Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 (15 page)

SOMEBODY HAS PATENTED
a revolving door equipped with an electric eye to start it going at “the right moment.” In our opinion there is no “right moment” for a door to begin revolving; almost always it's an unhappy compromise between two opposing factions, one trying to get into the building, the other trying to get out. The “right moment” never arrives, although we have seen neurotics hanging around the outskirts hopefully waiting for it. A revolving door is simply an ingenious trap which most people have learned to spring without getting killed. What a revolving door needs is not an electric eye but a steel grabhook to help hesitant ladies and a centrifugal governor to foil the ambitions of human dynamos. An electric eye for a revolving door would need to be fitted with bifocals, because one person's right moment is another person's Dunkirk.
*

PERILS OF THE SEA

10/7/44

OWNERS OF SMALL BOATS
know that yachting on Long Is-land Sound has its perilous moments—the sudden squall, the untried guest, the parted halyard, the accidental jibe, the over-shot mooring, the eagle-eyed audience on the clubhouse porch. It has its terrible overheated days, too, when the sail mildews because nobody is there to dry it, afternoons when the wind dies and the tide runs foul at the harbor mouth. Having come safely through a summer of trials and dangers afloat, a lady we know, captain of an eighteen-foot sailboat, sat down the other evening in the lee of her radio to refresh her memory by reading over the insurance policy she had blithely taken out last spring. For twenty-seven dollars the company had watched over her all season and would continue to watch until the policy expired. “Touching the adventures and perils,” she read, “which we, the Assurers, are contented to bear, and do take upon us, they are of the seas, men-of-war, fire, enemies, pirates, rovers, assailing thieves, jettisons, letters of mart and counter-mart, reprisals, takings at sea, arrests, restraints and detainments of kings, princes, and people, of what nation, condition, or quality soever, barratry of the Master and Mariners, and of all other like perils, losses, and misfortunes that have or shall come to the hurt, detriment, or damage of said yacht or any part thereof.” Well, it had been quite a summer. The detainment of a prince, she decided, must have been the day she took that Rye man for a sail and his right arm became unmanageable.

MAKING DO

8/11/45

A FEMALE FRIEND
of ours recently moved into a small apartment so full of defects as to be really quite charming. One rather obvious feature was that the place lacked kitchen shelves. After watching the pitiful and on the whole rather frightening preparations her husband made for remedying this defect (he went out and bought some twenty-penny spikes and a bottle of New England rum), our friend decided she would manage
without
kitchen shelves. She got looking around the apartment and observed that the bookshelves in the living room had four or five inches of space behind the books. Quieting her husband, she arranged her supply of canned goods neatly. For extra convenience, she alphabetized everything. Asparagus is behind Sherwood Anderson, cherries behind Conrad, peaches behind Proust. She is as happy as a child about all this.

GET A HANDLE ON IT

3/13/48

TOO OFTEN WHEN YOU LIFT SOMETHING
, your hand clutches an unsuitable shape. Seize any teapot, tennis racket, or oxyacetylene blowpipe, and what have you got? A plain handle. Your own marvellously curved digits are wrapped around an unmolded surface, stresses and strains all wrong, and the tea (or oxyacetylene gas) nothing but an awkward struggle. Happily, this state of affairs is about to end. A man named Thomas Lamb has invented a handle consistent with America's destiny, a handle to fit the hand. Soon you will be lifting something—a coal shovel, a machete—and your cunning digits will enfold the new Lamb Wedge-Lock Handle, designed to meet the human grasp as intimately as an ice skater's tights meet a cold leg.

We attended the unveiling of the Lamb handle last week in a small, white, odorless Prest-Glass room in the Museum of Modern Art. The Modern has a rather dreadful knack of giving an oversoul to a ripsaw and imbuing the future with undigested beauty. The blood pounded in our temples as we stared at a diagram of a gorilla's paw and heard the bells of St. Thomas next door, scattering “Lead, Kindly Light” into Fiftythird Street. As far into the future as we could see, there were only perfect handles. Man, the sign said, has achieved dominance through brain and hand, but his hand is still wrapped around the most outrageous old surfaces—plain old suitcase handles, plain old canoe paddles, plain old telephone receivers. No shape to anything the hand slips around unless you want to count a woman's waist. Fitted with the new Lamb Wedge-Lock Handle, your stewpot, your golf club, your castrating knife will take on new meaning. Fatigue and strain noticeably reduced.

We can report that the Lamb looks like any other handle except that it is grooved to take thumb and forefinger and is a bit thicker in some places than in others. It looks like a handle that has softened in the hot weather, been used, and then hardened again in the cold. The Modern always does things up brown, and there was a wall with projecting Wedge-Lock handles, where you could
push
with a Wedge-Lock handle,
pull
with a Wedge-Lock handle, and
twist
with a Wedge-Lock handle. People gravely pushed, pulled, twisted. The handles soon grew sweaty and gave us a queer feeling of the New Sweat. When your hand is around a Lamb, it feels almost too good—a little too pat, you might say. Also, it gives a slight trapped sensation, as when you grasp a bowling ball.

The handle is in production and you will soon be meeting up with it if you are the sort of person that ever takes hold of anything. We found, on trial, that the handle has one disadvantage: unless you seize it in the right place, you're out of the groove and might as well have hold of the wrong end of a gimlet. We strongly recommend, though, that the Brooklyn Dodgers look into it and try a Lamb Wedge-Lock bat handle. If the claims mean anything, it ought to add a hundred feet to any clean drive. Might mean the pennant.

We rode home, after the unveiling, in a crosstown bus, wedged in and hanging fast to an old, unmolded metal strap. Our palm resented every inch of the journey. Hardly anyone in the bus seemed truly happy.

HAND THROTTLE

9/25/48

THIS TOWN IS FULL
of persons who sleep fitfully on expensive innerspring mattresses that have been stiffened (or decontaminated) by expensive plywood bedboards, thus giving the sleepers' spines a solid support. These same bewitched persons, who paid through the nose for one slice of modernity only to discover that they had to go back and buy another slice to take the curse off it—these same persons, having brought their beds up to date with a bedboard, may now bring their automobiles up to date with a gadget called a Hande-Feed Finger Tip Gas Control. A mail-order firm in St. Louis is advertising it. It is installed in fifteen minutes. It costs $5.95. The manufacturer claims that it will enable you to relax while you drive—no toe on the accelerator. And if you are an old, old man, it may occur to you that what you are buying as an extra for your modern car is simply the hand throttle that used to be standard equipment on all cars in the days before streamlining set in. These are gay times. A man pays three thousand dollars for a new car, and then shells out an additional $5.95 for a hand throttle. Still, it's a hopeful sign. If auto-gadget makers are beginning to dig into the past for new ideas, maybe they'll come up with a lot of things. We may yet be able to buy special mail-order fenders that permit a car to be parked without the help of radar, and a special mail-order driver's seat that affords the pilot a view of the thirty feet of road immediately ahead of his front bumper.

TAKING IT WITH YOU

10/16/48

IN A RECENT ISSUE OF
The New Yorker,
an advertisement of Oshkosh luggage mentioned that prices ranged “from $25 to $5,000.” It seemed like a sweet range, so we wrote Oshkosh and asked which unit they were holding for five thousand dollars. We got back a nice letter saying that it is a special trunk made of alligators and goats. It has thirty-two hangers. Bottom slats are hickory. Covering is alligator. Hardware is triple gold-plated. Lining is imported goatskin, color of Dubonnet. Oshkosh didn't say where the goatskins are from, but we assume they're from Greece, from the original Raymond Duncan milking herd. The trunk enjoys the following equipment, and so would you if you owned the trunk: gold-plated rib-rod trolley, electric iron, ironing board, tilting shoe boxes, corduroy laundry bag, silk curtains, built-in radio with self-charging battery, and a small bar. Every rivet is gold-plated, and the best thing of all is that the trunk has twelve ball-bearing roller casters. “A child can push it around.” Oshkosh introduced this child rather suddenly and we didn't catch the little fellow's name, but we can see him at his deadly work—pushing the trunk around and around the room in Shepheard's Hotel while the trunk's radio blares the latest news of inflation in America and the child's father tries to overtake the trunk's bar so that he can pour himself a drink and the child's mother stands in the vortex wondering whether they hadn't better try to sell the trunk to a Cairo dentist for the gold there is in it.

TELEVISION

12/4/48

LIKE RADIO
, television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing. Already you can detect the first faint signs of this apathy. Already manufacturers are trying to anticipate it, by providing the public with combination sets that offer a triple threat: radio, record playing, and television—all three to be turned on at once, we presume.

Television, when it gets going, will almost certainly pick up and throw into one's home scenes it didn't reckon on when it set up its camera. There have already been examples of this. In London not long ago, a television broadcaster was giving his impressions of the zoo when a big lizard bit him on the finger. The technicians in charge of the broadcast, delighted at this turn of events, kept their camera trained on the spurting blood. Thus what had begun as a man's impression of an animal ended as an animal's impression of a man, and a few drops of private blood gained general currency and became a great pool of public blood, and the world immediately contained more per-sons who had seen a lizard bite a man.

AIR-CONDITIONED FIRES

9/12/53

AS YOU APPROACH
the taproom of the Holland House Taverne, in Radio City, pressing forward through the small, air-conditioned American foyer toward the distant Dutch retreat, you pass a fireplace in which an electric fire burns cheerfully in a coal grate. Somehow this combination of fire and ice, of heat and chill, of winterproofing in the midst of summerproofing, brings to a head the American Way in a single interior. It is an architectural banana split, a perfect case of the debauchery of design. A menu printed almost entirely in Dutch adds a fillip to a completely American occasion of lunatic splendor and comfort. There is something so wonderfully insatiable about this culture of ours. The other day, as we paused in front of the Holland House fire a moment to recover from the ninety-five-degree heat of the streets and to wait for a friend, we reached in our pocket and found there a letter from an engineering firm in Chicago telling us of a device for cutting king-size cigarettes in half. (“Stop cigarette waste. Save 25 cents a day. Combination case and cutter cuts king-size cigarettes in half—for 40 quick, always fresh smokes.”) Probably the man who thought up the idea of adding a cubit to the stature of a cigarette believed he had hit on something that was for the ages. It seems doubtful whether he envisioned that in a few short years somebody would come up with the revolutionary idea of cutting the longer cigarette down to size. (“Smoke the half you throw away!”) At any rate, we wished we had a cutter. We would have liked to spend a languorous afternoon there by the glowing coals in the air-conditioned room, nursing a bottle of Heineken's beer and slowly slicing cigarettes and allowing them to fall onto the ashless hearth of the heat-free fire.

BRANDY KEGS

4/16/55

PLENTY OF STORES
sell dog supplies—rubber bones, baskets, vitamins, leashes—but Abercrombie & Fitch doesn't stop there. For the past few days Abercrombie has displayed in one of its windows a brandy keg for a St. Bernard's collar. This object, so nicely made, so brilliantly unlikely, holds a curious fascination for us, a man who has been lost in the snows of Forty-fifth Street these many years and whom no dog has succored. We stand and gaze at it every time we pass, admiring its brass bindings and its strap of well-dressed leather. Only a store with a lot of guts would try to pay a high midtown rent by selling brandy kegs for St. Bernards. Of course, New York is a town of eight million inhabitants, many of them buying fools, but even so whole hours must slip by without anybody's dropping in to pick up a keg for a St. Bernard. Another thing that impresses us is the size of the keg. Its girth is about that of a dachshund puppy, and we would say that its capacity is very close to a quart. That's a lot of brandy for a half-frozen man to take aboard—and the least a snowbound man can do if a dog shows up with a drink is drink it.

 

When Churchill
*
retired the other day, we felt like sending him something—some gift in appreciation of his having once saved our life. Perhaps a St. Bernard, complete with brandy, would be the perfect present—a dog that would shuffle along at his side as he strolls the grounds of Chartwell, a sort of four-legged hip flask, keeping him supplied with his favorite comfort in the frightening blizzard of old age. We shall have to think about it, though; it's not the sort of project a person should rush into, however much it might stimulate Abercrombie, however deep our sense of gratitude to this great man.