The Yale Review

9 8 Y I N V I T A T I O N T O A D A N C E A ‘ ‘ L O S T ’ ’ S T O R Y R O B E R T P E N N W A R R E N With an Introduction and Afterword by William Bedford Clark and James A. Perkins The story that follows has a convoluted history. Originally titled ‘‘Do You Like the Ocean?’’ it probably dates from the second half of the 1930s, before the threat of German U-Boats made crossing the Atlantic a risky business and luxury liners were conscripted into service as troop transports. It is certain that Warren had a finished version on hand when he wrote his editor Lambert Davis on 1 April 1945 that he thought it best to eliminate it from a projected volume of short fiction. Accordingly, the story did not make it into The Circus in the Attic (1947), but the phenomenal success of All the King’s Men (1946) suddenly meant that ‘‘copy’’ from Robert Penn Warren was at a premium, even in popular venues. His new agent at William Morris, the resourceful Helen Strauss, dusted o√ ‘‘Do You Like the Ocean?’’ and sold it to a decidedly middle-brow magazine, Today’s Woman. There the title was changed to ‘‘Invitation to a Dance,’’ and it duly appeared in the February 1949 issue. Strauss subsequently placed ‘‘Invitation’’ with Woman’s Own, a British 9 9 R counterpart to Today’s Woman. The London-based magazine paid handsomely (twenty guineas) and ran the story in its 18 August 1949 number. Buried away in the ephemeral pages of a popular magazine for six and a half decades, ‘‘Invitation to a Dance’’ was e√ectively lost. It can now take its place in the available body of Warren’s work. Invitation to a Dance ‘‘Will you be comfortable here, my dear?’’ her father had asked when he left her to go to his stateroom, for he was always sleepy, he said, on the first day out. People always asked her that – will you be comfortable, will you be comfortable, wouldn’t you be more comfortable over here? Comfort, the sole end of life. She had said to her father that she would be comfortable. But she wasn’t. Not even lying back in the deck chair, with her head propped on pillows and the light wool robe thrown over her legs and drawn to the waist. The regular breathing swell of the calm June sea, the steady breeze, the brilliant sun and the endless brilliant blue of the water annoyed her. But there was, after all, nothing to do about it except wish vaguely that she were back in her soundless, familiar room at home, with the Venetian blinds almost closed and a depth of foliage cool and motionless outside. That was her world; she had mastered it. In the tiny mirror of her compact she caught her first sight of him. Merely out of restlessness she had opened it to look at her make-up, for in the midst of all this unfamiliarity her face, at least, would be familiar, the features regular, pale and clean, and the eyes large and blue. She had just decided, as she often had decided before, that she would keep her looks for a long time, twenty years more perhaps, for it was the kind of face that gently adapts and absorbs time instead of struggling harshly against it. But that she also decided was slight comfort. And then turning the little box she caught a glimpse of him in the glass. Beyond the other chair six feet away he stood smiling at her, not boldly but with a kind of boyish and timid question. Without thinking she smiled back at him. He was a nice boy with thick brown hair and brown eyes, not more than twenty-one, she 1 0 0 W A R R E N Y guessed, several years younger than she, anyway. He wet his lips and then said, ‘‘Do you mind if I talk to you some?’’ ‘‘No,’’ she said. ‘‘I wish you would.’’ He kept on smiling...