But Enough About You: Essays Read online

  Contrast Joe Heller and Ray Bradbury, then, with another writer who makes a brief appearance in here, Gore Vidal. If Joe Heller was a yellow jacket and Ray Bradbury a bumblebee, Vidal was a black widow spider, dripping venom. Yet you can still purr with guilty delight over his imperishable mal mot: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” And was he not also author of the schadenfreude-perfect remark: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail”? Chuckle, as I do, but rest assured: these were sincere sentiments. He meant it.

  I didn’t know him personally, but P. G. Wodehouse appears in these pages. Wodehouse was an anomaly as authors go, on two counts: first, he cheerfully admitted to reading reviews of his books. (Joseph Conrad: “I don’t read my reviews. I measure them.” Noel Coward: “I love criticism just so long as it’s unqualified praise.”) Second, Wodehouse was incapable of holding a grudge. Extremely rare in writers.

  After Wodehouse made his innocent but ill-advised wartime broadcasts from Berlin while he was an internee, he was mercilessly savaged back home in England. Among the voices howling for his head on a pike was A. A. Milne. And yet after the war Wodehouse made friends with almost all those critics, some of whom had publicly called for him to be tried and hanged for treason. Of Winnie-the-Pooh’s creator, Wodehouse would later write privately, “We were supposed to be quite good friends, but, you know, in a sort of way I think he was a pretty jealous chap. I think he was probably jealous of all other writers. But I loved his stuff. That’s one thing I’m very grateful for: I don’t have to like an awful person to like his stuff.”IV

  Sean O’Casey famously bestowed on Wodehouse the title of “Literature’s performing flea.” P.G. had the wit, to say nothing of grace, to remark, “I believe he meant to be complimentary, for all the performing fleas I have met have impressed me with their sterling artistry and their indefinable something which makes the good trouper.”V

  You’ll come across Herman Melville in here. (I didn’t know him either, personally.) His ego, and lack thereof, presents us with a tricky dialectic, as evidenced by his alternately chest-thumping and demure correspondence with his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  There was nothing demure about Melville’s near-contemporary author Theodore Roosevelt. (Roosevelt and I were great friends, but he never quite forgave me when I began advising William Howard Taft.) In the first volume of his magisterial—a word you don’t get to use very often—biographical trilogy, Edmund Morris provides us with a Zen-perfect instance of egotism reduced to the irreducible “I.” When TR was writing his book The Rough Riders in 1898, he splattered the text with so many first-person pronouns that the typesetters at Scribners had to send to the foundry for an extra supply of capital I’s.VI

  Perhaps the best way to get to the bottom of why writers have such bottomless egos is to back up and pose the predicate question: Why do they write in the first place?

  There’s a lovely story—in this telling, courtesy of the poet Billy Collins. A friend of his was walking down Madison Avenue with the New Yorker icon Roger Angell. A passerby spotted Angell and stopped to tell him how much he admired him and what a terrific writer he was. After moving along, Angell said, “That’s what it’s all about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what writing is all about,” Angell said.

  “What?”

  “The love of strangers.”VII

  Bingo? But I know a few cranky writers and I believe the last thing they crave is the love of strangers. If you stopped any of them on the street to gush, they’d tell you to f— off.

  The notoriously irascible Evelyn Waugh is the standard-setter of this type. His insults of people who were just trying to pay him a compliment are eye-poppers. When a woman at a dinner party gushed to him about how she loved Brideshead Revisited, he returned her serve by telling her, “I thought it was good myself, but now that I know that a vulgar, common American woman like yourself admires it, I’m not so sure.”VIII But then Waugh detested Americans, so we have to cut him some slack. Elsewhere, he put forth his view of the author-reader relationship less caustically: “I do not believe that the expenditure of $2.50 for a book entitles the purchaser to the personal friendship of the author.”IX Put Mr. Waugh down as non-craving of stranger-love.

  Occasionally—rarely—we come across a writer who comes bracingly clean about motivation. Balzac once gleefully copped to what he hoped fame would bring: “I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated, so famous, that it would permit me . . . to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing.”X How refreshing it would be to hear a writer of our own age put it just this way. Henry Kissinger, very much a writer as well as a statesman, was surely expressing a cognate sentiment when he said, “The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people they think it’s their fault.”

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my late friend Christopher Hitchens, so it’s apt to look for our answer to the pages of one of his great literary heroes, George Orwell. In Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write,” he adduces “four great motives for writing”:

  (i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one. . . .

  (ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. . . .

  (iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

  (iv) Political purpose. Using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction . . .XI

  Orwell goes on to tells us that he is by nature a “person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth.” He then adds that the twentieth century, in particular the Spanish Civil War, forced him into “becoming a sort of pamphleteer.”

  We use the word Orwellian to signify something futuristic, surreal, contradictory, and totalitarian. But Orwellian ought also to denote its eponym’s unflinching and unsettling—even ruthless—insistence on the truth. This was a quality that Christopher himself evinced, despite occasionally shattering consequences. So in his memory, then, let Orwell have the last word; or as Christopher would say, dernier mot:

  Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.

  Flattering, isn’t it? But on the plus side, how many people in other professions get to break wind in society with impunity?

  But enough about me. Over to you. This is a book of essays and other pieces, some of them memoirish, written over the last quarter century. That went by quickly, I must say. Kierkegaard is a philosopher whom I rarely quote and the spelling of whose name I always have to look up. He said that life is best understood backward but must be lived forward. I was originally going to title the book What Was That About? I’m still not sure. But with luck, the reader may find it boring in just the right way.

  —April 29, 2013

  Stamford, Connecticut

  * * *

  I. Laughter’s Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley, by Billy Altman. 1997.

  II. American Literary Anecdotes, edited by Robert Hendrickson. 1990.

  III. The Writer’s Chapbook, edited by George Plimpton. 1989.

  IV. Fighting Words: Writers Lambast Other Writers, edited by James Charleton. 1994.

 
; V. Ibid.

  VI. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. 1979.

  VII. http://daronlarson.blogspot.com/2011/01/love-of-strangers.html

  VIII. Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, by Christopher Sykes. 1975.

  IX. The Writer’s Quotation Book, A Literary Companion, edited by James Charleton. 1980.

  X. Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes, edited by Clifton Fadiman and André Bernard. 2000.

  XI. A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. 1946.

  But Enough About You

  * * *

  There’s no greater bliss in life than when the plumber eventually comes to unblock your drains. No writer can ever give that sort of pleasure.

  —VICTORIA GLENDINNING

  FREIGHTER DAYS

  Call me Whatever. At eighteen I went to sea, not in Top-Siders, but in steel-toed boots, as a deck boy aboard a Norwegian tramp freighter. My pay was $20 a week, about $100 today. Overtime paid 40 cents an hour, 60 on Sundays. Not much, I know, yet I signed off after six months with $400 in my pocket. My biggest expense was cigarettes ($1 a carton from the tax-free ship’s store; beer was $3 a case). I’ve never since worked harder physically or felt richer. The Hong Kong tattoo cost $7 and is with me still on my right shoulder, a large, fading blue smudge. Of some other shoreside expenses, the less said, the better.

  Shipping out was a phrase I’d always thought romantic, probably due to reading Conrad and Melville. At boarding school I used to stand way out on the ice on Narragansett Bay, far from shore, and watch the big ships make their way through the channel toward open sea. I wanted to go, and finally bound a berth on an orange-painted tramp freighter named MV Fernbrook. She took me from New York to Charleston, Panama, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Manila, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, Sumatra, Phuket (then still an endless white beach with not one building on it), Penang, Port Swettenham, India, and, as it was still called then, Ceylon.

  The final leg—Colombo to New York, around the Cape of Good Hope—was thirty-three days, longer than expected owing to a Force 12 gale in the South Atlantic. In such seas, the ship’s autopilot cannot function; the steering has to be done manually. I took my turns at the helm in a state of barely controlled panic at the thought that thirty-one lives depended on my ability to steer a shuddering, heaving 520-foot ship through mountainous seas. When the next man relieved me, my hands shook so that I couldn’t light a cigarette. Even some of the older men, who’d seen everything in their time, were impressed by this storm. Arvid winked at me. “Maybe ve sink, eh?”

  They were Norwegian mostly, a few Germans and Danskers. The mess crews were Chinese. The one in charge of waking us for breakfast did so by going down the corridor, banging on our doors and shouting, “Eggah!” It took me a few days to decipher. Eggs. Breakfast.

  We carried all kinds of cargo: a police car, penicillin, Dewar’s whisky, toilets, handguns, lumber, Ping-Pong balls, IBM data cards. A giant crate of them slipped out of the crane strap and split open on the deck, just as we were making ready to depart San Francisco. A jillion IBM data cards, sufficient to figure out E = mc2. As deckboy it fell to me to sweep them into the Pacific as the Golden Gate Bridge receded. In our modern era of recycling, this would constitute a crime worthy of being tried at the International Criminal Court at the Hague.

  The crossing to Manila took three weeks. I didn’t set foot onshore there until four days after we landed. As the youngest man, I drew consecutive cargo-hold watch duty. My job was to prevent the stevedores from stealing, a function I performed with spectacular lack of efficiency. They loved me, the stevedores.

  At one point I’d been awake for seventy-two hours when a huge crate slipped its straps and plunged fifty feet to the deck. Out spilled an improbable thing: five thousand copies of The Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant intended for Manila’s public schools.

  The stevedores were confused as to whether the books were worth stealing and turned to me, their new best friend, for guidance. I was beyond caring. I told them, “Well, it is a good book.”

  At sea in those latitudes, the temperature on the ship’s steel decks might hit 115 degrees. During my lunch break, I’d climb down the long ladder that led to the bottom-most reefer (refrigerated) hold, where it was pleasantly frigid and dark. Better still, there were hillocks of Oregon Red Delicious apples—I mean, mountains of them. I’d sit on top of a mound and munch away like a chipmunk in paradise. One day I consumed eight apples and emerged belching back into the heat and light to pick up my hydraulic jackhammer and resume chipping away at decades of rust and paint.

  I remember standing in the crow’s nest as we entered the misty Panama Canal, and the queer sensation as the 4,000-ton ship rose higher and higher inside the lock. I remember dawn coming up over the Strait of Malacca; ragamuffin kids on the dock in Sumatra laughing as they pelted us with bananas; collecting dead flying fish off the deck and bringing them to our kindly, fat, toothless Danish cook to fry up for breakfast. I remember sailing into Hong Kong’s harbor and seeing my first junk; steaming upriver toward Bangkok, watching the sun rise and set fire to the gold-leafed pagoda roofs rising above the jungle canopy; climbing off the stern down a wriggly rope ladder into a sampan, and paddling for life across the commerce-mad river into the jungle, where it was quiet and then suddenly loud with monkey chatter and bird shriek. I remember moonlight on palm fronds. I remember it all.

  —The Atlantic Monthly, December 2010

  ECRU, BRUTE?

  One year and many dollars ago, I decided to move back to the house I grew up in. I don’t have statistics for how many Americans are doing this, but it’s quite possible, in this economy, that even some recent college grads are moving back in with the ’rents. It’s also possible that for some parents, the words “Mom! Dad! I’m home!” no longer have quite the same heartwarming effect they once did.

  I hadn’t lived in the house since I was thirteen, before I went off to boarding school. That was in 1966, about the time I used to pedal my bike into town to buy the latest Beatles 45. So it’s been awhile, but I can still summon a memory for every square foot of the house and grounds. The tree my friend Danny and I used to climb up to smoke cigarettes; the place on the beach where the seven-foot shark went after me; the living room where I burst into the grown-ups’ cocktail hour one day, age ten, to announce, “President Kennedy has just blockaded Cuba.” Never since have I caused conversation to come to such a screeching halt.

  My original plan, after the last of my parents had checked out and moved, so to speak, to the Big Upstairs, was to hold my nose and spend whatever it took and put it on the market. (Did I say “market”? Sorry, just going for an easy laugh.) The brokers who bothered to return my calls came, looked around, and, as if reading off an identical script, said, “Nice bones, but it’s very dark.”

  The house had almost burned to the ground fifteen years before. My mother, a lady of excellent taste, had used the occasion to redecorate along a color spectrum ranging from dark chocolate to milk chocolate. It looked great, but you needed a flashlight to find your way around even during daylight hours. There are probably still weekend guests from the 1990s wandering around lost, looking like Gollum, going, “Precioussssss!” It finally dawned on me that women of a certain age—Mum was then in her late sixties—aren’t especially keen on bright ambient light.

  So it was that I found myself on my hands and knees with Danny, crawling around the floor with paint chips. I make no claim to knowing anything about decor. My only aim was to brighten and lighten for the real estate agents.

  “Well,” I said to Danny, “let’s start with white. How wrong can you go with white?”

  It turns out that there are many, many versions of white. Danny and I fanned through Colonial White, Egg White, White Out, White Nights, Snow White, White Flight, Perry White, Teddy White, E. B. White, and Hast Seen the White Whale? Somewhere out there amid the amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties and fruited plain, a dedicated group of Americans are working day and night to come up
with four thousand different names for beige. If Isaac Newton had gotten his hands on a paint-chip wheel, the rainbow would consist of the following colors: Better Red Than Dead, William of Orange, Lemon Tree Very Pretty, How Green Is My Valley, Danube Blue, Mood Indigo, and Violet Hush.

  Danny and I finally settled on Ostrich Shell. Your basic off-white, but with a more exotic name.

  I’d been told—rather, warned—that when you paint one room, it will look nice but will make the room next to it look as if raccoons have been living in it for the past decade. Indeed, this was the case. So we had to paint that room too, which made the room next to it look like the raccoons had been using it as well for their nefarious raccoony purposes. The Domino Effect. So we ended up doing all the rooms.

  Which provided another teachable moment, because if you make the inside look new, then the outside will look like the House of Usher. So the outside got painted, too. Then the basement. Why the basement, you ask? Well, if the upstairs and outside look nice, you can’t have a basement that looks like Abu Ghraib. The new basement is now bright off-white, or Crème de la Crème or Milk of Magnesia. Whatever. Now when guests go down into it, they no longer expect someone to leap out, put a hood over their head and waterboard them.

  After it was all finished, I looked at it and thought, Not bad. A person could live here.

  Danny ventured, “Your mom would be proud.”

  I considered. She was a woman of definite opinions, my mother.

  “It’s possible,” I said. “It’s also possible that she’s going to appear at the top of the staircase in a nightgown, holding a candelabrum and pointing a finger at me, and moan, “Ecru, Brute?”