But Enough About You: Essays (2 page)

One time before I gave a talk to a sizable audience in the Midwest, the gracious and well-meaning host introduced me as a “say-terist.” He repeated the word several times, which surely had some folks wondering why—on earth—the lecture committee had invited a sex fiend to address them at eleven o’clock in the morning in the civic center. An elderly lady came up to me afterward and sweetly asked how old I was when I first decided that I wanted to be a “say-terist.” I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, so I said, “It’s complicated.”

I’ve done a bit of public speaking, too much of it in the service of trying to get people to buy my books. Trust me when I say: You’re truly better off if they don’t introduce you as a “humorist” or “satirist” or any sort of amusing person. Chances are the audience already knows about you. They’re not a flash mob. They didn’t just spontaneously gather in response to some tweet. (I can proudly avouch that my audiences generally do not consist of looters.) So they already know that you’re not Stephen Hawking or Joyce Carol Oates or the author of the hot new analytical history on Queen Anne Style that everyone’s talking about.

I’ve gotten some laughs over the years, but when I lie there wide-awake in bed at three a.m., it’s not the laughs I remember, but the disasters. And there have been those, oh yes. Always—always—there’s that guy or woman sitting in the front row, arms tightly crossed
over the chest. The others might be laughing. Not him. No, no. He’s staring, impassive as the Sphinx, unamused as Queen Victoria. He even looks a bit put out that everyone else seems to be finding it all so darned amusing. I can read this fellow’s thoughts as clearly as I can the giant electronic news crawl in Times Square:
THAT’S NOT FUNNY . . . THAT’S NOT FUNNY, EITHER . . . I’M NOT GOING TO BUY YOUR BOOK . . . ANDY BOROWITZ IS COMING NEXT MONTH . . . I’LL BUY HIS BOOK . . .
HE’S
FUNNY . . .

You know those “About the Author” paragraphs on the back flap or cover of a book? The paragraphs authors pretend they didn’t write?
Considered one of the funniest, most brilliant, most original
—etc.—
writers of his generation . . .
Right—those. After a half-dozen books, I got bored saying the same thing (there wasn’t much to say to begin with), so for this one, I just made it all up. Among other noteworthy fictional accomplishments, I wrote that I’d been “an advisor to every U.S. president since William Howard Taft.” Why not?

By Day Ten of any book tour, you’re a bit punchy. I was shambling like a sedated mental patient into a studio to do an AM radio drive-time interview. With all due respect to the fine professionals who do these for a living, AM radio drive-time interviews are typically not occasions of Socratic dialogue.

The host was sitting at his console speed-reading the “About the Author” paragraph on the back flap of my book. I knew that this was all he would know about me.

He looked up at me dubiously. “You were an advisor to William Howard Taft?”

“Yes,” I said.

His brows beetled. “So . . . we could talk about that?”

“Sure,” I said.

And we did. I haven’t been asked back on his show, but I have no regrets. It was well worth it.

Book tours have a yin and yang to them. On the one hand, they’re a narcissist’s wet dream. You get to talk about yourself endlessly, again and again, until even you are heartily sick of yourself and your book. On the other hand, they tell you exactly where you fit on the food chain. On that same book tour, I happened to be following in
the slipstream of another author—George Stephanopoulos. George was promoting his number one best seller memoir about his years working for President Clinton. I was promoting a comic novel about the UFO world, which was getting okay-but-mixed reviews.

At every airport along my Trail of Tears, my author escort would greet me, still flushed with excitement. “We just had George Stephanopoulos. You’ve never seen such crowds. We had to move his reading to the coliseum.”

On my first book tour, I arrived one night for my reading at a venerable independent bookstore in Berkeley. It was all new to me and I was pumped and nervous. I needn’t have been, for there was not one single person present. The embarrassed manager excused herself. A few minutes later, four of the fifty seats were suddenly occupied—I couldn’t help but notice—by Hispanic persons. She’d gone into the stockroom and told the staff to go pretend to be my audience. It was very thoughtful of her. One of them even came up afterward and had me sign the book and then pretended to buy it at the cash register.

That was fifteen books ago. There are fewer empty seats now at the readings—but not to worry: there are still seats available for
you
. Book tours have their strange moments, but it’s at the bookstores that you meet your readers, and I could hug every one of them. I don’t know if George Stephanopoulos feels the same way about his readers, but then it would take him all day to hug everyone in that coliseum. Mine I can get hugged in no time.

But enough about you. Are writers more vain and sensitive—that is, insufferable—than people in other professions? Say, actors or musicians? Doctors, lawyers, architects, imams, hedge fund managers, elected officials, fashion designers, opera singers, models, university professors, submariners, dictators, fighter pilots, terrorists, funeral directors, comedians, spies, baseball players, football players, publicists, policemen, presidents, air traffic controllers, ship captains, plumbers? Buddhist monks?

Over the course of my life I suppose I’ve met or known most of the above types of people. (Actually, meeting a dictator is still
on my bucket list.) So I can say with absolute authority: I have no idea. But it’s probably safe to assert, if not asseverate (see “insufferable,” above), that as a rule, writers tend to come labeled
FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE
. This can variously be cause for amusement, nonamusement, or reaching for the nearest blunt instrument.

As W. H. Auden put it, “No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.” Auden himself was perhaps a unique case—of justifiable narcissism, if we take his fellow poet Stephen Spender’s word for it. Justifiable, that is, by virtue of utter self-confidence untainted by jealousy.

Spender said of his great friend, “He just thought he was cleverer than anyone else, but without arrogance really . . . He knew exactly what he was doing, and he was totally indifferent to what anyone said about it . . . For instance, when he was so attacked by Randall Jarrell in 1947 he said, ‘He must be in love with me; I can’t think of any other explanation.’ ”
^III

In the pages of this attractively packaged and
very
reasonably priced book, you’ll come across some writers I’ve personally known or encountered or studied. Joseph Heller and I became pals somewhat improbably after I wrote a respectful but far from glowing review of one of his novels. Joe had a healthy ego, no question. A writer once lamented to him that he would never write a book as good as Heller’s
Catch-22
. Joe replied, “Who has?” Not bad. If Joe had been a narcissist
qua
narcissist, he would never have written me the thank-you note for the unglowing review that inaugurated our friendship.

You’ll also find Ray Bradbury in here. I didn’t know Ray well, but I admired him greatly, not only for his genius as a storyteller, but also for the abundant joy that he brought to the business of writing. His electric zest seemed to act as an ego-jamming device. He so loved writing that it was infectious. And he was generous. He took pleasure in the success of fellow writers, especially younger ones.

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.”