Memories of The Great and The Good (19 page)

He had a marvelous cocky streak which was so amiably, almost jokingly, expressed that it caused no offense to notice but rather a belch of laughter. Once, I recall, we were mulling over the plight of NATO a day or two after de Gaulle pulled France out of it. Scotty sighed, tapped the stem of his pipe against his teeth and said a little wearily, “I think I'd better call on the general.” Which, without more fuss than a minute or two over the telephone, he proceeded to arrange. I have no doubt that a couple of days later he would be flying off to Paris, and while he was over there might just as well drop in on the new Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson.

There was a mythical story, which if not true ought to be, about the king of England's saying, after Britain went off the gold standard, “I shouldn't be surprised if Scotty Reston wasn't behind this whole thing.” Certainly, Scotty was one day ahead of our (the
Guardian's)
financial expert, then in Washington, in reporting that the retreat from gold was
going
to happen. Days before any other paper, the
New York Times
published under Reston's byline the details of the Dumbarton Oaks conference (no reporters present), which laid out, to the astonishment of the men who had been there, the blueprint of the oncoming United Nations.

Most risibly, I remember a Bermuda conference between Macmillan and President Kennedy. Absolutely nothing was coming out of the press officers of either side, and the parties of the first part could not be reached. The day wore on and out, as several hundred of us, seeing no hope of transmitting the communiqué, drifted and sifted and boozed into the night. Scotty was nowhere in sight. Just after eleven, he came in, jaunty with his bosun's roll, a little flushed, a puff of smoke preceding a large grin. He got me off in a corner. I asked him how the canary tasted. He chuckled till he had to wipe away the tears. He took a long happy draw on the pipe. On a promise that I would write nothing till the morrow, he told me what had gone on at the conference, who said what to whom, what the communiqué would say, better—something communiqués are designed to hide—what the communiqué meant. Unlike the stories of most journalists who have just scored a coup, his bore no hint of self-congratulation. It was plain, informative, exactly right, letter perfect. Where'd you get all this from, I asked. He wiped another tear: “I was under the carpet,” he said.

He was always under the carpet. This genial, Scots-shrewd, bulky but compact figure, ready for Moscow, Downing Street or the Pentagon, affable, unfooled, gave a special glow to the title reporter. After a bad bout with the grimmest of diseases, he died in 1995, during the anniversary week of Pearl Harbor, full of years and sly, quiet wisdom to the end.

A
beloved woman has just died. I choose the word carefully. The cause of her being loved was a talent, much akin to the genius of Mark Twain, for writing about the daily life of ordinary people without sentimentality, facetiousness or mock tragedy but with a wry sort of candor that called from her audience the response—sometimes delighted, sometimes abashed— “She's right, but that's me!”

In a word, she was something very rare: a woman humorist. If that sounds cavalier or bullying, in a macho way, I'd better say that that was not a flip remark. It is the outcome of years of brain-crunching thought which, in another age, might well have led to the discovery of the law of gravity. As it was, it led me to a simple distinction between wit and humor that has been confirmed every time somebody points out to me yet another funny woman writer. They always turn out to be wits, which goes at once to my theory that whereas wits have a target that is somebody outside themselves, the target of a humorist is himself. At his best he says blankly stupid things with the air of being specially wise, or he confesses a flaw in his character which we at once recognize as one of our own. To put it simply, wits make fun of other people, humorists make fun of themselves.

The most celebrated wit of her time, which was the time of the 1920s and 1930s, was Dorothy Parker. Reviewing Katharine Hepburn's debut as a leading lady on Broadway, she noticed—or pretended to notice—that whenever an old, famous actress, one Blanche Bates, came on stage, Katharine Hepburn retreated into the farthest corner. “Could it be,” mused Miss Parker, “that Miss Hepburn was afraid of catching acting from Miss Bates?” We all hoot over such a wounding shaft (Brendan Gill, another wit, called Dorothy Parker's wit “a surgical enterprise”) but are greatly relieved not to be the object of it.

On the other hand, consider the deeply thoughtful remark of Mark Twain after he'd been a month or two in England: “The English countryside is too beautiful to be left out of doors; it should be put under glass.”

I hope this is enough to show why humorists are lovable, wits never. Think of some of the renowned wits of our century: Bernard Shaw, Ambrose Bierce, Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward, Evelyn Waugh, Gore Vidal. They have been called many things, but lovable is not one of them.

This country seems to abound with witty women, some of them terrifyingly so. Fran Lebowitz is always, and rightly, called “acerbic.” I think Florence King may be the funniest writer alive, in the English language, but she is an arch misogynist who hates the human race and writes—not without good cause—books with such apt titles as
Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye
and
With Charity toward None
. I admire her extravagantly, so long as she's whipping other people, but I should hate to have her take off on me.

However, none of this is true of Erma Bombeck, who has just died in San Francisco in her seventieth year. She was a columnist for most of her life and put together several cherished collections, cherished, I should say, by a very large middle-class audience, of women I should guess more than men. Her titles were such as
When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, If s Time to Go Home
and
If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, Why Am I in the Pits ?

She was born Erma Fiste in a small town in Ohio, German on her father's side. He has been variously described as a crane operator or a construction worker. (Erma would have preferred the older, if less exact, word: bricklayer.) He died of a heart attack when Erma, an only child, was nine, and she and her mother went off to live with a grandmother. At about the age of twelve, she began writing a humorous column for her junior high school paper, got out of high school toward the end of the Second World War, became a copy girl on the nearby big-town newspaper, in Dayton, graduated as a bachelor of arts from that city's university and all in the same year married William Bombeck, a sportswriter who later became a high school headmaster. For her remaining forty-seven years, he was her one and only husband, favorite subject of wonder and (whenever she felt herself mean enough to turn into a wit instead of a humorist) her favorite object!

Her career was that of her generation—brace yourselves!—mother and housewife. She was born too soon to hear, from the savvy young feminists, that “you can have it all”: man, children, executive job, law practice. When, later in life, she did hear it, she didn't believe it.

But if that passing wind of change didn't knock her off her pins it left her a touch unsteady. It was the 1960s, and Erma Bombeck was in her thirty-eighth year. One day she was sitting in her kitchen “looking out the window,” she wrote, “watching women like Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Golda Meir carving out their own careers, and I decided it wasn't fulfilling enough to stay cleaning water taps with a toothbrush. I was too young for Social Security, too tired for an affair. I decided it was my time to strike out.” The last of her three children were now off at school. “Striking out” meant a daring decision: to write a column—for a newspaper. She persuaded a small suburban newspaper to pay her three dollars a column. “I was on my way,” she said. The next year, the editor of the big-city paper, the
Dayton Journal-Herald
, no less, spotted her stuff and made her the fabulous offer of fifteen dollars a week for three columns! She grabbed it. The rest is—worldwide syndication.

Later on, people used to ask her: how did you choose the subject of your column? Simple, she said, “being a housewife was the only thing I could discuss for more than four minutes.” That, indeed, is mostly what she did discuss in her columns, for the following thirty-one years. You'd think she must have plowed a grinding, monotonous furrow. It is the predictable fate of most humorists who have to be funny twice a week no matter how they're feeling. But, astonishingly, to the end, Erma Bombeck was rarely mechanical or predictable, even though she was writing about the most familiar domestic joys and woes: husband, children, the measles, kitchen stoves, holidays, yearning for holidays, love of home, boredom with home, fascinations and horrors of teenagers, a husband's capacity to sit immobile watching football (“when a man watches four consecutive football games, he can be declared legally dead”)—about her second-favorite household chore, ironing (“my first being banging my head on the bedpost till I faint”).

It must be obvious that by the time, almost twenty years ago, she was syndicated in more than nine hundred newspapers around the world, she had long ago ceased to be a household slave, or what we used to call a housewife, though she blithely used the title to the end. She earned something short of a million dollars a year for many years, and for the last two decades had lived in a valley out west, in the Arizona desert. So most of her later stuff, the themes of maybe three-quarters of her output, were exercises in remembrance of things past. But they were never memories recalled in the luxury of later life. Until the last year, when she was very ill, she did her own shopping, all but the heaviest housework, she checked the price tags on everything; and when her illness began to overwhelm her, she kept up her spirits with odd recollections and instant jokes about marriage in all its stages. She banged out what came to mind, and it caused the joy of chuckling or the wince of recognition especially in her huge, far-flung audience of women: on dirty ovens (“If it won't catch fire today, clean it tomorrow”); on sibling rivalry (“Who gets the ice cream sundae with the lone cherry on top?”); a warning to wives—”The light in the refrigerator is blinding to the male of the species.” Women, she reflected, especially married women, never cease fantasizing: “All over the country housewives are fantasizing their husbands taking the kids to the fair or something and leaving them alone for four days … the other day, an exterminator knocked on my door asking for directions, and I wondered—Ts he the one?' “

If Erma Bombeck is the only woman humorist (Fm eager to receive other applications), you may wonder why this should be so. Well, as I said in another way at the beginning, there are enough talented men who are secure in the scheme of things to feel free to make fun of themselves. I don't believe that in our civilization women have yet achieved sufficient sense of emotional equality to be eager to help men make fun of them. By the complementary reason, all the funny women I know are wits—all too grateful for their ability to strike back.

So why now should Erma Bombeck appear? It is a puzzle, but I hazard a solution. She was, from the accounts of all her friends, a winning, happy woman. She watched her husband with steady affection, so often the stumbling victim of her pieces, but she was confident enough of her own fallibility to make herself an equal butt. I believe this happy balance was due first to her temperament, a sanguine temperament, allied to her God-given gift (she wrote as simply as St. Luke: “And the word went out that all the world was to be taxed. The Democrats won again!”). The happy state of her marriage gave the gift and the temperament together free rein to express her humor. Twenty-five years ago, she told an interviewer: “The good years of my life began with my marriage. The rest has been gravy.”