Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

Davidson’s comic effects work in broad-seeming strokes that are actually quite deft. Joseph Tressling’s fulsome assurances are almost fugal in form: the hearty declaration “What the great cheese-eating American public wants is a story of resolved conflict concerning young contemporary American couples earning more than ten thousand dollars a year” is immediately followed by the antiphonal “But nothing sordid, controversial, outré, or passé”; and variations are played upon both themes for another page, which reach a climax that is immediately capped by the sinister query: “You’re not going to be one of those hungry writers, are you?” References to “the sources of the Nile” and the hackneyed wisdom that comes down from Robert R. Mac Ian are similarly sounded like musical motifs.

But, as with all Davidson, it is the prose we finally remember. Rereading, we note the tiny details: the colloquialisms from the heyday of British imperialism that cluster about the aged Martens, or the various hangover cures that Bob Rosen tries (they include the recipe Jeeves uses on Bertie Wooster). The title of Rosen’s best-known short story is taken from a passage in one of Lincoln’s letters, and even the horrid Shadwell makes a witty reference to The Merchant of Venice . Peter Martens, “glaring at [Bob] with bloody eye,” is both the Ancient Mariner and Dickens’s Magwitch, bestowing a terrible legacy on a chance-met young man. These baroque allusions are set against a series of sharp details concerning life in the Manhattan business world: the issues of Botteghe Oscure (a highbrow literary quarterly published in Rome until 1960), or the passing references to The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and the vogue for books about Aku-Aku, which firmly set Davidson’s tale in the late 1950s. The overheard remarks by a hussy in a bar are a staple of Madison Avenue satires of this period — see William Gaddis’s The Recognitions —but whether Davidson observed this phenomenon himself or encountered it in books (and one should never underestimate the breadth of Davidson’s reading), he makes it seem authentically of its time, unforced, and funny.

In “The Sources of the Nile” the future is presented, for perhaps the only time in Davidson’s work, as something other than a calamity. The (near-term) changes it will bring — soup-bowl haircuts for men, etc. — are, to be sure, utterly arbitrary, but the wealth awaiting those who espy them correctly gives the story a prospective (rather than backward-looking) impulse that is finally cheering. When we last see Bob Rosen, he has made the vanished Bensons his El Dorado, whom he pursues with undiminished ardor like the man who chases the horizon in the Stephen Crane poem. We want to cheer him on.

IT WAS IN THE Rutherford office on Lexington that Bob Rosen met Peter (“Old Pete”—“Sneaky Pete”—“Poor Pete,”: take your pick) Martens for the first and almost last time. One of those tall, cool buildings on Lexington with the tall, cool office girls it was; and because Bob felt quite sure he wasn’t and damned well never was going to be tall or cool enough for him to mean anything to them, he was able to sit back and just enjoy the scenery. Even the magazines on the table were cool: Spectator, Botteghe Oscure, and Journal of the New York State Geographical Society. He picked up the last and began to leaf through “Demographic Study of The Jackson Whites.”

He was trying to make some sense out of a mass of statistics relating to albinism among that curious tribe (descended from Tuscorora Indians, Hessian deserters, London street women, and fugitive slaves), when one of the girls — delightfully tall, deliciously cool — came to usher him in to Tressling’s office. He laid the magazine face down on the low table and followed her. The old man with the portfolio, who was the only other person waiting, got up just then, and Bob noticed the spot of blood in his eye as he passed by. They were prominent eyes, yellowed, reticulated with tiny red veins, and in the corner of one of them was a bright red blot. For a moment it made Rosen feel uneasy, but he had no time then to think about it.

“Delightful story,” said Joe Tressling, referring to the piece which had gotten Rosen the interview, through his agent. The story had won first prize in a contest, and the agent had thought that Tressling…if Tressling…maybe Tressling …

“Of course, we can’t touch it because of the theme,” said Tressling.

“Why, what’s wrong with the Civil War as a theme?” Rosen said.

Tressling smiled. “As far as Aunt Carrie’s Country Cheese is concerned,” he said, “the South won the Civil War. At least, it’s not up to Us to tell Them differently. It might annoy Them. The North doesn’t care. But write another story for us. The Aunt Carrie Hour is always on the lookout for new dramatic material.”

“Like for instance?” Bob Rosen asked.

“What the great cheese-eating American public wants is a story of resolved conflict concerning young contemporary American couples earning over ten thousand dollars a year. But nothing sordid, controversial, outré, or passé.”

Rosen was pleased to be able to see Joseph Tressling, who was the J. Oscar Rutherford Company’s man in charge of scripts for the Aunt Carrie Hour. The Mené Mené of the short story was said that year to be on the wall, the magazines were dying like mayflies, and the sensible thing for anyone to do who hoped to make a living writing (he told himself) was to get into television. But he really didn’t expect he was going to make the transition, and the realization that he didn’t really know any contemporary Americans — young, old, married, single — who were earning over ten thousand dollars a year seemed to prophesy that he was never going to earn it himself.

“And nothing avant-garde,” said Tressling.

The young woman returned and smiled a tall, cool smile at them. Tressling got up. So did Bob. “Mr. Martens is still outside,” she murmured.

“Oh, I’m afraid I won’t be able to see him today,” said Joe Tressling. “Mr. Rosen has been so fascinating that the time seems to have run over, and then some… Great old boy,” he said, smiling at Bob and shaking his hand. “Really one of the veterans of advertising, you know. Used to write copy for Mrs. Winslow’ Soothing Syrup. Tells some fascinating yarns. Too bad I haven’t the time to listen. I expect to see you back here soon, Mr. Rosen,” he said, still holding Bob’s hand as they walked to the door, “with another one of your lovely stories. One that we can feel delighted to buy. No costume dramas, no foreign settings, nothing outré, passé, or avant-garde, and above all — nothing controversial or sordid. You’re not going to be one of those hungry writers, are you?”

Even before he answered, Rosen observed Tressling’s eyes dismiss him; and he resolved to start work immediately on an outré, controversial, sordid costume drama with a foreign setting, etc., if it killed him.

He made the wrong turn for the elevator and on coming back he came face to face with the old man. “‘Demography of the Jackson Whites’,” the old man said, feigning amazement. “What do you care about those poor suckers for? They don’t buy, they don’t sell, they don’t start fashion, they don’t follow fashion. Just poach, fornicate, and produce oh-point-four hydrocephalic albinoes per hundred. Or something.”

The elevator came and they got in together. The old man stared at him, his yellow-bloody eye like a fertilized egg. “Not that I blame them,” he went on. “If I’d had any sense I’d’ve become a Jackson White instead of an advertising man. The least you can do,” he said, without any transition, “is to buy me a drink. Since Truthful Tressling blames it onto you that he can’t see me, the lying bugger. Why, for crying out loud!” he cried. “What I’ve got here in this little old portfolio — why, it’s worth more to those men on Madison, Lexington, Park — if they only—”