Read Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker Online
Authors: Henry Finder,David Remnick
Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (66 page)
1953
PETER DE VRIES
THEME AND VARIATION
Coleridge caused his wife unrest,
Liking other company best;
Dickens, never quite enthralled,
Sent his packing when she palled;
Gauguin broke the marriage vow
In quest of Paradise enow.
These things attest in monochrome:
Genius is the scourge of home.
Lady Nelson made the best of
What another took the rest of;
Wagner had, in middle life,
Three children by another’s wife;
Whitman
liked
to play the dastard,
Boasting here and there a bastard.
Lives of great men all remind us
Not to let their labors blind us.
Each helped to give an age its tone,
Though never acting quite his own.
Will of neither wax nor iron
Could have made a go with Byron;
Flaubert, to prove he was above
Bourgeois criteria of love,
Once took a courtesan to bed
Keeping his hat upon his head.
But mine is off to Johann Bach,
For whom my sentiment is “
Ach
!
”
Not once, but twice, a model spouse,
With twenty children in the house.
Some fathers would have walked away
In what they call a fugue today;
But he left no one in the lurch,
And played the stuff he wrote in church.
1950
W. H. AUDEN
PEOPLE
Fulke Greville
Wrote beautifully at sea level;
With each rising contour his verse
Grew progressively worse.
It was impossible to inveigle
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Into offering the slightest apology
For his Phenomenology.
Historians have tried to widen
Our conception of John of Leiden,
But the term Anabaptist
Remains aptest.
When the young Kant
Was told to kiss his aunt,
He obeyed the Categorical Must,
But only just.
Joseph Lister
Never worried his sister
By becoming an alcoholic;
His
vice was carbolic.
Longinus
Was one of those unpunctual diners;
He always knew what the Sublime was,
But never what the time was.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Had the habit as a teacher
Of cracking his joints
To emphasize his points.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Wept into his daiquiri
When he heard St. John’s Wood
Thought he was no good.
Paul Valéry
Earned a meagre salary
Walking in the Bois,
Observing his Moi.
1953
DONALD HALL
SIX POETS IN SEARCH OF A LAWYER
0;
Finesse
be first, whose elegance deplores
All things save beauty, and the swinging doors;
Whose cleverness in writing verse is just
Exceeded by his lack of taste and lust;
Who lives off lady lovers of his verse
And thanks them by departing with their purse;
Who writes his verse in order to amaze,
To win the Pulitzer, or
Tim
e
’s sweet praise;
Who will endure a moment, and then pass,
As hopeless as an olive in his glass.
Dullard
be second, as he always will,
From lack of brains as well as lack of skill.
Expert in some, and dilettante in all
The ways of making poems gasp and fall,
He teaches at a junior college where
He’s recognized as Homer’s son and heir.
Respectable, brown-suited, it is he
Who represents on forums poetry,
And argues to protect the libelled Muse,
Who’d tear his flimsy tongue out, could she choose.
His opposite is anarchistic
Bomb,
Who writes a manifesto with aplomb.
Revolt! Revolt! No matter why or when,
It’s novelty—old novelty again.
Yet
Bomb,
if read intently, may reveal
A talent not to murder but to steal:
First from old Gone, whose fragmentary style
Disguised his sawdust Keats a little while;
And now from one who writes at very best
What ne’er was thought and much the less expressed.
Lucre
be next, who takes to poetry
The businessman he swore he would not be.
Anthologies and lecture tours and grants
Create a solvency that disenchants.
He writes his poems, now, to suit his purse,
Short-lined and windy, and reserves his curse
For all the little magazines so fine
That offer only fifty cents a line.
He makes his money, certainly, to write,
But writes for money. Such is appetite.
Of
Mucker
will I tell, who tries to show
He is a kind of poet men don’t know.
To shadowbox at literary teas,
And every girl at Bennington to seize,
To talk of baseball rather than of Yeats,
To drink straight whiskey while the bard creates—
This is his pose, and so his poems seem
Incongruous in proving life a dream.
Some say, with Freud, that
Mucker
has a reason
For acting virile in and out of season.
Scoundrel
be last. Be deaf, be dumb, be blind,
Who writes satiric verses on his kind.
1955
ROBERT GRAVES
THE NAKED AND THE NUDE
For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.
Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.
The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping, by a showman’s trick,
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.
The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat,
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometime nude!
1957
| gooseneck lamp | As you all know, tonight is the night of the full moon, half the world over. But here the moon seems to hang motionless in the sky. It gives very little light; it could be dead. Visibility is poor. Nevertheless, we shall try to give you some idea of the lay of the land and the present situation. |
| typewriter | The escarpment that rises abruptly from the central plain is in heavy shadow, but the elaborate terracing of its southern glacis gleams faintly in the dim light, like fish scales. What endless labor those small, peculiarly shaped terraces represent! And yet, on them the welfare of this tiny principality depends. |
| pile of mss. | A slight landslide occurred in the northwest about an hour ago. The exposed soil appears to be of poor quality: almost white, calcareous, and shaly. There are believed to have been no casualties. |
| typed sheet | Almost due north, our aerial reconnaissance reports the discovery of a large rectangular “field,” hitherto unknown to us, obviously man-made. It is dark-speckled. An airstrip? A cemetery? |
| envelopes | In this small, backward country, one of the most backward left in the world today, communications are crude and “industrialization” and its products almost nonexistent. Strange to say, however, signboards are on a truly gigantic scale. |
| ink-bottle | We have also received reports of a mysterious, oddly shaped, black structure, at an undisclosed distance to the east. Its presence was revealed only because its highly polished surface catches such feeble moonlight as prevails. The natural resources of the country being far from completely known to us, there is the possibility that this may be, or may contain, some powerful and terrifying “secret weapon.” On the other hand, given what we do know, or have learned from our anthropologists and sociologists about this people, it may well be nothing more than a numen, or a great altar recently erected to one of their gods, to which, in their present historical state of superstition and helplessness, they attribute magical powers, and may even regard as a “savior,” one last hope of rescue from their grave difficulties. |
| typewriter eraser | At last! One of the elusive natives has been spotted! He appears to be—rather, to have been—a unicyclist-courier, who may have met his end by falling from the height of the escarpment because of the deceptive illumination. Alive, he would have been small, but undoubtedly proud and erect, with the thick, bristling black hair typical of the indigenes. |
| ashtray | From our superior vantage point, we can clearly see into a sort of dugout, possibly a shell crater, a “nest” of soldiers. They lie heaped together, wearing the camouflage “battle dress” intended for “winter warfare.” They are in hideously contorted positions, all dead. We can make out at least eight bodies. These uniforms were designed to be used in guerrilla warfare on the country’s one snow-covered mountain peak. The fact that these poor soldiers are wearing them here, on the plain, gives further proof, if proof were necessary, either of the childishness and hopeless impracticality of this inscrutable people, our opponents, or of the sad corruption of their leaders. |
1973
ELIZABETH BISHOP
12 O’CLOCK NEWS
CALVIN TRILLIN
CHRISTMAS IN QATAR
(A NEW HOLIDAY CLASSIC, FOR THOSE TIRING OF “WHITE CHRISTMAS” AND “JINGLE BELLS”)
V
ERSE
:
The shopping starts, and every store’s a zoo.
I’m frantic, too: I haven’t got a clue
Of what to get for Dad, who’s got no hobby,
Or why Aunt Jane, who’s shaped like a kohlrabi,
Wants frilly sweater sets, or where I’ll find
A tie my loudmouthed Uncle Jack won’t mind.
A shopper’s told it’s vital he prevails:
Prosperity depends on Christmas sales.
“Can’t stop to talk,” I say. “No time. Can’t halt.
Economy could fail. Would be my fault.”
C
HORUS
:
I’d like to spend next Christmas in Qatar,
Or someplace else that Santa won’t find handy.
Qatar will do, although, Lord knows, it’s sandy.
I need to get to someplace pretty far.
I’d like to spend next Christmas in Qatar.
V
ERSE
:
Young Cousin Ned, his presents on his knees,
Says Christmas wrappings are a waste of trees.
Dad’s staring, vaguely puzzled, at his gift.
And Uncle Jack, to give us all a lift,
Now tells a Polish joke he heard at work.
So Ned calls Jack a bigot and a jerk.
Aunt Jane, who knows that’s true, breaks down and cries.
Then Mom comes out to help, and burns the pies.
Of course, Jack hates the tie. He’ll take it back.
That’s fair, because I hate my Uncle Jack.
C
HORUS
:
I’d like to spend next Christmas in Tibet,
Or any place where folks cannot remember
That there is something special in December.
Tibet’s about as far as you can get.
I’d like to spend next Christmas in Tibet.
V
ERSE
:
Mom’s turkey is a patriotic riddle:
It’s red and white, plus bluish in the middle.
The blue’s because the oven heat’s not stable.
The red’s from ketchup Dad snuck to the table.
Dad says he loves the eyeglass stand from me—
Unless a sock rack’s what it’s meant to be.
“A free-range turkey’s best,” Ned says. “It’s pure.”
“This hippie stuff,” Jack says, “I can’t endure.”
They say goodbye, thank God. It’s been a strain.
At least Jack’s tie has got a ketchup stain.
C
HORUS
:
I’d like to spend next Christmas in Rangoon,
Or any place where Christmas is as noisy
As Buddhist holidays might be in Boise.
I long to hear Der Bingle smoothly croon,
“I’m dreaming of a Christmas in Rangoon”—
Or someplace you won’t hear the Christmas story,
And reindeer’s something eaten cacciatore.
I know things can’t go on the way they are.
I’d like to spend next Christmas in Qatar.
1994
JOHN UPDIKE
DUET, WITH MUFFLED BRAKE DRUMS
50 Years Ago Rolls met Royc
e
—a Meeting that made Engineering History
—
A
DV. IN
T
HE
N
EW
Y
ORKER.
Where grey walks slope through shadows shaped like lace
Down to dimpleproof ponds, a precious place
Where birds of porcelain sing as with one voice
Two gold and velvet notes—there Rolls met Royce.
“Hallo,” said Rolls. His umber silhouette
Seemed mounted on a blotter brushed when wet
To indicate a park. Beyond, a brown
Line hinted at the profile of The Town.
And Royce, his teeth and creases straight, his eye
A perfect match for that well-lacquered sky
(Has zenith since, or iris, been so pure?),
Said, “Pleased to meet you, I am sure.”
A graceful pause, then Rolls, the taller, spake:
“Ah—is there anything you’d care to make?
