Love in Lettuce, Ohio

A Drama Recounted in the Manner of the Realistic Middle-Western Novelist

SAMUEL HOFFENSTEIN

AT three o'clock of a mid-winter morning in Lettuce, Ohio, Aesop Leek quietly and dexterously manoeuvred his person out of bed, from the side of his sleeping spouse, and, encasing his substrata in washed-blue woollen socks and farina-grey drawers, under his night-shirt, sneaked into the hall and sat down on the top stair in an attitude of despair. What a sentence to have about one's person! But I digress. Thus accoutred in the peplum, pants and winged heels of normalcy, and looking, for all the world, like a house-broken Picasso, he wrestled with a complex.

Through the open doorway of the connubial chamber, he heard the unmuted snoring of his better half—or worse seven-eighths—deep in the arms of Morpheus, or whoever it was of whom she dreamed in the unpsychoanalyzed crypts of her unconscious. It was probably no more Morpheus than I. For my part, I suspect that White Ox of a dolichocephalic, the iceman, but I have no proofs, and I will pry only so far into the subconscious of a sleeping lady —and no farther. But 1 digress again; can you beat that for brachycephalic indecision and uncertainty. I must go to a good plastic surgeon and have him re-shape my skull to a decent style and purpose.

But with Aesop Leek, the case is altogether different. There, as one lodge-brother to another, I need have no scruples. If I ever get to it, with these wretched divagations, I shall extract his psychic innards, come veal, come veau, and hold them aloft on a skewer, that all the world may see such stuff as beans like Aesop's are made of. Before I'm through with him, you'll know why he wears rubbers, and why the buckles of his suspenders have the word "Fireman" engraved on them. If you think there isn't a sign or two of sexual symbolism in the business, you are grossly mistaken. Aesop Leek himself, taking him gross and scope, is nothing more or less than an erotic rebus, as he stands, or sits, in spite of the fact that he is half sentient. Symbols of repression are all about us, like sermons in stones and footprints in the sands of time, if you know where to look for them; but if you haven't the trained eye, don't come to me for it.

BY the way, have you noticed the familiar style yet, and the nice air of realism about the whole business? I'll bet you an untrammelled libido against six second-hand inhibitions, that you can already see Aesop sitting there at the top of the stairs, with despair regnant, as if he were perched on top of this very paragraph. He may be a bit translucent yet, on account of the pants and the peplum, and the tenebrosity of the hall, but when I'm finished with him, you'll not only see his fourteen points, spiritually speaking, but you'll look right through him as if he were a war for democracy. He may appear as sinister as the Thane of Cawdor, at the moment, considering the way I've left him, but let him keep out of a draught for a few paragraphs, and I'll present him to you in his true lack of colour.

But the time has come for action, curse the luck! If this is going to be a realistic Middle Western story in the best modern clinical manner, we might as well plunge right in and begin operating. I now remove the psyche and turn the sex facets towards the light. Here comes a bit of sly analysis! Do you happen to remember my telling you that Aesop could hear his wife snoring in the next room? Well, the sound of it sent Freudian shudders up and down his spine; turned his repressions inside out; made him see Gaugin green. That's the way a complex begins, nine times out of seven. Cherchez the wife! The fact is, Aesop loathed his wife as if Sherwood Anderson had written him. Wanted to murder her in heinous and original fashion. No grievance in it, mind you; just a sex reaction.

Now we have to digress again. What will become of Aesop's complex, sitting there all alone in its pants and peplum, and probably in a draught, while we go gallivanting all over subconscious Ohio, as it were, Lord only knows! That's the trouble with the Middle Western novel. The minute you've got a complex going, you have to digress here, and digress there, until, by the time you get back to it, you're lucky if you have a two-cent repression left. A complex is a sensitive and forgetful plant, and it's a wise one that knows its own author.

I said Aesop was wrestling with a complex. The fact is, he was going under. The enemy had him, hip and thigh. He was in no condition to wrestle, and you have to be pretty fit to give a complex from Lettuce, Ohio, any sort of decent tussle. A complex from Lettuce is a more complex complex than one from the bigger cities, like Detroit or Chicago, or even from Vienna, where they breed them for the export trade. A Lettuce complex isn't the pure strain; it's complicated by French postcards, love of God, demoralization by uplift, fear of the neighbours, lack of the Great Open Spiritual Spaces for free expression, the Algonquin mythology, burlesque shows, surreptitious literature, unique and extraordinary marital restraints, the communal complex, the terrible connotations of the City of Paris, and other such fearful entanglements of the long-suffering libido. The result is that it advances to the attack accoutred and caparisoned like the Black Prince, and preceded by so formidable a vanguard of boy and girl literary libertines, psychoanalysts and realists, that a fellow like our Aesop, debilitated by the paint and hardware business, soured by Mrs. Aesop, riddled with uplift and patriotism like the regimental ensign, worn out from attending lodge meetings, and generally softened and enfeebled by Lettuce, has no more chance than St. George with a Dragon. He not only succumbs; he teaches the victor new tricks. The conquering complex learns to look to him for new policies.

E now come to the point where the exigencies of contemporary Ohio fiction demand a "close-up" of our hero. Stand up Aesop, and look your sheepiest, while I take your Bertillon and fingerprints for the jubilant reader. Imagine a full-blooded Lettucian, married for twenty years to the only kind of woman who would marry him; his habits solidified and coated by the paint and hardware business, his reason submerged under a deluge of printer's ink Americanism, printer's ink morals, printer's ink amusements, scandals, adventures and commentaries; a member of fourteen lodges and benevolent associations; a firm believer in Saturday Night, the Eternal Life, Broadway, prohibition, the seven deadly sins as sins, the seven deadly sins as pleasures, and you have my protagonist in outline, prospectus and foreboding.

Is that the kind of glittering fellow to write a novel about? No! But that doesn't deter me; on the contrary I find a zestful malice in yanking poor Aesop out of bed and dangling him and his complex before the dying reader. If the latter doesn't like the type, that's none of my affairs; he's had plenty of chance to protest against Aesop's entrance into beautiful letters. As it is, my hero is a member in good standing of a now celebrated School of Fiction, and as such :.s entitled to exhibit his paints, pains, pants and peplum in public, without let, shame or habeas corpus.

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Step forward, Aesop, and show your certificate; and don't run away. The reader is about to hear one of those minute personal descriptions without which a realistic novel might just as well fold its wings like a scarab and as silently crawl away.

Carrying Aesop onto the page, feet first, we find that our champion has flat pedals: the kind that kept us out of war, and that are characteristic of the inveterate lodge-trotters of the pampas. They are sometimes known as "lodge-feet", and the stride begotten of the idiosyncrasy, as the "lodge shuffle." Now Aesop was a lodge-addict to the point of desperation; he bristled with benevolence; he carried paid-up fraternity to the very bourne of ferocity. You can imagine what it did to the fellow's feet, temper, head, outlook and home-life. I shouldn't be surprised if it prepared the soil for the complex; sowed the dragon's teeth, perhaps. These lamentable and benevolent extremities were ensconced in square-toed Lettuce boots of the paint and hardware tradition, with faded green laces and thirteen eyelets per boot: twenty-six in all. He tied ten eyelets on the left boot, and quit at the ninth hole on the right—invariably. How is that for microscopic observation? What a lynx! What a lynx!

There's a job, neatly done; the very buttons on Aesop's peplum—assuming, for example, that a peplum had buttons—are alive and kicking.

We now come to the denouement, or whatever you call it. I'm a young realist, and I haven't time to look up words. When the creative urge seizes me by the gullet, I daren't leave it for a second, or I'm liable to lose at least a six-cherubim inspiration.

Wherever we are, by divagation and dramaturgy, the time has come to purge Aesop of his complex, and the reader of his burning curiosity. And here, I admit, I'm stumped. I have very poor complexes myself; I'm really ashamed to show them to my friends. Ordinarily, I get a mild desire to shoot a traffic policeman who inveigles me into the street and then tries to have me run down; now and then I shouldn't mind letting Ann Pennington rock me to sleep; at the very worst, a sinister voice, deep inside me, mutters something I shouldn't care to hear in broad daylight. And yet I am expected to deal with a complex which, I have already stated, is unusually complicated; a veritable duplex of a complex; a triplex, quadruplex, quintuplex of a complex. I doubt whether you could get at it even with algebra. Why should I struggle with it? But I've more or less given my word; my Soudic honor is at stake; I must fish up something. All right, then; here goes.

As far as I can gather, from probing Aesop's psyche, the family next door had a maid of Swedish extraction; a blonde; a Valkyrie, made amiable by ong-bong-pwong; an epic of a woman, with Homeric instincts. By comparison, Aesop looked like one of Singer's Midgets alongside of the singing Memnon. Hilda sang too. Well, after a time, Aesop began to give her the Roentgen eye, if you know what I mean. Dash it all, he used to look right through her. That's an elementary complex. After a time he began to trick her out a bit; mentally of course; a bangle here, a spangle there; like the women of antiquity who used Palm-Olive soap. He went so far as to buy her an imaginary pair of cloth-topped shoes with pearl buttons. By this time the repressions are beginning to gnash their teeth, and the complex, of course, gnashes back out of sheer bravado. Well, let a production like this loose in a psyche like Aesop's, and you can pretty nearly unravel the complex yourself.

After all, I didn't say anything was going to happen; I merely remarked that Aesop was sitting on the top hallstair—with a complex. I've made good on that, haven't I? There he sits. I don't deny that the implications are terrible. I don't deny that Aesop's complex may have stolen a march on us while we were distracted by realism. Heaven knows what wolf in Hilda's cloth-topped shoes is gnawing at poor Aesop's vitals. Eheu, Ohio! Poor fellow!

Go to bed now, Aesop.