But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  Then there was Hurricane Gloria. In September 1985, this violent storm was working its way up the Atlantic, headed for Virginia Beach, headquarters of the Christian Broadcasting Network, with murderous force. Mr. Robertson went on the air and prayed, commanding the storm to stay at sea. It did—and came ashore at Fire Island, demolishing the summer house of Calvin Klein.

  —The New York Times, February 1996

  THE NEW YORKER MONEY CARTOONS

  One of the first Latin quotations schoolchildren of my generation were given to translate—and indeed meditate upon for the good of our souls—was the Chaucerian chestnut Radix malorum est cupiditas. Greed is the root of all evil. Greed, of course, being synonymous with “money.”

  The sentiment sounded plausible enough back in the fifth grade. Now that I have a fifth grader of my own, I would translate it differently: “Money is the root of all tuition.” It would be preposterous, not to say downright idiotic, in the context of New Yorker cartoons on this subject, to attempt to strike a more high-minded pose.

  Money has certainly always been the root of humor at the magazine that since 1925 has published more than sixty thousand cartoons. In the beginning, its founding editor, Harold Ross, scraped together a meager operating budget, which did not provide the staff with a working environment that could be called lavish. Certainly none of them ever accused it of that. The late Brendan Gill, an aboriginal New Yorker staffer, used to regale listeners with a hilarious description of how he had to walk over the desks of three other staffers in order to reach his own. One day, Ross demanded of Dorothy Parker why she had not handed in the article that was due. She replied, “Someone else was using the pencil.”

  The root of all evil continued to be the root of great mirth among The New Yorker’s legendary staff. After James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” was turned into a big box-office movie success starring Danny Kaye, Samuel Goldwyn tried to hire Thurber away from the magazine to be one of his studio contract writers. Goldwyn offered him $500 a week, a princely salary that in 1947 would have weakened the knees of most New Yorker—or for that matter, New York—writers. But Thurber cabled back: “Mr. Ross has met the increase.”

  Goldwyn knew Hollywood, but he clearly did not know Harold Ross, who would no more have paid a writer $500 a week than he would have bought another pencil. He cabled back, offering Thurber $1,000 dollars a week. Thurber wired back that again Mr. Ross had met the increase. Goldwyn upped his offer to $1,500. Again Thurber sent an identical cable. Finally Goldwyn offered $2,500. (That’s almost $25,000 a week in today’s dollars.) Still Thurber wouldn’t budge.

  Goldwyn gave up. But then later, he renewed his siren-singing, this time offering Thurber $1,500, apparently forgetting his previous offer of $2,500.

  “I’m sorry,” Thurber cabled back, “but Mr. Ross has met the decrease.”

  Twentieth-century literature and culture are the better off for Thurber’s remarkable resistance. However, a number of New Yorker staffers did succumb to the lure of Hollywood. As John McNulty headed west, Ross’s valedictory comment to him was, “Well, God bless you, McNulty, goddamn it.”

  Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker since 1986, estimates that of the thirteen thousand cartoons the magazine has run since that year, about a quarter of them have been on the subjects of business and money. Most New Yorker cartoonists, he points out wryly, have never gotten near business. This obdurate reality no doubt accounts for their tone of—shall we say—ironic detachment. As Sydney Smith wrote, “I read Seneca’s On the Contempt of Wealth. What intolerable nonsense!”

  Twenty-five percent seems like a lot when you consider the other available themes, such as, say, Love, Death, Lawyers, and Cats. But Mr. Mankoff explains that, until fairly recently (1992 and the arrival of Tina Brown as editor), The New Yorker’s cartoons never touched on another of life’s truly major themes. (Sex.) He attributes the cartoonists’ obsession with business and money as a “sublimation” of this forbidden territory. One grasps his point. If you can’t have sex, you might as well make do with money. As Hillaire Belloc put it:

  I’m tired of Love; I’m still more tired of Rhyme,

  But money gives me pleasure all the time.

  Or as Jack Benny, in his signature skit, says to the impatient mugger who has given him the choice of his money or his life: “I’m thinking . . .”

  The 1980s was all about Wall Street money. The 1990s have been about—money. According to The Wall Street Journal, over the last five years, U.S. households have created $13 trillion of net new wealth. If that strikes you as a lot, or to put it as Alan Greenspan would say, a “s—load” of money, you are in fact correct. Thirteen trillion equals the entire U.S. bond market. Or put it this way: the entire U.S. Gross Domestic Product (that is, the value of the work performed by maids, butlers, cooks, gardeners, nannies, etc.) in 1998 was $8.5 trillion.

  There is more money now than ever. Ten years ago, the richest person on the Forbes 400 was John Kluge, with a net worth of about $2.5 billion. In 1999, the richest person on the list was Bill Gates, with a net worth of $58 billion. It’s been a while since I took Econ 101, but I think this is called exponential growth.

  One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons is John Agee’s pastiche on the National Debt Clock near Times Square in New York City. This one is called “Bill Gates’ Wealth.” Beneath the display of continuously increasing mind-boggling numbers, is a subcategory labeled, as in the original, “Your Family’s Contribution.”

  It’s not that the rich have gotten richer. Everyone has gotten richer. (Okay, except for you and me.) That dorky guy you went to high school with now has his own Gulfstream. One of the longest-running books on The New York Times best-seller list is called The Millionaire Next Door. According to its authors, that guy next to you in the supermarket looking for a bargain on jumbo boxes of generic raisin bran, wearing a ripped, grease-stained, eight-year-old sweater from the Lands’ End catalogue and driving a rusty twelve-year-old Corolla is . . . rich. He just isn’t into looking rich.

  When I was growing up in the sixties, one of the coolest shows on TV was called The Millionaire, about an old money-buckets named John Beresford Tipton, Jr., who gave away a million dollars at a pop to people in distress. And what do you know—their lives were often not bettered by the hailstorm of manna. But the name of the show alone was exotic and alluring and unattainable. Your parents would whisper of someone, “He’s a millionaire.” Today, only Austin Powers is impressed by one . . . million . . . dollars. Once upon a time, the rich would cluster in places like Gatsby’s East Egg, “where they could be rich together.” Now they’re next door. They’d no longer all fit in East Egg. Even Seattle is getting cramped.

  As a result of this efflorescence of moola, the stuff has become a ubiquitous theme of modern life. At this point, a three-year-old would probably recognize the letters IPO. Not a day goes by without the newspapers informing us of the cost or amount of something. Having just sent in my tax returns, I now know exactly what portion I contributed to the cost of one of those Tomahawk missiles we lobbed into Belgrade during the recent unpleasantness. They cost $1.4 million apiece. A cruise missile goes for $1.5 million. To some, this seems like a lot just to take out an enemy truck—or a friendly embassy, for that matter. But since a single B-2 bomber costs $2.2 billion, who’s to say? (Bill Gates could afford twenty-six B-2 bombers. Should we be concerned?)

  In the midst of all the expensive bombing and peacemaking, an Air Force general sallied forth to point out that JDAMs, that is, Joint Direct Attack Munitions, the type of bomb that drops from the pricey B-2, cost only $20,000 each, or $10 per pound. As he gamely put it, “about the same as prime ground beef.”

  In the fifties and sixties, it was considered impolite to ask someone how much they made. Now magazines devote entire issues to “Who Made What.” I never had the remotest idea, or really cared, how much Walt Disney made from his Magic Kingdom. But last week we were all informed that D
isney’s chairman, Michael Eisner, made—jumpin’ Jehoshaphat—$547 million. (Having two children who are heavy Disney consumers, I could probably calculate My Family’s Contribution.)

  But how come I didn’t make $547 million last year? Obviously, I need one of Roz Chast’s Wonderwallets: “I know there’s only seven dollars in here, but it looks like seven hundred!” The genius of a New Yorker cartoonist is, to paraphrase Emerson, they know exactly what we’re thinking.

  Money, money, money. Most people today could tell you the opening weekend box office gross of the Phantom Menace Star Wars movie, or the new Austin Powers sequel. I could tell you the Gross Net Product of Pamela Lee Anderson. I didn’t even know such a thing existed, until I read it in a magazine last week. I knew she existed, but I didn’t know she had a Gross Net Product ($77 million). So now I know, and my life is fuller. The good news is that some New Yorker cartoonist is out there also mulling this important issue and preparing to reduce it to laughter.

  It is good to have this book as we near the end of “The American Century” and this money-mad decade. What can better distill the zeitgeist—German for “wish we had a word like that in English for ‘spirit of the times’ ”—than a New Yorker cartoon?

  One of Gahan Wilson’s shows a prison inmate in the upper bunk exclaiming cheerfully to a gloomy one in the bunk below, “Well, anyhow, it sure is handy having my broker right here in my cell!” At a time when everything is for sale, Ed Frascino’s cartoon says it all: the tooth fairy hovers over an elderly gent in bed, announcing: “Hi, I’m the tooth fairy. Want to buy back some of your teeth?”

  We spent a lot of time in the nineties thinking about health—and “managed” care. Frank Cotham gives us a doctor outside the Intensive Care Unit consoling the bereaved relative of the deceased: “His final wish was that all his medical bills be paid promptly.” And there’s a warning, as well as a laugh, in Bernard Schoenbaum’s two world-weary dogs walking along, one saying to the other, “Let’s face it—man’s best friend is money.” Mick Stevens gives us a man standing at the Pearly Gates before a scowling Saint Peter: “You had more money than God. That’s a big no-no.” And here’s Mort Gerberg’s Leonardo da Vinci, interrupting his work on a portrait of a woman with an inscrutable smile, to paint an even larger canvas entitled Production Expenses: Project—Mona Lisa. Two oppressed working stiffs stare philosophically at something going on offstage, one saying to the other, “There, there it is again—the invisible hand of the marketplace giving us the finger.” That could have run in 1929 or during the last recession. Or Mick Stevens’s of a wife demanding of her newspaper-reading husband, “I married you for your money, Leonard. Where is it?” Or Henry Martin’s two businessmen strolling down a street where every sign, every ad, every awning, flag, and license plate displays the same word: “Money.” Says one to the other, “Remember a few years ago when everything was sex, sex, sex?”

  Sort of. Or has it always been money, money, money? You could look it up in Chaucer.

  —from the introduction to The New Yorker Book of Money Cartoons, 1999

  CATCH-22 AT FIFTY

  There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and he could be grounded. All he had to do was ask: and as soon as he did he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Or be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy, and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

  “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

  “It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.

  The phrase “Catch-22” has so permeated the American language—or embedded itself, to put it in Desert Storm terminology—that we deploy it almost every day, usually to describe an encounter with the Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s common usage is so common that it’s right there in the dictionary. Not many book titles end up being (sorry, unavoidable) catchphrases. My own American Heritage Dictionary defines it as: “1.a A situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules or conditions. In the Catch-22 of a close repertoire, only music that is already familiar is thought to deserve familiarity. (Joseph McLennan).”

  Joseph . . . who? But it’s possible, even likely in fact, that the other Joseph would be amused at not being mentioned until the very bottom of the entry. I can hear him chuckling, “And how many copies of the American Heritage Dictionary have they sold so far?” I don’t know, but my guess is, not as many as Catch-22, which in the fifty years since it first appeared in October 1961 has sold more than ten million.

  In his memoir Now and Then, published the year he died, Heller tells us that he wrote the first chapter of his masterpiece in longhand on a yellow legal pad in 1953. It was published two years later in the quarterly New American Writing 7, under the title Catch-18. Also in that number were stories by A. A. Alvarez, Dylan Thomas, Heinrich Böll, and someone calling himself “Jean-Louis”—Jack Kerouac, a piece from a book he was writing called On the Road. Catch-22 and On the Road? Not a bad issue of New American Writing, that.

  The full story of how Catch-22 came about is told in Tracy Daugherty’s fascinating new biography, Just One Catch. Briefly: the novel grew out of Heller’s experiences as a bombardier in World War II, flying missions out of Corsica over Italy. It was seven years in the writing, while its author worked in the promotional departments of McCall’s and Time magazines. Just before being published, the novel had to be retitled, when it was learned that Leon Uris was about to bring out a World War II novel called Mila 18. Which is why you didn’t have a Catch-18 experience today at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

  The novel got some good reviews, some mixed reviews, and some pretty nasty reviews. The New Yorker’s was literary waterboarding: “. . . doesn’t even seem to have been written; instead it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper . . . what remains is a debris of sour jokes.” Heller dwells on that particular review in his memoir: “I am tempted to drown in my own gloating laughter even as I set this down. What restrains me is the knowledge that the lashings still smart, even after so many years, and if I ever pretend to be a jolly good sport about them, as I am doing now, I am only pretending.” (That was Joe Heller. Whatever flaws he may have had as a writer and human being, he was absolutely disposed of what Hemingway called the writer’s most essential tool: a first-class s— detector.) Evelyn Waugh, one of Heller’s literary heroes, pointedly declined to provide a blurb for the hardcover jacket. Catch-22 never won a literary prize and never made the New York Times best-seller list.

  But a number of people fell for it—hard. To paraphrase the novel’s first line, “It was love at first sight.” They took it up as a cause, not just a book, with evangelical ardor. Among these were S. J. Perelman, Art Buchwald, and the TV newsman John Chancellor, who printed up YOSSARIAN LIVES bumper stickers. (The phrase eventually became an antiwar slogan, the “Kilroy Was Here” of the Vietnam era.) Word spread: You have to read this book! In Britain, it went straight to the top of the best-seller lists. A reviewer there called it “The Naked and the Dead scripted for the Marx Brothers, a kind of From Here to Insanity.”

  Back on native soil, the novel took off after it was published in paperback. By April 1963, it had sold more than a million copies, and by the end of the decade, had gone through thirty printings. Heller’s biographer Tracy Daugherty concludes his Catch-22 chapter with an arresting quote from a letter Heller received a few months after the hardcover came out: “For sixteen years, I have been waiting for the great anti-war book which I knew WWII must produce. I rather doubted, however, that it would come out of America; I would have guessed Germany. I am happy to have been wrong . . . thank yo
u.” The writer was the historian Stephen Ambrose.

  Joe Heller began work on his World War II novel about the time the Korean War was winding down and published it just as another American war, in Vietnam, was getting under way. He was not the first twentieth-century author to find dark humor in war. Jaroslav Hasek’s unfinished classic The Good Soldier Schweik—a book Heller knew well—got there first. But Catch-22’s tone of outraged bewilderment in the midst of carnage and a deranged military mentality set the tone for the satires against the arms race and Vietnam. Dr. Strangelove appeared in 1964. Robert Altman’s 1970 M*A*S*H, with its Osterizer blend of black humor and stark horror, is a direct descendant of Catch-22. Ironically, that movie appeared the same year as Mike Nichols’s film version of Catch-22. M*A*S*H is the better movie by far, but in a nice bit of irony, it propelled the novel—finally!—onto American best-seller lists.

  When Heller died in December 1999, James Webb, the highly decorated Marine platoon leader, novelist (Fields of Fire), journalist, moviemaker, and now United States senator for Virginia, wrote an appreciation in The Wall Street Journal. Webb, a self-described Air Force brat, had first read and liked the novel as a teenager growing up on a Nebraska air base. He reread it in a foxhole in Vietnam in 1969, during a lull in fierce combat that took the lives of many of his men. One day, as he lay there feverish, insides crawling with hookworm from bad water, one of Webb’s men began laughing “uncontrollably, waving a book in the air. He crawled underneath my poncho hooch and held the book in front of me, open at a favorite page.

  “ ‘Read this!’ he said, unable to stop laughing. ‘Read it!’ ”

  Webb wrote, “In the next few days I devoured the book again. It mattered not to me that Joseph Heller was then protesting the war in which I was fighting, and it matters not a whit to me today. In his book, from that lonely place of blood and misery and disease, I found a soul mate who helped me face the next day and all the days and months that followed.”