Sex comedy

Although he made his reputation as a novelist, Graham Greene published dozens of short stories during his long writing career, including a 1967 collection called May We Borrow Your Husband? & Other Comedies of the Sexual Life.

Greene liked to categorize his work, as evidenced by the way he labeled some of his novels as entertainments to set them apart from his more serious work. Calling these stories comedies does much the same thing. He seemed to want to state before the critics could that his work was a bit of fluff, as if something entertaining or amusing could not also be artful.

"Two Gentle People," the last story in this book and one of the best ones, shows us a man and woman, each married unhappily to someone else, who meet in a park, make a connection and spend much of the day together before returning, unfaithful only in their hearts, to their spouses.

More obviously comic, though still a quality story, is "The Root of All Evil," in which a group of men meet secretly so that another man won't interfere with their drinking. Secrecy here is the root of all evil, leading to a series of hilarious misadventures.

In the title story, an attractive young couple honeymoons in Antibes, where an older writer (who seems a lot like Graham Greene himself) observes over a series of days while two men plot carefully to seduce ... the husband. As the husband shows surprisingly little interest in his beautiful bride, the seduction is all too easy.

"The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen" finds a young couple dining in a restaurant next to a table of eight Japanese men. The young woman has just been given an advance for a novel she is writing. While the young man wants only to marry her, she speaks endlessly of her bright future as a writer because of her powerful observation skills, while failing to even notice those eight Japanese gentlemen.

Despite the subtitle, there really isn't that much sex in these stories, but there is most blatantly in "Cheap in August." This is about a bored wife vacationing alone in Jamaica because it's "cheap in August." She sees this as her opportunity for a brief romantic affair, but the only man she can attract is a fat older fellow whose one attractive quality is that he is not her husband.

These are the best of the 12 stories in the book, but the others too keep the reader entertained.

Stuck at the border

The door to ordinary places was the door that I had missed. ...  I would live in the other places, among the exiled ping-pong players and the old ladies with dogs on their arms, and my true companions would be Godwin and Jenny and all those who had missed the same door,

Larry McMurtry, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

Danny Deck, the young Texas writer who sells his first novel early in Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), feels sorry for himself, but readers may not feel sorry for him. If he has missed the "door to ordinary places," it is because he himself has chosen other doors that lead nowhere.

McMurtry's title sounds like that of a comic novel, and for a number of pages that appears to be what we have here. Then the title turns out to be the literal truth. All his relationships are bridges burned by the end. Mostly those relationships are with women — usually married women, a Mexican prostitute he asks to run away with him, a beauty who wants his baby but not him. "I have no real resistance to temptation," he says early on. He can resist neither women nor alcohol, and both lead him where he really doesn't want to go.

McMurtry refers again and again to borders and rivers, his other metaphors of choice. His novel ends with Danny "drowning" his second novel in the Rio Grande, the border between the United States and Mexico. Danny seems stuck on the border, or just on the wrong side of the border that separates the ordinary life he craves from the restless, purposeless life he has fallen into.

In a preface to this edition, McMurtry says he wrote the novel in a rush immediately after finishing Moving On. He calls it a kind of afterbirth to that much longer novel. Of Danny Deck, he writes, "He wasn't me, but there was no large gap between his sensibility and my own." What this suggests is that Danny is. in fact, him: a young Texas writer with early success struggling to discover whether that was a fluke or whether he really does have talent worth cultivating. McMurtry found his own way across the border, across the river and through the door to ordinary places. It is left unclear whether Danny Deck can do the same.

The self-invented man

Lewis Mumford called Olmsted's combination of travel, shrewd observation, and intelligent reading "American education at its best." He suggested that Olmsted could be considered representative of a mid-nineteenth-century American type: the self-invented man.

Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance

Many young men who don't know what to do with their lives never find a satisfactory answer. Frederick Law Olmsted had the good fortune to have a father affluent enough and patient enough to allow his son the time he needed to find his career, and eventually the career found him, as Witold Rybczynski tells the story in a fine biography, A Clearing in the Distance (1999).

Olmsted spent a year as a merchant seaman, became a farmer and then a nurseryman, tried his hand at journalism and wrote some influential books, with his father making up the deficits in his various enterprises. Today we associate Olmsted primarily with the design of New York City's Central Park, assuming it to be the culmination of his career. Instead it was the beginning, where he discovered his true calling.

Olmsted and Calveret Vaux were hired to make a park out of a few blocks of mostly vacant land in the city. Olmsted had been to Europe and remembered parks he had seen in England and France. These observations, plus the knowledge he had gained working with plants and trees on his farm, led to the design of a park that surpassed expectations. Yet Olmsted was frustrated by New York politics, everyone trying to cut funding or change the plan. Some politicians wanted to plant flowers in the park, while Olmsted thought flowers had their place, but that place wasn't Central Park. He wanted a more natural look to the park.

He was glad to finally be rid of Central Park, but by then he had plenty of other opportunities for his thriving new business in what he called landscape architecture. Over the next decades he designed numerous public parks, grounds for public buildings, college campuses and private estates, including most famously Biltmore in Asheville, N.C. Other projects he worked on included Belle Isle in Detroit, the World's Fair in Chicago, the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington, National Zoological Park, Smith College, Notre Dame University, Duke, Vasser, Yale and Stanford. A more complete list takes up three pages in Rybczynski's book.

Olmsted saw himself as an artist, not a landscaper. His art has changed through the years, much of it no longer recognizable, yet enough of his work remains, including Central Park, to still impact American culture more than a century after his death.

Meaningless twaddle

So much of what we say says nothing. And often that is entirely the point. When we say things like "how are you?" and "nice weather we're having," we are just filling blanks. Eventually, if we're lucky, a real conversation might get started. In the meantime, we exchange meaningless twaddle until somebody says something meaningful, or at least interesting. Sometimes that never happens and the small talk continues until one party breaks away and tries again with somebody else.

Yet so often even meaningful conversation contains meaningless twaddle. Consider some of these phrases that we hear all the time:

"It's as easy as ABC"

"Going forward"

"Crunch the numbers"

"Give 110 percent"

"Not exactly rocket science"

"Knock on wood"

"Let me put in my two cents"

"On the same page"

"Let's not reinvent the wheel"

And so on.

Sometimes such phrases are not exactly meaningless, for some cliches do mean something. They can be a shorthand way of saying something that would take more time to say if we avoided the cliches. Yet so often they add nothing at all to the conversation. Instead of saying "let me put in my two cents," why not just say what you have to say? Rather than "give 110 percent," saying simply "do your best" covers the same ground without causing a cringe among those who know 110 percent is mathematically impossible.

"Not exactly rocket science" stopped being amusing ages ago, as did "reinventing the wheel." Such phrases add absolutely nothing to the conversation. Nor do they add anything to the reputation or prestige of those who say them.

Nobody escapes to jail

Fantasy, odd as it sounds to say so, is a perfectly rational undertaking.

Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare

Ursula Le Guin made her living creating fantasy, so it stands to reason that she would defend it. Yet like Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were highly intelligent, very rational individuals who wrote (and read) fantasy, and one could name any number of others like them. Lewis remembered as a schoolboy that the fantasy stories he read seemed more rational, more relevant to his own life, than the more realistic stories he read. The latter always seemed phony, somehow always unlike the real world.

Fantasy is often equated with daydreaming, which is a waste of time, at least according to most parents, teachers and employers. Better to focus on real people, real problems, real solutions. or so we've been told. They're right, but only up to a point. We all do need to live in reality, but many successful careers, my own included, have been inspired by childhood fantasies?

If fantasy always fails reality, why did our parents and teachers tell us those stories about Cinderella, the Three Bears, the Tortoise and the Hare, the Emperor's New Clothes, etc.? Even in adulthood, don't we sometimes recall some of these stories and relate them somehow to our own lives?

Fantasy is often referred to as escapism, a charge to which Ursula Le Guin had an apt reply: "Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies. But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is 'escapism' an accusation of?"