Imagining A Pandemic Where, Instead, Everyone Falls In Love
BY JOEY SWEENEY | Throughout this entire mess, I have routinely had cause to let my mind drift to a book I rescued from a remainder bin for 99 cents a lifetime ago: Vincent McHugh’s 1943 satirical novel I Am Thinking Of My Darling. It’s not the greatest book I’ve ever read; in fact I am forgetting much of its plot business. But it had a premise that has stuck with me throughout my life, and one that I think about just about daily now: It’s about a man trying to navigate his way through a city that has been completely overtaken by a virus that… makes all of its victims fall deeply, hilariously, madly in love. Whereupon, gradually, everyone in the novel becomes infected, from the police captain to the cigarette girls to the businessmen in their well-appointed offices.
Written while World War II was in full throttle and death, then as now, was everywhere, the book would have been received as either a welcome oddity, an ignorantly blissful escape, or it might have been in the wrong room altogether. It’s hard to say now, but McHugh toiled in relative obscurity both before and after, so I guess we know the answer. In 1968, a film adaptation appeared under the title What's So Bad About Feeling Good? (another fine, fine title), with George Peppard, Mary Tyler Moore, Susan St. John and Dom Deluise. But that would have been a wholly different era. Darling was so much of its time that right now might be the only time where we might be able to relate to it again.
Tell me you’re not sold by what Publishers Weekly said of the book:
"A rare tropical virus has invaded the city, infecting its victims with a fever of happiness. They become relaxed, insouciant, prone to stay with their jobs (or their marriages) if they like them, to leave if they don't. Merchants offer free food and free booze; everyone offers free love. As New Yorkers revel in a small-town spirit of amiable fun, city officials, including the narrator, acting planning commissioner Jim Rowan, scramble to find a cure."
Alas, however: The victims have no wish for a cure. In fact, they’ve never felt better. Hijinks ensue.
The metropolis pictured here is not only a New York that no longer exists, but cities in general no longer exist in quite this way. That’s a big piece of the romance here, too, the same way Christopher Morley’s depictions of Philadelphia about a century ago caught that same snap, crackle, and pop of the city now lost to the dust. In Darling, we’re in that idyllic, fantasy America of Hollywood comedies from the ‘30s, where every layer of society is existing in perfect harmony with every other layer, and the virus seems to, for once, somehow bring all those layers to the same level. Everyone is falling in love. Everyone is throwing caution to the wind. Everyone is thinking almost entirely only of their darling.
