Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (14 page)

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 drafts 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.

As it turned out, though, that thought would have been premature. Bierce had left a daughter. The daughter could read and write English and owned a supply of stationery. In a few years, Mencken found himself locked in correspondence with her about a memoir she proposed writing about life with her father—a memoir to be produced with the literary assistance of Stephen Crane’s niece. Not long after that, Mencken found himself composing letters to Stephen
Crane’s niece, who had decided, after the Bierce collaboration, that she was ready to write a memoir about life with Stephen Crane. That didn’t stop the letters from Bierce’s daughter. She asked Mencken’s advice about republishing a Bierce anthology and about the possibility of selling movie rights to Bierce’s short stories. She asked Mencken’s advice about getting the novel of a friend published. After some years of such requests, she, too, died, which would have brought an end to the letters Mencken had to write to the Bierce family except that he was already deeply involved in a correspondence with her cousin, Edward Bierce.

Edward Bierce wanted Mencken’s advice on a number of subjects, such as how to get a job on a newspaper. He also enjoyed sending Mencken chatty letters that contained no specific requests but had to be answered fairly quickly in order to avoid another letter asking if anything was wrong. In the thirties, then, Mencken was steadily writing letters not only to Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, but also to the last remaining letter-writing heir of Ambrose Bierce.

Edward Bierce’s letters seem to have fallen off in the forties. Then, in 1953, Mencken received a letter on the stationery of the Long Beach, California,
Independent-Press-Telegram
. It was signed not by Edward Bierce but by a newspaperwoman who said she knew him—and casually tossed in the information that, two and a half years before, she had covered the trial in which he had been convicted of second-degree murder in the death of his wife. (“He was justified in beating her,” the newspaperwoman wrote, “but he should have stopped before he killed her.”) The reason for the letter was not to report on Bierce’s domestic misfortune but to ask Mencken’s help in obtaining a publisher for the newspaperwoman’s eighty-thousand-word novel about the Nebraska sand hills and early Wyoming.

That was forty years after the apparently innocent compliment on the
Smart Set
articles. If I had been in Mencken’s place during that span of years, I might have begun to feel guilty at some point about having Ambrose Bierce’s still unanswered letter in my desk. But, then, nobody would be asking my help in obtaining a publisher for an eighty-thousand-word novel about the Nebraska sand hills and early Wyoming. The blessings of sloth.

1971

In the most recent Great Canadian Literary Quiz, a contest that runs annually in the Toronto
Globe and Mail
, I was the answer to No. 18. Not to boast. Well, to boast just a bit. Being an answer in the literary quiz of an entire country—one that just happens to have the second-largest landmass in the entire world—is not an honor that comes someone’s way every day. It’s true that at Southwest High School, in Kansas City, I was voted Third Most Likely to Succeed. That was in 1953, though, and a year or so ago I stopped mentioning it if someone happened to ask “Had any honors lately?” I’d decided that my wife was correct in observing that it might have lost a certain freshness.

On the other hand, being the answer to No. 18 in the Great Canadian Literary Quiz was something I considered worth bringing up, in an offhand sort of way, at the office water fountain. The response of one of the office’s premier scoffers, I regret to say, was, “I would have thought that every answer in a Canadian literary quiz would be Robertson Davies.”

Wrong. Not just wrong, but wrong in a way that reflects the patronizing American attitude that we figures in the Canadian literary world—even those of us who haven’t been figures for terribly long—deeply resent. In fact, I can just imagine discussing that very subject with others who are answers to questions on the Great Canadian Literary Quiz. We’d be at a literary soirée at the top of some swanky high-rise in Toronto—Saul Bellow and Robert MacNeil (both answers to No. 34) and Michael Ondaatje (No. 33A) and, even though it crowds the room a bit, British Columbia (No. 49C). We’d all know one another well enough to use the numbers of the questions we’re the answers to as sort of in-crowd nicknames:

“You know, Twenty-two, that remark about Robertson Davies
demonstrates just the sort of Yank arrogance you were talking about in your opposition to NAFTA,” I’m saying to Margaret Atwood. “Say, isn’t that Forty-one coming through the door?” Forty-one is Alice Munro, who has just entered the room chatting with Brian Moore, whom we all call Twenty, of course, or in particularly affectionate moments, Twen.

Just for the record, by the way, I informed the office scoffer that of the fifty answers in the Great Canadian Literary Quiz, many of them multiple answers, Robertson Davies was the answer to only No. 14E. And what was the question whose answer was Robertson Davies? I don’t know. Actually, I don’t know the question whose answer was me—or as we literary figures tend to say, I. My friend Dusty sent me the
Globe and Mail
that carried the answers to the quiz—she’d circled the answer to No. 18—but not the
Globe and Mail
that carried the questions.

I suspected that question No. 18 had something to do with my longtime contention that I should be recognized as one-sixth Canadian content. For some years, one method Canada has used to avoid being culturally subsumed into the United States is to insist that, say, a film or a broadcasting project include a certain percentage of Canadians—what’s called Canadian content. Since I live in Nova Scotia in July and August—one-sixth of the year—I have long maintained that for every six books of Mordecai Richler’s on the Canadiana shelf, there should be one of mine.

In making this claim, I’ve taken the sort of low-key approach that might be expected from a literary figure in Canada. I’ve simply laid out the simple math at the heart of it and said, in effect, “How about it, guys?” Actually, given the fact that Canada has twice as many official languages as some countries I can think of, I’ve also said, in effect,
“Alors, qu’est-ce que vous en pensez, les mecs?”

Maybe No. 18 was an indication that my Canadian content papers have finally come through. (“Which writer has just been certified as fractional Canadian content?”)

But what if No. 18 had been something like “Which American writer with vague Canadian connections has made a pest out of himself on the issue of Canadian content?” or “Which Nova Scotia summer resident named Calvin has been observed smiling modestly when
complimented on books about the art world that were actually written by Calvin Tomkins?” It occurred to me that, in the world of literature, the pleasures of being an answer are not really dependent on knowing the question.

1998

For a long time, I’ve had a lot of ideas for improving the publishing industry, many of them acquired in the course of doing research for a book I have been working on for years—
An Anthology of Authors’ Atrocity Stories About Publishers
. (So far, I have failed to find a publisher for the book, despite a friend of mine having improved the original idea considerably by proposing that the anthology be published as an annual.) It has recently occurred to me that there is a way to make my ideas for the industry mandatory through the simple vehicle of New York City ordinances. Because publishers are concentrated in Manhattan, their activities could be regulated in the same way that taxi rates and building permits are regulated. The city council could simply pass a law, for instance, that read “The advance for a book must be larger than the check for the lunch at which it was discussed.”

Yes, the publishers would say that such a law was unrealistic. They would threaten a mass move to New Jersey—the way the Wall Street crowd threatened to move to New Jersey when the city hinted about imposing what amounted to a parasite tax on stock-and-bond transactions—but the threat would obviously never be carried out. Where would publishers eat lunch in New Jersey?

Some of the ordinances would be simple consumer protection. Any person furnishing a blurb for a book jacket, for instance, would be required to disclose his connection to the author of the book. A one-sentence parenthetical identification, supported by an affidavit
filed in triplicate with the Department of Street Maintenance and Repair, would suffice. If, for example, a new novel by Cushman Jack Hendricks carried a blurb by a famous novelist named Dred Schlotz saying “Hendricks writes like an angel with steel in its guts,” the blurb would simply be signed “Dred Schlotz (Drinking buddy at Elaine’s)” or “Dred Schlotz (Hopes to be chosen shortstop on the author’s team at next East Hampton writers softball game)” or “Dred Schlotz (Just a fellow who likes to keep his name before the reading public between books).”

I suppose the publishers would put up some First Amendment quibble to the Open Blurb Law. But what I propose is really no different from the truth-in-packaging legislation that requires, say, frozen-food manufacturers to list how much MSG and cornstarch the consumer will be eating if he thaws out what purports to be a spinach soufflé. Although there may be writers who believe their books to be different in spirit from a spinach soufflé, spiritual differences are not recognized by the Department of Consumer Affairs.

One ordinance would require any novel containing more than three hundred pages and/or fourteen major characters and/or three generations to provide in its frontis matter a list that includes the name of each character, the page of first mention, nickname or petname, and sexual proclivities. Under another ordinance, passed despite some opposition from an organization called Urban Neurotics United, each publisher would be limited to one Kvetch Novel per month (“A Kvetch Novel,” in the language of the ordinance, “will be defined as any novel with a main character to whom any reader might reasonably be expected to say, ‘Oh, just pull up your socks!’ ”). All profits from books published by convicted felons who have held public office would, by law, be turned over to a fund that provides kleptomaniacs with scholarships to Harvard Business School. An author will be legally prohibited from ending a book’s Acknowledgments by thanking his wife for her typing. There would be no books by any psychotherapist who has ever appeared on a talk show. Each September, under the joint supervision of the Office of the Borough President of Staten Island and the Department of Marine Resources, the city itself would publish a book called
An Anthology of Authors’ Atrocity Stories About Publishers
.

1978

MADLY MAKING MONEY

“My long-term investment strategy has been criticized as being entirely too dependent on Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.”