Book Review: ‘The Lede,’ by Calvin Trillin
I began this review with eulogies because the best section in “The Lede” is a short one called, simply, “R.I.P.” It contains remembrances of some of Trillin’s favorite people, including Russell Baker, Molly Ivins, John Gregory Dunne, Morley Safer, Andrew Kopkind and Murray Kempton.
About Baker, the former Times columnist, Trillin writes that he “preferred the unadorned to the gussied-up” and was “an enemy of pretension and pomposity.” Trillin might as well be writing about himself. He reminds us that Baker compared writing 800-word columns for what was once called the Op-Ed page to “doing ballet in a telephone booth.”
Trillin also recalls the time that Baker almost died when a raw potato fell from a tall building, barely missing him. No one wants to be remembered for a goofy death, like Sherwood Anderson’s, for example. He died after accidentally swallowing the toothpick that skewered the olive in his martini.
Trillin reports Ivins’s comment that “if a certain congressman’s I.Q. dropped any further, he’d have to be watered twice a day.” He notes Dunne’s imaginary “Irish drawer,” files devoted solely to grudges. Safer, the “60 Minutes” correspondent, had a sideline making paintings of hotel rooms. He quotes Safer this way:
Capturing the unique colors — the burnt oranges, the vivid turquoises — that are frequently encountered in American hostelries poses an extraordinary challenge to the artist. You realize that the bedspreads and rugs in Holiday Inns were designed for one purpose — so that people can get sick on them and it won’t show.
Trillin’s droll manner has a lot to do with his gift for understatement. So when I read, in his remembrance of Kopkind, the Nation journalist, that he was “the most entertaining person of his generation,” I had to put the book down for a moment. I thought to my stunned self: That is possibly the greatest bit of praise I have ever heard — coming from Trillin, at any rate. Kopkind must have had a personality that could microwave leftovers at 30 yards.
