have to actually practice law. No. No. I wasn’t there yet. No. I was O.K. O, period, K, period. I knew what I was doing. I was a star — or had been recently and could be one again. Would be one again. Just as soon as I found a case study. A good case study. Which I would do right away. Of course I would.
The water spot on the ceiling looked like a rabbit with fangs. One ear turned down, the other upright, drops of blood trickling from long teeth. There was a word for this psychological phenomenon, seeing images of animals or faces in clouds or on the surface of the moon or in stains. But I couldn’t remember it. There was also a word for the inability to remember a word, which I couldn’t remember either, although I knew it sounded Greek — contained Greek — and that the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had coined it. Amnelogia, maybe. I could, at least, recall the various words that meant “behind”: delinquent, overdue, delayed, belated, and retarded, the last of which was sadly unacceptable, no matter the context, thanks to the euphemism treadmill.
My laptop had gone to sleep. A flick of the touchpad revealed my dissertation. Forget it. I slinked over to the Fiction and Literature section, found the twentieth century, and pulled out a copy of Frederick Langley’s Complete Works.
I first heard the name Frederick Langley in middle school when my eighth-grade English teacher recommended Brutality and Delicacy. He impressed upon me that Langley was a serious author and made clear he wouldn’t entrust just anyone with Langley’s work. It was a mark of distinction. Although reading Langley felt like my official introduction to literary culture, the aura of formality in no way spoiled my pleasure. I encountered Langley slightly before it became automatic for me to underline or take notes, that prelapsarian period when fiction was just for enjoyment.
My attachment was short-lived. In high school, I became acutely aware that the students who didn’t care for reading cared for Langley the most. They found him delightfully outrageous. They loved “Longer,” the grotesquerie in which the circumcised protagonist tries to regrow his foreskin. One boy could recite the entire dinner-table scene from memory. His girlfriend pledged never again to eat calamari.
The idiots liked Langley. The idiots who thought they were countercultural because they were bad at tests. The idiots who thought that any book published before the twentieth century was boring. The idiots owned that dumb T-shirt with a bulging eyeball on the front and, on the back, We see each other in glances. The idiots never bothered to learn the difference between a dactyl and an anapest — didn’t see the point — yet had the energy to track down old magazine articles about the time Langley wowed a Greenwich Village crowd: he’d read the first half of a story and then improvised three possible endings. (And it really did require energy to find those articles. I went to high school in the dark pre-Google age, when the internet was still the domain of math nerds and pedophiles, so the idiots’ best option was microfiche.)
The idiots liked Langley. So I stopped liking Langley. The fact that Langley was my introduction to literary culture made him seem introductory. The fact that I enjoyed reading his stories made them seem frivolous. I formed the impression that he wasn’t sophisticated. He was, in my adolescent assessment, serious enough for a serious eighth-grader, not for a budding literary critic. That judgment stayed with me. Still, when Helen told me that she was Frederick Langley’s niece, the information produced in me a childish excitement.
I skimmed the introduction to Complete Works, which divided Langley’s stories into two major categories, “epiphanies” and “compulsions.” The epiphanies were formulaic: something happens to X that changes his perspective on Y.
The quintessential epiphany was “Alone at Green Beach,” featuring an eleven-year-old boy, Oscar, who’s infatuated with his adult cousin Roger and daydreams that they’ll run away together 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