But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  I’d asked him if he would write a blurb for a collection of essays of mine that was being published.

  Fall 1996

  Don’t concern yourself about the blurb. . . . I will even let you write it for me, really, at least the first draft. . . .

  Is your collection all reprints or will there be much that is new? If the former, don’t expect to sell as many copies as Mario Puzo, or even Joseph Heller.

  It didn’t. I’d stumbled across a first edition of his second novel, Something Happened, in a bookstore in Key West. Robert Gottlieb, who edited both Catch-22 and Something Happened, considers the latter book Heller’s finest novel. It remains to be seen if Something Happened, published in 1974, will, like its predecessor, sell more than 20 million copies, be made into a movie, and be translated into more than fifty languages.

  February 1997

  Something Happened? You’ve got a daughter and a son and you may find yourself one of those readers who are touched very deeply.

  I have the new Odyssey translation on cassettes—Ian McKellen reading. It is thrilling to hear!

  Joe had read a version of The Iliad when he was ten years old. That experience made him decide to be a writer.

  April 3, 1997

  Good to hear from you again finally; sorry to hear you’re still out on the book tour. I tried to warn you, but you young people refuse to listen.

  We’re fine. I’ve completed the writing and editing of a new book, and Bob Gottlieb is now working very hard on its production details to make sure it looks good. It was a work inspired by FYI and the article I did on Rome, but I’m not going to dedicate it to you or FYI. A sister takes precedence, and when and if you read it (after Something Happened, which I’m sure you’ve still not read), you’ll understand why.

  May 21, 1997

  No dice on another food or travel piece from Rome, Capri, Naples, Venice, Como, Milan, N.Y. or East Hampton. I will fax you the rest of Prague from one of those places.

  The Pope confides there is no such thing as sin and expects you to know that.

  After some cajoling, Joe was persuaded to write a piece for us on a recent trip he made to Prague. He also agreed to do another piece for us, on a famous Italian hotel. He was now getting to be adept at the art of handling magazine editors.

  July 11, 1997

  When you send me the check for Prague, I’ll fax the text for “Sunrise at Villa D’Este.”

  July 16, 1997

  Things working out as well as they seem to be doing, if you make me an offer I can’t refuse for one piece on Capri and one on Venice later this year, I might let Valerie talk me into doing them.

  If you read Something Happened, I’ll read Wet Work [a ten-year-old novel of mine].

  He sent us his article on Prague. We titled it, “Czech, Please.”

  July 1997

  Just what I wanted to hear—that the piece was acceptable, not that you had fallen sick. The illness you describe was just Nature’s way of saying you’re a putz for doing so many things that take you away too often. Give them up and devote yourself to what’s important: absorbing Something Happened.

  Summer 1997

  Have you seen a page of photos in the current issue of a magazine called W? One of the pictures looks like me, and one looks exactly like you. The one of me is better-looking.

  Fall 1997

  Very good to hear from you again. I’ve been struck by the uncharacteristic silence . . .

  Mine has been a lackluster and mainly tedious summer, spent on nothing more important than—a good title for a book—Waiting for Galleys. Because Bob Gottlieb works so swiftly and because there was no hurry to publish, the wait for galleys has been, and still is, a long one. In case you’ve forgotten [I had not], the book is a reminiscence with a Coney Island background of a childhood and career that has been very much different from your own . . .

  I will go to Pritikin in California . . . to lose about ten of the pounds I’ve been putting on. Valerie refuses to believe I will be going there. . . . She suspects, I suspect, I will be going there to tryst, and thus far she insists on going to California too and seeing me for dinner every night.

  November 14, 1997

  Your new issue is a lovely one, even without any contribution from me . . . For your next novel, try something scandalous in one way or another.

  He’d sent me the galleys of his memoir.

  December 7, 1997

  I’m glad you found the book [Now and Then] enjoyable; I knew you’d find it informative. . . . Knopf finds it a little difficult to believe that I truly would prefer not to sit in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in New York for an hour and sign books. The U.K. [book tour] schedule, on the other hand, is as pleasurable and luxurious as I have ever enjoyed, beginning with three nights in Dublin, where we already have some close and boisterous friends.

  December 14, 1997

  Valerie is bedded with a bad cold and it appears that I will remain out here until Christmas Day (a holiday probably instituted by Jews, I’m sure you’ll agree). And shortly after that, we’ll be headed for Paris for New Year’s Eve, a holiday of some sentimental importance to Valerie, it seems, so it does not look like I will see you for a while. Unless your job and total future income depend on it, I’d really rather not think about another piece for FYI or anywhere else. I feel it’s time now to begin thinking about another book, and since in my lifetime I’ve never been able to come up with more than one idea at a time, I’d like the idea I do come up with to be for that one.

  December 18, 1997

  On Page 309 of a scholarly book recently published by Wayne State University Press titled Tilting with Mortality is a bibliographical reference to Forbes FYI.

  Celebrations are in order, along with a huge promotion in title and a huge increase in remuneration. You have breached the wall between Capitalist Cool [FYI’s motto] and serious literary scholarship.

  February 28, 1998

  In case you ever feel yourself running short of BIG money, there are collectors out there who are now hungry from the FYI issue with the Rome piece. I’ve been advertising it [on his book tour], even in the L.A. Times, as the first true chapter of Now and Then.

  Joe’s article in the magazine on the Villa D’Este Hotel on Lake Como generated a thrilled letter from the hotel management, offering him and Valerie a complimentary return visit.

  March 21, 1998

  There are undiscovered fringe benefits writing for FYI, as you’ll see for yourself if you can decipher the enclosed fax. We will extend our May Italian trip three or four days to take advantage of them.

  Perhaps I should be editing FYI and you should be writing for me as a roving reporter . . .

  I’d written to express solidarity and outrage over an allegation contained in a letter to the editor of The Times of London that Joe had plagiarized elements of Catch-22 from an obscure 1950 novel. The charge was subsequently acknowledged to be baseless.

  April 29, 1998

  Stop grieving—there is a much better piece for me in today’s N.Y. Times. Absurdly, I find myself in a rage against a man I never knew who died a few years [ago] and was the author of a novel I never heard of!

  The new issue is stunning—even without me. And swollen beautifully with ads! Tell Forbes you deserve a raise.

  Joe was soon playing all the angles of a seasoned magazine travel writer.

  May 9, 1998

  At a local book event last night, a man doing PR for the French islands in the Caribbean offered to send me and a companion to all four if I would do a piece for your magazine. I’m tempted to encourage this . . . I’ll bet I could induce him to pay for you and your wife too. My idea there is to have you do the piece eventually and for me and a companion of my choice to be along for the free ride.

  The fear in his temptation is that my next and final novel will be about a spent novelist who spends the final of his golden years writing travel articles read by few people he knows for a younger novelist like you, in a kind of odd
Faustian bargain in which Mephistopheles himself is also prey to the Capitalist Cool he serves.

  I’d reported that Valerie had come up from behind and pinched me at a Norman Mailer book party. Fairly tame behavior for a Norman Mailer book party, actually.

  May 1998

  Valerie has long experience at grabbing attractive men by the crotch of their trousers . . .

  What does someone like you and I do at a lavish book party in which crowds of people there seem more important to us than we know they are?

  “You’re equivocating like a Clinton!” he wrote after I tried to hedge on a bet we had made over the number of casualties on D-day. I finally conceded defeat, and owed him another lunch at the restaurant of his choosing.

  May 28, 1998

  Of course I’m right! When you know me better, as my closest friends do, you’ll realize that I’m always right. With my innate modesty, I never push a point unless I’m absolutely sure I’m right.

  Mr. Chow’s?

  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

  JFK, JR.

  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 elev
ator 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.