Leaves & Pages

The Joyous Season by Patrick Dennis ~ 1964. This edition: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965. Hardcover. 230 pages.

My rating: 9/10.

Ignore the candy cane on the dust jacket, and the internet references you may find to this being a “holiday book.” No, no, no. It is not. Christmas features, but only incidentally. The scope is much broader than that.

“Patrick Dennis,” you’ll possibly be saying to yourself. “Sounds familiar, but ???”

Auntie Mame, darlings!

Ten years after penning his highly successful social satire starring the exuberant Mame and her sedate nephew Patrick, author Edward Tanner – writing under the pseudonym Patrick Dennis – came up with this little  comedic gem. I wasn’t sure what to expect, having only ever previously experienced Mame, but The Joyous Season was absolutely marvelous, and better than I had anticipated. Such a treat!

10-year-old Kerrington – Kerry – is our narrator. He lives in a posh New York apartment with his 6-year-old sister Melissa – Missy – and his parents, both members of the New York “aristocracy”, though his mother’s family is higher up in the strata, and his maternal grandmother never lets his father forget that for a moment. Dad’s a successful architect, and Mom is most definitely one of the ladies-who-lunch, leaving much of the care of her two children to the fifth member of the menage, Lulu.

Lulu’s our nurse. We need a nurse like we need a case of mumps. I mean, hell, I’m ten and eleven twelfths years old and I’ve already smoked over two packs of Tareytons. (They’ve got that extra charcoal filter, you know, for cancer.) Even old Missy can take a bath and get dressed and wipe herself without any help, which is pretty good for six, I guess. But like Mom always said, we can’t go around New York alone because of kidnappers and Dirty Old Men (especially on East Eighty-sixth Street) and types like that. So Lulu drags us across town every day, me to St. Barnaby’s – although she turns me loose at the stationery store so the kids won’t think I’m being hauled around by a nurse at my age – and Missy two blocks further (or farther, whichever it is) to Miss Farthingale’s. Except for that, Lulu hasn’t got much to do except see we go to bed and get up and eat and don’t fight.

Lulu’s quite a character. She’s colored and elderly and has been with us ever since I was born. She’s kind of old fashioned and hates the N.A.A.C.P. and says she doesn’t want to integrate with any white people except Missy and me and that’s only because she gets paid to. Lulu says that after us she needs a rest, if we don’t kill her first, and she wants to retire and move back down South. Gadzeeks, South! I mean I don’t even like Palm Beach, which is supposed to be the next thing to heaven… Give me New York City and keep the rest. Crazy! Anyhow, Lulu tells us real interesting stories and knows every kind of poker there is – except strip – and always lets us have some of her beer and hates Gran’s place in East Haddock almost worse than we do. I mean Lulu is great, even if we don’t need a nurse.

Oh – I forgot one more family member. There’s also Maxl, the incontinent, prone-to-carsickness, full-of-mild-vice dachshund. His escapades run in a kind of sub fusc harmony to the ups and downs of Kerry’s and Missy’s lives, providing a counterpoint to the human drama of this gloriously dramatic tale.

So as the story opens, Kerry, Missy, Lulu and Maxl are reluctantly heading out the door to Gran’s place in East Haddock. Gran is Mom’s mother, and oh boy, is she ever a snooty piece of work! And she’s more or less the reason for the whole darned situation Kerry and Missy are in. To condense greatly, on Christmas morning there was a bit of a situation with Mom and Daddy which saw several kinds of shots fired, much broken glass, some physical violence and some exceedingly blunt words spoken. As a result, Kerr and Missy are poised to become Children of Divorce, much to the delight of meddling Gran. Everyone (except Gran, who openly gloats about the come-uppance of her despised soon-to-be-ex son-in-law) has decided to be Very Civilized About It All, and Not To Make The Children Suffer, but suffering they are indeed, though not perhaps in the way one would expect.

Kerry and Missy, despite all of the adult antics going on in their world, are the epitome of well-adjusted, though no one but Lulu seems to quite get that, and Kerry’s knowing-naive narrative exposes the follies of the grown ups, and New York upper crust society at large, to our appreciative eyes.

Mom is suddenly being courted by her own divorce lawyer, the social-climbing Sam Reynolds, while Daddy is pounced on by the predatory Dorian Glen, a self-invented fashion magazine editor. This gives much glorious scope for satirical commentary, and Kerry is well up to it. His descriptive passages are true works of art, and I found myself wearing a perpetual smile as I willingly gave myself up to the contrivances of the complicated plot.

For example, as this is New York in the 1960s, psychoanalysis is all the rage, and Kerry finds himself saddled with three hours a week with Dr. Epston. The adults in his life just want to ensure that he is coping well, and they are sure that he needs “fixing”, which if nothing else gives Patrick Dennis via Kerry an opportunity to get in some juicy digs at the world of the well-paid New York shrinks.

Dr. Epston’s consulting room is small and dim with a couch to lie on; two easy chairs; Kleenex, for crying into, I guess; a desk and a bookshelf with about a million copies of Tensions in the Metropolitan Adolescent by I. Lorenz Epston. I guess it wasn’t exactly what they call a best seller, but he’s getting rid of the supply bit by bit by making each patient’s family buy a copy (at ten bucks a throw). There are also some pictures on the wall that look like Missy painted them and a framed photograph of Dr. Epston’s three daughters. One is in the upper school at Dalton, one goes to Rudolf Steiner and the littlest one is in the School for Nursery Years – if that gives you some idea of what kind of kids he’s got. They also look like Eskimos. In fact, Dr. Epston’s first question was always, “What are you thinking about right now?” And my answer was always “Eskimos.” But when he’d ask me why, I just couldn’t tell him, because even if he is kind of a boob, I didn’t want to hurt the poor guy’s feelings. So I’d hem and haw and talk about igloos and blubber and wasn’t it interesting that the French spelled Eskimos Esquimaux and like that. So I always got kind of a demerit for being what Dr. Epston called “evasive” (when I was only trying to be polite) and at the end of the first week Mom sent off to Wakefield-Young Books for copies of Nanook of the North and Inyuk and some other suitable reading about the North Pole, when I didn’t care much one way or another.

The first day Dr. Epston made me lie down on the couch and darned if I didn’t drop right off to sleep while he was droning away about trusting him and telling him everything that came into my mind, no matter what. After he woke me up he kept asking me what I was trying to escape from and he wouldn’t believe me when I told him I’d stayed up late the night before watching “The Nurses” (it was all about this dope fiend) and it would have rude to say that also he was kind of a bore. But after that he let me sit up straight in a chair.

And so on, and so on. Kerry certainly does not suffer from lack of things to say; his self-confessed verbosity is what makes this satire such a delight. He’s a truly nice kid, for all the knowingness and the cynical tone he tries to maintain, and his relationship with the volatile Missy is just plain sweet, though they swap sibling-appropriate verbal digs and occasional blows.

Missy is a glorious character in her own right, and it would take me pages and pages to do her proper justice, so I’m not going to even try.

If you liked Auntie Mame, I’ll guarantee that you’ll love The Joyous Season. Highly recommended.

And here, as a bit of a bonus (because I do like to read reviews from the time of publication, and usually try to seek them out to see what those of the time had to say to compare it to my own years-further-on take), is the Kirkus review from October 14, 1965, because it sums things up quite well. I did edit to remove the spoiler; the ending is blatantly given away; that’s such a cheat in a commercial review, don’t you think? Liked the Holden Caulfield reference, because I thought that too, before I ever read the Kirkus review!

The people from the Auntie Mame strata are back under the snickersee of Patrick Dennis. The narrator is 10-year-old Kerrington, scion of a bloodline so inside Society that he yawns at the mere thought. After Daddy’s monumental Christmas hangover, Kerry and his 6-year-old sister, Missy, are slated to become Children of Divorce. Kerry’s prose style would make even a Holden Caulfield blanch, but his reportage is as complete. It seems Mommy and Daddy are going to do the Terribly Civilized bit. The demoniacally wholesome children are taken in on the divorce plans and exposed to the new interests of their wayward parents. Daddy falls victim to a voracious career woman (whose job allows P.D. to vivisect the fashion magazine sub-culture) and Mommy gets stuck with a stuffed shirt (who polarizes the P.D. thunderbolts directed at the nouveau riche). No tribal rite of the East Coast uppercrust, no Southern smarm and no mid-Western gaucherie is sacred … P.D. has picked their milieu to tatters. His full cast of credible caricatures are given dazzlingly funny dialogue. It’s a fair guess that this could easily go the Auntie Mame route — book to play to movie.

I honestly don’t know if this book did ever make it onto stage or screen, but it could well have. All I know is that I’d never heard of it before doing my bit of casual research on the author while reviewing Auntie Mame last year. He was well on my radar as one to watch out for, and when I came across The Joyous Season last week on the bottom shelf of the used book section of a secondhand furniture store in Prince George which I visit every few months “on spec” – for locals, that would be City Furniture right in the core of the scruffy old P.G. downtown on 3rd and Quebec – stacks and stacks of dusty books which I’ve now mined fairly thoroughly but which still contain some occasional vintage “finds” – I grabbed it with a silent shout of glee.

Young Kerry, narrator of the story, could have come across as either cloying or annoying, but Patrick Dennis has nimbly avoided either obnoxious extreme, to create a character whom I found I could completely relate too, after checking my own cynicism at the door, as it were. (Young Kerry’s dialogue occasionally slips to reveal the very adult puppet master handling the authorial strings, but it didn’t matter at all; I was happily and deliberately complicit in my own deception and looked away the few times it happened.)

I liked the likeability of Kerry’s whole family, for though Daddy and Mom were guilty of high tempers and hasty words to each other, they truly came across as loving parents, which was much appreciated; it could so easily have had a sour tone. The in-laws on both sides, and the assorted friends and hangers-on of each of the parents, gave loads of scope for Patrick Dennis to work with; he was bang on the mark with each and every one. Brilliant.

And though I saw the ending coming from just a few pages in, it never ruined things for me to find out I was right. Great “light” escape reading, and definitely a keeper.

I do believe this title is fairly easy to obtain, as it was republished in 2002, and looks to be available as a new softcover through Amazon, or, hopefully, your favourite local bookstore. There are a few vintage copies available through ABE, but these are priced a bit high, up into the $20s and $30s and beyond, so unless you’re a purist and need the original hardcover, I’d say go for the cheapest decent copy you can find, which might well be the 2002 reprint. Or perhaps try the library?