The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [0]
CLASSICS
ELAINE DUNDY was born in New York City, has lived in Paris and London, and was married for a time to theater critic Kenneth Tynan. She has written plays, novels, and biographies, including Elvis and Gladys. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, and Vogue among other publications. A resident of Los Angeles, her most recent book is her autobiography, Life Itself!
TERRY TEACHOUT is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the music critic of Commentary. His books include The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, and A Terry Teachout Reader. He writes about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.
THE DUD AVOCADO
ELAINE DUNDY
Introduction by
TERRY TEACHOUT
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Introduction
THE DUD AVOCADO
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
Afterword
Copyright and More Information
INTRODUCTION
It is the destiny of some good novels to be perpetually rediscovered, and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, I fear, is one of them. Like William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf or James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor, it bobs to the surface every decade or so, at which time somebody writes an essay about how good it is and somebody else clamors for it to be returned to print, followed in short order by the usual slow retreat into the shadows. In a better-regulated society, of course, the authors of such books would be properly esteemed, and on rare occasions one of them does contrive to clamber into the pantheon—Dawn Powell, the doyenne of oft-rediscovered authors, finally made it into the Library of America in 2001—but in the normal course of things, such triumphs are as rare as an honest stump speech.
The Dud Avocado is further handicapped by being funny. Americans like comedy but don’t trust it, a fact proved each year when the Oscars are handed out: our national motto seems to be Lord Byron’s “Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter/Sermons and soda-water the day after.” To be sure, The Dud Avocado is perfectly serious, but it preaches no sermons, and what it has to say about life must be read between the punch lines. That was what kept Powell under wraps for so long—nobody thought that a writer so amusing could really be any good, especially if she was also a woman—and it has been working against Elaine Dundy ever since she published The Dud Avocado, her first novel, in 1958. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that The Dud Avocado has never been out of print in England. I’m no Anglophile, but I readily admit that the Brits are better at this sort of thing. Unlike us, they treat their comic novelists right, perhaps because Shakespeare and Jane Austen taught them early on that (as Constant Lambert once observed apropos of the delicious music of Chabrier) “seriousness is not the same as solemnity.”
Now The Dud Avocado is out again in the United States, and I’ll bet money that some dewy-eyed young critic is going to read it for the first time and write an essay about how Sally Jay Gorce, Elaine Dundy’s adorably scatty heroine, was the spiritual grandmother of Bridget Jones. To which I say … nothing. I actually kind of like poor old Bridget, but if you want to properly place The Dud Avocado in the grand scheme of things, you should look not forward to Chick Lit but backward to Daisy Miller. Sally is Daisy debauched, an innocent ambassador from the New World who crosses the Atlantic, loses her virginity, and learns in the fullness of time that experience, while not all it’s cracked up to be, is nothing if not inevitable—and that Europe, for all its sophisticated ways, is no longer the keeper of the flame of Western civilization. Paris may be “the rich man’s plaything, the craftsman’s tool, the artist’s anguish, and the world’s largest champagne factory,” but you don’t have to live there to live, and once Sally gets to know some of its not-so-nice residents, she has a flash of full-fledged epiphany that is no less believable for having popped up in the middle of a comic novel: