Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (12 page)

2005

SONIA SOTOMAYOR CAUSES SUSPICION

2009

JOHN ROBERTS ACTS AS UMPIRE

“Judges are like umpires.… I have no agenda.… And I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”

—John Roberts’s opening statement at his confirmation hearing, 2005

“The Roberts court … ruled for business interests 61 percent of the time, compared with 46 percent in the last five years of the court led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.”
—The New York Times
, 2010

2010

I heard on the morning news that some kidnappers in the Bronx telephoned the wife of their victim with a demand for $100,000 in ransom money, and she talked them down to $30,000. The newscaster said the story had a happy ending—the victim was returned unharmed, the ransom money was recovered, the kidnappers were arrested—but all I could think of was how the man must have felt when, back in the bosom of his loving family at last, he discovered that his wife had him on discount special.

I suppose a lot of people who heard the story took it as just one more indication that New York City is getting to be one of those places, like Bombay or Tijuana, where the price is always negotiable. They could probably imagine the victim’s wife standing in front of some huge counter, poking at her husband the way she might poke at a cantaloupe, and saying, “A hundred grand for that! The way it’s going soft around the sides already! You have the nerve to stand here and tell me that you are trying to charge one hundred thousand American dollars for
that
!”

Even a resident of the American Bombay, though, has to be disturbed at the prospect of having a loved one treat him the way she would treat an overripe cantaloupe. “What if I got kidnapped and they called demanding ransom money?” I asked my wife, Alice, after stewing over the Bronx caper for a couple of days. “I don’t suppose you’d have any inclination to see if you could talk them into settling for thirty cents on the dollar, would you?”

“You’re not going to get kidnapped,” Alice said. “Why can’t you just worry about high interest rates or acid rain or The Bomb, like normal people?”

As it happens, I didn’t use to worry much about being kidnapped. After I heard the kidnapping story from the Bronx, though, it began to occur to me that the days when kidnappers limited their efforts to the better-known names of Manhattan café society may be over. It’s possible that the sagging economy has driven kidnappers to the outer boroughs. I had to consider the possibility that some particularly desperate gang was staking out the garage in Brooklyn where I take my car to be repaired. If so, I’m in real danger: If a kidnapper tried to calculate my net worth by simply extrapolating from the amount of money I’ve poured into that wretched machine, he would figure me for eight or ten million dollars at the least.

All of which meant that I also had to consider the possibility that I might be the cantaloupe being discussed in a scene that flashed across my mind:

“Don’t get me wrong,” I said to Alice. “Nobody could blame you for reminding the perpetrators that it’s going to be impossible for this country to get inflation down to some manageable level unless people in every walk of life make some effort toward voluntary control of wages and prices.”

“I’ve never understood why you don’t get a hobby,” Alice said.

Was it mere chance that she did not directly deny that she might ever consider me cut-rate merchandise? Was it really possible that she might respond to the dread call with a little dickering?

“I suppose there’s no reason to assume that just because someone happens to be your husband he’s automatically worth the full sticker price,” I said.

“Maybe you should get involved in some sort of volunteer work,” she said. “Afternoons part-time at one of the thrift shops—something like that.”

“Aside from some mileage on the odometer,” I said, “I’m sure I have a few little faults that might be mentioned by someone interested in lowering the asking price just a little.”

“You mean little faults like going on and on about some particularly silly subject?” Alice said.

“Well, I hadn’t actually thought of that, as a matter of fact.” Then I did think of it:

1982

O.J.?

Oy vey!

1995

LIFE AMONG THE LITERATI

“The average shelf life of a book is somewhere between milk and yogurt. Books by Dan Brown or Danielle Steel may have a longer shelf life, but they contain preservatives.”

For an Authors Guild benefit some years ago, four or five of us were asked to write a rejection letter turning down some classic work of literature. Garrison Keillor rejected
Walden Pond
, by Henry David Thoreau. He said that
Walden Pond
had a lot of good axioms in it, but that the structure was weak. So he suggested turning it into a calendar. I rejected
The Waste Land
, by T. S. Eliot. I rejected it in iambic pentameter, of course. The last couplet of my letter was, “I know this
is a blow, Tom, not to worry: / You’re still the greatest poet from Missouri.” The faintness of praise in calling someone the greatest poet from Missouri can be gauged by the fact that the other poet from Missouri is me. Another way to put it is that T. S. Eliot and I comprise the Missouri school of poetry.

I know you’re thinking that there are considerable differences between T. S. Eliot and me. Yes, it’s true that he was from St. Louis, which started calling itself the Gateway to the West after Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch was erected, and I’m from Kansas City, where people think of St. Louis not as the Gateway to the West but as the Exit from the East. But then there are the similarities. For instance, both of us have a penchant for using foreign languages in our poetry. In fact, the rejection letter I wrote to Eliot criticized him for going overboard in that regard:

I’ve never used Sanskrit in a poem myself. I go in more for Yiddish. I think it’s fair to say that Eliot was not partial to Yiddish. When the breakup of Yugoslavia provoked a few wars, for instance, I wrote

Both of us toss in some German now and then. Eliot, of course, includes a passage from
Tristan und Isolde
in the opening stanza of
The Waste Land
, and I, when George W. Bush named an old family retainer as attorney general of the United States, took advantage of the fact that Alberto Gonzales rhymes with “loyal
über alles.
” And we both have occasionally written about animals. Eliot famously wrote a
series of poems about cats, and I have written, for example, that corgis appear to be a breed of dog assembled from the parts of other breeds of dog—and not the parts that those other breeds were all that sorry about giving up. As a matter of perspective, I should acknowledge that there has never been a long-running Broadway musical called
Corgis
.

Our paths do separate dramatically on the matter of rhyme. It isn’t that Eliot shunned rhyme. I still sometimes find myself murmuring couplets from
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
“Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells.” But in
The Waste Land
, there were so few rhymes that I said in my rejection letter, “So my advice, Tom, ‘Hurry up, it’s time’ / For restoration of some lines that rhyme. / And when that’s done, I think it might be neater / If you could sort of tidy up the meter.”

I, on the other hand, have stuck stubbornly to rhyme. That might have something to do with the poetic influence of my father. He was a grocer for most of his working life, but he owned a restaurant for a while, and he treated that as an opportunity to put a rhyming couplet on the menu every day at lunch. He was devoted to rhymes, particularly rhymes about pie. He rhymed “pie” with “shy” and “July” and “evening is nigh” and “All right warden, I’m ready to fry. / My last request was Mrs. Trillin’s pie.”

The result of the separate paths T. S. Eliot and I took is simple: He is thought of as perhaps the greatest literary figure of the twentieth century, and I am a deadline poet, commenting on the events of the day in verse for a hundred dollars a shot.

Deadline poetry is a small subset of rhyming poetry. A very small subset. A few years ago, John Allemang, of the Toronto
Globe and Mail
, and I founded the International Deadline Poets Organization, or IDPO. We were the only members. I hasten to say that IDPO is not the only exclusive literary organization I have ever belonged to. When I was traveling the country to do regular reporting pieces for
The New Yorker
, Jules Loh was doing a similar series for the Associated Press, and we formed the American Association of American Correspondents Covering America. Our meetings were held at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. We were the only members. The American Association of
American Correspondents Covering America had only one rule: You can’t quote de Tocqueville. That’s how we kept the membership down.

IDPO hasn’t needed any rules to keep the membership down. In fact, Allemang’s verses no longer appear in
The Globe and Mail
, so I’d say that his membership hangs by a thread, except that saying that would constitute a metaphor and IDPO discourages metaphors. I continue to turn out a deadline poem every week for
The Nation
—or every issue, I should say, since
The Nation
publishes only every other week in the summer, even though the downtrodden are oppressed every day of the year.

It’s left to me to speak up for deadline poetry against the implied sneers of people like T. S. Eliot—or what we often refer to at IDPO gatherings as “the Sanskrit crowd.” It’s left to me to persuade literary critics that in describing deadline poetry, the term “accessible” is preferable to the term “simpleminded.” It’s left to me to point out that making a deadline almost every week is something never faced by what my family has an unfortunate tendency to call “grown-up poets.” Take Eliot, for instance. And I’m not here to knock the competition. But take Eliot, for instance. If he came upon a “patient etherized upon a table” and wasn’t quite inspired, he could always wait for the next patient etherized upon a table. If he wasn’t turned on by those “half-deserted streets,” he could wander around until he found some half-deserted streets more to his liking. Eliot was under no deadline pressure.