Context N°22
James Schuyler and I began writing A Nest of Ninnies purely by chance. It was July 1952 and we were being given a lift back to New York from East Hampton, N.Y. where we had spent the weekend as guests of the musical comedy librettist John Latouche. Latouche planned to make a short movie starring us and our friend Jane Freilicher called “Presenting Jane,” from a scenario by Schuyler. A few scenes had just been shot, including a scene of Jane walking on water (actually a submerged dock on Georgica Pond); the film was never finished though Schuyler’s script recently surfaced and is going to be published soon. Now we were in a car being driven by the young cameraman, Harrison Starr, with his father as a passenger in the front seat.
Since neither Jimmy nor I knew the Starrs very well, we at first contented ourselves with observing the exurban landscape along the old Sunrise Highway (this was before construction of the now infamous Long Island Expressway). Growing bored, Jimmy said, “Why don’t we write a novel?” And how do we do that, I asked. “It’s easy—you write the first line,” was his reply. This was rather typical of him—getting a brilliant idea and then conscripting someone else to realize it. Not to be outmaneuvered, I contributed a three-word sentence: “Alice was tired.”
And we were off, on a project that would keep us entertained for months and years to come. Jimmy immediately created another character, Marshall, Alice’s petulant brother. Passing through the village of Smithtown, we noticed an archetypal suburban white house with green shutters that we decided would be the home of our protagonists. After returning to New York he and I would meet regularly, sometimes several times a week, to work on the “novel.” It never occurred to us that it would one day be published and people would read it—at the time we were unknown and unpublished young poets with no apparent potential audience. But we had fun, accumulating characters and incidents, usually with a few drinks for stimulation.
This went on irregularly over the next three years, until I unexpectedly received a Fulbright scholarship to France, where I basically remained for the next ten years, except for the winter of ’57–’58 when I was back in New York, taking graduate courses in French literature at NYU and teaching beginning French at their Bronx campus (now Bronx Community College). Schuyler and I shared an apartment that winter, and worked on the novel sporadically. The fact that the apartment was a sixth-floor walk-up whose rent was $57 a month may have contributed to the relatively affluent lifestyles we bestowed on our characters.
The following June I returned to France, supposedly just for the summer, but ended up staying five years without a return visit to the U.S.—again, my income was the determining factor here, along with my refusal at the time to travel by air. Jimmy and I tried a few times to continue Nest via correspondence, but this didn’t work. It seemed we needed to be in each other’s presence in order to write it.
I finally moved back to the U.S. for good at the end of 1965. By that time I had a publisher, Holt, and a sympathetic editor, Arthur Cohen. He eventually asked the question that editors of poets often get around to: “Have you ever thought of writing a novel?” I remembered Jimmy’s and my collaboration, which by this time we seldom thought of, and described it to Arthur, who was interested. This proved the stimulus we needed, and we began working on it again in earnest, finishing it, to our satisfaction at least, in about six months. We decided to bend our own rules a little to achieve this: instead of just alternating sentences, we allowed ourselves to keep writing solo for as long we wished—whole paragraphs even. Arthur liked the end result, and it was published in the spring of 1968 by Dutton, where he was now employed.
There were some good reviews, notably one by Auden in the Times Book Review—one of his main reasons for liking the book was the fact that there were no sex scenes, which might also be one reason why it didn’t leap onto the best-seller lists. There were also some not so good reviews. After a few months the edition was pulped without our getting a chance to buy remaindered copies—a practice I have since discovered isn’t all that uncommon in the publishing world.
I suppose the book would have proved problematic for an editor to describe to the sales force. First there’s the lack not only of sex but even of much of a plot. In the early sections we had ambled along, addressing each other through our ninny characters (the title comes from an Elizabethan sottiserie I had noticed in a bookseller’s catalogue): After all, we began it simply to entertain ourselves. Once the prospect of publication arose, we continued to do so, hoping others might be amused too. That has apparently happened, since the book has been reprinted three times, not counting the present edition. One of these editions was British; a German translation (Ein Haufen Idioten) has also appeared and a Spanish one is forthcoming.
What we were also attempting, perhaps without knowing it, was to recreate the 1930s world of our childhoods, spent in two small towns of western New York state. The radio programs (especially “Vic and Sade” and “Easy Aces,” which offered mildly astringent parodies of American life, small-town and urban, respectively), the magazines (Life and Good Housekeeping), the glitter of downtown, the movie marquees that changed two or three times a week,—these were the ephemera that surfaced while we wrote, and which might require footnoting. Who now remembers Milton Cross, Evelyn and Her Magic Violin, or the operetta diva Martha Eggert (though the latter, now in her nineties, has recently published a book of memoirs)? Maybe someone will remember them again. Or, as Virgil wrote, “Perhaps some day it will be a joy to remember even this.”
