to lead a storybook life full of adventure. One afternoon at Green Beach, Roger encourages this fantasy. Roger tells Oscar that he’ll need to pick up survival skills if the two of them want a shot at making it on their own: How to gut and scale a fish, how to skin a deer. When Roger runs out of beer — he’s been drinking all day — he drives to the market, leaving Oscar alone at the beach. Oscar waits and waits, but Roger never returns. Close to midnight, Oscar accepts that his cousin isn’t coming back and that Roger isn’t worthy of his adoration.
What made Langley famous were the compulsion dramas, in which he took an ephemeral thought or urge and followed through to a logical-yet-extreme conclusion. Many compulsion dramas were intentionally unrealistic, even fantastical.
In “While You Were Out,” a man takes a sedative after a root canal and falls into a deep sleep. His wife, watching over him, feels a sudden, irresistible desire to pluck one of his white hairs, which blossoms into an almost Ahab-like commitment to totally depilate him. She starts with a tweezer, upgrades to clippers, and then resorts to a razor. By the time he wakes up, she’s shaved off all his head and facial hair. “You’ll look better once you’ve had a little sun” is the last sentence.
In “Baby Crazy,” an old maid — Langley’s term, not mine — folding clothes at the laundromat finds a tiny white T-shirt that must belong to someone’s infant. She writes a lost-and-found ad — Missing something? Baby tee, newly washed — which her pretty young neighbor answers. It’s her daughter’s. She must have left it in the dryer by mistake. The old maid dreams about the T-shirt that night and realizes that she desperately wants a child of her own. So she assembles a miniature wardrobe and kidnaps the neighbor’s girl.
Line by line, Langley didn’t offer much. He wasn’t a great prose stylist. Nor was he a deep thinker. He rarely fleshed out his characters’ motives and provided only the briefest glimpses of their interiority (the old maid wants a child). Like a behaviorist, he generally confined himself to describing observable actions. His stories were often extremely short, sometimes only a few pages long, and I wondered if that was because he didn’t have much to say. Yet I warmed to the material. Langley was versatile, by turns crude, exuberant, and quiet. He could write by numbers — as in the simplistic epiphanies — but he could also veer off trail. And after spending so many years in a classroom, I appreciated that he seemed unambitious.
Browsing through the stacks, I found a copy of The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Literature, which had a short paragraph on Langley.
Langley, Frederick (1938–1981). American short-story writer born in Concord, Mass. Released his debut collection, Brutality and Delicacy (1960), while an undergraduate at Faber College. Published two more collections in quick succession: Alone at Green Beach (1962) and Omega (1964), which cemented his reputation as a short-form master. Although popular with the public from the start, not recognized by critics until Omega. Died in a car accident.
Three books at two-year intervals, then nothing in the last seventeen years of his life. That struck me as odd. Since no one had gotten around to writing Langley’s cradle-to-grave biography — as a short-form rather than long-form master generally considered more fun than important, he probably wasn’t at the top of anyone’s list — I settled for something called Freddy Remembered, a slim oral history published in 1990.
On the inside flap I found a black-and-white head shot captioned simply The author, 1963. Langley had long wavy hair, a delicate nose, and an unusually pronounced supraorbital ridge. I tried, and failed, to think of a word to describe his gaze that wasn’t piercing or penetrating; and I tried, and failed, to find in Langley’s face some trace, however faint, of his niece.
The introduction claimed that “the people who knew Freddy best” had sat for interviews, which were then cobbled together into short “remembrances.” There was no contribution from Helen Langley or, for that matter, anyone with the last name Langley, which arguably put the “best” into question. Oh, well. A common refrain was that the author found writing amazingly easy.
Paul Church: I was editor of the Faber College Beagle when Freddy was a freshman. He started submitting stories as soon as he arrived on campus, and I liked them. They had a dashed-off quality. I don’t mean that as an insult — better to say they seemed effortlessly produced, as in fact they were. He had that kind of genius. He found ideas everywhere. On a walk or listening to the radio. The joke on campus was that while other writers labored, Freddy’s manuscripts arrived fully formed, delivered by stork. In the course of an afternoon, he could set down a whole story.
He barely revised. When we first worked together I suggested improvements. But he found the editing process frustrating. He didn’t like going back to a story. We got into a fight once because I called him lazy. Freddy said, “I’m not lazy, I’m accepting.” I think he meant that he didn’t put on airs. He knew what he was capable of and what he was not capable of, and he didn’t see the point in striving. I thought he was dead wrong and that there most certainly was a point. In the end, it was Freddy who got his way.
Rebecca Johnson: I dated Freddy when he was finishing up Omega. He was a really affectionate guy and he always had time for me. That was a surprise. I’d been with artists before and they always wanted whole weeks to themselves so they could work. “Becky, if you don’t let me be, I’ll never finish!” “Becky, get out of here, you’re ruining my career!” It was like they needed a hundred hours of absolute silence just to get a few words on the page. Not Freddy Langley. He wanted to go out and have some fun. He loved going to fancy restaurants and ordering for everyone at the table so he could taste a bit of every dish. One time a waiter thought he was a food critic and gave us all free chocolate cake.
I did see Freddy in a dark mood this one time when he had to go see his dad. He said he had to “kiss the ring,” which I guess was a reference to the Mob, which was strange because his dad was the headmaster at a religious school. Afterward he was in an even worse mood. He said his dad, who at first wasn’t too pleased about the writer thing, was finally coming around. Freddy’s dad saw that Freddy was doing well, making money, getting his name out. Everyone likes success, right? The way Freddy’s dad saw it, if writing was what Freddy did best, and he was good at it, and he could earn a living at it, there was no harm in it. I was confused. “Shouldn’t you be relieved, Freddy? Shouldn’t you be happy he feels that way?” Freddy sneered.
Andrew Cafferty: In October of 1963 — I remember the month because the Dodgers had just swept the Yankees in the World Series — I threw a dinner party at my country house in Maine and I invited Freddy. I’d recently returned a pair of boots to L. L. Bean, the retail company, and was extolling their great customer service. I’d had the boots for eight or ten years already, but when I told the salesclerk that they were letting in water, he gave me another pair, no trouble at all. I guess I was going on.
All of a sudden Freddy stood up and declared he had an idea that he couldn’t let get away. He demanded a pen, paper, and privacy.
In the morning — he’d spent the whole night writing — he came downstairs with “Lifetime Warranty,” the famous story about a woman who purchases her husband from L. L. Bean via mailorder catalog and then returns him decades later because he no longer satisfies her. You know, sexually. That was the husband’s “design flaw.” He “did not perform as advertised.”
October 1963. Langley’s final collection, which contained “Lifetime Warranty,” came out in September 1964. Assuming Andrew Cafferty had the date right and building in book-production lag time, then “Lifetime Warranty” must have been among the last stories that Langley completed for publication. I skipped ahead to the remembrance from Langley’s book editor. He also mentioned “Lifetime Warranty.”
Richard Anders: The highbrow crowd
