The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [1]
“They are corrupt—corrupt,” I kept saying to myself, over and over again, as I paced around the room. It was the first time I’d ever used that word about people I actually knew, and again the idea that I could take a moral stand—or rather, that I couldn’t avoid taking one—filled me with the same confusion it had that morning.
I don’t want to leave the impression that The Dud Avocado is in any way po-faced. It is above all a book about youth, about a clever girl’s realization that she is up to her ears in possibility, and every page bears the breathless stamp of her new-found freedom: “Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I’ve suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.” In the very first sentence, Sally tells us that it is “a hot, peaceful, optimistic sort of day in September,” the kind of day that Ned Rorem, another clever young American who came to Paris in the Fifties, must surely have had in mind when he turned Robert Hillyer’s “Early in the Morning” into a perfect little song about what it feels like to find love on the rue François Premier: “I was twenty and a lover/And in Paradise to stay,/Very early in the morning/Of a lovely summer day.” If you read it without laughing, you have no sense of humor, but if you read it without shedding at least one tear, you have no memory.
The Dud Avocado was extremely well received on its initial publication. “It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm),” Groucho Marx declared in a fan letter to the author. “If this was actually your life, I don’t know how the hell you got through it.” It was, more or less, and Groucho didn’t know the half of it, for in 1951 Dundy had the bad luck to marry Kenneth Tynan, a great drama critic who turned out to be a comprehensively lousy husband, and though she would publish other good books, she never became quite as famous as she should have been. To make matters worse, Dundy began to lose her sight shortly after writing an alarmingly candid memoir cheerily titled Life Itself! in which she told her side of the unhappy story of her marriage. By then The Dud Avocado, her best book, had already gone through three or four cycles of obscurity and revival. Perhaps this long-overdue new edition will bring it the permanence it so richly deserves.
But even if The Dud Avocado is doomed to remain one of those novels that is loved by a few and unknown to everyone else, we lucky few who love it will never stop recommending it to our friends, for it is so full of charm and life and something not unlike wisdom that there will always be readers who open it up and see at once that it is just their kind of book. Every time I read it, I find myself tripping over sentences I long to have written: “A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.” “It’s amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don’t know; it’s only the people you do know who confuse you.” “I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.” I rank it alongside Cakes and Ale, Scoop, Lucky Jim, and Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born, a quartet of soufflé-light entertainments that will still be giving pleasure long after most of the Serious Novels of the twentieth century are dead, buried, and forgotten. A chick litterateuse could do a lot worse for herself.
—TERRY TEACHOUT
THE DUD AVOCADO
PART ONE
“I want you to meet Miss Gorce, she’s in the embalming game.”
—JAMES THURBER (Men, Women, and Dogs)
ONE
IT WAS A hot, peaceful, optimistic sort of day in September. It was around eleven in the morning, I remember, and I was drifting down the boulevard St. Michel, thoughts rising in my head like little puffs of smoke, when suddenly a voice bellowed into my ear: “Sally