Few things give you as good a picture of life at a particular time and place as seeing what people considered satire. Satire with legs is tough to write. Barbs that seemed razor sharp at the time can strike today’s reader as dull — or worse, off-target or unsuccessful to an extent that can be excruciating to watch as a rerun. What was meant to poke the funnybone can seem like an unwelcome jab in the ribs. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea is an example of the dangers of consuming satire too long after its sell-by date.
By the Sea is set in the remote seaside town of Plankton. When I read the book, I was sure that Plankton was somewhere along the Central California coast, but many of its contemporary reviewers were convinced it was in New England. Albee offers no good geographic reference points to anchor it, so let’s say we’re both right.
Plankton’s original name — as not even the Indians found the place habitable before the crazy white men showed up — was Zion’s Golden Strand. A religious sect named the Semi-Submersion Redemptionists, whose men wore beards like Spanish moss and women dressed “like adders in calico,” settled there around 1900 to practice their faith in peace. Which they did for several decades, until their stricture against sex in any form began to whittle their number down to a handful. Then, during Prohibition, the rumrunners moved in, using it as a quiet and safe to land fast boats full of illegal hooch. After FDR eliminated the profit margin, the town was left for the strays and stragglers to occupy.
There is Bonesetter, a retired seaman who runs the town’s drug store and lives in a loose menage with his wife and her ex-stripper sister, Zarafa. There is Manuel Ortega, known to everyone as “Spic” (and here we begin to see the stretchmarks in the satire), who lost an arm bringing a load of whisky ashore and stayed to run the general store. There are the Tatum sisters, two retired librarians, and their mother, whose dementia takes the peculiar form of believing herself to be General George Custer. And there are a handful of artists, sculptors, and miscellaneous Bohemians.
The diverse collection of Planktonians is united on one point: that success as defined by the world outside is an anathema. “The human race, friends, cannot stand success,” Bonesetter tells his fellow townspeople. “Prosperity makes monsters of us all. Plankton has never known prosperity, and never will. Plankton is a serene place, a joyful place, an undiscovered place; what the literary critics call a happy valley. Let us keep it that way.”
Of all the misfits, none is quite so ill-fitted as Myrthis Lathrop. Having been sent to university to study law by his father, Myrthis rejected the notion that commerce was a game he needed to play. “The world is a mighty tough place, my fine young liberal,” he father told him, “as you’ll find out when you try to make a dollar.” To which Myrthis replied, “The world is a mighty tough place because it’s full of men trying to make a dollar.” He decided instead to move to Plankton, where he could live in one of the old abandoned Redemptionist houses for nothing, and be a bum, making a few bucks by selling samples of plants, sea creatures, and insects to his old university’s laboratories. When we first meet him, Myrthis is spending his day lying on the ground, taking notes on the second day of the Ant War.”22 blacks still on their feet, to 112 browns.”
Myrthis is himself a bit of a parasite. His fellow Planktonians feed him, fuel him, clothe him, fix his plumbing, and when necessary, save him from drowning. As little as they aspire to material success, Myrthis’s obstinate aimlessness irritates many and maddens Bonesetter in particular. He concocts a scheme to marry Myrthis off to Vitalia, a scroungy young woman recently arrived in town.
Hoping this will force Myrthis to settle down, Bonesetter is disappointed. Myrthis and Vitalia decide to establish a newspaper, despite the fact that they have no printing press and can’t write — or at least, spell. Undismayed, Myrthis types up the first issue with its front page story, “YOUR FRIEND AND MINE THE COKROACH.” Myrthis is not just pro-roach: he is a zealous roachist. “Those of us who are a bit too sure that we are the final and fairest flower of Creation will do well to reflect upon the fact that the cokroach has been here longer than we have and will be here when we are all through.” When the universe comes to its whimpering end, he assures his readers, “it will be the roach, not Man, who will stand on tip-toe on the last charred Reef of Earth and cry farewell my brothers farewell farewell.”
Somehow, Myrthis’s piece gets into the hands of a desperate syndication agent, and the next thing you know, all of America is calling for more. Myrthis and Vitalia are swept off to New York City to make the rounds of television game shows, news shows, and talk shows, all of which offer Albee opportunities to satirize What’s My Line, The Tonight Show, and other artefacts of the time that have now grown quaint or forgotten.
P. G. Wodehouse described By the Sea, By the Sea as “like a sort of innocent Peyton Place,” which may be more accurate now than when he said it. Peyton Place long ago lost its scandalous reputation, and so, by extension, has By the Sea. When the book was marketed, the favored hashtags were #lusty and #Rabelaisian, neither of which could manage to raise the lightest eyebrow today. Yet some of the reviewers were still able to wind themselves into a righteous tizzy about it. Writing in The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Martin Quigley practically issued an invitation for a book-burning: “This is a rather pleasant and funny little summer story that has been spoiled by self-conscious and witless dirty talk. The publisher and the author are trying to justify and exploit the dirty talk on the grounds that it is Rabelaisian.” Scoring points with the chauvinists in his audience, he added, “It is remindful of a sissy trying to pass himself off as a tough guy.”
Barely two hundred pages long, By the Sea, By the Sea could easily sit at one end of the bookshelf alongside Tobacco Road and Cannery Row — neither of which, IMHO, carry much more than trace amounts of the humor and raucousness that made them favorites of a generation or two of mostly male readers. It takes a lot more to stand out as a drop-out from society in today’s world.
Not that George Sumner Albee hadn’t earned his stripes as an outsider. He’d taken to the road early in life, traveling around the world in his twenties, stepping in to save Hemingway from getting pasted by a boxer in Key West in the thirties, taking a house in Cuba’s own Key West, Varadero, in the 1950s. He was a connoisseur of the laidback expat lifestyle, capable of writing a long and gushing letter in praise of Under the Volcano to Malcolm Lowry. Lowry, replying from an unhappy spell in England, was somewhat envious: “I have an impression that Cuba must be a marvellous place in which to live, and pursue the Better Life, the Better Thing, and indeed celebrate generally the Life Electric.” Finding the political climate in England not much more enlightened that that of Eisenhower’s US, he added, “… the only thing one could do is to put one’s school cap back on and read Wordsworth, or perhaps Henry Adams, until it all blows over. Meantime it is likely that no contribution will be made to human freedom.”
Albee had made his living as something of an acceptable rebel, a gentle satirist. His first novel, Young Robert, was a semi-autobiographical jab at his own young self, a story about a San Francisco youth full of the spirit of the Gold Rush and progress with a capital P. Although he published a couple of softer, more nostalgic novels in the 1950s, he earned his living as a writer of magazine fiction back in the days when that was still possible.
Albee’s magazine fiction was often satire a soft S. His 1948 story for Cosmopolitan, “The Next Voice You Hear,” played out a premise he came up with over lunch with a friend. “You know,” he said, “wouldn’t it be something if God would come on the radio and give people such a bad scare they’d wake up and behave themselves!” He repeated the story to his friend, Cosmopolitan’s fiction editor, Dale Eunson, and Eunson told Albee the magazine would buy the story if he wrote it.
In the finished product, the voice of God goes out over every radio station on Earth one day: “A plan of creation ought by rights to go forward under its own rules, but you, dear children of the Sun’s third planet, are so near to destroying yourselves I must step in. I shall spend this week with you.” As you might expect, this news sends everyone but the most deeply devout into a panic, but God’s subsequent broadcasts are written in a wholly New Testament voice. When he takes leave on the following Saturday, his voice has “the gentleness, the fondness, the inifinite patience of the voice of an older brother teaching a beloved younger brother to skate, or make a kite, or whittle”: “A planet is a school. Live, dear children, and learn.”
“The Next Voice You Hear” was made into a film with the same name in 1950, starring James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (soon to be Reagan). Producer Dore Schary wrote an account of the making of the film, Case History of a Movie, soon after. James M. Cain, reviewing the book for the New York Times, wrote that “it gives a picture of movies that is almost definitive, with a singularly candid viewpoint.”
Albee was a flower child before the name existed. In his 1957 story, “The Mysterious Mr. Todd,” an updated version of Twain’s Mysterious Stranger pleas for a town council to turn a patch of land into a park instead of a prison:
There are people in this world who like prisons. They like them because prisons lock up souls, and they believe in locking up souls. They want to see all of us in uniform, marching along in lock-step, saying, “Yes, boss; yes, Fuhrer; yes, commissar.” A prison is the sorriest place in the world, sorrier than any cemetery, because in prison you bury souls. Now what does a park stand for? A park is a scale model of what we hope we’ll turn the whole danged world into someday. A park is a place where we can walk under trees, with flowers around us, and meet our neighbors and shake their hands and ask them how things are going and meet ourselves, too, maybe, on a quiet path, and find out who we are. A park is a freespace for free men. That’s why we’ve got to choose it every time — every time! Because the men in prison are the men who never had parks.
But not all of Albee’s satire reads quite so benignly today. In a 1961 piece for The Saturday Evening Post, for example, his tongue was perhaps too deeply buried in his cheek for his self-mockery to come through. Titled, “Let’s Put Women in Their Place,” he criticizes the U.S. for being the only country where women are not banished when men sit down to talk. He sorts women into seven categories such as “The Frustrated Actress” and “The Compulsive Talker.” He then lays out a program by which husbands can retrain their wives: “Take her to court trials. Take her to visit a chemical laboratory. Play Bach to her. Read her a bit of Kant, showing her how he extrudes one idea from another. From time to time, hit her.” With a little patience and persistence, he assures the reader, “in a year’s time you may find you have a chastened, thoughtful, well-mannered, reticent woman who can actually join in a conversation without destroying it.” And if she happens to slip into her old habits, “Check her promptly. ‘How would you like a rap on the mouth?’ is a query that startles the sturdiest woman.”
This is impossible to read without cringing. If you ever wondered what men like Mad Men’sDon Draper were reading, it was far more likely to be this than the poetry of Frank O’Hara, I’m afraid. George Sumner Albee may have been lucky that he died in 1965: I’m not sure how he would have fared when the Women’s Lib movement got going.
In 1974, by the way, Paramount Studios announced that producer Jerry Bruckheimer would be filming By the Sea with a script by Steve Tesich, but the project appears to have stalled soon afterward.
By the Sea, By the Sea was recommended to me by Kate Peacocke, who wrote from New Zealand, saying her father “loved its zany humour and its gentle wisdom, and so do I.” For me, the book lands halfway between unjustly and justly neglected. If you do read it, it’s best to look for the spirit of “Mr. Todd” and ignore the brief flashes of “Let’s Put Women in Their Place.”
Other Reviews
- • Vernon Fane, The Sphere
- … a happy, bawdy and very funny novel indeed; Mr. George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea, which I propose to re-read often and certainly not to lend, unless it is to benighted travellers unable to get to a bookshop. Mr. P. G. Wodehouse has gone on record as finding it one of the funniest books he has read for ages and full of charm, too. He adds that it is like a sort of innocent Peyton Place, as contradictory a statement as the old master can ever have emitted. Be that as it may, he is certainly right about its being funny, and since that is a quality fairly thinkly parcelled out in contemporary fiction, I can recommend it to those readers who are free, broadminded and twenty-one.
- • Dave Lipman, The Kansas City Star
- If Aldous Huxley had stumbled across Plankton, he would not have had to search around bravely for new worlds. He could have loosened his tie and luxuriated in the company of somebody like Myrthis Lathrop…. There’s a theory, unproved, that a man who uses shingles from his own roof for firewood is a man worth meeting. It follows that a book in which such a man plays a leading role is a book worth reading.
- • Stephen Hugh-Jones, The Guardian
- the funniest book I have read in years: that is to say it is not “a riot of fun” but witty; satirical, not smart; adult, not “adult”; and like funny books from Candide to Lucky Jim, basically serious…. A young man’s book, presumably, which I wholly recommend.
- • Lynn Hopper, The Indianopolis Star
- Light, brassy, with serious undertones, and definitely on the wild side. A new book with more charm than most summer fiction is George Sumner Albee’s By the Sea, By the Sea.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960
London: Victor Gollancz, 1960