Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Read online

  IDPO hasn’t needed any rules to keep the membership down. In fact, Allemang’s verses no longer appear in The Globe and Mail, so I’d say that his membership hangs by a thread, except that saying that would constitute a metaphor and IDPO discourages metaphors. I continue to turn out a deadline poem every week for The Nation—or every issue, I should say, since The Nation publishes only every other week in the summer, even though the downtrodden are oppressed every day of the year.

  It’s left to me to speak up for deadline poetry against the implied sneers of people like T. S. Eliot—or what we often refer to at IDPO gatherings as “the Sanskrit crowd.” It’s left to me to persuade literary critics that in describing deadline poetry, the term “accessible” is preferable to the term “simpleminded.” It’s left to me to point out that making a deadline almost every week is something never faced by what my family has an unfortunate tendency to call “grown-up poets.” Take Eliot, for instance. And I’m not here to knock the competition. But take Eliot, for instance. If he came upon a “patient etherized upon a table” and wasn’t quite inspired, he could always wait for the next patient etherized upon a table. If he wasn’t turned on by those “half-deserted streets,” he could wander around until he found some half-deserted streets more to his liking. Eliot was under no deadline pressure.

  And then there’s the question of rhyming. “Real poets”—another phrase my family has an unfortunate tendency to use—can choose the words they want to rhyme. Deadline poets are stuck with writing about people in public life, and there are people who persist in going into public life despite the fact that their names are impossible to rhyme. And deadline poets have no truck with the near-rhymes that people in the trade sometimes call slant rhymes—the sort of thing occasionally used by poets like, well, T. S. Eliot, for instance. We are as strict about exact rhyming as my father was when he wrote what was perhaps his best-known menu poem: “ ‘Eat your food,’ gently said mom to her little son, Roddy. / ‘If you don’t, I will break every bone in your body.’ ”

  For uncompromising rhymers, the presidency has been a particular problem. The nice iambic candidates with strong vowels like Ross Perot and John McCain always seem to lose. For a deadline poet, November has been the cruelest month. Bush is a terrible rhyme. When George H. W. Bush left office, I wanted to write him a poem, and I had to make do with his middle names:

  Adieu to you, George Herbert Walker.

  Though never treasured as a talker—

  Your predicates were often prone

  To wander, nounless, off alone—

  You did your best in your own way,

  The way of Greenwich Country Day.

  So just relax, and take your ease,

  And never order Japanese.

  Clinton was even worse. Clinton is the orange of American presidents. In his second term, right at the beginning of the … unpleasantness, it was said that Hillary Clinton was going on the Today program to lead the defense. I had to use what in past days we would have called her maiden name—what would now be called maybe her name of origin, her slave name:

  And so it’s up to our Ms. Rodham

  To prove Bill’s White House isn’t Sodom.

  It’s left to this adroit señora

  To show that it is just Gomorrah.

  Oddly enough, Obama, who has often mentioned having a funny name, would have been an improvement on his predecessors if only I hadn’t used up all of the relevant rhymes with Osama bin Laden—Yokohama, Cinerama, slap yo’ mama.

  I’m sometimes asked if I’m ashamed of making a living by making snide and underhanded remarks about respectable public officials, and my only defense has been “It’s not much of a living.” But sometimes I do think of what might have happened if my path and T. S. Eliot’s path hadn’t diverged—if, for instance, as a boy in Kansas City I had paid a little more attention in Sanskrit class. Would I have moved to England and started talking funny? Could I have written something obscure enough to be considered profound? Or would I just get rejection letters like the one I wrote to T. S. Eliot about The Waste Land—a rejection letter that has as its penultimate couplet, “I’ve read it, Tom—the lines, the in-betweens. / I don’t know what the bloody hell it means.”

  2010

  Paper Trials

  For people who make their livings as writers, the routine messages of everyday life have to be put together with some care. You don’t want to leave rough drafts lying around. I’ve known novelists for whom the prospect of composing a note asking that a son or daughter be excused from gym that day can bring on a serious case of writer’s block.

  Recently, our car had to be left on city streets for a few days, and, attempting to benefit from the experience of a couple of trips in the past to AAAA Aardvark Auto-Glass Repair, I took on the task of composing a sign to inform potential pillagers that it contained nothing of value. Hours later, my wife happened to ask me to do some little chore around the house and I heard myself saying, “I can’t right now. I’m on the fourth draft of this car sign.”

  There was no reason for her to be surprised. She has seen me stuck badly on an RSVP. In fact, a routine piece of social communication can be particularly knotty for writers, since they habitually try to express themselves in ways that are not overly familiar. This is why a biographer who seems capable of producing a twelve-hundred-page Volume One in fairly short order can often be inexcusably late with, say, a simple thank-you note. Reading over what he’s put on paper, he’ll say to himself, “I can’t believe that I wrote anything as lame as ‘Thanks for a wonderful weekend.’ ” Then he’ll put aside the entire thank-you-note project until a fresher phrase comes to mind. A few weeks later, while the draft is still marinating on the writer’s desk, the weekend’s hostess feels confirmed in her impression—an impression that began to surface with the wine-spilling incident on Saturday night—that the biographer is a boor or a yahoo.

  What my fourth draft of the car sign said was NO RADIO. I thought that was spare and to the point, without extraneous language. I came to it from NO RADIO OR ANY OTHER VALUABLES, which I decided, after some reflection, protested too much.

  “What do you think?” I asked my wife, handing her the sign.

  “It’s okay,” my wife said. “I saw some ready-made signs for car windows at the hardware store, and that’s what one of them said, so I guess it’s what people think is effective.”

  “You saw the same sign—worded in just that way?”

  “I’m not saying you plagiarized it from the hardware store.”

  “Actually, I haven’t been in there in some time,” I said.

  “It’s really okay,” my wife said. “NO RADIO is fine.”

  It’s fine if you’re satisfied to be writing at the same level as some gorilla at the sign factory. Thinking I needed fresh ideas, I phoned my older daughter, who lives just around the corner. “What would be a good sign to put in the car to discourage crackheads from smashing the window so they can get at six cents in change on the floor and the spare fan belt and an old pair of pliers?” I asked.

  My daughter, a survivor of one of those earnest and progressive nursery schools in the Village, said, “How about USE WORDS NOT HANDS?” This was a reference to what the teachers at her nursery school were constantly saying as the little monsters attacked one another with any weapon available. At one point, we all began to wonder exactly what the words for sneaking up behind another kid and pulling her hair might be.

  It wouldn’t surprise me at all if that hair puller had turned to a life of petty crime. Much as I enjoyed contemplating the look on his face when he spotted his nursery-school slogan on a car he was about to break into, I decided that the impact of USE WORDS NOT HANDS rested on the sort of allusion that an editor would criticize as “too inside.”

  The next draft was a complete departure—more of a new approach, really, than just another draft. It said THERE IS NOTHING OF VALUE HERE. Upon reflection, I decided that it sounded too philosophical. I could picture
a car thief who came upon it turning to his partner in crime and saying, “Talk about pretentious!” So now I’m sort of stuck. Meanwhile, the car’s on the street. It is not completely without protection. An old shirt cardboard taped onto the back window bears the words SIGN IN PREPARATION.

  1994

  Half an Oaf

  There was a discussion at my house recently about whether or not I am an uncultured oaf. This is not the first time the subject has come up. The form these discussions take isn’t what you might assume. It’s not that somebody accuses me of being an uncultured oaf and I defend myself by talking at length about some movie with subtitles that I’ve recently seen. That’s not the way it happens at all—and I don’t just mean that I’d have a different defense, because I haven’t seen a subtitled movie in a long time and had trouble following the plot of the last one I did see. These discussions are not accusatory; they’re more like dispassionate inquiries. Everyone present seems genuinely curious about whether I can be accurately categorized as an uncultured oaf, and no one is more curious about it than I am.

  I think that at this point I should present my credentials. I’m a college graduate. That’s not all: I was an English major. There’s more: I graduated from a distinguished American research university. All of that makes me wonder whether or not there are a lot of other people with ostensibly respectable academic credentials who have reason to suspect that they may be uncultured oafs.

  It’s true that I have no advanced degree, a fact my daughters like to remind me of from time to time, as a way to keep me sort of damped down. It’s also true that I grew up in the Midwest, in a milieu (a word I’ve learned since) in which culture did not hang heavily in the air. As was customary in that time and place, my mother took my sister to concerts and road shows of Broadway musicals, while my father took me to the Golden Gloves and the NCAA basketball tournaments. (We all went to the American Royal Livestock Show together.)

  Still, this country is way past the days when cultural levels were geographically based. For years, our friend James has been described around our house as the most cultured person we know, and James has lived virtually all of his life in south-central Louisiana, a good two hours from the nearest place showing subtitled movies. He is consulted with particular respect when we have a discussion about whether or not I’m an uncultured oaf.

  Not long ago, I read an article about a distinguished literary critic, long deceased, and, as an example of the critic’s remarkable writing ability, the article drew particular attention to this sentence: “This intense conviction of the existence of the self apart from culture is, as culture well knows, its noblest and most generous achievement.” I had no idea what that could mean.

  On the theory that a certified intellectual might be able to enlighten me, I decided to consult someone I know who is an officer of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. There’s no substitute for going right to the top. Here’s what the certified intellectual had to say about the sentence in question: “I suppose it’s meant to imply that culture (whatever that is) has allowed (by encouraging the Romantic ideal) the idea of the self to flourish, indeed triumph, to the extent that we value it more than anything else.” Appreciative of his help, I decided not to trouble him further, although what I wanted to ask him was what I would have wanted to ask the literary critic if he had laid that business about the existence of the self on me while, say, we were waiting together in the subway station for a train: “Could you please give me an example?”

  Recently, I attended a modern-dance program. I hasten to say that this was not an attempt to amass evidence for any discussion that might come up about who is and who isn’t an uncultured oaf. The choreographer had gone to my high school in the Midwest, and I make it a policy to attend any cultural event created by someone who went to my high school—a policy, it may not surprise you to know, that still leaves me with plenty of evenings free for other activities. I loved the modern-dance program. I loved it so much, in fact, that I began to consider the possibility of attending modern-dance programs choreographed by people who had not gone to my high school. A couple of nights later, James, who was visiting from Louisiana, saw the same program, and he loved it, too. Maybe, I allowed myself to think, I am not an uncultured oaf after all.

  The only review I saw of the modern-dance program offered testimony to the contrary. It compared the plot to a soap opera. (Actually, I had missed the plot. I don’t mean that I failed to follow it: I hadn’t been aware that there was one.) Also, the reviewer implied, without using these precise words, that the program had been designed to make modern dance palatable to, well, uncultured oafs.

  What did that say about me? What, for that matter, did it say about James? Is it possible that I’m such an uncultured oaf that the person I’d always considered the most cultured person I know is also an uncultured oaf? No one is more curious about that than I am—except maybe James.

  2009

  Mencken’s Mail

  My first reaction to reading a letter that requires a letter in return is to wonder whether I can get away with claiming that it got lost in the mail. That is also my second reaction, and it lasts a minimum of six weeks—by which time it’s often safe to conclude that the time during which a reply would have been relevant has passed. The replies I do write invariably start with an apology for the delay—an apology that sometimes fills the entire letter with imaginatively concocted tales of broken typewriters or arthritis in the fingers or files destroyed by the arson of embittered office-seekers. Occasionally, I’m pithy. A letter I just sent off began: “Please excuse my tardiness in answering your letter of Sept. 28, 1953. I have been out of the city.”

  There are disadvantages in not being a letter writer. For instance, when I run across people whose letters I have been meaning to answer for a year or two, they often appear surprised and mildly disappointed to find that I’m alive. But I have also benefited from what might be called the blessings of sloth—the same kind of advantages that come to a man who is too lazy to exercise and can therefore comfort himself with the knowledge of how many muscles he has avoided painfully pulling and how many dreary lectures on proper backswing technique he has been spared. Whenever I’m in danger of feeling guilty about the drawerful of unanswered mail in my desk, I reassure myself with the reminder that answering a letter only brings another letter to be answered. For me, the New York Public Library’s announcement that its collection of H. L. Mencken correspondence was available for inspection presented an opportunity not for scholarly research but for proving to myself what enormous problems an intelligent man like H. L. Mencken could cause himself by answering his mail.

  My inquiry was rewarded immediately in Mencken’s correspondence with Ambrose Bierce, the San Francisco journalist and short-story writer, whom I have always treasured for writing, in a column complaining about slow service on the Southern Pacific railroad, that “the passenger is exposed to the perils of senility.” In 1913, Bierce, who had met Mencken in Baltimore, sent him what appeared to be a fairly harmless letter from California. “A few days ago I bought the May number of the rather clever magazine with the unpleasant name The Smart Set and was delighted to find in it two things by you,” Bierce wrote. “Maybe you write for it all the time. I don’t know. Well, I like your work and want to tell you so. I had not known that you could write so devilish well.… I hope you prosper in so far as prosperity is compatible with happiness.”

  If I had been in Mencken’s place, I would have resolved to write Bierce back immediately—thanking him, with appropriate modesty, for such a kind letter. Then I would have considered the wisdom of trying to save Bierce future embarrassment by informing him that in certain circles it would be assumed that any literate citizen knew about H. L. Mencken’s writing for The Smart Set all the time, and devilish well. Then I would have wondered whether I could do that with appropriate modesty. Then I would have wondered if modesty was really appropriate under the circumstances. Then I would have wondered how many d
rafts would be required to put such complicated thoughts in a form I wouldn’t be embarrassed to send to Ambrose Bierce. Then I would have put Bierce’s letter in my desk drawer, reminding myself that I should get right to it just as soon as I took care of some other important matters, such as alphabetizing my filing cabinets and giving my baseball mitt its spring application of neat’s-foot oil.

  Mencken, making one of those quick decisions that are characteristic of the type of people who answer their mail, apparently wrote Bierce a simple note of thanks, because Bierce sounded slightly embarrassed in the next letter he wrote Mencken. “Happening to look you up in Who’s Who, I’ve been thinkin’ that you can’t have been greatly feathered by my ‘coming upon’ you unexpectedly,” Bierce wrote. “The purpose of this note, however, is not apologetic: I’d like to know which of your books you are least ashamed of, so that I may read it.” (Most writers I know, including me, would have saved that last line for some revenue-producing effort—perhaps a short story that included a letter from one acerbic literary man to another—but it’s possible that Bierce had enough of those lines to toss off two or three at the breakfast table every morning without having to remind himself to write them down. It’s also possible that he might have used them in a letter and then in a revenue-producing effort.)

  From these first letters there followed what letter writers would probably consider a pleasant correspondence—until Bierce went off to Mexico and disappeared. If I had been Mencken at about the time Bierce was presumed dead, the weight of my sorrow would have been lightened a bit by the thought that at least I had one less correspondent to worry about.