Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs

For the truth is that children’s literature is a poor relation in her department-indeed, in most English departments: a stepdaughter grudgingly tolerated because, as in the old tales, her words are glittering jewels of a sort that attract large if not equally brilliant masses of undergraduates. Within the departmental family she sits in the chimney-corner, while her idle, ugly siblings dine at the chairman’s table-though, to judge by enrollment figures, many of them must spout toads and lizards.

Well, Vinnie thinks bitterly, now she has got her wish; her work has been mentioned in the Atlantic. Just her luck-because surely there were others whose project titles might have attracted the spiteful attention of L. D. Zimmern. But of course it was she he chose, what else could she expect? Vinnie realizes that Fido has followed her onto the plane and is snuffling at her legs, but she lacks the energy to push him away.

Above her seat the warning light has been turned on; the engines begin to vibrate as if with her own internal tremor. Vinnie stares through the streaked, distorting oblong of glass at gray tarmac, pitted heaps of dirty congealed snow, other planes taxiing toward takeoff; but what she sees is a crowd of Atlantic magazines queuing for departure or already en route, singly or in squadrons, flying over the United States in the hands and briefcases of travelers, hitching their way in automobiles, loaded onto trucks and trains, bundled and tied for sale on newsstands. She visualizes what must come or has already come of this mass migration: she sees, all over the country-in homes and offices, in libraries and dentists’ waiting rooms-her colleagues, ex-colleagues, students, ex-students, neighbors, ex-neighbors, friends, and ex-friends (not to mention the members of the Foundation Grants Committee). All of them, at this moment or some other moment, are opening the Atlantic , turning its glossy white pages, coming upon that awful paragraph. She imagines which ones will laugh aloud; which will read the sentences out with a sneering smile; which will gasp with sympathy; and which will groan, thinking or saying how bad it looks for the Department or for the Foundation. “Hard on Vinnie,” one will remark. “But you have to admit there’s something a little comic about the title of her proposal: ‘A comparative investigation of the play-rhymes of British and American Children’-well now, really.”

About its title, perhaps; not about its content, as she has spent years proving. Trivial as it may seem, her material is rich in meaning. For example-Vinnie, almost involuntarily, begins composing in her head a letter to the editor of the Atlantic -consider the verse to which Professor Zimmern took such particular exception:

Ring around a rosy

Pocketful of posies.

Ashes, ashes,

We all fall down.

– This rhyme appears from internal as well as external evidence to date very possibly from the Great Plague of 1665. If so, the “posies” may be the nosegays of flowers and herbs carried by citizens of London to ward off infection, while “Ashes, ashes,” perhaps refers to the burning of dead bodies that littered the streets.

– If Professor Zimmern had troubled to do his research… if he had merely taken the time to inquire of any authority in the field-Vinnie continues her imaginary letter-he… he would be alive today. Unbidden, these words appear in her mind to complete the sentence. She sees L. D. Zimmern, whom she has never met but imagines (inaccurately) to be fat and bald, as a plague-swollen, discolored corpse. He is lying on the cobblestones of a seventeenth-century London alley, his clothes foully stained with vomit, his face blackened and contorted, his limbs hideously askew in the death agony, his faded posy of herbs wilting beside him.

– Many more of these apparently “meaningless” verses, she resumes, a little shocked by her own imagination, have similar hidden historical and social referents, and preserve in oral form…

While the stewardess, in a strained BBC accent, begins her rote exhortation, Vinnie continues her letter to the editor. Phrases she has used many times in lectures and articles repeat themselves within her head, interspersed with those coming over the loudspeakers. “Children’s game-rhymes/Place the life vest over your head/oldest universal literature/Bring the straps to the front and fasten them securely/representing for millions of people their earliest and often their only exposure to/Pulling on the cord will cause the vest to become inflated with air.” Inflated with air, indeed. As she knows from bitter experience, nothing is ever gained by sending such letters. Either they are blandly refused (“We regret that our limited space prevents…”) or, worse, they are accepted and printed weeks or months later, reminding everyone of your discomfiture long after they had forgotten about it, and making you seem a sore loser.

Not only mustn’t she write to the Atlantic: she must take care never to mention its attack on her to anyone, friend or foe. In academic life it is considered weak and undignified to complain of your reviews. Indeed, in Vinnie’s experience, the only afflictions it is really safe to mention are those shared by all your colleagues: the weather, inflation, delinquent students, and so forth. Bad publicity must be dealt with as Vinnie was once taught by her mother to deal with flaws in her adolescent appearance: in total silence. “If you have a spot on your face or your dress, Vinnie, for goodness’ sake don’t mention it. At best you’ll be reminding people of something unpleasant about yourself; at worst you’ll call it to the attention of those who might never have noticed.” Yes; no doubt a very sensible policy. Its only disadvantage is that Vinnie will never know who has noticed this new ugly spot and who hasn’t. Never, never know. Fido, who has been standing with his forepaws on her knees, whining hopefully, now scrambles into her lap.

The rackety roar of the engines increases; the plane begins to trundle down the runway, gathering speed. At what seems the last possible moment it lurches unevenly upward, causing the usual shudder in Vinnie’s bowels and the sensation of having been struck on the back of the neck with the seat-cushion. She swallows with difficulty and glances toward the window, where a frozen gray section of Long Island suburb is wheeling by at an unnatural angle. She feels queasy, disoriented, damaged. And no wonder, whines Fido: this public sneer will be in her life forever, part of her shabby history of losses and failures.

Vinnie knows, of course, that she ought not to take it so hard. But she knows too that those who have no significant identity outside their careers-no spouse, no lover, no parents, no children-do take such things hard. In the brief distant time when she was married, professional reverses did not damage the core of her life; they could not disrupt the comfort (or, later, the discomfort) of what went on at home. They were, so to speak, outside the plane, muffled by social insulation and the hum of the marital engines. Now these blows fall on her directly, as if the heavy oblong of glass had been removed so that Vinnie could be slapped full in the face with the Atlantic-not the magazine, but a cold half-congealed sopping-wet arm of the ocean after which it is named, over which they are passing; slapped again and again and-

“Excuse me.” It is a real voice that Vinnie now hears, the voice of the passenger in the aisle seat: a bulky, balding man in a tan Western-cut suit and rawhide tie.

“Yes?”

“I just said, mind if I take a look at your newspaper?”

Though Vinnie does mind, she is constrained by convention from saying so. “Not at all.”

“Thanks.”

She acknowledges the man’s grin with the faintest possible nod; then, to protect herself from his conversation and her own thoughts, picks up Vogue. Listlessly she turns its shiny pages, stopping at an article on winter soups and again at one on indoor gardening. The references to marrowbones, parsnips, and partridges, to Christmas roses and ivy, the erudite yet cosily confiding style-so different from the hysterical exhortation of American fashion magazines-make her smile as if recognizing an old friend. The pieces on clothes and beauty, on the other hand, she passes over rapidly. She has now no use for, and has never derived any benefit from, their advice.