Christmas at The New Yorker Read online

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD BY JOHN UPDIKE

  the spirit of giving

  MORE OF A SURPRISE / Sally Benson

  SCHOOLBOY / Sally Benson

  CHRISTMAS MORNING / Frank O’Connor

  CHRISTMAS IS A SAD SEASON FOR THE POOR / John Cheever

  THE MAGI HANGUP / William Cox

  PARENTAL ADVISORY / Daniel Menaker

  CHRISTMAS CARDS / John Updike

  and Talk of the Town by Mrs. John Swinton, St. Clair McKelway, Rosann Smith, William Kinkead, Russell Maloney, H. Weiss, Geoffrey Hellman, and John Updike

  the feast

  A FINE TURKEY DINNER / Brendan Gill

  STARE DECISIS / H. L. Mencken

  THE TURKEY SEASON / Alice Munro

  MY EX-HUSBAND AND THE FISH DINNER / Joan Acocella

  WINTER IN MARTINIQUE / Patrick Chamoiseau

  and Talk of the Town by Jean P. Helm, William B. Powell, and James Thurber

  k. kringle, esq.

  A VISIT FROM SAINT NICHOLAS / James Thurber

  WAITING FOR SANTY: A CHRISTMAS PLAYLET / S. J. Perelman

  NO SANTA CLAUS / Emily Hahn

  SKID-ROW SANTA / Ken Kesey

  THE TWELVE TERRORS OF CHRISTMAS / John Updike

  and Talk of the Town by William Shawn, Francis Steegmuller, and Harold Ross

  family matters

  CHRISTMAS POEM / John O’Hara

  CHRISTMAS / Vladimir Nabokov

  SOLACE / Linda Grace Hoyer

  A CHRISTMAS STORY / Garrison Keillor

  CRÈCHE / Richard Ford

  and Talk of the Town by Elizabeth Hardwick

  holiday spirits

  COMMENTS / E. B. White

  SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS / Sally Benson

  TWO PEOPLE HE NEVER SAW / John McNulty

  FLESH AND THE DEVIL / Peter De Vries

  THE CAROL SING / John Updike

  and Talk of the Town by Carroll Newman, St. Clair McKelway, Harold Ross, James Thurber, C. E. Noyes, Russell Maloney, J. Soans, Geoffrey Hellman, Preston Shroyer, E. B. White, and S. C. Westerwelt

  a tannenbaum

  HOMECOMING / William Maxwell

  OCCURRENCE ON THE SIX-SEVENTEEN / George Shephard

  TOKIO CHRISTMAS / Max Hill

  A COUPLE OF NIGHTS BEFORE CHRISTMAS / J. F. Powers

  and Talk of the Town by Russell Maloney, Harold Ross, Charles Noble Constance Feeley, Robert A. Simon, and E. J. Kahn, Jr.

  christmas carols

  CHRISTMAS WEEK / Parke Cummings

  CHRISTMAS EVE / Karl J. Shapiro

  A CHRISTMAS CAROL / John Ciardi

  CHRISTMAS EVE / John Ciardi

  WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS / Phyllis McGinley

  CHRISTMAS FAMILY REUNION /Peter De Vries

  LANDSCAPE OF THE STAR / Adrienne Rich

  THE PASSING OF ALPHEUS W. HALLIDAY / E. B. White

  ALL’S NOËL THAT ENDS NOËL / Odgen Nash

  SAINT NICHOLAS, / Marianne Moore

  THE MAGUS / James Dickey

  THE CHRISTMAS CACTUS /L. M. Rosenberg

  ICICLES / Robert Pinsky

  CHRISTMAS IN QATAR / Calvin Trillin

  TREE WITH ORNAMENTS BY MY MOTHER / Elizabeth Macklin

  25.XII.1993 / Joseph Brodsky

  NATIVITY POEM / Joseph Brodsky

  FLIGHT TO EGYPT /Joseph Brodsky

  GREETINGS, FRIENDS! (1939) / Frank Sullivan

  GREETINGS, FRIENDS! (1957) / Frank Sullivan

  GREETINGS, FRIENDS! (1978) / Roger Angell

  GREETINGS, FRIENDS! (1995) / Roger Angell

  drawings

  CHARLES ADDAMS

  CONSTANTIN ALAJALOV

  PETER ARNO

  PERRY BARLOW

  CHARLES BARSOTTI

  RALPH BARTON

  MEG CROCKER BIRMINGHAM

  HARRY BLISS

  HARRY BROWN

  ROZ CHAST

  MICHAEL CRAWFORD

  WHITNEY DARROW, JR.

  CHON DAY

  ROBERT DAY

  RICHARD DECKER

  ELDON DEDINI

  LEONARD DOVE

  EDNA EICKE ii, iii

  LISA C. ERNST

  IAN FALCONER

  ED FISHER

  TOM FUNK iii

  WILLIAM CRAWFORD GALBRAITH

  ARTHUR GETZ

  EDWARD GOREY

  WILLIAM HAMILTON

  HELEN HOKINSON

  REA IRVIN

  LONNI SUE JOHNSON

  WILLIAM JOYCE

  BRUCE ERIC KAPLAN

  ILONKA KARASZ

  EDWARD KOREN

  ANATOL KOVARSKY

  ARNIE LEVIN

  LEE LORENZ

  ROBERTA MACDONALD

  CHARLES E. MARTIN

  HENRY MARTIN

  EVER MEULEN

  FRANK MODELL

  MORRIS NEUWIRTH

  ALPHONSE NORMANDIA

  GEORGE PRICE

  MISCHA RICHTER

  VICTORIA ROBERTS

  AL ROSS

  CHARLES SAXON

  ANDRE DE SCHAUB

  J. J. SEMPE

  JUDITH SHAHN

  OTTO SOGLOW

  EDWARD SOREL

  ART SPIEGELMAN

  WILLIAM STEIG

  JAMES STEVENSON

  RICHARD TAYLOR

  BARNEY TOBEY

  MIKE TWOHY

  BENOÎT VAN INNIS

  GAHAN WILSON

  JACK ZIEGLER

  FOREWORD

  JOHN UPDIKE

  New York City is the capital of the American Christmas. The Puritan settlements to the north banned the holiday as Popish and pagan; and so it was, descended from the ancient Roman solstitial Saturnalia. But mercantile, diverse Nieuw Amsterdam—not just Dutch fur traders but French-speaking Protestant Walloons; arrivals from Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Poland; African slaves, twenty-three Sephardic Jews (as of 1654); a Danish sea-captain, Jonas Bronck, whose plantation, known as the Broncks, gave its name to a borough; and, in the alarmed words of Peter Stuyvesant’s adviser the Calvinist minister Johannes Megapolensis, “Papists, Mennonites, and Lutherans among the Dutch”—celebrated two separate winter occasions with gift-giving. St. Nicholas Day, on December 6th, involved Santa Claus and goodies left in good children’s wooden shoes; New Year’s Day was the traditional Dutch day for adult presents and ceremonial calls.

  When the English took over, in 1664, they brought with them an Anglican toleration of customs frowned upon by the stricter Reformed churches. St. Nicholas survived the eighteenth century and by the early nineteenth his day had merged with the English Christmas. In 1823, a New Yorker, the Bible scholar Clement Clarke Moore (who also donated the land for the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church), published the poem, beginning “’Twas the night before Christmas,” that gave Christmas its American mythos. The most famous American short story about the holiday, O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” was composed by an adopted New Yorker and concerns two humble, striving, big-hearted members of the city’s then population of four million; it appeared in the New York World in 1905, and in the author’s 1906 collection The Four Million. The best-known American Christmas movie, Miracle on 34th Street (1947), takes place in and around Macy’s, and was partly shot on location.

  In the Yuletide season, which now begins before Halloween and extends through many a worried January review of consumer shopping performance, Manhattan becomes one big bauble—a towering mass of glowing boxes, a cascade of elaborate window displays, an island gaily tied with ribbons called, north-south, avenues and, east-west, streets. The Empire State Building glows red and green; St. Patrick’s Cathedral gazes toward Rockefeller Center’s giant Christmas tree while rubbing its left shoulder against S
aks Fifth Avenue, one of the enduring venues of spectacular Christmas windows. Throughout America, Main Street has run to the suburbs and hidden in the malls, but New York still wears Christmas on its sleeve. Here Salvation Army bell-ringers still tend charity’s tripodded pot and chestnuts roast on street vendors’ grills. Here Santa Claus sports, behind his white beard, many a subarctic complexion.

  So it is no wonder that The New Yorker, a publication devoted since 1925 to the gala spirit of its eponymous metropolis, has generously partaken, year after year, of Christmas cheer. The writer of this preface, when a boy, intimately associated the magazine with the season, since his list for Santa usually included one of the New Yorker cartoon anthologies that, in the early decades of the magazine’s existence, Doubleday and Random House and Simon & Schuster regularly offered book buyers. The glossy paper of these droll and sophisticated albums gathered sheen from the snow (or hopes of snow) outside the living-room windows; the scent of the fresh binding glue mingled with the resin of the family Christmas tree; the elegance of the drawings glittered like the paper star topping the tree. Those big slim volumes, either devoted to an individual cartoonist—Arno, Addams, Cobean, Robert Day, George Price, Carl Rose—or culled from a few years of the magazine’s run, endure on my shelves, sixty years later, as still-precious remembrances of otherwise irrecoverable Christmases past.

  But the book in your hands contains more than cartoons. It samples The New Yorker’s breadth of offerings—covers, fiction, poetry, humor, reminiscence, Talk of the Town, even spot drawings and newsbreaks—as it basked in the Christmas glow from 1925 (Rea Irvin, showing a maharaja receiving an elaborately presented necktie) to 2002 (Roz Chast, showing Santa being nagged by his elves). The editors have sifted assiduously, retrieving the tiniest bright bit of tinsel along with paper chains, cranberry festoons, papiermâché angels, and hand-painted glass balls the size of emu eggs. Here you will find James Thurber rewriting Clement Moore’s poem in the voice of Hemingway (1927); S. J. Perelman putting Santa’s workshop onstage in the manner of Clifford Odets (1936); William Cox redoing “The Gift of the Magi” for hippies (1967); Max Hill remembering a not totally unmerry Christmas in a Japanese prison (1942); and Alice Munro evoking, even more fondly, a season of girlhood spent gutting Christmas turkeys in Ontario (1980). Here are poems by Karl Shapiro and Phyllis McGinley, Adrienne Rich and Ogden Nash, James Dickey and Calvin Trillin and others, in mood reverent or ir-, in form rhymed or un-, in import pro-Christmas or anti-. “Greetings, Friends!,” of which four rollicking examples are included, is, of course, the annual seasonal salute, in rhymed couplets of festive breeziness, that The New Yorker has traditionally addressed to its friends and some celebrities of the day; the first was composed by Frank Sullivan in 1932 and his last in 1974; from 1976 until recently the custom has been carried on, in kindred metrics and jubilo, by Roger Angell.

  Younger readers who know the opening paragraphs of The Talk of the Town, once called Notes and Comment, only as political editorials of a pondered weight, should be aware that this section began and long continued as a grab bag of humorous oddments, a short-winded gallimaufry of mild, resolutely apolitical jests and grimaces. It was, above all, E. B. White who broadened and deepened the department; no one has ever been better at infusing a light, even facetious tone with graver notes from the inner man and the larger world. His Notes and Comment of Christmas, 1944, is a wartime threnody; dozens of battles and thousands of deaths are wrapped into a central conceit, the conquered terrains of global war as Christmas presents to us, the American people. The Norman coast, Saipan, Guam, Leghorn, the Alban Hills, a forest south of Aachen, and many other hard-won territories come “not wrapped as gifts (there was no time to wrap them), but you will find them under the lighted tree with the other presents.”

  The magazine’s covers ring the first chime and get our holiday juices flowing. Butlers, those anachronistic representatives of well-financed domestic order, figure in some of the most memorable—in 1940, Helen E. Hokinson’s servitor lends a dignified finger to his harried mistress’s ribbontying; that same December, Robert Day’s man, in white hair and muffler, smartly brings a blazing plum pudding to an English bomb shelter; eight years later, Peter Arno’s monumental old retainer ignites his plum-pudding brandy with a cigarette lighter. Santas—Santa being dressed by his valet, Santa punching a time clock, Santa sitting alone and rueful in a cafeteria or sitting sleek and dapper at a corporation desk where the Naughty stack towers above the Nice—recur, forming a jigsaw puzzle here and a dog’s uncomfortable costume there and, in a subway car, a veritable mob of masquerading misfits, caught red-suited by George Price’s scratchy pen. Curiously, this was Price’s only cover, though his raffish cartoons were legion; two other prolific artists, Ralph Barton and Edward Gorey, also seized the occasion of Christmas for their solo New Yorker covers. Whereas Charles Addams, both as cover artist and as cartoonist, couldn’t get enough of the holiday, unveiling a sinister side to it usually suppressed.

  Suicides, notoriously, rise in the Christmas season; its call for rejoicing and universal good will stresses the human psyche in ways faithfully recorded by the seismograph of fiction. “Christmas is a kids’ gag,” one of John McNulty’s barflies tells another in a vignette of 1944. For the characters in Sally Benson’s “Spirit of Christmas” and Peter De Vries’s “Flesh and the Devil,” the holiday stirs up romantic sparks and marital awkwardness. For those in Emily Hahn’s “No Santa Claus” and Richard Ford’s “Crèche,” the celebrative muddle borders on the noir. Frank O’Connor’s “Christmas Morning” ends with this grim realization by the young hero: “I knew there was no Santa Claus flying over the rooftops with his reindeer and his red coat—there was only my mother trying to scrape together a few pence from the housekeeping money that my father gave her. I knew that he was mean and common and a drunkard, and that she had been relying on me to study and rescue her from the misery which threatened to engulf her.” With the writer’s inimitable hyperbole, John Cheever’s “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor” proposes that the city’s lower echelons, beginning with elevator operators, are overwhelmed by a surfeit of gifts, rich and poor all “bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence.” Licentious benevolence!

  Christmas light can be a cruel light. But in William Maxwell’s “Homecoming” and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Christmas” it shines in two death-scarred households, as an electrical connection is mended and an old cocoon gives birth. Ken Kesey and H. L. Mencken see a measure of cheer brought to Skid Row. In Patrick Chamoiseau’s Martinique, a cherished pig becomes gifts for many; in J. F. Powers’ Minnesota, a peripatetic priest finds “Christmas as it was celebrated nowadays still pretty much to his liking” and compares the season’s agile, hard-breathing merchants to the tumbler who performed acrobatics as an offering to Our Lady; in the Pennsylvania of John O’Hara and Linda Grace Hoyer, poetry and memory shed grace on a rather obligatory social whirl. To get through the year’s shortest, darkest days, we grasp at straws. The holiday offers little resistance to the secular; its hustle blends, in New York, with the all-year hustle. There is something in the Christmas story for everyone—the baby in the manger for innocents, the sheep and the oxen for animal lovers, Joseph for natural bystanders, the Magi for diversity and high fashion, the Star for astrophysicists. The whole panorama sprouted from rather few Biblical verses: the Virgin Birth and the wise men appear in Matthew, the Annunciation and the shepherds and angels and the manger in Luke. If crèches, haloes, and bended knees have been phased out of department-store windows, that still leaves Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Tiny Tim and sleigh riders from Knickerbocker days, with top hats and ermine muffs. The tree with pagan roots continues to accept grafts.

  The prose and poetry and art assembled here range widely in setting and tone, but for this sentimental reader it kept coming home to an older, gentler, more credulous New York, a pre-Lever House city of brick and granite, a pre-television city that lived for parties,
a city where a wreath on an apartment door and a tree in a brownstone window came and went as naturally as jonquils in the spring and yellow ginkgo leaves in the fall. The oldest poem here reports from 1926:

  When bankers quote the Golden Rule,

  And visitors enjoyment seek,

  And lads and maids are home from school,

  New York’s engulfed in Christmas week.

  A city, in short, drenched in Christmas, which is the way I think of New York in December, and the way it exists—rejoice!—in these pages.

  MORE OF A SURPRISE

  SALLY BENSON

  Just after Thanksgiving Day every year, Jim and Rhoda Huston made out their Christmas lists. The lists were for each other and were nicely balanced, combining a feeling for the practical with Yuletide abandon. For instance, one of the items on Mrs. Huston’s list might be “Pigskin gloves—size 6½,” a good, sensible suggestion, but it would be followed by a bit of frivolity, such as “Bath salts—something spicy.”

  Some years ago, Mr. Huston had made the grave mistake of picking out things from Rhoda’s list that he thought she really needed and he had lived to regret it. It was the Christmas she had dutifully supplied the three pairs of pajamas, no buttons, that he had asked for but had also added six boxes of tobacco from Dunhill’s so that he could blend his own pipe mixture. Since then she had hammered away at the idea that while it was lovely to get the presents one needed, it was even lovelier to be surprised with some foolish little thing. Jim Huston tried to explain that if Christmas presents were to be surprises, there wasn’t much use in their making out lists, but he couldn’t get Rhoda to understand. “I’d rather be surprised than anything,” she told him. “And it’s a perfectly simple thing to be able to do to anybody. Just let yourself go.”

  This year, the advertising firm Jim Huston worked for gave all its employees a bonus, and when his bonus check was sent in to him early in December and he saw that it was for six hundred dollars, he was going to telephone Rhoda right away about it when a thought struck him, and he decided that he would spend the whole amount on one staggering Christmas present for her. He took the list she had made for him out of his pocket and read it. She had written, “Set of dishes—service for four—Altman’s—$5.95—plenty good enough. Barbizon slips—peach—size 36. Lipstick—your choice. Bath towels—like the ones we have. A scarf—something gay. 6 small glasses—the kind for tomato juice. Heart-shaped sachet—smallest size. Bath soap—luxurious. Bridge-table cover—maroon. Breakfast tray, if not too much—I long for one. Sweater—pullover—better get size 38, as apt to run small.”