Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin by Calvin Trillin

Author:Calvin Trillin [Trillin, Calvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-60480-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

Pinko Problems

For some years, I was worried about the possibility that The Nation was getting to be known around the country for being a bit pinko. I was born and brought up in Kansas City, and I wasn’t really keen on the folks at home getting the impression that I worked for a left-wing sheet. They knew I did a column for The Nation, of course—my mother told them—but most of them did not inquire deeply into The Nation’s politics, perhaps because my mother was sort of letting on that it’s a tennis magazine. She was able to get away with that because The Nation is not circulated widely in Kansas City: In the greater Kansas City area, it goes weekly to three librarians and an unreconstructed old anarcho-syndicalist who moved to town after his release from the federal prison at Leavenworth in 1927 and set up practice as a crank. Still, I was concerned that The Nation’s political views could be revealed in the press.

My concern was not based on any notion that the people back home would react to this revelation by ostracizing my mother for having given birth to a Commie rat. Folks in the Midwest try to be nice. What I was worried about was this: People in Kansas City would assume that no one would write a column for a pinko rag if he could write a column for a respectable periodical. They might even assume that payment for a column in a pinko rag would be the sort of money people in Kansas City associate with the summer retainer for the boy who mows the lawn. Realizing that I had struggled for years in New York only to end up writing a column for lawn-mowing wages, they would spend a lot of time comforting my mother whenever they ran into her at the supermarket. (“There, there. Don’t you worry one bit. Things have a way of working themselves out.”) My mom’s pretty tough, but tougher people have broken under the burden of Midwestern comforting.

Without wanting to name names, I blame all of this on Victor S. Navasky. When The Nation provoked a public controversy by attacking a book on the Hiss case from a position that might have been described as somewhat left of center, I tried to be understanding. I figured that Navasky was trying to pump up circulation because he lacked some of the financial resources that most people who edit journals of opinion have. Traditionally, people who run such magazines manage financially because they have a wife rich enough to have bought them the magazine in the first place. It’s a good arrangement, because an editor who has his own forum for pontificating to the public every week may tend to get a bit pompous around the house, and it helps if his wife is in a position to say, “Get off your high horse, Harry, or I’ll take your little magazine away from you and give it to the cook.”

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