Trillin on Texas by Calvin Trillin

Sitting in the drafts on this very blog is an essay I will never write -- almost the only thing on paper is the title: "I Am Not Calvin Trillin's Son-in-Law."

I'm not going to explain that here. I'm not sure I could. That's what the essay would have done, if I were able to do it. But Trillin is a writer I've been reading for thirty years, since I think my earliest working days, and is one of the best models I know of how to be a good writer and a good man: funny, pointed, true, dogged, smart, engaged, whimsical, honest, committed, clear-eyed.

As you go through life, people ask in passing who your heroes are, who you look up to. I've never been good at those questions: I tend to say I don't have any. But I suppose my heroes are newspapermen and similar jobbing writers, the ones I read a lot of when I was young and impressionable, whose path I wanted to follow while knowing I never would. Trillin. Art Buchwald. Russell Baker. Dave Barry, sometimes. Mike Royko. Roger Ebert.

But mostly Trillin. He combined a regular-guy honesty and plain-spokenness with the real writing chops befitting a New Yorker staff writer. He had a deep understanding of the sneakiness and chicanery of political life that never descended into simple cynicism, like a Molly Ivins who somehow maintained optimism and focus despite it all. And I kept reading Trillin whenever I could even for the twenty years or so that I was officially on the other side of the great American political divide. (I still tend to say, when asked, that I am registered as a Republican, as if that was an event that can't be taken back.)

And here I am writing about him in the past tense. Calvin Trillin is still very much with us, in his mid-eighties, still living in Greenwich Village as he has for fifty years or so. But his most recent books of new work were a slim book of doggerel about the 2012 presidential election and the 2016 children's book No Fair! No Fair!, so he may be semi-retired at this point. And I've always thought his prose was much better than his verse -- frankly, I think everyone does, even Trillin, but he enjoys writing verse and when you're an American icon in your eighties you can do what you want.

So we're in the era where the "new" Trillin books are collections -- 2011's Quite Enough, the racial-relations-themed Jackson, 1964 from 2016 (which I still haven't seen myself). And the subject of this blog post: Trillin on Texas, an oddity from a writer born in Kansas City and associated strongly with New York, published in 2011 by the University of Texas Press.

It's relatively short, with eighteen pieces in its hundred-and-eighty pages, plus a quick intro from Trillin. Those pieces originally appeared from 1970 through 2008, and all of them (except a funeral oration for Molly Ivins) originally appeared somewhere journalistic (mostly the New Yorker) and likely also appeared in a more general Trillin collection. So this is a book for Trillin completists and readers of Texiana (is that the word I mean? frankly, is it a word at all?).

I don't care all that much about Texas myself -- I mean, a whole lot of my current colleagues live and work there, in the Dallas area, and I like and respect them, and I do have a cousin and her family in Austin, but it's not one of my top five states -- so I was here as a Trillin completist. And I was not disappointed.

The pieces here are semi-random, and arranged in a pleasing order that has no obvious structure -- it's not chronological, and if it's geographical, I'd have to plot it out on a map to understand it. But each of them is smart and witty and full of great Trillin lines -- look, here's a semi-random quote, from "Mystery Money" on p.21:

The City of Waco found that having nearly five hundred thousand dollars in cash was a burden. The money had to be kept somewhere. I had to be guarded. It represented a potential liability if it got lost or if the city was sued for giving it to the wrong parties. A lot of parties were asking for it.

I'm not actually recommending this book, unless you're a) already a Trillin fan who didn't know about it or b) a Texan who needs an excuse like this to try Trillin. Otherwise, head to his collections of columns (my pick: Enough's Enough, the title essay of which influenced my parenting style as much as Calvin's dad), or his books about food (best collected in The Tummy Trilogy) or the great Travels With Alice.

Actually, just start with Travels With Alice. I did, thirty years ago, and it's just as good now. Someday, you'll get to the other end of his books and pick up Trillin on Texas. It'll be there waiting for you.