The intersection of writing, fame and commerce that was the coda of Sujatha's last post triggered a memory of a crônica by Russell Baker that was included as a post script in an anthology titled "The Historian as Detective - Essays on Evidence", Robin W. Winks, Ed. Not the historian, silly! Wink, the editor, with a nudge, gives this nod to Baker, the humorist :
"We need not take the tragedy of history so seriously as to forget our obligation to laugh as well. Perhaps the humor of history is black, a discipline of the absurd to match the world's stage on which the theater of the absurd plays to standing-room-only audiences, but the humor is there nonetheless. Let the final word here be given to a man who represents those historians of the moment, newspaper reporters, those men who give most Americans all the history they will ever read once they have left school, and all they have ever read with pleasure. Russell Baker, a columnist for The New York Times, reminds us of Carl Becker's message, that Everyman will be his own historian."
Having typed that I seem to have forgotten how it all relates to Sujatha's post, except that Baker's piece is in counterpoint to her conjecture that "maybe the freedom to write what one wishes comes after fame". In the event, humor is a reward unto itself.
March 27, ----
Dear Groucho [Marx],
The Groucho Letters is (are?) a delight for all us FBI types who like to read other people's mail, but you're probably going to find, next time you find a piece of stationery, that publication was a mistake.
Once you start letting letters get into print, you tend to get confused when you sit down to write a note to Aunt Hannah. The problem is whether you're writing for Aunt Hannah's benefit or for the 300,000 people who are going to gobble up your next book of letters.
One of those moderately notorious characters in which Washington abounds lives down the street here, and a few years ago he agreed to give some university out West his correspondence, on the theory that the documentation of American history would be incomplete without a record of his notes to the milkman.
The trouble is that ever since he committed himself to writing letters to posterity he hasn't been able to write a line. Sometimes when you drop in at his place he'll have thirty or forty quarts of milk in the kitchen because he hasn't been able to rephrase "No Milk Today" with the felicity that will satisfy Edmund Wilson when his correspondence is published.
He's an extreme case, admittedly, but not the worst example of what happens to people when they realize their letters are being mailed over the heads of their correspondents for ultimate delivery to The New York Review of Books. The worst is the sort of thing that happened to a certain novelist, formerly of Possum Gap, Tenn., now of New York, who hit it big with his first book and, after yielding to the inevitable pressures to publish his letters, began worrying about his literary reputation.
His mother passed through Washington not long ago and dropped by the office. "How's Al?" I asked her. "He writes all the time but he don't say", she said. "It's gotten so I hate to see the mailman on account of I know it's going to be another one of those eight-page letters from Al telling me about how wrong some fellow named Eliot was in comparing Henry James and Turgenev."
All his mother wanted to hear, of course, was that he was making a mint and living high off the hog, but having committed his letter to print, Al felt he'd be destroying his literary reputation unless he poured it on her about subjects that book reviewers think a real artist ought to talk about to the old mom. His mother, naturally, assumes he has become unhinged.
This is known in medicine as the Lord Chesterfield reaction. You, as a father, know as well as I do that all Chesterfield wanted from the old boy was a few lines ending with, "Enclosed find check for the amount you requested." Instead Chesterfield battered him with volumes of advice on how to get on in the world, which was obviously meant to show posterity what a keen bird old Chesterfield himself was.
We can assume, as a matter of course, that the boy thought the old man, at best, daft.
At that, Chesterfield was a more entertaining writer of letters for the public than most men who do.
Now that you are stuck with writing letters to posterity, your'e going to have problems. Take your letter to Norman Krasna in which you review The Balcony by Jean Genêt. A splendid letter since it was written without posterity peeping over your shoulder.
Not expecting any literary critics to intercept your mail, you could easily write, "If this is show business, I'm glad I'm getting out."
But suppose you were writing to Krasna in your new manifestation as Groucho, Man of Letters, vulnerable to assault by Jean-Paul Sartre. Knowing that dismissal of a Genêt work as a 'turkey' (your word) is an offence punishable by character assassination, you would probably take 6000 words to say it and end up sounding like Marcel Proust.
Or take "Last night I saw a broad we had both pursued during moments of our more active lives". Marvelous. But are you still going to be able to come up with a line as free-spirited as that now that you know your mail is likely to wind up on shelves between Lord Chesterfield and Mme. de Sévigné? There's a frail germ of a joke there, but I'll leave the punch line to you. These days you never can be sure your mail isn't being delivered direct to the printer.
As ever,
Russell Baker
That does it, Narayan. I'm hitting 'publish' on my next F-n-S blog post, without trying to polish it for posterity! Who cares if there are no deep and discussion-worthy truths tucked away in it?
Posted by: Sujatha | December 27, 2010 at 06:18 AM