The Rescue of Miss Yaskell and Other Pipe Dreams and Growing Up
Baker, Russell
There are miles and miles of barbed wire in the fence. People speculate that should the wire strands be laid end to end, they would encircle the globe." Kiril knows that those who get past...
...But you didn't go over there, did you...
...Such stuff is closer to the grain of American life than bloodless comment on Watergate, the sins of Richard Nixon and his friends, Vietnam, or Pax Atomica...
...Or take this example from The Rescue of Miss Yaskell and Other Pipe Dreams, his latest collection: Men, have you ever felt the lust for shirtings...
...And for good reason, too...
...For once, Anthony Lewis is right...
...This is not to say that Baker is a confectioner of lightweight goods...
...Such work is bittersweet, and filled with desperation...
...He felt reporting was drudgery, "an unworthy way for a grown man to spend his life...
...Yet the disappointment lingers, for a bad Russell Baker column is as rare as a bad chocolate-chip cookie...
...Instead, you find essentially three columns: one of withering satire, reflecting outrage at the modern world while upholding the traditional values...
...Here Baker goes to the movies, and "Gary Cooper is in the next seat as usual, wearing his badge and Stetson...
...The realist-humorist, which is not the most elegant but the most apt term, describes the rituals, characters, and episodes that are more or less permanent features of the landscape, the anchors in the midst of life's more fabulous moments of melodrama...
...As a reward for good work, the Sun sent him to its prestigious London post...
...At the Sun, Baker was a rewrite man and reporter, covering general assignment and police stories...
...He was sitting outside a closed Senate committee hearing when he was so inspired...
...In 1962 the Sun tried to lure him back by offering him a column...
...The satirist tells us a lot about his times, about fads, popular delusions, and the madness of crowds...
...It should be read by the men and women this side of the Iron Curtain who care not a whit about that desire...
...While this may result in very good daily reporting on politics, it rarely makes for particularly enduring commentary on the American scene...
...Kiril knows that those who get past the boundary have been reduced to a trickle of a hundred or so per year...
...Psychoanalysis, radical feminists, and book-banning all pass under the cynic's gaze, and do not come off the better for it...
...I mean, have you ever ducked into one of those high-toned haberdasheries to get out of the rain and noticed a discreet sign over in the corner--probably in Old English lettering--that said "Men's Shirtings," and felt your mouth water...
...In the first place, few have the imagination...
...In fact, less than one-third of his columns are written with humorous intent...
...Of course you didn't...
...and one in the madcap burlesque mode...
...Double Crossing is a thriller and a moral fablemserved up with an engaging restraint and dedicated to "men and women behind the Iron Curtain who share, with the hero of this book, a common desire: to be free...
...You didn't have the nerve to walk up to the salesman and say, "I want to buy a shirting...
...Baker writes, "She was like a warrior mother fighting~o protect her children in a world run by sons-of-bitches," optimistic and even sunny in the face of rejection, defeat, and failure...
...His father died when he was five years old, and his mother raised him just about singlehandedly...
...Baker covers a lot of familiar ground in a book Anthony Lewis calls an American Classic...
...For a look at how we live now, however, Baker has no superiors, and few peers...
...He was born in 1925 in Virginia...
...But even Kiril is stunned to learn that those who try to pass the boundary--and who failmare buried in unmarked graves...
...This is very funny, and possibly very sad...
...Baker stopped being a reporter in 1962, when he began making staccatotoned, witty columns...
...The first deflates pomposity, the second shows us what George Ade called People You Know, and the third makes us laugh...
...at his worst, he is indistinguishable from the other heavy lumber on the Times op-ed page...
...He attended Johns Hopkins, served in the Navy during World War II, and then joined the Baltimore Sun...
...We know what Baker is talking about when he describes the social striations among Nantucket's summer people...
...Joe Mysak is a reporter f o r the Daily Bond Buyer...
...And the hell with politics...
...You have good seats, sure, but you're always on the sidelines...
...Baker is much better than this, and he knows it, which is why you won't find many of the fish-wrapper columns in his collections...
...Summer is also a lightning bug glimmering against the sycamore, and don't you ever forget it, Virginia...
...They exist in a rarefied atmosphere...
...A political Russell Baker column...
...They work right in the halls of power, have the best seats--they Know...
...It is familiar: The reader experiences the shock of recognition upon reading about romances, characters, neighborhoods, events, and even meals he knows...
...Summer is a wilted collar on the neck, steam on the eyeglasses, poison ivy between the toes and a mosquito bite behind the ear...
...We know about a man's love for his car...
...You have a shaving system...
...Baker did not spring full-blown from the brow of Ochs...
...Few writers can carry o f f such things as well...
...In one of his collections, you can turn to another column...
...For opinions on such things we turn to more informed, wiser, or at least more politically compatible heads...
...Sure you have...
...42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984...
...Again, considering the literary art of the modern menu, Baker observes that a hamburger is not a hamburger, but " a magnificently seared thickness of sizzling goodness...
...Such is Observer Russell Baker...
...Lucy Baker told her son when he was eight, " I f you think I'm going to raise a good-for-nothing, you've got another think coming...
...The Times counteroffered, and Baker has been writing the "Observer" column ever since...
...He presents the facts, and you draw your own conclusions...
...We know the perils of bachelor cookery...
...Things that can spoil your day: Leaving your wallet home...
...Growing Up is about Baker's early childhood in Virginia, his father's death when he was a boy, and his mother's heroic efforts to get her son " t o make something of himself...
...In the newspaper, you can turn to some really important reading on the social pages or the obits...
...In 1954 he joined the New York Times Washington bureau...
...Thus does Russell Baker win his laughs...
...The Washington press corps covers Important front page stuff...
...9 began to wonder why, at the age of 37, I was wearing out my hams waiting for somebody to come out and lie to me," Baker reminisced for Time in 1979...
...It may be funny, but it is also truthful, even factual...
...At his best in these columns, Baker is somewhat Menckenesque...
...Baker the satirist deadpans...
...Here, Daddy tells his daughter Virginia about the good old summertime while putting down a good number of gin and tonics: No good old summertime...
...For one thing, you weren't sure what a shirting was...
...A flat tire...
...Such is his style of burlesque...
...Baker uses this style best in his autobiography, Growing Up, which last year won him his second Pulitzer Prize (the first having been for commentary...
...Baker warns Coop to "stay out of i t . " Of course Coop cannot, not in this age of the antihero and the vice squad...
...For another thing, it sounded like something so elegant that you were afraid the salesman would say that people as minimal as you weren't worthy to wear shirtings...
...Despite the claims of certain of his fans, Baker is not the funniest man in America...
...While in his political columns he often affects what may be termed a Sixties New Dealer pose, Baker more often than not looks at politicians of whatever stripe the only way a journalist should, in the words of the old editorial writer's saw: down his nose...
...The burden of Erika Holzer's novel is that it probably won't be...
...one of a realisthumorist style...
...I am always nervous in the presence of systems," he writes...
...A girl's laugh...
...Ink on a white shirt...
...You might as well say that" there are no good television repeats, no sand in the sheets, no seconddegree sunburn...
...A lightning bug against the sycamore, ants in the kitchen, a mole in the lawn, a snake in the meadow and a shark in the surf . . . . When the radiator is boiling and the picnic is floating away in the thunderstorm and the roof of the seaside cottage is leaking, then do men sing, "Sumer is icumen in, coo-coo...
...Nowadays you don't have a razor anymore...
...And that's not all summer is...
...Politics, and writing about politics, covering politics and commenting on politics thus seduced Baker, although not entirely...
...But he did not really begin writing until 1974, when he left the Washington bureau for New York...
...In the second, fewer can so faithfully record the antic ravings of maniacs...
...A word may be in order here to show why leaving the Washington bureau would have such a dramatic effect on a journalist's life...
...Rounding out the Baker canon are his burlesques...
...Such, as Dickens wrote, is life...
...No, Russell Baker is funny in the same way Mark Twain, George Ade, and, in our own day, Jean Shepherd are funny: darkly...
...You're not making anything...
Vol. 17 • February 1984 • No. 2
