Russell Baker Has the Last Word on His Sunday Column

I see that Russell Baker is giving up his Sunday Observer column in the New York Times Magazine.

He made the announcement Sunday in a column that was, like all the other personal columns of his that I’ve read, fresh, funny and deceivingly casual. Deceivingly, because no one gives up a column casually. It is like abandoning a life-support system.

After a while you can’t quite be sure whether you are supporting the column, as it seems, or the column is supporting you, as it is. Never mind the financial aspects of the column. Baker says the editor offered him another $2.80 a week and he rejected it coolly, unmoved.

A column gives your life a regularity, like a breathing machine. It provides a sense of stern and unrelenting duty by imposing a succession of deadlines, each of which is followed by a delicious if momentary feeling of accomplishment and relief.

What the columnist ought never to do, but which Baker may have done, is put his or her head on the rails and look up the track toward that far horizon where all the columns, like all the wooden railroad ties, merge into one indecipherable mass and where the thought of all the columns you’ve written is as numbing as the thought of all the pieces that lie ahead.

“Fifteen years, more than 700 columns about 800 words per column,” Baker told himself in his Sunday farewell, “makes about 560,000 words of what was supposed to be inventive prose. Nobody can be that inventive.”

And that is just the Sunday total. Although he did not say so, Baker’s Observer column began in the daily paper in 1962. The same kind of multiplication must surely yield a total wordage in the millions. And no one who admires the Gettysburg Address as a miracle of brevity is entirely comfortable about having committed millions of words to paper.

Years ago Hal Boyle wrote six columns a week for the Associated Press. They were a little shorter than Baker’s, maybe 500 words. But si x times a week; even other columnists were in awe. A friend of mine did a profile of Boyle for Time magazine and as a last question he asked if Boyle had any secret dreams. Boyle looked around nervously, as if he was afraid lightning would strike the chair, and said, “Someday I’d like to cut back to five.”

When I joined the Los Angeles Times 23 years ago, part of the arrangement was a thrice-weekly column. As I was about to start it, a friend of mine who was then writing three pieces a week for a syndicate said, “People will always ask you if you can ever get ahead. I have an answer. I tell them that doing a column is like sex; you can never get ahead but you can fall behind very fast.”

You can never get ahead because if you can put a column in a drawer, your dread presumption is that you probably ought to leave it there.

Baker’s defection led me to do some calculating of my own. For the 13 years, I was the film critic of the paper, I cut back to one column a week, plus the reviews. But it has been an aberrational week when I haven’t committed at least 2,000 words to these pages.

Assuming a 48-week work-year, I make it something over 2.2 million words, minimum, and it is a sobering thought on a lovely spring morning. When Cecil Smith retired after 40 years on this newspaper, the library presented him with a roll of microfilm containing every word he’d written during those decades.

The roll slipped into a shirt pocket, with room left over for two pencils, a pen and a pack of the cigarettes he then smoked. It depressed him for days.

Baker has shaped his columns into several books. His charming book of childhood reminiscences, “Growing Up” (1982), has rightly been a best seller. Hard covers--and even soft covers--ease the newspaper writer’s occasional glum insight that he is carving his initials on the surface of a lake.

The columnist’s consolation is a newsy immediacy if he wants and requires it. One of Baker’s laments about the Sunday pieces was that they had a three-week deadline. “For two years, the Sunday Observer never referred to ‘President Nixon’ because you couldn’t be sure he’d be President three weeks later. So you have to write fiction--and fiction, Bo, is hard, hard, hard.”

But the columnist is, by a central definition, a compulsive writer, and my hunch is that Baker, who is 62, has only got rid of Sundays and not the compulsion.

There’ll be that one morning a week when he can awaken, feel the familiar knotting in the stomach, then realize that it is newly a deadline-free day so he can roll over and snooze some more if he cares to. It will seem a guilty pleasure, but guilty pleasures are the best.

Then again the guilt is there, and the compulsion. Concluding the column Baker wrote, “So that’s it, I hope.” Keep your eye on the hesitant hope.