The Tents of Wickedness by Peter De Vries

First published: 1959

Type of plot: Comedy of manners

Time of work: The late 1950’s

Locale: Decency, Connecticut

Principal Characters:

• Charles (Chick) Swallow, the protagonist, a newspaperman in his forties
• Crystal Swallow, his wife
• Elizabeth (Sweetie) Appleyard, Swallow’s onetime girlfriend
• Charles Appleyard, her father
• Mme Piquepuss, Elizabeth Appleyard’s rich maternal grandmother
• Nickie Sherman, Swallow’s brother-in-law, a self-styled detective and boulevardier
• Lila Sherman, Swallow’s sister and Nickie’s wife

The Novel

Toward the end of the second section of the book, Charles Swallow recounts a vision: “With that odd unreality we experience in dreams, I seemed unable to do anything right, but bungled whatever I put my hand to.” Though the events of the dream are indeed unreal, the incompetence that they expose is not.

As the Picayune Blade’s “Lamplighter,” Swallow advises those who write to him in distress. He takes this role of Dutch uncle seriously and so cannot refuse Charles Appleyard’s plea for help with his daughter. Years earlier, Swallow and Elizabeth had been discovered together in a coal bin, and this traumatic experience had arrested her sexual and intellectual development.

Swallow attempts to repair the damage by exposing her to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he succeeds all too well. Soon Elizabeth runs away to Greenwich Village to live with Danny Dolan; she decides to have a child without the nuisance of a husband, imitating the uninhibited Isadora Duncan. She chooses Swallow as the father; even though he initially refuses, he later consents when he sees her getting into a taxicab with his brother-in-law, Nickie Sherman, his other botched case.

To persuade Nickie to abandon his unremunerative detective work for a regular job, Swallow arranges a supposed murder that reveals exactly how inept Sherman can be. Instead of curing Nickie, though, the exposure induces schizophrenia: Half of Nickie remains a mediocre sleuth, but the other half becomes Johnny Velours, master thief.

It is to save his sister’s marriage from further strain that Swallow agrees to father Beth Appleyard’s child. After she becomes pregnant, she has second thoughts. When her father and grandmother are killed in a plane crash, she reverts to her adolescent inability to cope with life.

Swallow thus fails to help the two people he has tried so hard to aid, watching them drift off into insanity. Frustrated, he, too, takes refuge in temporary madness. All ends happily, though, as Nickie recovers his sanity and prepares for a teaching job, Elizabeth moves to California and marries well, and Swallow emerges from his experiences a wiser man.

The Characters

Charles Swallow’s life imitates art. At the beginning of the novel, he imagines himself a Marquandian hero, and when confronted with difficulties in life, he translates them into scenes from William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway. To cure Elizabeth Appleyard, he naturally turns to a novelist—believing that fiction teaches people how to live, absorbed as he himself is in the world of the books he has read.

Though Swallow’s views are clearly derivative, he is capable of clever observations, and it is through his eyes that the reader sees the others in the novel. Naturally, he likens them to literary characters: Madame Piquepuss resembles Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1861); Nickie Sherman is a latter-day Oscar Wilde. Beyond these stereotypes, though, Swallow notes minute, revealing details. Madame Piquepuss’s long fingers resemble fried bananas. Later, when he feels more sympathetic toward her, he likens them to chocolate eclairs.

Clothes are significant in showing character. Beth Appleyard’s initial reluctance to wear shoes and her preference for long, white gowns suggest the child playing at being an adult. Having become a liberated woman, she dresses—and undresses—like a flapper. Upon reverting to childishness, she again appears in white and barefooted.

Language, too, serves to reveal states of mind. Relaxed at the start of the book, Swallow talks like a character in a J. P. Marquand novel. As he becomes increasingly tormented, his voice becomes Faulkneresque; eventually, he will sound like Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915). Only at the end of the novel does he find his own voice. Nickie Sherman is a master of the epigram; one can tell when he imagines himself to be Johnny Velours by his more natural speech. Beth Appleyard converses largely through her poetry, which is initially as juvenile as her attitude. As she matures so does her verse, though it remains parodic, just as she parodies the women in Fitzgerald’s fiction. At the end of the novel, she is able to achieve a voice of her own, one still ironic and amusing but also original and sensitive.

Swallow is a keen observer of mannerisms. The Greek who runs the Samothrace cafe is notable for his hypochondria and his reluctance to serve his would-be customers; the druggist Hickett “always looked as though he were trying to swallow his eyeballs.” In her youth, Beth Appleyard sits in trees and showers passersby with pages of poetry torn from library books. Bulwinkle, Swallow’s boss, keeps “black coffee, aspirin, and stale pie” on his desk in an effort to cultivate his image as editor of a large metropolitan daily; he also sports curious pictorial ties. While a few of the minor characters are interchangeable, most possess these quirks that render them both humorous and memorable.

Critical Context

The Tents of Wickedness is an extraordinary novel that praises the ordinary. Like De Vries’s three earlier novels it was popular; the Book-of-the-Month Club offered it as part of its dual summer selection in 1959. Critical response was more mixed. Some reviewers praised it as highly as his earlier work, but others sensed a decline. The same ingredients were present—the clever wordplay, the witty allusions, the faithful echoes of other writers. Yet these elements do not always cohere, and in seeking to point a moral, De Vries mars his tale.

In part, The Tents of Wickedness is a reworking of earlier material: Some of the book was originally intended for Comfort Me with Apples (1956), where the Swallows and Shermans first appear, and some of the incidents are derived from The Tunnel of Love (1954). The narration shifts uncertainly between first and third person, and the pun “Legal Tender is the Night” is repeated. Despite these minor flaws, however, the novel is among the most memorable (and the most amusing) of the many modern fictions which center on the relationship between literature and life.

Bibliography

Bowden, Edwin T. Peter De Vries. Boston: Twayne, 1983. A concise critical biography that provides a useful overview of De Vries’s life and works. After an introductory biographical chapter, Bowden discusses each of De Vries’s major novels. The text is supplemented by a chronology, notes, and a selected bibliography of primary and secondary works.

Campion, Dan. Peter De Vries and Surrealism. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995. Provides chapters on De Vries’s literary life, his encounter with surrealism in the 1930’s, his novel But Who Wakes the Bugler, and his use of humor. Includes very detailed notes and bibliography.

David, Douglas M. “An Interview with Peter De Vries.” College English 28 (April, 1967): 524-530. A lively interview in which the author raises some interesting questions about De Vries’s style of humor. De Vries discusses his use of suburban settings, his character types, and his humorous attitude toward sexuality.

Higgins, William R. “Peter De Vries.” In American Novelists Since World War II. Vol. 6 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 1980. A standard author entry that provides a useful profile of De Vries’s life and works. It includes a list of primary and secondary sources.

Jellema, Roderick. Peter De Vries: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1966. This monograph in the Contemporary Writers in Christian Perspective series includes a critical study of De Vries’s first eight novels. This study points to the religious issues that are often overlooked in discussions of De Vries as a humorist.

Sale, Richard B. “An Interview in New York with Peter De Vries.” Studies in the Novel 1 (1969): 364-369. This interview touches on De Vries’s writing habits and includes questions about the type of humor in his novels and his view of the world. De Vries discusses the question of whether he is a black humorist.

Yagoda, Ben. “Being Seriously Funny.” The New York Times Magazine, June 12, 1983, 42-44. A feature article that presents a portrait of De Vries and an overview of his literary career. Yagoda’s article offers a good introduction to the writer and his work.