A Comedian Crowned with Brussels Sprouts: Retrieving Peter De Vries

Peter De Vries confessed, ever so wryly, that we crown our tragedians with laurel but our comedians with Brussels sprouts. We regard tragedy as the prime genre because it embodies the profoundest truths about proudly flawed heroes such as King Lear. Despite his ruinous hubris, the king dies nobly, even redemptively. Comedies, by contrast, seem a secondary, perhaps even tertiary art meant largely to amuse and entertain. Even the best of them, A Midsummer Night’s Dream—with its fine blurring of the line between enchantment and reality—is more concerned with superficial romances than deep insights.

I will argue that De Vries’s most memorable novels, especially The Mackerel Plaza and The Blood of the Lamb, ascend heights of wonder and plumb depths of degradation. Yet he remains an almost forgotten figure, in danger of total oblivion. He needs to be retrieved.[1]

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Peter de Vries was born in 1910 and raised in a Dutch- and English-speaking enclave on the south side of Chicago. His father hauled ice in the summer and coal in the winter; he became a furniture mover and eventually opened a warehouse business. Hoping his son would become a Christian Reformed minister, he sent Peter to Calvin College in Grand Rapids. There De Vries studied English, played basketball, excelled in interscholastic debate, and wrote spiky editorials for the student newspaper. Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago, working at various pedestrian jobs, even as a radio actor playing gangster roles (and once imitating a wounded gorilla!), before finding a part-time job earning twenty-five dollars per week helping to edit Poetry, the most distinguished journal of its kind. During De Vries’s stint there, he helped publish Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, Karl Shapiro, and Dylan Thomas. During those same years, De Vries fashioned himself as a sort of New Yorker dandy—minus the top hat and monocle. His heroes were Thomas De Quincey and Oscar Wilde. But one morning an older writer told De Vries, quite bluntly, that he had “a face unmarked by sorrow.” The young editor was so shaken that he left the office and went home for the day.

It was a lesson De Vries would never forget, least of all when his breakthrough came in 1944. He was brought on to the staff of the New Yorker at the insistence of James Thurber, about whom De Vries had written a laudatory essay, calling him “The Comic Prufrock.” As a cartoon doctor, De Vries soon exhibited a remarkable talent for matching the visual with the verbal. So deftly did he join the wisecracks with the drawings that many of the cartoons first began as De Vriesian captions for which pictures were then commissioned. De Vries met Katinka Loeser when she won a prize given by Poetry and later served as an editorial assistant. After their marriage, they lived briefly in Greenwich Village but eventually settled in suburban Westport, Connecticut.

Perhaps recalling his early commuting days with Katinka on the Merritt Parkway, De Vries recounts a conversation between Ben and Alma Marvel, the main figures in Through the Fields of Clover (1961), as they return from New York. Lamenting the terrible state of things, Alma asks, “Honey, what in the world are we coming to?” Having watched the road signs, Ben solemnly replies “Connecticut”—putting a stop to his wife’s weltschmerz while confessing that most problems are local rather than distant. For more than thirty years, De Vries worked part-time at the New Yorker, while devoting his real talent to his novels. After he began to publish them almost annually, Kingsley Amis called him “the funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic.”

Onomastics, Puns, Apothegms, Vignettes, Malaprops

De Vries’s onomastic talent is unparalleled; indeed, his comic names are a treasure trove. Cotton Marvel is the agnostic successor to Cotton Mather, the Puritan divine. A psychiatrist is named Von Pantz. As a child Chick Swallow was read to sleep with classics and spanked with obscure quarterlies. Roderick Jellema notes that Swallow’s name suggests “something birdlike, pesky and twittering.” Chick and his friend Nickie Sherman’s favorite haunt is Moot Point, also called Wise Acres. De Vries’s novels are also rife with farcical puns. “A man,” observes Swallow, “is made of chalkstone—don’t take him for granite.” “Like the cleaning lady, we all come to dust.” “The mere thought of cremation turns some people ashen.” “The last place to have a ball is at a formal dance,’’ a De Vries character observes. ‘‘Nothing like hepatitis,” adds another, “can make one look on the world with a jaundiced eye.” An itinerant preacher decides to deliver his message while still astride his horse. He calls it “the sermon on the mount.” In The Cat’s Pajamas (1968), Hank Tattersall’s life lies all in tatters. He locks himself out of his own home but seeks to re-enter through the doggy-door, only to get his head stuck. His antagonistic alter ego ruefully reminds him that “Your end is in sight.”

De Vries’s apothegms are alternately funny and piercing. “There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.” “Topsoil is no longer dirt cheap.” “The American home is an invasion of privacy.” “Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off indefinitely.” “Let him cast the first stone who has never thrown a rock.” “What is an arsonist,” a De Vriesian character asks, “except someone who has failed to set the world on fire?” “It’s easy enough for a man to love his enemies,” declares another, “The question is whether he can forgive his benefactors.” “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be,” Swallow complains in The Tents of Wickedness (1959). “Platitudes have their place,” he adds. “They are like the lower teeth in a smile.” “Life is a carnival,” he also laments, “at which one should throw balls at the prizes.” “Love,” he sighs, “is the lotus that turns to lettuce.” Seeing worshippers hurrying to church, he offers an unbeliever’s true thanks: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Far more darkly, Swallow asserts that “Human existence is a tragedy which is perpetuated by the passion that relieves it.” Lest he relish his cynicism, his wife Crystal then asks, “Is that why you never laugh?”

De Vries’s vignettes are outrageous. A psychologist’s son walks on his heels to keep his toes clean, the better for sucking them. A wealthy New England spinster stitches obscene needlepoint. The unbelieving Tom Waltz contracts a “miraculous sickness” at Lourdes. A house is set ablaze by a short in the fire alarm. An automobile driver dies while fastening his safety belt. A mass meeting held to protest student apathy attracts an audience of four. A man works himself to death while seeking to pay off his life insurance policy early. A chiropractor attending a patient throws out his own back. A husband who demands that his wife explain why she bought a mink coat is told that she was cold. Another wife sues her husband’s mistress for alienation of his affections, demanding $ 65 in damages. After giving a lecture on comedy, a Dr. Didisheim is congratulated by a listener who slaps him in the face with a recipe for custard pie. So little does the world submit to intellectual explanation that a De Vriesian character describes philosophy as the endeavor to untie a tight wet knot while wearing boxing gloves. Another one finds the atmosphere of Heidegger’s work so rarefied that he keeps swallowing in order to pop his ears as he reads. In Let Me Count the Ways (1965), Stan Waltz pleads, like a latter-day Job, “Certainty is better than Nothingness. Oh give us the hand of God, if only the back of it.”

Nowhere are De Vries’s goofy gifts better displayed than in his mastery of the malaprop. Chick Swallow, who first appears as an advice columnist in Comfort Me with Apples, receives a letter from a woman who suspects that something is missing from her 17-year marriage, since she has never experienced an “organism” and wonders what one is. Another wife with eight children writes, full of consternation, that she has discovered her husband to be a heterosexual. “Everywhere you turn these days,” she complains, “you hear of some new kind of perversion or abnormality.” Another naif, told that her son suffers from satyriasis, asks the doctor whether it will require surgery. Stan Waltz, in Let Me Count the Ways, thinks a certain style of egg is bedeviled. His son Tom Waltz splendidly misquotes Shakespeare: “Love is not love that alters when it altercation finds.” One De Vriesian character says of another, “Deep down, he’s shallow.” Alma Marvel, whom we earlier met in Through the Fields of Clover, admires Proust for his command of the English language, while praising Beethoven’s “Erotica” Symphony. She also deplores communism because it “smacks of socialism.” Catching her daughter Greta in bed with the girl’s lover, Mrs. Wigbaldly screams at her with a furious stray shot, “Prude!” and then calls the boyfriend a slut.

Yet De Vries’s novels remain a mixed success. It is difficult to keep his protagonists distinct. He is more the master of caricature than character. He sometimes plagiarizes himself, repeating drolleries from previous works. His loopy plots often exemplify his stated aim that they contain a beginning, a muddle, and an end. They often provide little more than gossamer excuses for De Vries to display his splendid gift for gags. A suave suburbanite named Shrubsole appears briefly in Sauce for the Goose with no other discernible purpose than to offer a zany Frostian excuse for leaving a luncheon party early: He has premises to keep and miles to mow before he sleeps. With the exception of Sauce for the Goose (1981), De Vries’s finest novels came early rather than late, during a fourteen-year outpouring of excellence: The Tunnel of Love (1954), Comfort Me with Apples (1956), The Mackerel Plaza (1958), The Tents of Wickedness (1959), Through the Fields of Clover (1961), The Blood of the Lamb (1962), Let Me Count the Ways (1965), plus two sequential novels published together in 1968, The Cat’s Pajamas and Witch’s Milk.

Satire and Humor, Tears and Laughter

De Vries’s most successful work is centered on his distinction between satire and humor. “Humorists are more easily housebroken,” says De Vries. Unlike satirists, they are too busy laughing at themselves to hike a leg and spray those who are not as they are. Neither do they have leisure time for pointing fingers of accusation. Satirists are often social reformers, attempting to pound the world into shape with their hammers. “Humor is more charitable [than] satire,” De Vries declares, “and, like charity, suffereth long and is kind.” This allusion to 1 Corinthians 13 is not gratuitous. It undergirds De Vries’s fullest declaration:

I’d say, very roughly, that the difference between satire and humor is that the satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive—often to release him again for another chance. Swift destroyed the human race; Mark Twain and Thurber enable it to go on. We human beings are all absurd variations of one another . . . and this is what comedy of all kinds puts down on paper. . . . I don’t think I shoot to kill. If I did I’d been dead long ago, since, like [other] humorists, I’m my own best butt. I don’t think I have enough lemon in me to be a satirist.

Ted Peachum is perhaps the butt of De Vries’s occasional penchant for sentimentality when, in Consenting Adults (1980), he describes himself as a self-pitying Stoic and a jilted Narcissus: he has a crush on himself, but the feeling is not returned.[2]

De Vries the confessed humorist “does not laugh so much at mankind as he invites mankind to laugh at itself.” The solemn and the ludicrous often dwell cheek by jowl. “You can’t talk about the serious and the comic separately,” he opines, “and still be talking about life, any more than you can independently discuss hydrogen and oxygen and still be dealing with water.” Osgood Wallop attests, in Mrs. Wallop (1970), that “laughter must have an honest root in reality, and that means a necessary melancholy undercurrent.” De Vries chose his epigraph for The Tents of Wickedness (1959) from Sydney Smith, the nineteenth-century Anglican wit: “You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave.” Saturnine solemnity may be silly, whereas slam-bang hilarity may be incisive. “I’d rather offer the reader an honest surfboard ride,” our unabashed stuntman confesses, “than pack him into a diving bell and then lower him into what turns out to be three feet of water. As many serious writers do.” De Vries pitches for the belly laugh no less than the sly grin. Hence his claim that “You laugh at that which, if there were more of it, would be painful. Humor deals with that portion of our suffering that is exempt from tragedy.” Tragic heroes such as King Lear suffer because they are “more sinned against than sinning,” as the ruined monarch protests. De Vries’s comic characters seek no exemption: they often suffer because they are more sinning than sinned against, more guilty than innocent, more worthy of saving than damning—even as our diaphragms ache from laughing at their redemption.

It is often noted that Scripture reports Jesus as having wept but never as having laughed. De Vries has Stew Smackenfelt, the narrator-protagonist of Forever Panting (1973), correct the record. He insists that “Christ may have been a superb mimic, not just a satirist.” He was “really taking the scribes and Pharisees off about straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel and so on. Burlesquing them with his impressions. Mugging like hell.”

The Dutch Calvinists on South Halstead Street never encountered such a Jesus. “We were the elect,” De Vries confessed in an interview, “and the elect are barred from everything . . . except heaven.” The young De Vries found their world to be oppressive. His parents displayed a copy of the Apostles’ Creed on the kitchen wall, the better to inculcate their children in the Faith. When young De Vries repeatedly gazed up at this warning—“And he shall come to judge the quick and the dead”—he pictured a fleet-footed Jesus outrunning him, chasing him down, sending him to hell. Little wonder that De Vries wanted to escape this Jerusalem of hyperbolic belief. Thus did he embark on “a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress in reverse; as though our young Christian, his back turned on the City of God, sets his face like flint for the beckoning glamours of Vanity Fair.” Among these fissiparous Dutch Calvinists, De Vries formed “a splinter group of one.” He fled, as we have seen, into the very Babylon of unbelief, the New Yorker. Yet rather than embracing an insouciant libertinism among like-minded dandies, De Vries discovered how dull can be the products of refinement, how strict the conformities of the epicure, how laborious the leisures of the flesh. Even if regrettably, De Vries admits that he became a “backslidden unbeliever.”

The Mackerel Plaza: Marooned in the Mercies of Marriage

De Vries’s backslidden unbelief is finely figured in The Mackerel Plaza (1958). The Reverend Andrew Mackerel (also called “Holy Mackerel”) is the teller of his own tale, although he sometimes speaks in the third person, so great is his self-estimate. Yet he has recently failed to publish his book entitled Maturity Comes of Age. Even so, he has succeeded as pastor of People’s Liberal, “the first split-level church in America.” It is long on relevance and short on doctrine because it seeks to meet the needs of “the whole man.” Its architectural layout is a mishmash—a ballroom, a parlor, a gymnasium, a theater, an expandable psychiatric wing, but no sanctuary at all, only “a small worship area at one end.” In proper deference to biblical higher criticism, the pulpit is built of four different fruitwoods, the better to signify that the gospels cannot be harmonized. A huge interdenominational mobile has also been suspended from the ceiling of the church’s foyer, less in fear than celebration of “the Pauline stricture against those ‘blown by every wind of doctrine.’”

If we were to regard De Vries as offering a cockamamie critique of liberal religion such as no serious person would ever espouse, we would be wrong. He is comically exaggerating the kind of faith that many of his fellow sophisticates embrace. They tremble not at the dread of heresy but only at the fear of seeming anything less than au courant. Much like De Vries himself, they dwell in suburban Avalon, Connecticut, living in “hand to mouth luxury, never knowing where their next installment of taxes or the payment on their third car is coming from. They get off the same bar car at the same time every night.” Nor have they ever swum in anything but a pool in their own backyard. It is a new kind of provincialism. When a flood engulfs a neighboring town, these clueless partygoers send cocktail snacks to the victims—“vichyssoise, artichoke hearts, smoked clams and even trout pâté.” The otherwise unruffled Mackerel is taken aback when he imagines these distraught souls sitting on the roofs of their floating homes while eating tomato aspic and calf’s-foot jelly.

Yet it is Mackerel himself who is the chief butt of De Vries’s joke. More than a decade in advance of the so-called “death of God” theology, he is a convinced necro-theologian. “The final proof of God’s omnipotence,” he announces with unbated breath, is that “he need not exist in order to save us.” It is the idea rather than the reality of God that matters. It represents all of humanity’s skull-cracking attempts to explain the universe and to project mundane meaning into cosmic terms. Like a latter-day Feuerbach, Mackerel believes that the calling of true Christianity is to declare its own bankruptcy—“theology, by annihilating itself, sets religion free.”

What kind of preaching could such a self-canceling religion produce? “Dearly beloved,” Mackerel begins one of his sermons, “the Bible is at worst a hodgepodge of myths, superstitions, and theologies utterly repugnant to a man of taste and sensibility, let alone a true Christian.” The ire of the usually sedate Mackerel is kindled only when one of his church members has a huge neon JESUS SAVES sign erected outside the pastor’s window. Furious at this threat to both aesthetic and economic values, Mackerel screams in protest: “How do you expect me to write a sermon with that thing staring me in the face? How do you expect me to turn out anything fit for civilized consumption?” Mackerel devotes his edifying discourses, for example, to the superiority of American over British pronunciation. The British say “phen” when they should say “phone,” as we Americans properly do. Whereupon an ardent Harvardian leaps to his feet and shouts—not “Amen” but “Hyah! Hyah!”

De Vries flirts with the satirist’s desire to slay stupidities in this wacky send-up of vapid religion. Yet the humorist wins in the end when, as we have heard him say, he brings his prey back alive in order to release him again for another chance. Mackerel’s second chance comes via Frank Turnbull and Hester Pedlock. Turnbull is a lecher who fears that, in punishment for his sins, he may have bequeathed his sexual obsessions to his son. This youth is a preppy educationist-cum-psychologist who has privately published his term paper entitled “Some Aspects of Unconscious Homosexuality in Mutt and Jeff.” Chiefly, however, Turnbull has come to confess his own sexual sins. Mackerel will not listen. He dismisses Turnbull’s fornications as mere “carnal peccancies” springing from his middle-aged loss of libido.

As his name indicates, Turnbull will not be averted. He proceeds to catechize his pastor, explaining that Jesus saves him from the sin that otherwise damns him to hell. Heedless, Mackerel urges him to “forget about Jesus.” “Try to get a whole new viewpoint.” When Turnbull pleads that he is a miserable offender—a “guilty, lifelong, rotten, damnable sinner”—Mackerel accuses him of putting on “airs.” “Poor man, that he needs the doctrine of the fall to invest him with a little glamour? Pitiful ego, that must sit in sackcloth and ashes and fancy itself the butt of Reprobation.” For Mackerel, Turnbull is a hopeless case:

“Another backslider,” I thought wearily. It was this damned religious revival. They were everywhere, these converts, defecting to pie-in-the-sky from the hard-won positions they have been urged and hauled by rational and honest men. Looking at the codger, I thought, Can this man be educated. Or is he beyond salvation?

The implied question, of course, is whether Mackerel can be salvaged. De Vries provides no easy answers. The members of People’s Liberal Church are not a whit scandalized, for instance, when their pastor is thrown in jail for fighting with a street-corner evangelist. Instead, they welcome him back by raising “their voices in the strains of ‘Funiculi-funicula.’” Mackerel finally oversteps the limits by indulging in outrageous sexual word-play from the pulpit. Rather than firing him, the congregation sends their pastor to a retreat center for therapeutic recovery. There he is confronted by Von Pantz, the resident psychiatrist. To Mackerel’s horror, he discovers that Von Pantz has recently been converted from believing his patients need to be cured to believing they need to be saved. Announcing to the startled Mackerel that he is “in the grip of sin,” Von Pantz transfixes poor Andrew with the question he least wants to confront: “Reverend Mackerel, do you now and before God, accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

Mackerel of course rejects such “godforsaken theology,” as he wildly misnames it. He sticks with his own gospel of “the obligation to evolve”—the sweating trek “up from the muck of this rotten ball . . . into something resembling human grace and wit and beauty.” As a denier of divine providence, Mackerel also opposes an ecumenical prayer service beseeching God to end a terrible drought afflicting the region. Calling it “the community rain dance,” he offers his own bleak petition: “Let us hope that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God.” When, alas, the Lord sends an all too miraculous flood—a cloudburst from a cloudless sky—Mackerel mocks it as “Jehovah’s wetness.” The pastor whose faith was founded on the solid-rock conviction that miracles cannot happen is crushed by a miracle. “I have no more faith,” he laments. Yet because his religion was a mere “workable illusion,” he suffers no serious loss. He compares it to “losing a wooden leg in an accident.”

The faithless Mackerel is given his undeserved second chance via Hester Pedlock. She is his housekeeper as well as the saintly sister of his deceased wife. Though she possesses the sexual vitality of Hawthorne’s sublime adulteress, Hester is no lascivious live-in maid. She insists that she and Mackerel enjoy their carnal life within the bounds of marriage—the institution that will perhaps give concrete substance to Mackerel’s abstract religion as well as his abstract lust. De Vries’s hilarious plot convolutions trace the pastor’s failure to escape this marriage. Suffice it to say that, while the Reverend Andrew Mackerel does not recover authentic Christianity, he finds its distant cousin when he becomes padlocked in wedlock with Hester.

De Vries is no naive optimist who regards marriage as a universal panacea or believes that it can never go fatally awry. Ben and Alma Marvel celebrate their golden wedding anniversary a decade in advance, unsure that their marriage can last another ten years. Yet De Vries’s married couples rarely separate into solitary self-sufficiency. In Let Me Count the Ways, Stanley Waltz is so enamored of his wife Elsie that he sneaks outside and peers into her bedroom as she undresses at night, until he is arrested as a Peeping Tom. Often inadvertently, sometimes even against their wills, De Vries’s couples discover that they cannot live without the grace enabled by connubial companionship. Husbands and wives keep stumbling into love, backpedaling into hope, recovering their marriages despite themselves.

“You’re the salt of the earth, you louse,” confesses one De Vriesian spouse to another. “I wouldn’t divorce you,” admits another, “if you were the last man on the earth.” It is while screaming diatribes at each other that Chick Swallow discovers his incurable love for his wife Crystal: “As she threw the suitcase on the bed and began flinging things into it with the declaration that she was leaving and never wanted to see me again as long as she lived, then ordered me out and slammed the door after me, I knew, as I had never known before, that she was the woman for me.” A fine confirming moment occurs in a bar when Chick encounters an old flame who offers him a romp in the hay. “Thanks just the same,” the contentedly married Swallow tells her, “but I don’t want any pleasures interfering with my happiness.”

Given his high regard for marriage as the institution that, even when it is failing, may still signal our essential mutuality, De Vries is impatient with its cultured despisers. In fact, he mounts his comic counterattack against the attackers. Though narrated impersonally, Sauce for the Goose is told wholly from Daisy Dobbin’s angle. Like other De Vriesian protagonists, Daisy longs to escape the Celestial City for Vanity Fair. She has ambition. She wants out of the cultural backwater of Terre Haute and into the beau monde of Grand Rapids. Better still would be the discovery that she was not born to the ordinary parents who have given her such an ordinary name. Thus does Daisy dream of the possibility that she has been adopted, and that her real home is a chateau in the south of France called Domblemy. Denied such an exotic provenance, she seeks its academic equivalent by attending Kidderminster, a posh New England college.

There, Ms. Dobbin meets a student who has altered her name from Roberta Diesel, to Bobsy, to Bo, sometimes even to “the Diesel.” Ms. Diesel is indeed a truck-strong gynocrat. She smokes panatelas and dresses like a stevedore. She wears her hair in two large coils, like an adder ready to strike any male chauvinist who hoves into view. Hence, the narrator’s description of Diesel as a furious feminist “beating off men who weren’t trying to get to her.” Perhaps this is why she resembles Will Rogers in every respect but one: she has never met a man she liked.

As editor of a magazine called Femme, Ms. Diesel assigns Ms. Dobbins the task of exposing sexism in high places, especially the New York business world. Her job is to document what all right thinkers know to be fact: “The woman as victim. The woman as sexual n****r. A female employee having to sleep her way up the corporate ladder.” There is no doubt that such sexist injustice exists, but Daisy has trouble detecting it. The first company she tries to infiltrate turns out to be a “den of rectitude.” Though she is a “born-again atheist,” Daisy is reduced to the ignominy of praying for some Lothario to make a pass at her. When at last a man makes his move, his aim is to find out whether Daisy has made a “decision for Christ.” Already, the specter of male concern for something other than sex has reared its grim visage, putting Daisy on the defensive.

Despite this initial unsuccess at finding abusers of women, Daisy Dobbin determines to remain, like Bobsy Diesel, what the narrator describes as “one of those moral pugilists who relish their wrongs more than they do their rights.” At another company called the Metropole, Daisy at last finds the beast she has so long assumed to be lurking within every man’s pants. Even his name seems to indicate his phallic intentions: Dirk Dolfin, the Dutch-born company president. He is indeed an uncouth brute who likens women in the various sexual positions to sausages being turned in order to get them brown all around.

Yet Dolfin is hardly the compleat lecher. His idea of pillow talk, for example, is to discuss the Synod of Dort and the difference between infra- and supra-lapsarianism. Dolfin is such a compliant chauvinist, moreover, that he takes Daisy to a feminist restaurant. Dirk jokes that this ideological eatery has been established by women who wanted to get out of the kitchen. De Vries’s narrator ponders the matter discerningly:

How could food be feminist? . . . What had any shared orientation among restaurant colleagues to do with the food they served (which in this case was creditable standard fare)? It was like the organic theatres, whose productions presumably contained no additives, or the environmental bookstore downtown where volumes supposedly free of pollutants could be purchased. It was all more evidence of how the basically cogent could self-propel into fatuity.

In violation of all her theoretical principles—and despite repeating ten “Betty Friedans” in times of trouble—Daisy finds Dolfin amiable past all understanding, genial beyond all toleration, indeed her very heart’s desire. The mystery of mutual regard is revealed most amusingly when Dirk takes Daisy to his apartment for an apparent seduction. Dolfin’s real intentions prove to be less erotic than domestic: he wants Daisy to scrub a stain from his expensive new suit. Not only does his request contravene all of her feminist precepts, it also converts her into a virtual char. That Daisy cleans the soiled suit does not prove her a slave to chauvinist convention. On the contrary, it reveals her to be a free woman liberated from the fortress of an über-moralism bent on ethical scorekeeping. Daisy submits to Dolfin’s request quite simply because she loves him—even in his selfishness. All of this goes right past Daisy, of course, who thinks she has committed the unpardonable sin:

They watched as she bent to her chore in the kitchen, all of them: Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Pankhurst, and their no less formidable latter-day reincarnations, Friedan, Steinem, Greer. There they had stood, their mouths compressed in disapproval, their brows furrowed, their arms folded on their breasts, rank on rank, the army of unalterable law. He called her a jewel as he stood watching over her shoulder, and they all heard.

“The army of unalterable law” refers not chiefly to the battalions of axe-wielding gynocrats who would massacre Daisy, but to the brittle moralists who believe that human existence can be lived without reliance on transcendent grace. Daisy is not a failed feminist, therefore, so much as a failed moralist. She is wholly unsuccessful in defending her own rights. She is equally unable to mete out punishments and rewards to others. “We can’t always give people their just deserts,” thinks Daisy, “because where would that leave even the best of us?” She is drawn ineluctably to Dolfin because he shares her own fundamental condition: he too is a fellow sufferer, and thus a man all the more appealing, endearing, forgivable. There are obstacles to their union, of course, and the novel’s plot reveals how they wackily manage to hurdle them. Dolfin warns Daisy that “if love is what makes the world go ’round, no wonder that it wobbles on its axis.” Yet in the end they are married amid salty disclaimers. “I’m no bargain,” Dolfin assures Daisy, who needs no convincing. “In a day when raspberries are four dollars a half-pint,” she replies, “you’re no gyp, Dirk.”

Such a madcap ending reveals why Sauce for the Goose is far more than an absurd send-up of women’s lib. De Vries is no reactionary who fears that women may break their ancient shackles. He is, instead, a comic convinced that “the problem of the sexes is coexistence . . . the same as it is for two great political powers. Not to let rivalry become enmity.” The often-rivalrous relation between husbands and wives may be less a matter of unequal rights than equal wrongs—“the husband trapped in an office when he wants to write, just as she is in a kitchen and wants to paint.” Yet when the bonds of marital injustice are broken via divorce, there remains the danger of casting out one demon only to admit seven others. Inequity must indeed be combated by reason and knowledge, but self-righteousness ensnares the enlightened even more than the benighted. “The trouble with treating people as equals,” says the narrator of The Prick of Noon (1985), “is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.” In De Vries’s fiction, marriage is often the rock upon which a censorious egalitarianism founders. We could become gross scolds but for the courtesy and generosity—indeed, the gracious inequality—implicit in sexual attraction and marriage.

De Vries’s connubial comedies resound with a laughter that derives, at least distantly, from the Calvinist doctrines he could never fully abandon—election is unconditional, grace irresistible. God refuses to unwed his unfaithful people, just as Yahweh instructs Hosea not to divorce his faithless wife Gomer. Hence the faithful teaching of the apostatizing Peter De Vries: we should not abandon our marriages—despite many justifiable reasons for doing so—without the hope of eventual reconciliation. They provide a large earthly analogue of the grace that maroons us in mercy.

The Blood of the Lamb: The Wrenching Redemption of Don Wanderhope

The single book for which Peter De Vries will longest be remembered is The Blood of the Lamb (1962). It is far from his masterpiece, especially when compared to The Mackerel Plaza (1958) and Let Me Count the Ways (1965), his finest novels. Yet it remains his most poignantly autobiographical work, even as it departs drastically from his other work. Far from being another comic romp, it offers a fictional anti-theodicy as fierce as the one mounted by Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov.[3] Like Ivan, Don Wanderhope, the protagonist-narrator, he is not an atheist but an anti-theist. He believes that God exists and that he is monstrously evil for failing to stop the horrific suffering of innocent children.

Like De Vries, Wanderhope is a Dutch-descended Chicagoan. The opening scene vividly revisits what life may have been like in the De Vries household on South Halstead Street, where vehement theological debates were standard fare. It is focused on Don’s 19-year old brother Louie, who is dying of pneumonia. As a biology student at the University of Chicago, Louie has learned the popular formula for evolution: Phylogeny recapitulates Ontogeny. It proves, for Louie, that human embryos share early developmental stages of other animals, such as gill slits and tails, that were later sloughed off. It also implies that our species has undergone epochal changes making the earth exponentially older than 6000 years. This is what the family’s Dutch Calvinist pastor is preparing to argue in his next sermon—even as he keeps his notes from fluttering away in the breeze by anchoring them with “a piece of fossil rock from the Paleozoic era, five hundred million years old.”[4]

Such witty irony, far from being absent, is also at work in Louie’s dying. Rather than regarding his brother as “a flower no sooner blown than blasted” (Milton), Don makes a virtual compact with Louie to find not a whit of consolation in the bromides being uttered around his death-bed—certainly not to pray for divine deliverance.[5] Like Louie, Don regards such supposed hope as an abomination:

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away”—there must be balm of some sort in that for men whose treasures have been confiscated. These misplaced Dutch . . . must have had their reasons for worshipping a god scarcely distinguishable from the devil they feared. . . . All the theologies inherent in the minister’s winding drone came down to this: Believe in God and don’t put anything past him. . . . Why doesn’t He pick on somebody his size? (25).

God indeed exists, but he is an evil deity.

Wanderhope does not become a Don Juan because he seeks to escape his sorrow over Louie’s death but because he is a Casanova to the core, a gay blade seeking to bed every lusty woman who will consent to lie with him—often in unlikely places, even beneath the bushes at Chicago park. The most troubling of Don’s liaisons occurs much later with Rena Baker, a dying tubercular woman. She asks whether they should pray for her healing. He replies by voicing his acrid anti-theism: “Asking him to cure you—or me, or anybody implies a personal being who does us this dirt. The prayer then is a plea to have a heart. To knock it off. I find the thought repulsive. I prefer thinking we’re the victims of chance than to dignifying any such force with the name of Providence” (104). Thus does doomed Rena welcome Don’s hand under her gown to provide them a brief spasm of pleasure.

At the same time he is making his many sexual conquests, Wanderhope is also trying to finagle his way into the world of the swank and the suave—“the urbane drawl, the prattled wit, the indifference to the answers at the other end” (57). To do so, he must not let his hosts learn his darkest secret: he works on a garbage truck with his father, who has redundantly named his company Sanitary Sanitation, much to Don’s chagrin. In perhaps the novel’s most hilarious scene, the elder Wanderhope backs his truck so close to a garbage pit that it tumbles in. He emerges from this fetid Gehenna “wearing, like a beret, one half a cantaloupe rind.” He then disappears from view “singing the doxology” (52).

The final two-thirds of the novel are devoted to Don, his wife Greta, and their daughter Carol. After conceiving Carol in their torrid lovemaking, they somewhat ruefully agree to marry. Yet Greta is soon engulfed with guilt over a previous affair with a married man that had led to a pregnancy. Her marital eye also continues to wander. Gradually, she falls into irreparable melancholy, refuses to see a psychiatrist, embalms her sorrows in alcohol, and eventually kills herself. Rather than being paralyzed with grief at Greta’s death—and thus at being left to rear Carol alone—Don does not feel burdened. The girl is witty, fun-loving, adorable. “This was a dream child,” he confesses. “Hair like cornsilk, blue bird’s wings eyes, and the carriage that resembled a fairy sprite. One would not have been surprised to see her take off and fly away in a glimmer of unsuspected wings” (165).

Then, when Carol is twelve, calamity crushes their idyllic life. She is diagnosed with leukemia—the disease that had taken Katinka and Peter De Vries’s own daughter Emily in 1960 at the same age. Don has reached the precipice he had long feared: “There is a point when life, having showered us with jewels for nothing begins to exact life’s blood for paste” (151). Not at first knowing the dread final outcome, Wanderhope believes that, whatever happens, he will be sustained by the creed he composed for Carol during one of her remissions:

The quest for Meaning is foredoomed. Human life “means” nothing. But that is not to say that it’s not worth living. What does a Debussy Arabesque “mean,” or a rainbow or a rose? A man delights in all of these, knowing himself to be no more—a wisp of music and a haze of dreams dissolving against the sun. Man has only his own two feet to stand on, his own human trinity to see him through: Reason, Courage, and Grace. And the first plus the second equals the third (167).

Though Wanderhope later learns that his dying daughter found it helpful, he regrets that his humanist manifesto amounted to so little. Perhaps because he remembers the old hymn, “There’s a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins,” Don begins employing overtly Christian tropes, if only in anti-Christians ways. Having described Carol’s needle-punctures as “stigmata”—i.e., as wounds akin to Christ’s own—Wanderhope likens her to an innocent lamb being led to the slaughter by leukemia. It is fitting that Carol dies at 3:00 in the afternoon, the hour “when the children were putting their schoolbooks away, and getting ready to go home” (236). It is also, of course, the hour of Christ’s death.

Earlier, as Carol lay near death, Don had engaged the maleficent God in what he calls the Great Debate “between two voices now scarcely for a moment silent in my brain.”

D: “I ask, my Lord, permission to despair.”
G: “On what grounds?”
D: “The fairy is now a troll. The spine is gone. She supports herself on her breastbone.”
G: “Do you do as well?”
D: “Do you exist?”
G: “If I say yes, it will only be as a voice in your mind. Make me say it then, and be quiet.”
D: “Are God and Herod then one?”
G: “What do you mean?”
D: “The Slaughter of the Innocents. Who creates a perfect blossom to crush it? Children dying in this building, mice in the [experimental lab next door]. It’s all the same to him who marks the sparrow’s fall.”
G: “I forgive you.”
D: “I cannot say the same.” (225)

Don cannot forgive God when Carol dies, especially as he beholds her looking “like some mangled flower, or like a bird that had been pelted to earth in a storm” (237). He is filled, instead, with justifiable rage:

How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress. . . . Progress doubles our tenure in this vale of tears. Man is a mistake, to be corrected only by his abolition, which he gives promise of seeing to himself. Oh, let him pass, and leave the earth to the flowers that carpet the earth wherever he explodes his triumphs. Man is inconsolable, thanks to that eternal “Why?” when there is no Why, that question mark twisted like a fishhook into the human heart. “Let there be light,” we cry, and only the dawn breaks (242-43).

Speaking of himself in the third person and the past tense, Wanderhope seems to make a last-minute return to the Faith he had forsaken: “Thus Wanderhope was found at that place for which the diabolists of his literary youth . . . was said to be the only alternative to the muzzle of a pistol: the foot of the Cross” (238). It is crucial to note why Don stands beneath the crucified Christ. It is not because he is his newfound Savior, but because he is a fellow sufferer dwelling in the communion of the pitiable. Wanderhope’s (and the novel’s) final words are sentimental to the core, alas: “How long is the mourner’s bench upon which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship, all of us, brief links, ourselves, in the eternal pity” (246). This is maudlin. It stands at a far remove from Aristotle’s declaration, in the Nicomachean Ethics, that “Friends are of help to the young by protecting them from mistakes; to the elderly by looking after them and making up for their failing powers of action; to those in the prime of life, to help them in doing good things.“ True friendship issues in virtuous action, not flaccid self-pity.

Don Wanderhope unwittingly displays the nature of such action in the novel’s most crucial scene. He prepares for it by having Carol twice repeat the truth she had learned from her childhood friend Omar about “the sacred subject of the thrown pie” that he calls a “ceremony”:

“Have you ever noticed, Daddy, . . . that after the one guy throws his pie and it’s the other guy’s turn, the first guy doesn’t resist or make any attempt to defend himself? He just stands there and takes it. He even waits for it, his face sort of ready. Then when he gets it, he still waits for a second before wiping it out of his eyes, doing it deliberately, kind of solemn” (191).

Wanderhope had often passed by the Church of St. Catherine of Siena during visits with his dying daughter. On the morning of Carol’s death, Wanderhope had actually entered the church. He had taken with him a fully-iced cake that Mrs. Brodhag, the faithful family companion and housekeeper, had baked for Carol. He laid it on a pew and then forgot it, while offering this plangent prayer, one of the most touching in all of Anglophone literature. It deserves quoting in full, so keen is Don’s eye, so fierce his grief:

I do not ask that she be spared to me, but that her life be spared to her. Or give us a year. We will spend it as we have spent the last, missing nothing. We will mark the dance of every hour between the snowdrop and the snow: crocus to tulip to iris to rose. We will note not only the azalea’s crimson flowers but the red halo that encircles a while the azalea’s root when her petals are shed, also the white halo that rings for a week the foot of the old catalpa tree. Later we will prize the chrysanthemums which last so long, almost as long as paper flowers, perhaps because they know in blooming not to bloom. We will seek out the leaves turning in the little-praised bushes and the unadvertised trees. Everyone loves the sweet, neat blossom of the hawthorn in spring, but who lingers over the olive drab of her leaf in autumn? We will. We will note the lost yellows in the tangles of that bush that spills over the Howards’ stone wall, the meek hues among which it seems to hesitate before committing itself to red, and next year learn its name. We will seek out those subtleties so lost in the blare of oaks and maples, like flutes and woodwinds drowned in brasses and drums. When winter comes, we will let no snow fall ignored. We will again watch the first blizzard from her window like figures locked snug in a glass paperweight. “Pick one out and follow it to the ground!” she will say again. We will feed the plain birds that stay to cheer us through the winter, and when spring returns we shall be the first out, to catch the snowdrop’s first white whisper in the wood. All this we ask, with the remission of our sins, in Christ’s name. Amen (228-29).

On returning to his car after Carol has died, Don suddenly remembers the cake and finds it still there. He takes it outside and hurls it at the crucified Christ hanging over the church door, heaving it precisely onto Jesus’ face, just beneath the crown of thorns:

Then through scalded eyes I seem to see the hands free themselves of the nails and move slowly toward the soiled face. Very slowly, very deliberately, with infinite patience, the icing was wiped from the eyes and flung away. I could see it fall in clumps to the porch steps. Then the cheeks were wiped down with the same sense of grave and gentle ritual, and with all the kind sobriety of one whose voice could be heard saying, “Suffer the little children to come unto me . . . for of such is the kingdom of heaven” (237).

This is a profoundly Christian scene, even if Peter De Vries did not intend it as such. He allows the backslidden Don Wanderhope to slide back, if only for a moment, into the Faith he thought he had once and for all abandoned. Albeit unawares, Wanderhope affirms that Christ patiently receives the flung cakes and pies of justifiable human fury over unjustifiable human misery, absorbing the wrath into himself. “With his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). While Don professes no such biblical faith—certainly no return from his rock-hard unbelief to Dutch Calvinism—he makes clear that neither will he “decline the burden of resumption. The Western Gate is closed” (243). Rather than firing the sunset gun of suicide, he will go forward with his life, bearing a new burden in a new way.

Though his name echoes wanhoop, the Dutch word for despair, Wanderhope still affirms Calvin’s doctrine of sola gratia, if only in reverse order: “We are indeed saved by grace in the end—but to give, not take” (243). Hence, his final vow to imbue his life with “the throb of compassion rather than the breath of consolation”:

Time heals nothing—which should make us the better able to minister. There may be grief beyond the reach of solace, but none worthy of the name that does not set free the springs of sympathy. Blessed are they that comfort, for they too have mourned, may be more likely the human truth (246).

***

When queried about the way he hoped to be remembered, De Vries kept his antic stance: “All I ask is that [my readers] say, ‘We know now what they couldn’t see then. He was six months ahead of his time.’”

Peter the burlesquer was blessedly wrong. At their best, his novels memorably embody what, again with fine irony, he called “the eternal severities”—the timeless, time-laden truths about the tragicomic human condition. Thus should Peter De Vries be crowned with both the Brussels sprouts of comedy and the laurel wreath of tragedy. He remains, simultaneously, our master of hilarity and melancholy.

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