But Enough About You: Essays (28 page)

Spring 1998

Another piece for FYI is tempting but ought to be avoided by me at this time—but we will see.

It won’t happen to you, but if you’re ever stuck for a book idea, I have a wonderful opening line for a novel that is outside my capabilities, but probably well within yours. Don’t ask for it now.

Just after the Monica Lewinsky story broke:

Spring 1998

Great news about Clinton, right? I haven’t had so much fun since I read
Lolita,
the first time . . . With Clinton there’s a catch (22?). I’d rather be appalled and titillated by him than bored by Gore.

June 24, 1998

Good to hear from you at last. I was beginning to fear you might have plummeted into one of my depressions. I think you’re thinking clearly about future work. But keep in mind it is possible to be both humorous and mordantly serious. Haven’t you read the novels of Joseph Heller? If you’ve not read
God Knows,
do so right now. Also, the non-Catholic novels of Evelyn Waugh are worth stealing from.

I had written to confide misgivings that the novel I’d just finished writing had once again fallen catastrophically short of the Great American Novel.

September 5, 1998

I’m exhausted too and I’ve been doing nothing all summer but resting . . . If you have finished, as you said, one f—ing book, sold it to the movies, and have started writing another f—ing comic novel, you’ve been doing fine. Stop thinking about “the GAN” and begin thinking of it as “a GAN.” “The” GAN has already been written, perhaps even twice, and you know by whom.

A newspaper in England reported that Joe might be appointed master of a college at Oxford. I addressed him as M’lud.

December 13, 1998

Should I receive and accept the offer to succeed Lord Plante as the next Master of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, the formal mode for addressing me in letters and speech will be Lord Heller. On informal occasions when we are dining alone or with wives, our own or other men’s, you may call me Master. On truly informal, drunken occasions, if you call me Sire, I will call you Squire.

December 18, 1998

This Xmas I am being generous: I will go with Valerie up to Poughkeepsie (a colorless place, no matter how it’s spelled) and have a few meals with families there. . . . Normally I dislike holidays, including birthdays, including my own, and prefer to spend them doing exactly what I would be doing if it was not a holiday, but culturally that often proves impossible. And my God—there is still that New Year’s Eve to face.

Joe wrote a generous blurb for my new novel. A few months before publication, I faxed him the decidedly mixed review it received
in
Publishers Weekly
, the book trade journal. He crossed out the decidedly mixed parts and sent it back.

January 25, 1999

This way, it’s a total rave.

In the midst of a ten-city, ten-day book tour for the novel, I wrote him the kind of letter that writers write to other writers in the middle of ten-day, ten-city book tours. He wrote back:

April 1999

The life of a novelist is almost inevitably destined for anguish, humiliations, and disappointment—when you get to read the two chapters in my new novel I’ve just finished you will recognize why.

Spring 1999

Where the hell have you gone to this time?

We leave for Italy Sunday. Is there anything there worth seeing?

Fall 1999

I may be getting soft, but the new
FYI
is a beauty. Even the ads are gorgeous. We had planned to have dinner in New York City around Christmas.

Then I wrote to beg a postponement until January, pleading a busy December. Among other things, my father was retiring from his television show,
Firing Line
, after a record thirty-four-year run, and there was a big dinner to mark the occasion. I mentioned to Joe how proud I was.

Earlier in the summer, Joe had asked me to read his son, Ted’s first novel,
Slab Rat
, a delightful black comedy about a young magazine editor. I thought it brilliant, and said so in an enthusiastic blurb.

This, the last fax I got from Joe, arrived the day before he died, accompanied by a rave review of Ted’s novel.

December 11, 1999

Dear Chris, Good gracious—34 years? You have very good reason to be proud of your father—that must be the longest-running show on television. And he, of course, has very much good reason to be proud of you, and does show it on the rare occasions we see him.

And next, we both may have reason to be proud for backing what thus far looks like a winner of sorts with Ted’s novel. As another proud father, I’m taking the liberty of sending you a couple of good pre-pub reviews.

I hope that someday I will do as good—and that you do too.

Dinner definitely as soon as possible next year . . .

Valerie misses you, and I do too.

Love, Joe

—
Forbes FYI
, March 2000

I never met him, but a few months before he died, I experienced a nanosecond of what it must have been like for him. I was walking out of the Washington Hilton lobby after the White House Correspondents’ dinner, a big, black tie, celebrity-rich (-
laden
might be a better term) environment. Tourists and gawkers were lined up behind ropes on either side as we exited.

Suddenly, the crowd began to make this
noise
. I’d never heard
anything like it. A collective groan of wonderment, curiosity, and awe. Cameras flashed. Female squeaks.

“It’s him!” . . . “There!” . . . “Oh,
God
, it’s
him
!”

As it turned out, it wasn’t “him,” but him’s look-alike, Jamie Rubin, the State Department spokesman. But as Rubin was walking with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy on his arm, he was, if only for a brief, shining moment, a perfect simulacrum of JFK, Jr.

It must have been a thrill, as much as it must have been a bore for the real him, who had to live with this mob response nearly every minute of his short life. No wonder he liked flying. Up there are no photographers, no gawking passersby. When I read that three top-secret KH-11 spy satellites had been retasked to scan the waters off Martha’s Vineyard, it seemed weirdly, sadly appropriate—the ultimate paparazzi, 250 miles above, taking the final snapshots.

Some years ago, in the building in New York where I then worked, I sensed palpable amps of electricity humming through the corridors one morning. Secretaries were talking to each other in excited whispers. Actually, middle-aged males were also buzzing. Strange. Celebrities are regular droppers-in at the Forbes Building: Reagan, Gorbachev, Mrs. Thatcher, Bill Gates have all been to lunch. What was causing such collective water-cooler tachycardia?

The answer turned out to be that John Kennedy was coming, to try to get Forbes to invest in his prospective magazine, called
George
.

The Forbes executive whom he was coming to visit, told that Mr. Kennedy was in the lobby, asked his secretary to escort him up, thinking that it would give her a fun story to tell.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I couldn’t.” She didn’t trust herself not to swoon in the elevator riding up with the prince.

JFK, Jr., handled this burden with grace, modesty, and humor. It’s ironic then, and poor tribute to him, that his death, like that death of his counterpart Princess Diana, has been the occasion for such infantilizing and trivializing sentiment.

A colleague at work remarked that while he was showering the morning after the news broke, the radio referred to “John F. Kennedy, American hero,” not once but three times. It’s a truism that the
word has lost most of its meaning, but as my friend observed, until now he had not heard it applied so promiscuously to someone whose recklessness resulted in the death of two young women.

In other news, the Coast Guard was claiming that it would undertake a search of such magnitude for “anyone, not just John Kennedy.” Really? So we’ll all qualify for a National Oceanographic Administration vessel with side-scanning sonar and KH-11 satellites? Why should the Coast Guard feel compelled to assert such nonsense? What American taxpayer would begrudge any government effort to find the son of President John F. Kennedy? But all sorts of people were saying all sorts of things.

The historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in
Newsweek
, “My job as friend was to play the historian, and at a recent lunch I compared him to John Quincy Adams, the son of the second U.S. president, a fellow Massachusettsean whose entire political career was centered on escaping his father’s shadow, on proving his own worth in the political arena.”

He mentioned that JFK, Jr. had declared that the boxer Michael Tyson, recently rejailed for attacking motorists while on probation, had been persecuted because of “racism . . . pure and simple.” This only served to remind us that Mr. Kennedy was capable of other lapses of judgment: his friendship, for instance, with the pornographer Larry Flynt; or, more grotesquely, commissioning an article for his magazine by Oliver Stone, whose movie
JFK
asserts that Mr. Kennedy’s father was assassinated by his own government. There was at least this satisfaction: in his article for
George
, Stone alluded to King Henry VIII’s imprisoning Thomas à Beckett for opposing his marriage to Anne Boleyn.

Norman Mailer wrote an article once in which he described escorting Jackie Onassis to some event and being overwhelmed by the flashbulbs. Reaching as usual for the Big Thought (bless him), Mailer whispered to Jackie, “It’s these lights that make idiots of us all.” That quote has been on my mind this sad week. To his credit, those lights did not make an idiot of young John Kennedy. It’s the rest of us I’m worried about.

—
National Review
, July 1999

The headline in the
Times
—SOLZHENITSYN, LITERARY GIANT WHO DEFIED SOVIETS, DIES AT 89—seemed discrepant. Hadn’t he already died? Near as I could recall, the last headline about this, yes, giant, was that his TV show had been canceled for bad ratings, as if the pope had been reduced to teaching Sunday school. How did Emerson put it? Every hero becomes at last a bore.

It was hardly boring, reading his obituary, to which the
Times
devoted two entire pages, the kind of acreage typically given to statesmen, or for that matter, popes. His life reads like a Russian novel, and a long one at that. Ironic to consider that he became famous in 1962 for a novel,
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, of only 160 pages. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky took that many to clear their throats.

He was born one year after the Russian Revolution and outlived the Soviet Union by almost twenty years. Jailed by Stalin, rehabilitated by Krushchev, reexiled by Brezhnev, welcomed back by Yeltsin, bemedaled by the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. That’s some arc. Only Churchill, another erstwhile bricklayer, lived through such a panoramic sweep.

I fell for Solzhenitsyn as a teenager when my father introduced me to
Ivan Denisovich
. I read it, amazed and horrified. You come away from the book as you do Primo Levi’s account of Auschwitz, numb and vaguely ashamed of yourself for having enjoyed the myriad benisons of a twentieth-century American birthright.

I went on to his other books, but admit to having given up about halfway through the 300,000 words of
The Gulag Archipelago
, when the account—perhaps more accurate to say accounting—of horrors reached the point of surfeit.
Gulag
is among other things a work of meticulous reporting. Solzhenitsyn interviewed 227 other survivors of the prison system, and seems to have left nothing out. The sheer math of it is monstrous: An estimated sixty million human beings
went through the Gulag. Sixty million, the combined populations of California and Texas.

Reading about Solzhenitsyn puts one in mind of another giant of the Cold War era, Whittaker Chambers, author of the classic
Witness
. Solzhenitsyn was preeminently a witness. As he notes in
The Oak and the Calf
, published a year after the KGB arrested him and sent him toward exile in Vermont, “I must write simply to ensure that it was not all forgotten, that posterity might someday come to know of it.”

Ill with almost certainly mortal cancer in the early 1950s, and living a wretched existence in internal exile, his main concern was that his record of Soviet-wrought human misery might be lost. So he wrote it all down on small strips of paper which he inserted into an empty champagne bottle that he buried. The ultimate message in a bottle. He did not die of the cancer, and was convinced that this was the result of “a divine miracle.” Another giant of the Cold War, Pope John Paul II, was also convinced that he had been spared by Providence when Mehmet Ali Aga’s five bullets failed to kill him.

If Solzhenitsyn had not endured such ordeals—world war, the camps, cancer, exile—it might be easier to tut-tut over his being so gosh-darned inconsiderate to the 1978 graduating class of Harvard. As you’ll recall, he had the temerity to tell them: “After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.” This elicited from the graduates a collective groan of
Dude, chill!
Chill Solzhenitsyn did, at a penal camp in Kazakhstan—a place more recognizable to today’s college gen as the fictional home of Borat.

While he was writing
The Gulag Archipelago
, his typewriter kept giving out. He had to solder it back together and jury-rig repairs. It was as if the machine itself were collapsing beneath the weight of all the horror stories. He worked fast, looking over his shoulder. “If the KGB descended,” he wrote in
The Oak and the Calf
, “the many-throated groan, the dying whisper of millions, the unspoken testament of those who had perished, would all be in their hands, and I
would never be able to reconstruct it all, my brain would never be capable of it again.”