I’ve been reading Russell Edson’s “Mr. & Mrs. Duck
Dinner” and realizing just what a hit American arts and letters took when we
lost Edson this April. The prose poem challenges the ordinary as it commits to
a novel scenario:
An
old woman with a duck under her arm is let into a house and asked, whom shall I
say is calling?
Mr.
and Mrs. Duck Dinner.
It’s not allegory, exactly. It’s not dark humor, exactly.
But it is, as it is nowhere else in literature, an interspecies couple who hire
themselves out as a duck dinner. “My husband will need plucking; I can undress
myself” announces Mrs. D. “We’ll have the kitchen girl defeather your husband,”
offers the butler. The absurd? The farcical? I taught this poem recently, and
we all agreed that it’s a scene a certain British comedy troupe would have made
short work of. The Python crew, however, would have missed the pathos, quickly
cutting to Terry Jones nude at the piano as soon as the weirdness started to
loop back upon itself.
Edson doesn’t take the easy way out here. In spite of – perhaps
because of – the absurdity, we get the wiriness, the hurt. I suspect it’s the
civility with which the woman carries out her unusual task that breaks my heart
in the end. She carries out her duties within the erudition that comes from too
many servants, too much culture, too many careful ways of saying things. There
are those who can hire out just about anything, and the rest of us who endure
our lot. There are intimacies that need to be addressed and worked out. When
the whole business of defeathering and “rather pretty” kitchen help gets
addressed, our heroine reminds us that we’re not fooling around. We’re all “professional duck dinners.”
–
G. F. A.
