as an empowering revenge story. Women have needs too. Women should realize that they, too, have the right to discard unsuitable partners. Choosy selfishness isn’t just for men anymore! Loyalty is a feudalist hang-up! The New Critics obsessed over a single line describing the husband’s outfit: “George wore his navy and mountain red Norwegian sweater, which Alice had given him on their first date, and which he had never liked.” It didn’t sound like much, they admitted, but it was the only time Freddy had chosen to give the husband’s point of view — shared his feelings. What did it mean? It had to mean something!
Freddy found the whole “Lifetime Warranty” mania funny, because he’d intended the story to be just that: funny. “It’s too much,” he said, laughing. “I wrote it all in one night and I’ve never even read any Marx.” The enthusiasm for “Lifetime Warranty” took me aback as well. I didn’t say this to Freddy, but I didn’t think the story was all that refined. It was a good read for a train ride. A trifle.
Richard Anders was naive — oddly so for an editor. He didn’t seem to realize that critical feeding frenzies often had little to do with the objective quality of the work in question. If a story could be used to promote a pet construct, nothing else mattered. Not its heft. Not its finesse. Nothing, including the author’s intentions. Langley had never read Marx. The Marxists did not care.
I looked for remembrances of Langley’s later years, but his friends and professional acquaintances, the people who knew him best, knew him exclusively as a young man. There was only one entry concerning Langley’s life after publishing.
Daniel Godolphin: I was living in Paris when Freddy was there, and we got along. We’d hang out at cafés and kid around. He listened to me complain about how much cheaper the city had been when Hemingway and those people were doing the expatriate thing. They could get by pretty nicely on the peanuts they got for their stories. On one occasion I worked up the guts to ask, “How much did you get for your stories?” I may have had a few too many drinks. He may have had a few too many drinks. He was annoyed. He wouldn’t say. I’m pretty sure, though, that he got more than peanuts. It’s weird he didn’t keep churning that stuff out. If I’d had a major-league New York publisher and a fawning audience, I would’ve milked that situation. But I never saw him so much as sit down at a typewriter. I don’t think he even brought one with him overseas.
Once a cub reporter tracked Freddy down with a magazine profile in mind. The reporter needled him: “Are you working on anything? More short stories? A novel? A screenplay?” Freddy kept saying no, but the reporter didn’t take him at his word. He assumed he was hiding something, and he suggested that in his article. It was ridiculous. Freddy started getting letters from people back home saying, “When can we expect your great work?” It made him uncomfortable. He’d been inspired once, but he wasn’t inspired anymore.
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