So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (15 page)

Recently, I notice how many are dropping away, most of these without warning. In the last few years, Anne Wexler, Howard Paster, Gerald Green, John Mashek, Jack Nelson, Nan Robertson, Tom McCoy, Jack Miller, Jody Powell, Charles Francis, Ted Kennedy, Bill Safire. And I add my own stories with each one. Herbert J. “Jack” Miller, for example, had been RFK’s assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division at the Justice Department and later a key RFK supporter, although a strong and lifelong Republican. Jack was a leading Washington attorney, and I’d joined with some of his clients in my later work in public relations. He was skilled and dedicated, and almost alone among Republicans and conservatives he had a sense of humor. And Charles Francis, my successor as editor of the
Daily Bruin
at UCLA, had gone on to a successful career as an IBM executive after he and I had reluctantly abandoned the notion of buying the newspaper in Pismo Beach, California; the price—ten thousand dollars—was quite out of reach. There was something special about each of them.

And so, at the start of each day, these days, there are past friends to think of and exchanges to recall. I tend to keep the Mass cards, and once, after three or four weeks, I noticed John Mashek’s still in my jacket breast pocket. That set me to thinking about a conversation we’d had a few days before he died; we often spoke at least once a week, more often during the baseball season, because John’s loyalty to the Philadelphia Phillies was as strong as mine to the St. Louis Cardinals. He had dropped dead of a heart attack while watching his granddaughter play in a soccer game, and this was during the Yankees-Phillies World Series. If he’d survived, I surely would have chided him for leaving a real American game for soccer, a European sport dismissed and ignored by most Americans, and he would have agreed with me—“except when it must be done for family.” That could have provided the spur for a discussion of cultures, how hard it is to change them, the suburban horror of physical contact sports—at least among mothers—and so on, perhaps then descending to the evident belief of sports editors that Title IX, a law requiring colleges to provide equal resources to women’s athletics, applies to newspapers. I remember thinking, “Now I’ll never talk about the Phillies again; I don’t know any more of their fans.”

*   *   *

I’ve contributed numerous “appreciations”—lengthy essays written right after a famous person who happened to be close to me had died—for
The Washington Post
. All of these appreciations, whether of political consultants or Hollywood stars, end pretty much the same way: a humorous story, either real or occurring only in my imagination, in which the deceased person mocks death. Here, for example, is the last paragraph of my 1988 appreciation for John Houseman. Much of it focuses on how Houseman, throughout his life, including what became a very old age, kept discovering new artistic challenges. It ends,

He wrote a rather sad note to his friends a few weeks ago advising us he had cancer—but not painful, he was quick to assure us—and encouraging us all to write or call. I’m sure we all did—he told me he was headed back to the hospital but had plans for some European productions in the next few months. He wife Joan said he suffered no pain in the end, but I think if he had, he would have brushed it aside. It would have interfered with his career.

Jack could do that—dismissing death sometimes with an uplifting, often funny quip.

*   *   *

I’ve noticed the three most common words in the paid death notices are “cherished,” “adored,” and “loving,” for spouses, children, and grandchildren. People never say they think “fondly” of the deceased.

*   *   *

I do not feel troubled when others do not recognize the names of books or people I mention. After I refer, in a group, to a short story titled “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, for example, and I am asked, “Who is Shirley Jackson?” I don’t then say, “What? You’re never heard of Shirley Jackson? How could that be?” I simply explain who Shirley Jackson was and go on to talk about “The Lottery.”

This attitude may transform me into a time portal, allowing others access to literature and ideas about which they would never have been aware. “The Lottery,” for example, is a short story published in
The New Yorker
in 1948. Its plot is simple and straightforward and (in my reading) a wonderful commentary about societies that routinely send their young people off to die in war: At precisely ten
A.M.
, on the same day every year, certain village residents pick one name by lottery and stone that person to death. All of this occurs according to a precise schedule, so every family in the village can return home for the noon meal. As they draw the name, in the scene described by Jackson, village elders complain to each other that some young people, clearly unappreciative of all their village offers (“Nothing’s good enough for them”), are talking about getting rid of the lottery because it is so cruel and inhumane and serves no purpose. One elder mentions that some villages have already quit lotteries, to which another replies, “Pack of young fools.”

Why am I so relaxed and unthreatened about the “Who is Shirley Jackson?” questions? How could I not see them as proof I’ve grown old? For that matter, how could I be unbothered by so many major events and people of my life being forgotten? Memory, after all, is very much what defines us. And “to be remembered” may be our highest goal. But what seems permanent always disappears. That’s natural; that’s how things work.

Actually, I think death is only one form of disappearance. Before or after death come the fading, disappearance, and death of memories of you inside people who are living. Time passes. The living world continues, and eventually little or nothing of you is part of it. This is unavoidable. It is also fine, because being remembered is often a misleading and irrelevant test of significance. Everything is forgotten. That is, of course, the way it should be. Time passes. The new replaces the old. We’ll all be forgotten, and faster than we’d like to think. Importance comes from being alive and what is done with your time. Beyond that, things can be remembered, forgotten, and remembered again. Maybe what gets remembered are good stories. Or maybe the important ideas keep getting remembered, forgotten, and discovered—remembered—again.

*   *   *

A few years ago, the movie
The Matrix
and other stories suggested how machines may be the evolutionary step that follows human beings. There’s a new fascination with this issue. Even
Blade Runner,
which depicts a near future in which machines and humans are indistinguishable, was talked of as a Broadway play.

But this concern may not be so new. It sounded to me like
R.U.R
.

“R.U.R.” stood for Rossum’s Universal Robots, a play first produced in 1921 that became a symbol of the increasing industrialization of life. Written by Karel Čapek, a Czech playwright, it depicts a war between humans and robots that the robots seem to win. They quickly realize, however, that without humans they have no way to reproduce and will disappear. Disaster is avoided when a mixed breed of human-machines, able to feel emotions, love one another, and produce children, prepares to inherit the earth.

I had never heard of
R.U.R
. until my father told me of it, but it has a
Wikipedia
entry and reopened recently as a live play in New York City. So what is the process by which some literary works are remembered and others, like
R.U.R
., are forgotten but remembered again and then re-forgotten? Does each individual and each society have a certain amount of memory, so it’s a zero-sum game, and for everything remembered or re-remembered, something must be forgotten?

I think there’s no finality. Something forgotten now, or fifty years from now, may seem quite important to people a hundred years from now. That’s why it’s best not to worry about it or devise a formula for it.

*   *   *

To quote from
Ulysses,

Mr Bloom’s glance travelled down the edge of the paper, scanning the deaths: Callan, Coleman, Dignam, Fawcett, Lowry, Naumann, Peake, what Peake is that?… Sadly missed. To the inexpressible grief of his. Aged 88 after a long and tedious illness.…

It is now a month since dear Henry fled To his home up above in the sky While his family weeps and mourns his loss.…

Do they know what they cart out here every day? Must be twenty or thirty funerals every day. Then Mount Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick.…

First the stiff: then the friends of the stiff.…

Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.…

Keep out the damp. You must laugh sometimes so better do it that way. Gravediggers in
Hamlet
. Shows the profound knowledge of the human heart. Daren’t joke about the dead for two years at least.
De mortuis nil nisi prius
. Go out of mourning first.

Much is easy to understand. Read your own obituary, get a new lease on life. Don’t joke about the dead for at least two years. Poetic and wise. But “De mortuis nil nisi prius”?

That’s vintage Joyce, from the Latin phrase
De mortuis nil nisi bonum,
which roughly means “speak only well of the dead.” Joyce seems to be playing with the legal expression
nisi prius,
which roughly refers to a court of original jurisdiction.

*   *   *

I won’t be in my friends’ obituaries. Friends are never mentioned. It’s surviving siblings, ex-spouses, children, and “companions,” even if the poor deceased haven’t spoken to them in decades. Obituary writers always think close friends are not worth mentioning, but you’ll wind up on the Corrections page of
The New York Times
should you leave out some step-grandnephew’s middle initial.

“We both probably assume I’ll read your obituary,” a younger friend once said. “But there’s no reason to assume that. It could be the other way around.”

It was a great opportunity for me: “What do you mean, ‘it could be the other way around’?” Mrs. Moore would have asked. “Do you mean my obituary will read you?”

*   *   *

The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,
and
The Washington Post
must already have my obituary written and ready to publish, needing only last-minute updates and details. Most major newspapers and news services have the obituary of well-known living people written, which they update periodically, needing only the last few details and a cause of death when the person actually dies. Certainly the
Los Angeles Times,
for whom I am a hometown boy, is ready to go. When I worked for Robert Kennedy, sometimes I’d get a call from a paper like
The New York Times
saying, “We’re updating so-and-so’s obituary. Would Senator Kennedy like to include a comment?” Needless to say, “He would not.”

While I’m far from famous, I suppose the main body of an obituary about me has already been prepared. In some cases, I can make a pretty good guess about which of my journalist friends has written it. But I don’t ask, because they’d never talk and I don’t want to know about it anyway.

Maybe now I’m using the stories I remember to write my own obituary. James Joyce said, “Read your own obituary; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease on life.” So I’m writing my own obituary. What would be wrong with that?

*   *   *

Two women at a table across a restaurant waved to me recently, and I walked over to talk to them. When I returned to my lunch companions, I explained, “Those are old friends of mine. One’s the mother of the actress who played Elaine on the television show
Seinfeld
and now plays our vice president in
Veep
.” To anyone knowing this, the woman would suddenly look different. She would become more real because she would be “certified.”

“Certification” is a useful and important concept. The reality and extent of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially by drone attacks, for example, has never been certified. Maybe they’ve been certified for people elsewhere, but not for Americans; they haven’t been exposed—or certified—for us visually.

Walker Percy’s novel
The Moviegoer
(1961) introduces this use of “certification.” The novel’s main character, who lives in New Orleans, takes his girlfriend to a movie, which happens to include a scene filmed in their neighborhood. In his terms, the neighborhood has now been certified: Your neighborhood, he explains, can leave you “empty inside.” But once a movie shows that neighborhood, you can live there as a person who is “Somewhere.” Certification, he is saying, makes something real, significant, worthy of attention.

Television has quickly become the great certifying agent of our time, now augmented by “smart” phones equipped with video and “regular” cameras, which bind people more and more tightly to their electronic screens. And, once we start thinking seriously about certification, we can see its manifestations everywhere: The attacks of 9/11, for example, derived much of their impact on the American psyche because of what could be seen—and shown over and over and over again—on television.

Back in 1951, the monthly magazine
Galaxy Science Fiction
published a short story written by then-thirty-year-old Ray Bradbury. The story describes a near future in which the walls of people’s homes are floor-to-ceiling screens; books are forbidden, and firemen answer emergency calls to burn books and the people who hide them. In one of the most chilling scenes in American literature, a fire captain explains to one of his men how this happened:

It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!… People want to be happy.… Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of “facts” they feel stuffed, but absolutely “brilliant” with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a
sense
of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy.