De Vries, Peter

(b. 27 February 1910 in Chicago, Illinois; d. 28 September 1993 in Norwalk, Connecticut), American comic novelist known for his extravagant wordplay and sparkling satire of suburban mores.

De Vries was the second of three children of Joost De Vries, a warehouse owner, and Henrietta Eldersveld, a home-maker. His parents, immigrants from the Netherlands, subscribed to Dutch Reformed Calvinism, an austere sect that forbade dancing, card playing, and moviegoing, among other activities. Peter graduated from Chicago Christian School in 1927 and then attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he edited the student newspaper, played varsity basketball, and was chosen during his senior year as the state intercollegiate extemporaneous-speaking champion. He graduated with a B.A. degree in English in 1931.

De Vries returned to Chicago and began submitting and publishing poems and humorous sketches in magazines. To support himself he held various jobs, including community-newspaper editor, vending-machine route operator, taffy-apple salesman, radio actor, and furniture mover. In 1938 he was hired as associate editor of the prestigious Poetry magazine and four years later he was named coeditor. On 16 October 1943 he married Katinka Loeser, whom he had met when she won Poetry’s Young Poets Prize. She would later be known as a short-story writer. They had four children.

In 1944 James Thurber, well known for his comic sketches and cartoons for the New Yorker, came to Chicago at De Vries’s invitation to give a benefit lecture for Poetry. The two hit it off and, when De Vries brought out some of his own comic pieces, Thurber was so taken with them that he promised to show the work to Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, and lobby him to give De Vries a job on the magazine. Ross was duly impressed. He offered—and De Vries accepted—a position working two days a week as a poetry editor and two days screening newly submitted cartoons. He left the job in the poetry department in 1947 but continued helping with the cartoons two days a week until his retirement in 1987.

Before leaving Chicago De Vries had written three novels, but he later disowned these, and his reputation rests on the books he published beginning in 1952, with No, But I Saw the Movie, a collection of short pieces. This was followed by: The Tunnel of Love (1954); Comfort Me with Apples (1956); The Mackerel Plaza (1958); The Tents of Wickedness (1959); Through the Fields of Clover (1961); The Blood of the Lamb (1961); Reuben, Reuben (1964); Let Me Count the Ways (1965); The Vale of Laughter (1967); The Cat’s Pajamas and Witch’s Milk (1968); Mrs. Wallop (1970); Into Your Tent I’ll Creep (1971); Without a Stitch in Time (1972); Forever Panting (1973); The Glory of the Hummingbird (1974);I Hear America Swinging (1976); Madder Music (1977); Consenting Adults; or, The Duchess Will Be Furious (1980); Sauce for the Goose (1981); Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (1983); The Prick of Noon (1985); and Peckham’s Marbles (1986).

Despite the high number and varied titles of De Vries’s novels, they almost all fall into one of two categories. In the first, the protagonist finds his Midwestern home culturally stifling and makes his way east, taking part in varied comic adventures along the way. In the second group of novels, the hero, already ensconced in New York City or its suburbs (De Vries himself moved from Manhattan to Westport, Connecticut, in 1948), finds himself in an assortment of professional, personal, amorous, and moral fixes, and has to try to find a way out.

In both cases, plot is secondary to humor. De Vries is a specialist in high-class puns (“We’re all like the cleaning woman. We come to dust“); droll epigrams (“The murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums“); quaint similes (the man with “hair like the grass on a putting green, except for the color of course“); and an original comic figure of speech, merging the literal and the para doxical, that has been identified as the De Vriesism (Husband: “Come to bed.” Wife: “I’m too tired”).

De Vries’s one serious novel, The Blood of the Lamb, grew out of a personal tragedy: the death of his ten-year-old daughter of leukemia in 1960. In the book the narrator’s daughter suffers the same fate and his wife commits suicide. His only slight consolation, he feels, is his capacity to offer compassion to his fellow sufferers.

De Vries, whose sober, sometimes melancholy personal demeanor belied his madcap prose, stopped writing in 1986. His daughter Jan told the New York Times, “I asked him why he wasn’t working, and he simply said, ‘When you know you’re done, you’re done.’” De Vries’s health subsequently deteriorated, and he ultimately died of pneumonia in Norwalk. He is buried in Westport.

Throughout his career De Vries’s books sold modestly. But he gradually garnered more admirers over the years— many of them from the other side of the Atlantic. Anthony Burgess called him “surely one of the great virtuosos of modern America” and Auberon Waugh “one of the great comic geniuses of our time.” In 1983, in recognition of the virtuosity, humanity, and sheer invention of his humor, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the nation’s most prestigious cultural fraternity. Only three other humorists had preceded him: Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, and E. B. White.

De Vries’s papers are collected at the Boston University Library in Massachusetts and several of his letters to James Thurber can be found at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. Book-length studies of his work are J. H. Bowden, Peter De Vries (1983), and Dan Campion, Peter De Vries and Surrealism (1995). For articles and reviews before 1978, see Edwin T. Bowden, Peter De Vries: A Bibliography 1934-1977 (1978). A thinly-disguised version of De Vries appears as the main character’s husband, Gladstone, in Katinka Loeser’s collection of short stories A Thousand Pardons (1982). Obituaries are in the New York Times (29 Sept. 1993) and London Times (4 Oct. 1993).

Ben Yagoda