Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

by Calvin Trillin

  Without wanting to name names, I blame all of this on Victor S. Navasky. When The Nation provoked a public controversy by attacking a book on the Hiss case from a position that might have been described as somewhat left of center, I tried to be understanding. I figured that Navasky was trying to pump up circulation because he lacked some of the financial resources that most people who edit journals of opinion have. Traditionally, people who run such magazines manage financially because they have a wife rich enough to have bought them the magazine in the first place. It’s a good arrangement, because an editor who has his own forum for pontificating to the public every week may tend to get a bit pompous around the house, and it helps if his wife is in a position to say, “Get off your high horse, Harry, or I’ll take your little magazine away from you and give it to the cook.” I haven’t made any detailed investigation into the finances of Navasky’s wife, but it stands to reason that if she had the wherewithal to acquire entire magazines she would by now have bought him a new suit.

  No matter what his motives for running the Hiss piece were, Navasky’s cover was obviously blown—and so was mine. I could no longer answer questions about why I wrote for The Nation by saying, “It’s the closest magazine to my house.” Not long after that, while I was doing a promotional tour for a collection of Nation columns, a newspaper interviewer in Boston asked me if I could describe the magazine for his readers.

  “Pinko,” I said, after some reflection.

  “Surely you have more to say about it than that,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a pinko magazine printed on very cheap paper—the sort of magazine where if you Xerox one of your pieces, the Xerox is a lot better than the original.”

  1982

  The Case of the Purloined Turkey

  A secretly Xeroxed manuscript of Richard Nixon’s new book has, as they say in the trade, found its way into my possession. For years, I have been waiting for some carefully guarded document to find its way into my possession. In my mind, the phrase has always conjured up the vision of an important document wandering the streets of Lower Manhattan, confused and bewildered, until a kindly policeman on Sixth Avenue provides flawless directions to my house. I figured that a secret document would find its way into my possession if I simply waited around long enough at the same address, looking receptive. That is precisely what happened. I did not ferret out this document. I might as well admit that I hadn’t realized Mr. Nixon had produced another volume; it seemed only moments since the last one.

  I had assumed, I suppose, that his literary output would have been slowed up by the bustle of moving from San Clemente and by his previous difficulties with trying to buy an apartment in East Side co-ops that persisted in treating him as if he were Jewish or a tap dancer. Ordinarily, complications involving living quarters play havoc with a writer’s production; a writer I’ll call William Edgett Smith, whose procrastination devices are taught in the senior creative writing seminar at Princeton, once stopped writing for seven weeks in order to see to a leaky radiator. Mr. Nixon apparently suffered no such delays—although in Smith’s defense it should be said that he has to manage with no federally funded research or secretarial help to speak of. Despite the interruptions that accompany any move (“The men want to know whether those partly erased tapes in the cellar stay or go, Dick, and what do you want done with the crown jewels of Rumania?”), Mr. Nixon managed to turn out a volume for Warner Books called The Real War. I know because a Xerox of the manuscript found its way into my possession.

  Although it is customary to refuse to divulge the source of any document that has found its way into one’s possession, I should say at the start that the person who gave me this document was Victor S. Navasky, the editor of The Nation. If anybody feels the need to prosecute or sue, Navasky’s your man. I feel no compunction about shifting the blame to Navasky, because he would obviously be the logical target of any investigation anyway, this being his second caper. At this very moment, The Nation is being sued by Harper & Row and Reader’s Digest for $12,500 for running an article based on a smuggled-out manuscript of Gerald Ford’s book, which was somehow published under a title other than The White House Memories of a Lucky Klutz. In an era when an unfairly dismissed busboy would never think of suing for less than a million, the purpose of suing The Nation for the price of a publisher’s lunch is obvious: The plaintiffs want to make Navasky out to be not just a thief but a small-time thief.

  My involvement in this started innocently when Navasky said to me, “We’ve got a copy of Nixon’s book.”

  “I hope you didn’t pay full price,” I said.

  “Not that book. The new one. Smuggled out.”

  Sticky Fingers Navasky had struck again. I was, of course, astonished. It’s no joke to discover that you’ve been handing in copy to a recidivist. “If you put it back now, maybe they won’t notice that it was missing,” I said. Warner Books is part of the sort of conglomerate that is often described as “playing hardball,” and I figured that they weren’t above humiliating Navasky by suing him for something like eighteen dollars and carfare.

  “Take it!” Navasky said, thrusting a bulky bundle into my arms. “Reveal something.”

  I took it, and skulked out the door. The elevator man was reading the sports page of the Daily News as we descended. “Just some laundry,” I said to him, gesturing at the bundle I was carrying. “Shirts. That sort of thing.” He kept reading. So far, so good.

  After what seemed like about an hour, I was startled by the jangle of the telephone. It was Navasky.

  “Find anything yet?” he said.

  I looked down at the manuscript. I was on page 4. “He says, ‘The next two decades represent a time of maximum crisis for America and for the West, during which the fate of the world for generations to come may well be determined.’ ”

  There was silence on the phone. Then Navasky said, “Skip ahead.”

  I skipped ahead to page 105, and started reading. “He says, ‘The final chapters have yet to be written on the war in Vietnam,’ ” I reported.

  “Skip some more,” Navasky said.

  “Well,” I said, “on page 287 he says, ‘The President has great power in wartime as Commander in Chief of the armed forces. But he also has enormous power to prevent war and preserve peace.’ ”

  There was a pause. “Keep skipping,” Navasky said.

  I read paragraphs on the advantages of summit conferences and on the difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. More silence. Finally, I said, “Shall I keep skipping?”

  There was no answer. Navasky had fallen asleep.

  What is the purpose of being willing to reveal the contents of a purloined manuscript if there is nothing in it that bears revealing?

  “Let’s give it back,” I said to Navasky.

  “Our source does not want it back,” Navasky said.

  “I can see his point.”

  “Maybe we should shred it,” Navasky said.

  “All I have in that line is a Cuisinart,” I said. “I have a better idea. I’ll put it on Sixth Avenue. Maybe it will find its way into someone else’s possession.”

  1980

  I’m Out of Here

  When the editor of The Nation, the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky, said he was going to double my pay, I did the only honorable thing: I resigned. Maybe I should start at the beginning. Here are some milestones in our relationship since the aforementioned Navasky asked me if I’d be interested in writing a column for The Nation:

  MARCH 18, 1978. The wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky and I have lunch in the Village to talk about his grand vision for transforming The Nation from a shabby pinko sheet to a shabby pinko sheet with a humor column and a large office for the editor. I pick up the check. I ask what he plans to pay for each column. He says, “Somewhere in the high two figures.”

  MARCH 20, 1978. I refer the offer to my high-powered literary agent, Robert (Slowly) Lescher, together with instructions for the
ensuing negotiations: “Play hardball.”

  APRIL 8, 1978. Slowly gets him up to $100.

  SEPTEMBER 5, 1978. The W. & P. Victor S. Navasky questions the authenticity of some quotations used in my column. He says, “Did John Foster Dulles really say, ‘You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but you might as well give it your best shot’?” I say, “At these rates, you can’t expect real quotes.”

  MAY 14, 1980. Executive editor Richard Lingeman, who would probably be described by one of those hard-nosed post-Watergate reporters as “a longtime Navasky operative,” sends me a Table of Organization chart that gives me pause: It lists me under “Casual Labor.”

  NOVEMBER 10, 1981. The W. & P. Victor S. Navasky says that although he would never try to exert any pressure to influence what I write, he might just point out that columns devoted to ridiculing him are less likely to be sold for republication in newspapers because they are considered “inside” and (although he doesn’t say this) perhaps a bit distasteful. I say not to worry: Since The Nation never gets around to paying me my share of the republication fees, I feel no pressure at all. To show there are no hard feelings on my part, I write a column revealing him to be a klutz on the basketball court. To show there are no hard feelings on his part, he continues to hold onto my share of the republication fees.

  MAY 29, 1982. I receive a letter from a reader who asks, “Is it true that employees of The Nation are forced to sell flowers and candy in airports and turn the proceeds over to Victor S. Navasky?” I publish the letter in my column, along with my strongly worded reply (“Not exactly”).

  OCTOBER 25, 1985. The wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky and I have lunch in the Village. He reaches for the check. I am instantly put on my guard. He says he is going to double my pay. I figure he has to be up to something. I resign. He tells me my share of the check is $13.38.

  “I’ve quit,” I told my wife when I returned from lunch. “That’ll show him.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell him you got a better offer from the newspaper syndication people?” she said.

  “Because I prefer to resign on a matter of principle.”

  “What, exactly, is the principle involved?”

  “Worker solidarity.”

  “Worker solidarity!” she said. “I never heard you talk about worker solidarity before.”

  “I never got a better offer before,” I said.

  “I think it’s terrible that all you can talk about, even now that you’re leaving The Nation, is money,” she said.

  “That’s what the owners of the textile mills in Yorkshire in the nineteenth century used to say about the workers who complained that a family couldn’t be supported on two and six a day: ‘All they ever talk about is money.’ ”

  “Aren’t you going to miss The Nation?” my wife asked.

  Well, of course. It was sort of comforting to know that whenever I’d show up at the office the fellow we call Harold the Committed would ask me if I’d like to see civilization as we know it destroyed in a nuclear holocaust; it’s The Nation’s equivalent of having an elevator operator who can be counted on to say “Have a nice day.” And I do feel solidarity with my fellow workers. I feel kinship with the ancient bookkeepers who have been convinced by Navasky that 10 percent of their salary is going directly into a legal defense fund for the Scottsboro Boys. I feel comradeship with the college interns Navasky has managed to lure into The Nation’s slave/study program. I feel brotherhood with Richard Lingeman, who, finding himself in 1956 with a strong hand but no cash during a poker game in New Haven that included Victor S. Navasky, covered a raise by signing a paper for thirty-five years of indentured editorial service, and then failed to fill out his flush. For that matter, I feel a communal bond with all those Nation employees selling flowers and candy in airports.

  “And how about Victor Navasky?” my wife said.

  “Oh, he’ll get along without me.”

  “No doubt,” she said. “But will you get along without him? Every time you haven’t been able to think of a column idea, you’ve attacked poor Victor—just the way Ronald Reagan, whenever he was stuck for an answer, used to mention that woman who picked up her Aid for Dependent Children check in a Cadillac.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Navasky has been, in a manner of speaking, my welfare cheat. Doing the column for the newspapers, I wouldn’t have Navasky to kick around anymore. I could imagine editors from Midwestern dailies sending queries back to the syndication people: “Who’s this Navasky anyway?” they’d ask, or “What’s this mean here—‘There’s no gonif like a left-wing gonif’?”

  “Yes, I will miss the old W. & P.,” I said to my wife.

  “Well, it would be nice if you did something to show that,” she said.

  Fine. But what? “I’ve got it,” I said, after a while. “I’ll attack him for trying to double my pay.”

  1986

  Inspired by Sununu. Paid by Navasky.

  Could there be anyone else who was inspired to write poetry by the presence of John Sununu? It has occurred to me that if I ever get to poets’ heaven—as I envision it, it’s a place where the accent is on any syllable you want it to be on, and there are plenty of rhymes for “orange”—I might find myself feeling rather awkward during a discussion that turns toward how all of us poets acquired the vital spark of inspiration. William Shakespeare, for instance, might talk passionately, if rather enigmatically, about how inspiring the dark lady of his sonnets was. Sooner or later, the other poets would look my way, and I’d say, “Well, when George H. W. Bush was President of the United States, he had this guy from New Hampshire as chief of staff.…”

  Sununu surfaced at a time when the small-joke trade was trying to cope with what you might call a serious gray-out. The most prominent members of Bush the First’s administration were respectable Ivy League gentlemen whose blandness was not even spiced up by a decent scandal. Political cartoonists had trouble telling them apart. Only Sununu had all the attributes we look for—arrogance, self-importance, and a management style that he might have picked up intact from the Emperor Caligula. Not since the relatively brief appearance several years before of Robert Bork—who turned out to be more interested in showing himself to be the smartest man in the room than he was in being on the Supreme Court—had Washington served up a character so intent on letting everybody know how intelligent he was.

  Was I inspired by all of this? Yes, of course. But to poetry? Not exactly. What led me to poetry was that wondrously euphonious name—Sununu. I couldn’t get his name out of my mind. “Sununu,” I would murmur to myself while riding the subway or doing some little task around the house. Sooner or later the murmuring became the title of a poem—“If You Knew What Sununu.”

  After I’d sent “If You Knew What Sununu” to the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky, he phoned me to suggest that I do a poem for every issue of The Nation. Steeling myself, I asked how much he intended to pay for each poem.

  “How long does it take you to write one of these?” he asked.

  “I usually write them on Sunday,” I said. “Which is at least time and a half, and in most trades double time. There is also the matter of poetic inspiration—walking on the windswept bluff, and all that. Just to get from here to a windswept bluff that could be considered remotely inspirational …”

  As I said that, I could hear his calculator clicking away. “How about a hundred?” he said.

  What I realized instantly—what I suppose he meant me to realize instantly—was that I would be getting the same money for a poem as I’d gotten from an eleven-hundred-word column.

  “What are the conditions?” I asked. With the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky, there is always a condition or two.

  “Don’t tell any of the real poets you’re getting that much,” he said.

  “Your secret is safe with me,” I assured him.

  At first, I didn’t think a century sounded like much. But then I learned that real poets are normal
ly paid by the line. Three-fifty or four dollars a line is fairly common, I was told, and ten dollars a line is probably tops. Since I was being paid by the poem, I realized, all I needed to become the highest paid poet in the world was pithiness. When I want to get that buzz you get when you know you’re working for the absolute top dollar in your field, I write a two-line poem. Fifty dollars a line.

  1994

  TWENTY YEARS OF POLS—ONE POEM EACH

  “I believe in an inclusive political system that prohibits from public office only those whose names have awkward meter or are difficult to rhyme.”

  JOHN SUNUNU

  New Hampshire Governor, White House Chief of Staff

  If You Knew What Sununu

  If you knew what Sununu

  Knows about quantum physics and Greek

  And oil explorations and most favored nations

  And the secret handshake of Deke,

  Maybe you, too, like Sununu,

  Would adopt as your principal rule

  That you are the brightest, you’re lit the lightest,

  And everyone else is a fool.

  With the IQ that Sununu

  Relentlessly tells us is his,

  You might think you’re paid to devote half your day to