The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [123]
But isn’t it the end, the very end?
I mean Japan for a honeymoon. It’s so cool. It’s so chic. It’s so suave and so sleek and exotic. It’s the end, it’s the end …! It’s the last word.
It’s zymotic.
AFTERWORD
I look back in wonder at The Dud Avocado: in wonder at its initial reception and at the many times it’s been reissued—for years it was even republished alongside of every new book of mine that came out. I look back in wonder at the 1950s. The dull conformity of those years as they are generally imagined is something I don’t recognize. I look back in wonder at London in particular, where whole areas destroyed during the Second World War still lay in rubble. But London was in the midst of a renaissance for artists. In literature and playwriting the Angry Young Men were making their splash and new young actors like Richard Burton, Peter O Toole, Albert Finney, and Peter Finch were coming into their own. London was an orderly place where it was safe to take risks. Optimism was the rule of the day and I was there.
I’d come to London as a young actress from a year in Paris escaping my family and waiting to be discovered. I had a wonderful time though my career was almost invisible. I wonder now that I still nurtured the impossible dream in the face of reality. In London, aside from bit parts, I was unlucky in my career but I was lucky in love. There was a theatrical club much frequented by all the young lions on their way up. They all gathered to eat inexpensively and be made blissful by the lethal house cider. It was there I met Ken Tynan, recently down from Oxford, and already the enfant terrible of Britain’s drama critics. Mutually magnetized, we married three months later. I sent a wire to my parents in New York: “Have married Englishman. Letter follows.” I was madly in love with him and stepped happily into the Wonderland of his fame.
There was an abundance of what we call both humorously and respectfully Big Personalities. Ken knew many of them and those he didn’t wanted to know him. It interested them that he was married to an American and that they had an adorable baby, Tracy. Not long after she was born, and I’d just come from playing a twelve-year-old girl, opposite a real twelve-year-old actress on BBC TV, I knew it was time to pack it in. Ken asked, why didn’t I write a novel? I’d never written anything except some short stories at college. He thought I could do it and I wondered if I could. He told me not to show it to him until it was finished because he wouldn’t know my intent.
I’d been regaling people about my times in Paris and as I did something strange happened within me. As I rattled on about all the mishaps I’d encountered there, like ending up at a police station because I was caught in first-class in the Metro with a second-class ticket (they let me go because they said my French accent was so good), I heard myself talking in a voice that wasn’t mine—but was. I felt I knew this girl and I knew some of her adventures in Paris.
One day, Sally Jay Gorce appeared, fully formed. I opened a notebook and wrote, “I was walking down the street when suddenly …” I thought, where is my heroine going, and why is she walking at noon down the boulevard Montparnasse in an evening dress? The answer presented itself: she was on her way to meet her Italian lover, but instead ran into an American friend she found herself attracted to. I look back in wonder how it went, slowly but steadily. I wrote most of what became The Dud Avocado in the living room, hunched over a typewriter on my knees. This caused me to have that most unsympathetic of all ailments, a bad back. But I look back in wonder that not far from where we lived was the Dorchester Hotel, which had an inexpensive women’s Turkish bath, complete with massage, where I could go whenever my spine screamed for it.
Halfway through writing the book, I still had no title. It came wonderfully into being when I complimented my host at a party on his flourishing avocado