Elaine Dundy: The Dud Avocado

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• Excerpt

The Dud Avocado (1958) is the diary of an American girl's adventures in 1950s Paris. Sally Jay Gorce is coming of age and determined to run wild. She tries on a variety of personae and relationships--bureaucrat’s mistress, hard-partying absinthe drinker, actress, reluctant librarian. The situations are humorous, but what makes the book is her surprisingly modern voice and flippant, expressive language.

In this scene Sally Jay’s got herself stuck in the countryside with an ill-assorted group:

July 1-2. Somewhere between Monday and Tuesday. Late late late.

Our lives seem to be developing along the lines of Greek Tragedy--star-crossed and pursued by Furies. I'm not exaggerating. We ran into some old sparring partners tonight and it turned out to be a head-on collision. And here I am early in the morning again so charged up by all the clash-crashing I can't possibly get to sleep.

As a rule I'm rather fond of excitement. Raw, rollicking, riveting and toute cette sorte de crap, it has a way of forcing me out of myself and at the same time dragging me back in that I find truly exhilarating. On the whole I should say it's a fine thing; a stepping-up thing, a leading-to-action-t-least sort of thing. But is it an end in itself, I begin to wonder. I mean couldn't one have enough of it--or, to put it more plaintively--can't it have enough of me? I wish it would stop hovering over me like some privately commissioned thunderbolt.

It's a book full of great sentences. The idiosyncratic language gives Sally Jay's self-assessments extra personality and frankness. She wants a style, a role, a shtick--some means to stand out from the crowd--but she's honest with herself when it doesn't work.

Stranger than fiction

In a new introduction, Terry Teachout describes The Dud Avocado’s reception in 1958:

"It made me laugh, scream and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm)," Groucho Marx declared in a fan letter to the author. "If this was actually your life, I don’t know how the hell you got through it." It was, more or less, and Groucho didn’t know the half of it.

I don't find Avocado screamingly funny--I only smiled--but reading about Dundy's own life adds a whole layer of interest. I love the close-knit literary world of that era; I enjoyed fitting Dundy's Paris in with the different Parises of Somerset Maugham, Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Durrell.

The '50s were an especially bumpy time for Dundy; she wrote Avocado during a notoriously bad marriage to theater critic Kenneth Tynan. (There's hardly a dull detail in their history; for example, Tynan is perhaps most widely known as the first person to say "fuck" on British television.) Dundy describes Sally Jay as a comic alter ego, making all the choices she didn’t (and some that she did). Nonetheless, she gives Sally Jay a happy ending (presumably through a choice not made by her creator). It's a good ending too, showing Sally Jay another way to be individualistic.

Chick lit?

Teachout foresees "some dewey-eyed young critic" describing Sally Jay as "the spiritual grandmother of Bridget Jones". He's right: readers call it a smarter, funnier Sex and the City or Bridget Jones's Diary. However, I find Avocado more akin to a "lad lit" novel of the late '90s or '00s: young man explores the world, gets sexually liberated, tries on attitudes, and incidentally grows up a bit. Except this time it's a young woman, and her sexual adventuring takes place somewhat shockingly in the '50s.

Dundy herself didn't scorn chick lit; she enjoyed Bridget Jones's Diary. However, what she aspired to write were anti-heroines to match the "exhilarating" anti-heroes of the '60s, and she found many of today's heroines insipid:

[Kate Bolick, Boston Globe]: Well, what do you think about the evolution of available heroines over the course of your lifetime?

Dundy: In 1964, I said to my friend Emma Tennant, a novelist, "Have you noticed that we're having a really bad time? Doris Lessing and everyone always write heroines that are passive and put-upon." Emma said, "Absolutely. Why don't we do a whole magazine about it?" We published it in what you would call menstrual red, and I got all kinds of people, like Kingsley Amis and R.D. Laing, to write. So I think I was ahead of everyone in saying that women are getting a very bad deal. In "The Dud Avocado" I have Sally Jay saying, "It isn't our century."

Dundy died a few weeks ago; the obituaries are worth a read. I particularly like her friends' quotes in the LA Times.

Grade: B+ for a saggy middle; A- for lively language.