores fell from the roof, frosting the writhing shapes of the already poisoned men. Before my horrified gaze,
the fungus grew;
it spread from the head to the feet of those it touched; it enveloped them as in glittering shrouds. ‘They die like flies!’ screamed Fu-Manchu, with a sudden febrile excitement; and I felt assured of something I had long suspected: that that magnificent, perverted brain was the brain of a homicidal maniac—though Smith would never accept the theory.” Since no hint is given of what theory Smith preferred, we have to fall back on conjecture. More than likely, he smiled indulgently under his gag and dismissed the whole escapade as the prankishness of a spoiled, self-indulgent child.

The ensuing events, while gaudy, are altogether too labyrinthine to unravel. As a matter of fact, they puzzled Rohmer, too. He says helplessly, “Any curiosity with which this narrative may leave the reader burdened is shared by the writer.” After reading that, my curiosity shrank to the vanishing point; I certainly wasn’t going to beat my brains out over a riddle the author himself did not pretend to understand. With a superhuman effort, I rallied just enough inquisitiveness to turn to the last page for some clue to Fu-Manchu’s end. It takes place, as nearly as I could gather, in a blazing cottage outside London, and the note he addresses to his antagonists clears the way for plenty of sequels: “To Mr. Commissioner Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie—Greeting! I am recalled home by One who may not be denied. In much that I came to do I have failed. Much that I have done I would undo; some little I have undone. Out of fire I came—the smoldering fire of a thing one day to be a consuming flame; in fire I go. Seek not my ashes. I am the lord of the fires! Farewell. Fu-Manchu.”

I DARESAY it was the combination of this passage, the cheery hearth in front of which I reread it, and my underwrought condition, but I thought I detected in the Doctor’s valedictory an unmistakable mandate. Rising stealthily, I tiptoed up to my daughter’s bedchamber and peered in. A shaft of moonlight picked out her ankles protruding from beneath the bed, where she lay peacefully sleeping, secure from dacoity and Thuggee. Obviously, it would take more than a little crackle of the flames below to arouse her. I slipped downstairs and, loosening the binding of “The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu” to insure a good supply of oxygen, consigned the lord of the fires to his native element. As he crumbled into ash, I could have sworn I smelled a rather rare essential oil and felt a pair of baleful green eyes fixed on me from the staircase. It was probably the cat, though I really didn’t take the trouble to check. I just strolled into the kitchen, made sure there was no trapdoor under the icebox, and curled up for the night. That’s how phlegmatic a chap gets in later life.

1950

JOHN LARDNER

THOUGHTS ON RADIO-TELEVESE

I
NTERVIEWING
Governor Rockefeller recently on Station WMCA, Barry Gray, the discless jockey, felt the need to ask his guest a certain question. He also felt a clear obligation to put the inquiry in radio-televese, the semi-official language of men who promote conversation on the air. Though it is more or less required, this language is a flexible one, leaving a good deal to the user’s imagination. “Governor,” Mr. Gray said, after pausing to review the possibilities of the patois, “how do you see your future in a Pennsylvania Avenue sense?” I thought it was a splendid gambit. Another broadcaster might have said “How do you see yourself in the electoral-college picture?” or “How do you project yourself Chief Executive-wise?” The Gray formula had the special flavor, the colorful two-rings-from-the-bull’s-eye quality, that I have associated with the work of this interviewer ever since I began to follow it, several years ago. For the record, Governor Rockefeller replied, “I
could
be happier where I am.” He might have meant Albany, he might have meant the WMCA studio. As you see, radio-televese is not only a limber language, it is contagious.

The salient characteristic of remarks made in radio-televese is that they never coincide exactly with primary meanings or accepted forms. For instance, Mr. Gray, a leader in the postwar development of the lingo, has a way of taking a trenchant thought or a strong locution and placing it somewhere to the right or left of where it would seem to belong. “Is this your first trip to the mainland? How do you feel about statehood?,” I have heard him ask a guest from the Philippines on one of his shows (the program runs, at present, from 11:05
P.M.
to 1
A.M.
). On the topic of Puerto Ricans in New York, he has said, “How can we make these people welcome and not upset the décor of the city?” On a show a few years ago, he described an incident that had taken place in a night club “that might be called a bawd.” A drunk at a ringside table, Mr. Gray said, “interrupted the floor show to deliver a soliloquy.” “When did the chink begin to pierce the armor?” he once asked, in connection with a decline in the prestige of former Mayor O’Dwyer. “The fault, then,” he said on another occasion, “is not with Caesar or with his stars but with certain congressmen.” Speaking of the real-life source of a character in a Broadway play, he has observed, “He was the clay pigeon on whom the character was modelled.” When Mr. Gray called Brussels “the Paris of Belgium,” I was reminded of an editorial I had read in a Long Island newspaper long ago in which Great Neck was called “the Constantinople of the North Shore.” There is an eloquence and an easy confidence in Mr. Gray’s talk that stimulates even his guests to heights of radio-televese. Artie Shaw, a musician, in describing the art of another performer to Mr. Gray, said, “He has a certain thing known as ‘presence’—when he’s onstage, you can see him.” Another guest declared that the success of a mutual friend was “owing to a combination of luck and a combination of skill.” “You can say that again,” Mr. Gray agreed, and I believe that the guest did so, a little later. The same eloquence and the same off-centerism can be found today in the speech of a wide variety of radio and television regulars. “Parallels are odious,” Marty Glickman, a sports announcer, has stated. “The matter has reached a semi-head,” a senator—I couldn’t be sure which one—said at a recent televised Congressional hearing. “I hear you were shot down over the Netherlands while flying,” a video reporter said to Senator Howard Cannon, a war veteran, on a Channel 2 program last winter. “Where in the next year are we going to find the writers to fill the cry and the need?” David Susskind demanded not long ago of a forum of TV directors. “Do you have an emotional umbilical cord with Hollywood?” Mr. Susskind asked a director on the same show.

Mr. Susskind’s second question raises the point that metaphor is indispensable in radio-televese. “Wherein water always finds its own level, they should start hitting soon,” a baseball announcer said about the Yankees the other day. In an earlier year, Red Barber, analyzing a situation in which a dangerous batter had been purposely walked, with the effect of bringing an even more dangerous batter to the plate, remarked that it was a case of “carrying coals to Newcastle, to make use of an old expression.” I suspect that Mr. Barber meant that it was a case of the frying pan and the fire, and I also suspect that if he had thought of the right metaphor afterward, he would have corrected himself publicly. He is a conscientious man, and therefore by no means a typical user of radio-televese. The true exponent never retraces his steps but moves from bold figure to bold figure without apology. There have been few bolder sequences (or “seg-ways,” as they are sometimes called on the air) than the one that Mr. Gray achieved in 1957, during a discussion of the perils faced by Jack Paar in launching a new program. I think I have quoted this passage here once before; it still fills me with admiration. “It’s like starting off with a noose around your neck,” Mr. Gray said. “You’ve got twenty-six weeks to make good, or they’ll shoot you. That sword of Damocles can be a rough proposition.” As most of you know by now, Mr. Paar eventually made good before the sword could explode and throttle him.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of radio-televese is its power to move freely in time, space, and syntax, transposing past and future, beginnings and endings, subjects and objects. This phase of the language has sometimes been called backward English, and sometimes, with a bow to the game of billiards, reverse English. Dorothy Kilgallen, a television panelist, was wallowing in the freedom of the language on the night she said, “It strikes me as funny, don’t you?” So was Dizzy Dean when he said, “Don’t fail to miss tomorrow’s doubleheader.” Tommy Loughran, a boxing announcer, was exploring the area of the displaced ego when he told his audience, “It won’t take him [the referee] long before I think he should stop it.” Ted Husing was on the threshold of outright mysticism when he reported, about a boxer who was cuffing his adversary smartly around, “There’s a lot more authority in Joe’s punches than perhaps he would like his opponent to suspect!” It is in the time dimension, however, that radio-televese scores its most remarkable effects. Dizzy Dean’s “The Yankees, as I told you later . . .” gives the idea. The insecurity of man is demonstrated regularly on the air by phrases like “Texas, the former birthplace of President Eisenhower” and “Mickey Mantle, a former native of Spavinaw, Oklahoma.” I’m indebted to Dan Parker, sportswriter and philologist, for a particularly strong example of time adjustment from the sayings of Vic Marsillo, a boxing manager who occasionally speaks on radio and television: “Now, Jack, whaddya say we reminisce a little about tomorrow’s fight?” These quotations show what can be done in the way of outguessing man’s greatest enemy, but I think that all of them are excelled by a line of Mr. Gray’s, spoken four or five years ago: “What will our future forefathers say?”

It is occasionally argued in defense of broadcasters (though they need and ask for no defense) that they speak unorthodoxly because they must speak under pressure, hastily, spontaneously—that their eccentricities are unintentional. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Their language is proud and deliberate. The spirit that has created it is the spirit of ambition. Posterity would have liked it. In times to come, our forebears will be grateful.

1959

ADAM GOPNIK

THE MUSICAL HUSBANDS

T
HE
musical husbands buy Monster cable for their speakers, because they are sure that it increases the midrange response. They listen to the speakers as soon as they have attached the new cables—even before they have pushed the speakers back up against the wall—hoping to hear all the new, warm alto tones. They take the fabric screens off the speakers to expose the woofers and tweeters. Then they put the screens back on. They have read about the midrange in their audio magazines. If the midrange is full, soprano voices are, it seems, “burnished” and “honeyed,” rather than just high and piercing; in the midrange, music “swells expressively,” and strings have an “ambient glow.”