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The kids at the top of their classes, grade-wise, in high school who also score around 1400 or higher on their SATs are pretty much the only ones with a chance of being accepted into Yale, Harvard, or Princeton. I wasn’t one of those lucky ones with a brilliant, super-speedy brain.
What tends to happen after those Ivy Leaguers graduate is they get fast-track, solid-paying first-year jobs, and they’re on their way to careers full of power, money, and prestige.
This is also true of the graduates who enter the writing profession from these supremely elite universities. A disproportionately high percentage of land writing and reporting jobs at major magazines such as The New Yorker and The New York Times. And away they go, writing well and often. They are the gifted, the chosen ones, full of natural talent and sharp minds.
You can try to puncture a hole in this overall assertion but I wouldn’t bother. I know. I have lived it and seen it. Out of college I was in the newsroom of The Chronicle of Higher Education and quickly noticed an overpowering trend. Virtually all the reporters went to Ivy League Schools: Cornell, U of Pennsylvania, Brown, Harvard, Princeton. Wall to wall Ivy Leaguers.
They wrote well. They were ambitious. They were immediate influencers. Their careers took off and, for the most part, never stopped ascending.
I share this with you because I just finished reading a book by a writer I hadn’t heard of named Calvin Trillin. Once I started reading his prose, so elegant and smooth, I figured he must have gone to an Ivy League school. Yep – Yale.
Trillin worked for many years at The New Yorker Magazine and Time Magazine – prestigious publications, no matter how you measure. You don’t get a job writing for these two outlets unless you’re top-notch, a rarefied person who can write better than just about anyone else in the world.
The book he wrote published last year, The Lede: Dispatches From a Life in the Press, delivers a fun trip through his many colorful, offbeat, and eclectic travels as a journalist covering all sorts of things such as Texas barbecues, street food stands in New York City, racial events in Mississippi, New York politicians, and and business moguls. You come away from the book convinced this guy went on an interesting ride during his career – and never really took any of it, including himself, too seriously.
I picked up the book thinking it would be relatively straightforward and serious, like a career-reflective memoir, but started to figure out several pages in that this guy wisecracks quite a bit in a subtle and dry way. He’s joking around quite a bit, but if you’re not reading closely, you may not pick up on it. Turns out he became one of America’s most talented humor writers.
Despite the hourglass sand almost all on the bottom half, I aspire to be that one, so it was captivating to study how he crafted sentences so that the unexpected punchline would come, seemingly from three blocks away, at the end of the sentence. This is a writer’s trick that almost invariably works.
Writers as gifted as Trillin could be, I have come to expect, condescending or arrogant or both, but that’s not how he comes across. He is a light-hearted type of humor that reveals that while this was a revered American journalist, he understood it was just a job, and he had fun with much of what he encountered. With this passage revealing his admiration, in an amusing way, for his own writing, he won me over.
“Over the years, my wife has come to believe that I will use almost any excuse to reread my own prose. She claims that she has occasionally heard me in my office late at night cackling away at some ancient witticism of my own, occasionally bursting out with “That’s a good one!” or “Now there’s a fellow who knows how to write!”
Like this guy, most writers are closet egomaniacs if not out in the open about it. They love their own words, as I do, even if no one else does. Words are really all writers have to show for themselves; words are the stamps they implant on the world. There have been times when I have asked people to read back to me what I’ve written, and they never want to, and they shouldn’t be blamed for that. They don’t care about my writing as much as I do, and that makes sense.
Even covering serious situations, Calvin Trillin seems to have made joking around his way of getting through each day. Check out this smart aleck line in a job opportunity situation:
“In 1982, when I was approached about writing a column for The Nation, I asked for only one guarantee: would I be allowed to make fun of the editor?”
Decent-paying writing jobs with publications read by lots of people are scarce. So, for this guy to risk annoying a person in position to hire him tells you he either just couldn’t control himself or he was supremely sure his writing shined so bright he would get hired regardless of his dubious attempt at wit in an interview.
I especially enjoyed when this writer gets into a nice groove sharing stories about his assignment to write about the best barbecue joints in Texas for a publication produced in that state called “Texas Barbecue” or something like that. Cruising all over Texas – not a small place – with random people eating at a bunch of places – reporting on all of it, he got me smiling with this rack of beef:
“Although I grew up in Kansas City, which was a completely different style of barbecue, I have always kept au courant of Texas barbecue, like a sports fan who is almost monomanically obsessed with basketball but glances over at the NHL standings now and then just to see how things are going.”
My favorite line in the book was his description of some guy from Texas with whom he was eating all kinds of barbecue as “a large man with white mustache and mid-section that reflects a forty-year interest in Texas barbecue.”
Beautiful and fresh writing that is. A sentence any writer would be proud to craft. I also liked him describing how early he and his cronies had to get to the Texas barbecues at sunrise to ensure they got to devour the meat before the restaurants ran out.
“We were eating a huge meal of barbecue at a time on Saturday morning when most people were starting to wonder what they might rustle up for breakfast once they bestirred themselves.”
Bestirred is a stuffy Ivy League word. He could have just gone with “woke up” but had to show off. That’s what Yale grads do sometimes; they can’t help themselves proving they’re not as emotionally intelligent as they are intellectually intelligent. All people have flaws.
But I dig his writing and here’s another reason. Because it wasn’t too clear why he was carousing around Texas – the biggest state on the planet I would guess having driven through most of it one day myself. All of the sudden he was on assignment for a Texas publication eating barbecue early in the morning. Wait, what about The New Yorker gig? Makes me think not explaining how this all came about was another way he wanted to entertain me.
He also enchanted me with descriptions of seemingly instantly acrimonious meetings with Malcolm Forbes, who was the editor of Forbes Magazine, and later regaling me about a separate breakfast tryst with Malcolm’s personality challenged son, Steve. You’ll get the sense he didn’t regard either of them in high regard but he doesn’t say that directly.
“Reading the article New York ran on the multifaceted life of Malcolm Forbes – who manages to publish a magazine and captain transcontinental balloon flights and amass great collections and oversee vast real estate holdings – I was interested mainly in his parking situation. We all have our own area of specialty. Mine happens to be parking.”
See what he did? No one cares about parking except maybe a few people in the parking business but probably not even them. Yet Calvin claims it was something he cared about which is rather amusing at the least and never really explained so it made sense. I repeat: no one cares about parking which is why it’s funny he wrote that he did.
His skill as a humorist also shined in this re-telling of his breakfast encounter with Steve, who nobody has ever said was the most smooth person in social situations.
“Around the time Steve Forbes dropped out of the presidential race, I imagined myself walking into a New York dinner party a bit early and finding him to be the only other guest on hand…[At the breakfast] he starts glaring at me. His glare is easily as maniacal as his smile, and much more malevolent. “Well,” I say as cheerfully as I can manage. “I suppose you might be wondering why U referred to you in Time as a dork robot.”
You wonder if he really said this. The book leaves that up to guesswork. The author says he was guilty of making up some things including quotes in his career and rationalizes it was kind of acceptable because he wrote satire. Not a journalistic purist who likes to re-read his own writing – I can respect that.
It’s usually poignant, I have discovered, when a funny writer turns serious – Tony Kornheiser comes to mind – because for some reason they seem to be especially perceptive and articulate about life’s universal truths. I find myself wanting to read more serious prose by humorists. This author’s insights about the late Russell Baker, a New York Times columnist and one of my favorites when he was alive, showed me Trilling has a heart and appreciation for earnestness. He writes:
Baker’s obituary in The Times said that “he could be tongue-in-cheek one day and melancholy the next, then folksy, anguished, lyrical or acid…A Times reader who turned to his column might read a fanciful tale about a man who woke up to find himself with someone else’s feet, and he might read this dead serious description of Richard Nixon: “There were darknesses in his soul that seemed to leave his life bereft of joy. He was a private, lonely man who never seemed comfortable with anyone, including himself, a man of monumental insecurities for whom public life, I thought, must be a constant ordeal.”
What you have here is one writer, Trillin, appreciating the writing of another, Baker. And another writer here, me, revealing to you that I find Trillin’s writing appealing.
Writers go away to be alone so much in our lives. We understand our unusual existences; there is a natural empathy among us. And when we like what another one of us writes, we get excited and salute them.
Because we know how elusive and magical that so often is.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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