Russell Baker (1925-2019) was a New York Times reporter and then columnist. His book about growing up — titled, oddly enough, Growing Up— was a wonderful read. This 1990 selection of his columns was — pretty good. Mostly.
Baker starts off saying that when he first moved from news reporting to writing columns thrice weekly, he was exultant. Now “at last free to disgorge the entire content of my brain.”
However, he writes, “having written fewer than a dozen columns, I made a terrifying discovery: I had now disgorged the entire content of my brain, yet another column was due at once.”
Actually, he exaggerates. The book is full of exaggeration. It’s what he’s good at.
One piece, for example, “The Incredible Shrinking Life,”* chronicles the tribulations occasioned by rising New York City rents, forcing repeated moves to ever smaller apartments, and the painful sacrifices this entailed. The repeated refrain: it was like “being whittled away.” First to go, unable to fit them in a reduced space, were the children. It proceeds from there. Ending with accommodations too small for anyone over four feet tall. “A touch of sadness is only to be expected,” says the surgeon, “after you’ve been whittled away.”
Speaking of surgery, Baker presciently anticipates today’s trans phenomenon, with a very practical suggestion for men who’d prefer to have female bodies, and women who want men’s. They should just trade heads. If the experience fails to fulfill their expectations, they can simply switch back. Problem solved.
“The Excellence of Welby Stitch, Jr.,” purports to be a Harvard recommendation letter for the named young scholar. Whose record and personal qualities are glaringly rotten in every salient respect. All of which the letter gamely endeavors to spin in a derangedly positive light, as if to make a silk purse of the proverbial sow’s ear, turning standards on their heads. The letter ends with the signature: “Welby Stitch, Sr.”
“Boneless Sunday” sets forth a rather elaborate narrative set-up to enable Baker to finally pen the words, “Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone, but when she got there, the cupboard was bare.”** But that wasn’t the ending. The tale continues, “and so the poor dog left home to go to Acapulco with a Texas bone millionaire who loved the idea of a dog who could say, ‘Nuts to the King.'” Yes, the story had previously introduced a king, set before whom now is a pie. When told blackbirds had been baked into it, he says, “The cook must be losing his mind.” And “then the pie was opened and the birds began to sing.” The king was revolted, whispering “Ugh!” to the Queen.
“Shut up and eat a slice,” she says, lest he hurt the cook’s feelings.
But the king does more than hurt his feelings. The cook’s body is found in a ravine.
However, that still is not the end of this jam-packed story. Jack and Jill, and Little Miss Muffett, duly put in appearances. All in all, quite the literary tour-de-force.
Eating, being a major human activity, receives attention in other pieces. Baker’s gourmandizing is not too refined. He rhapsodizes about one of his favorites, the fried seafood platter, even telling of a 250 mile road trip just to hit one of the few restaurants that still serves it — at least in conformity with his exacting standards. But much as he describes relishing the dish, he actually makes it sound highly unappetizing. It seems it’s really the experience of the meal — you had to be there — not the flavor.
Money is a frequent preoccupation. No, make that obsession. Baker is always expostulating about how much things cost. One piece satirizes itemized hospital bills by chronicling his visit to a sick friend, being billed every step of the way, from the elevator ride to partaking of the illumination supplied in the corridors. A big point for him is people on expense accounts not paying with their own money. A lengthy commentary about the gravity-defying figure on a hotel bill (including an “occupancy” tax as if one might rent a room but not occupy it) concludes with the desk clerk fainting on hearing that Baker must pay with his own cash. Likewise, first class air travelers are shown laughing at the economy class peons because, “except for Rothschilds and madmen,” the former are never paying out of their pockets. And Baker notes that with business expenses tax deductible for companies, those first class tickets are actually paid for, in the end, by the taxpayers in economy class.
Speaking of taxpayers, there is “A Taxpayer’s Prayer,” couched in stentorian Biblical cadences. One line intones, “Yea, though we falter in meeting thy wishes,” it’s due to “our poor want of appreciation of thy marvelous law [i.e., the Internal Revenue Code] which surpasseth all understanding.”
So, yes, Baker is a humorist. Yet his temperament is curmudgeonly in a way I didn’t find endearing. A lot of this book is a howl against modernity, deeply felt. His modernity, of course, now decades past, which in today’s hindsight seems imbued with quaintness. I cringe to think what Baker would make of our current American culture.
I myself have written some pretty acerbic things on that subject. There’s always plenty to criticize and cluck one’s tongue at. But I come to it with a sensibility completely different from Baker’s. He seems to be one of those people who romanticize the “good old days,” forgetting what they were really like. Look at the opening scenes of Monty Python and the Holy Grail which, though hilarious, quite accurately depicted a time when life was “nasty, brutish, and short.” That continued being largely true until not very long ago. My immersion in history makes me never forget it; makes me profoundly grateful for modernity, with all its faults.
* For those too young to remember, there was a 1957 sci-fi film, The Incredible Shrinking Man.
** Reminding me of a joke with a couple discussing the weather, and also an acquaintance who’s a Communist spy, to set up the punchline, “Rudolph the red knows rain, dear.”