Eminentoes/Russell Baker's Gentle Reign
Kaplan, Howard
EMINENTOES RUSSELL BAKER'S GENTLE REIGN T his summer at the New York 1 Times, July 16 to be exact, Russell Baker's famous column turns an ancient twenty-five. Now I hate to spoil the party in any...
...One of the earlier, larger dots is the Romantic essayist William Hazlitt (who didn't discover his vocation until . . . age thirty-six...
...Who would fight for "eminently safe...
...This encomium occurs in the official nominating letter that helped put a Pulitzer in the Cogitator's pocket...
...In July 1983, on the occasion of his column's twenty-first birthday, Baker took a look backward to consider his big themes...
...This, ultimately, is the problem with Baker...
...The gentle irony, the gentle melancholy, the gentle inanity...
...The truth is that the dollar is absolutely powerless...
...Of all his judgments this is easily the most crushing...
...This is nonsense...
...Just a quick glance at several shows their eminent safeness, their remoteness from Mencken...
...Along with his letter Frankel enclosed ten columns, a kind of "Best of Baker" from 1978...
...indeed Baker became the "Observer" because he was sick of being a reporter...
...Though now lost to the world, "The Art of Eating Spaghetti" by its mere title alone has to stand as the prototypical Russell Baker "Observer" piece...
...If he exists anywhere in space it's in front of the tube, out of whose flimsiest content he can pad a whole column much as Addison wove Latin tags into The Spectator...
...There are many definitions of art...
...He conforms to a type...
...Not to mention "my house, and the entertaining techniques a house can contrive for crushing the owner's spirit...
...In effect, The Tatler and The Spectator did not lead public opinion, they expressed it...
...Addison is a seminal figure, and here is Baker his apparent avatar...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987...
...rr his is all beginning to sound like 1 a glorious compliment to Baker...
...556-635...
...This issue is at the heart of a critical study of Addison by Bonamy Dobree, published in 1925...
...Not exactly what you'd call a succes de scandale...
...A middle-age, middle-class, defeated man who doesn't know what's going on...
...And even if for certain Baker-ites the columns "don't seem very political," Addison's too by his own admission tried to mute the rumble of partisanship: "I never espoused any Party with Violence, and am resolved to observe an exact Neutrality...
...Writers supposedly get pummeled just for being prolific, and if that's the case then Baker is long overdue...
...If this comparison works at all it's only to get at Baker's defects through those of an established name in EngLit...
...It's as if Baker were Addison come back to life...
...Probably this was what Time meant by "down-home wisdom...
...William Thackeray tells the story in his book of lectures, The English Humorists: "Addison, then in Ireland, caught at his friend's notion, poured in paper after paper, and contributed the stores of his mind, the sweet fruits of his reading, the delightful gleanings of his daily observations...
...Check out, too, the following gem dropped in an interview: "I'm always uneasy dealing with anything . . . religious...
...And whether you're anthologizing The Spectator or puffing Baker for the millionth time, you must slip in, always, the words "follies" and "foibles," or betterfollies of the day," which each man in his own way is "gently ridiculing...
...Gentle inanity...
...A writer like Baker doubtless could make a fair case for the significance of "the insignificant...
...What little dialogue or scene-description occurs in the writing is either an obvious fabrication or something espied from an armchair...
...by Howard Kaplan As he once told an interviewer: "The image I carry in my head of my reader is of a sophisticated, well-educated woman who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan...
...In his memoir Growing Up (1982) he describes how he came to write his first successful essay, "The Art of Eating Spaghetti," and how "even Mr...
...Baker in any case is not the first to follow Addison, or the "Addison-Steele tradition...
...Mostly, though, it's the approbation of Time magazine...
...I was always a spectator...
...No wonder it- was the last collection of his to be published .. . until, that is, So This is Depravity (1980), which just so happened to follow his Pulitzer by a year and probably never would have come out if it hadn't been for that...
...His crotchets, fidgets, inconsistencies, minor incapacities, small humiliations, aches and pains, slow burns, peccadillos, pet peeves, runny nose—these are okay, and he discusses them freely (the assumption being these are also our pet peeves, our peccadillos...
...If only he'd stopped there...
...And when, in the following weeks, Baker courageously spoke out on such contemporary hot potatoes as political jargon, opinion polls, and the introduction of bucket seats, the Observer's voice was set forever in the key of middle C. This is why a certain comparison made of Baker is ridiculous...
...That's enough for twenty volumes, a whole shelf of the "Observer," and still the man has never provoked anything but . . . esteem...
...Things go by at such a rate...
...Poor Russell's Almanac (1972) smells of greeting card cuteness and Murphy's Law melancholia...
...writing about what un-vital men do, i.e., Russell Baker...
...Baker covers nothing...
...he has not yet learned to depend on the tube...
...Like Connolly a century later, Hazlitt was bored by Addison's Spectator...
...He emphasized his gentle irony, his gentle melancholy, his gentle inanity...
...And here once again he pairs up with his predecessor...
...From one column to the next the scene is never quite "placed" and the speaker himself seems a disembodied voice...
...Now we can let it go at that, a nice coincidence and so on, but it may explain why the two seem so alike...
...I'm not," he once said, "for a constant bombardment of truth," and it sounds like a paraphrase of a line from The Spectator "There are many more shining qualities in the mind of man, but there is none so useful as discretion...
...Not a humorist but a moralist"—John Chancellor on Baker...
...It is part of the curse of the eminently safe...
...Not just criticized but tagged and bagged...
...The Cogitator here was now a full-blown presence, and he has never, ever, left us for a moment...
...Every magazine profile ever written about Baker lovingly stresses this warm-blooded instinct for home-life...
...Or look at the ideal reader for each...
...In 1979 Baker's boss, Max Frankel, wrote: "Not since Mencken has our profession produced such a star...
...He is too nice a guy, too bland in his bones...
...if anything he's now sitting around...
...But it's certainly true of Baker in his role as Observer, for whom a better appellation would be, say, the Ruminator or the Cogitator, or the Idler with his Pipe...
...Even the bookish Mr...
...In Baker's Rescue of Miss Yaskell, his last collection to date, he frequently kicks off a piece in the glare of blue light: Watching television weather reporters rave about the wind chill factor always reminds me . . . If you've been missing me lately around the dance hall on Friday nights, folks, it's because I have been riveted to my parlor telly .. . As always when "The Mummy" is shown on television, I was riveted to my armchair the other night .. . In this television commercial .. . The thing about the Cogitator is that, insular as he is, he'd sooner pluck out his eyes than map the island of his soul...
...The observations are direct, even smart...
...Three weekly performances every year for a quarter-century rounds off to 2.9 million words on the calculator or almost triple the mileage of Remembrance of Things Past...
...what Hazlitt, speaking of The Spectator, called the huge "proportion of common-place matter": You have to be fast nowadays...
...Spectator was not averse to stepping out...
...But substitute Baker's name for "he" and change the verbs to present tense, and the above lines read like an indictment of the "Observer...
...Rather, hes a dot on a line thick with dots like himself—l`the professional humorists, the delicious middlers, the fourth leaders" (Cyril Connolly...
...Gentle melancholy...
...But is Baker aware of the other overlaps...
...Baker fled Washington for New 11 York in 1974, and among Baker aficionados this is still a hot issue...
...Even the respective testimonials practically match up word for word...
...The first series of The Spectator ran daily for over a year, from March 1, 1711 to December 12, 1712 (nos...
...Gentle irony...
...Baker on the other hand pulls the old reverse-snobbery...
...So for me the real watershed is '65-'66, which puts the number of his "good" columns at five or six hundred...
...Just as it reflects his own bias so it melds with that of Addison, who worked intermittently for the liberal-spirited Whigs...
...that is, a high burlesque treatment of "the insignificant...
...1-555...
...To call him a humorist does not contain him," Time eulogized in February...
...Baker's very first "Observer" piece back in July of '62 was a spoof of President Kennedy and his press conference manner...
...If Baker died tomorrow and Time ruled the world, his remains would be safe-deposited among the immortals...
...Exactly...
...The majority proved to be "my car and my children and the amusing tribulations of having cars and children...
...the gentle inanity is soft-pedaled...
...A great writer and moralist'!—that's Thackeray on Addison...
...We could do this forever...
...He's almost proud if it, you see...
...Even I can see his good points, and for my money his first two collections are his best: No Cause for Panic (1964) and All Things Considered (1965...
...In my experience things that are widely acclaimed as healthy usually turn out to be bad for you...
...But Addison has been attacked and not by Connolly alone...
...And it isn't just the utter lack of enemies that tips you off...
...In fact it'sthese very relaxants that get the Cogitator going...
...You know, gc - ing up to Elaine's, where all the guys are showing off their bimbos and their sports jackets and so forth...
...The papers keep saying the dollar is weak...
...And that type has been criticized...
...Baker was born the same year, and it's as if Dobree's judgments touched the infant in his cradle...
...Seven years went by before his next collection appeared, and if these are the kernels you wonder what was winnowed out...
...Incredible but true...
...At times it's uncanny...
...Thirty-six marks the first of many slow-ups on life's highway...
...Which Baker is better—pre-'74 or post-'74...
...Of course Baker himself conceivably had Addison in mind when in 1962 he, dubbed his new column the "Observer": Addison's fame largely derives from his periodical, The Spectator, the first of its kind devoted exclusively to the light essay...
...He for one knew when to quit...
...In short, he wrote playfully and apologetically about nothing...
...a pinprick here and there perhaps, but nothing more sustained...
...In Baker's own words: "I'm never terribly comfortable with an 'all boys' group...
...He complained about it afresh to Geo in 1983: "I'd been a reporter for fifteen years...
...But] Addison seems to have spent most of his time in his study...
...Nowadays Americans come to New York to be alone...
...This isn't quite fair of Hazlitt since Mr...
...So where Mencken was a mocker and most fundamentally Mencken, Baker is as circumspect as a turkey in October...
...But "eminently safe...
...Of course even in his_tussles, his fits of contrariety, Baker always remains lovable...
...Spectator frequently reports on the goings-on at his club...
...I was sitting around writing about what vital men did, but I wasn't doing anything...
...The age itself seems to have locked them into . . . irony, melancholy, and inanity, all "gentle...
...The writer in question is the English essayist Joseph Addison (1672-1719...
...Addison first hit his stride as a professional "columnist" in his friend Richard Steele's earlier journal, The Tatter...
...For relaxation, Baker watches old movies on television and reads what he calls "trash...
...Which again is perfect too, this business of "slightly liberal...
...One of Baker's favorite wheezes has him trudging through Proust...
...W ell, perhaps in the mind of man, but is that what we want from our writers...
...respectively, how to eat junk food and how to get yourself killed...
...But beyond this it would only THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 25 get messy for everyone, and you can read him for years and never get below the surface unless you count various ineptitudes as the ultimate in confession...
...Dobree's words come back to haunt: "The thoughts that he developed in his modulated phrases seemed to many exactly the things they also were thinking...
...the second series ran three times a week, from June to November 1714 (nos...
...It would have tallied so beautifully with Addison's modest efforts...
...Maybe she's been to Smith, maybe she's slightly liberal...
...If he were living in New York today he'd have a table at Elaine's...
...Baker's own flair for the trivial first declared itself in high school...
...It is all so "eminently safe," to quote Dobree again...
...It's also the two Pulitzer Prizes and the massive syndication, it's the good burghers who rush to blurb the latest Baker book...
...When the story of our times is finally written, historians may find it best defined not by conventional Washington experts but by Baker's down-home wisdom...
...needed, affected when it did not require affectation...
...Basically, this is an observer who never leaves his front door...
...Baker has since referred to it as "an insolent squawk," but really it's just a squeak, the kind of cute little jest that prompts governmental aides to say, "Nobody, I assure you, enjoyed it more than the President...
...He confessed as much to House Beautiful in 1971: "This is the kind of personality I try to create...
...But from "spectator" to "Observer" hardly seems much of a leap...
...Baker's titles have gotten a tad more sophisticated since high school, but in effect he's still churning out the old freshman themes —The Art of Dining In, say, or The Art of Crossing a Street in Midtown, both of which in Baker's hands become lessons in futility...
...Spectator comes right out and says, There are none to whom this paper of mine will be more useful "than to the Female World," by which phrase he specifically means London ladies, the women of bon ton . . . in spirit the same exact audience favored by Baker...
...He doesn't cover the scene, he merely pronounces on it...
...After that Addison killed it...
...D ussell Baker is not the first light .1\ essayist who ever lived...
...He was, Thackeray adds, "six-and-thirty years old" . . . Baker's same exact age at the birth of his own column...
...From Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise (1938): He made prose artful, and whimsical, he made it sonorous when sonority was not Howard Kaplan is a contributing editor of Spy magazine...
...Fleagle stopped two or three times to repress a small prim smile" while reading it out loud...
...Now I hate to spoil the party in any major kind of way, but never once in all these years has the "Observer" been criticized...
...I would submit this is not the true watershed...
...Nothing is truly "observed" in the reportorial sense...
...For instance, Dobree speaks of Addison's "quite unaffected contentment with the insignificant," his "talent for committing to paper what oft was thought, no doubt, but was scarcely worth the labor of expressing...
...A little extracurricular reading only points up the resemblance...
...He was much more 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 a Steele-man who saw in Steele the superior reporter: "Steele seems to have gone into his closet chiefly to set down what he observed out of doors...
...The Bakers shun the trendy New York social scene, preferring instead to dine quietly with close friends or attend movies and plays...
Vol. 20 • July 1987 • No. 7
