Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 Read Free

when eaten cause stomach cramps. And in the lily of the valley is a subtle substance that makes the heart slow down. But the conclusion drawn by the writer of the article, chewing absently on a daffodil bulb, was a good one. We must plant this garden anyway. Even in the face of such terrors, we must plant this garden. Quite a few prophets and thinkers, these days, are recommending just the opposite. They advise doing away with a garden that produces such dangers. Let’s change the seed, they say.
    DANBURY FAIR
    10/18/30
    SOMETHING MUST HAVE GOTTEN INTO US , because we arrived at the Danbury Fair shortly after sun-up on the first day. Nothing much had started. Freaks and crystal-gazers were still asleep in the back seats of old sedans. They slept with their clothes on. Grass in the tents was still green, untrampled.
    In the Guernsey barn a calf had been born during the night. A farmhand was teaching it to suck, squirting milk into its stubborn face as it sprawled in the sweet hay. Near the door a bull was having his hair clipped, murder in his eye, murder in the awful muscles of his neck. The electric clippers made a pleasant noise that seemed to go with the good smell of cattle. When the barber was through, a farmboy asked for a hair trim. He would be going into Danbury that night, wanted to look spruce when he winked at the girls. The man cut his hair with the bull clippers. Outside, on the south end of the race course, the overhanging elms still threw long morning shadows on the track as the trotting horses were sent around for a brisk, the drivers hunched over their rumps.
    The first day is really the best; you take your ease and see what goes on. The smells, when we arrived, were just starting to taint the air; the food booths were just starting to smear the first layer of terrible grease on their grills; the faces of the prize dolls were just starting to compete with “your chirce of any pretty lamp.” A man in a wing collar was raking, with a tiny rake, the eleventh fairway of a tiny golf course. “Make 80 and win a free airplane ride.” Madam Drielle, blonde as a birch leaf, stood in the doorway of her tent, yawning—wise with Love, Business, Marriage, Speculation, and Travel, but still a little sleepy. She hated already the faces of the people who hadn’t come yet. Everywhere, sprawled on the ground, were the strange and implausible equipment of the concessionaires—things that fitted vaguely and temporarily into other things. In the big produce tent, marvellously juxtaposed, pumpkins of golden yellow, Crane bathtubs of jade green. We lolled comfortably on the running-board of a truck, watching a Holstein bull get his baptism of bluing. It is not every day one sees a bull bathed. A small lad in spectacles holds the ring of his dripping nose, while a red-cheeked washer dips his tail in bluing-water to make it white. Down the midway Betty, the inexplicable freak of nature, 5 tongues, 3 jaws, Truthful, Tangible, Thriving, Come In. In the poultry house, the sawdust soft underfoot, the birds full of dawn song, cocks in fighting trim, and the inquiring geese penetratingly audible.
    It was a long, untroubled day. There is nothing like it. Sitting in the grandstand, watching, between trotting races, a trained bear riding a bicycle. All beginnings are wonderful. We rode home in the cool of the evening, wondering what a bear thinks about when he first sees a bicycle.
    SAVE THE GRIZZLIES
    1/23/32
    A COMMITTEE HAS APPROACHED US to ask if we would help in the work of protecting and preserving the brown and grizzly bears of Alaska. Need we say we will? Once we spent six weeks in Alaska, and although we never happened to have an opportunity to protect a grizzly from the predatory old paper-pulp interests, which threaten their extinction, we always stood ready to. We are still ready. The islands of the Inside Passage, where the bears live, seemed to us lovely, perfect. We should not want one of them