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Our Columnists Write About Writing |
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NACHMAN  |
of a career in writing  The author's own caricature of himself as a fledgling writer, circa 1960. |
How a future cartoonist
took a surprising turn
By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
A big question--“Why I Write?”--but the answer is easy: It’s all I know how to do and care to do. So, it’s extremely lucky that they coincide with a need to make a living.
Writing was actually a
fallback position. My original boyhood ambition was to be a cartoonist--any
kind: single panel, editorial, sports, comic strip, animated.
I pored over books about drawing and eagerly attended art classes,
in school and private, and came quickly to the realization that
about all I had a gift for was caricature--and even that was
a hit or miss proposition.
I had little technique, and not enough patience to learn any,
but a lot of energy and ideas. After struggling through still-life
and perspective classes at the California College of Arts &
Crafts in Oakland, trying to learn how to draw a cloth surrounding
a bowl of apples that looked like a cloth, I threw in the ink-rag.
If I couldn’t even draw a piece of cloth (forget the actual
fruit in a bowl) it seemed hopeless.
I was 19 at the time and treading water at junior college, worried what I might do with myself for the next 60 years, when it occurred to me that I liked writing for the high school paper, but had never taken it seriously. It was for kicks, especially a weekly “Batman” parody I wrote with two friends, entitled “Vultureman and Crow.” It broke us up constantly, but probably left the readers wondering what was the point. We owed a major debt to Mad magazine, our chief inspiration for all things subversively satirical.
Contemplating a livelihood, I considered commercial art, but that, too, required many more drawing skills than I had at my fingertips, and the thought of slogging through four years of art classes made my eyes glaze over. No, I wanted to be a genius right out of the box--another Al Hirschfeld or Will Elder or Bill Mauldin or Willard Mullin, a few of my countless cartoonist idols. I took a course in caricature, and did OK, but that seemed a meager hook on which to hang one’s cartooning career hopes
I figured that my interest
in and knowledge of, if not actual skill at, drawing, combined
with my less labored fluency with the language, might just comprise
a career in advertising, my original major at San Jose State
College.
Once there, however, I found myself inextricably drawn to the
daily campus newspaper and the quarterly humor magazine. I was
a literary snob, and my fellow advertising majors struck me as
a shallow and rowdy bunch, many of them members of dreaded fraternities
and sororities, whereas the journalists typing away on the other
side of the little fence that separated the two departments,
seemed to be having all the fun.
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contemplation of something that would emerge on paper as hilariously funny...in his days as a columnist for his college newspaper. |
My only journalistic credential was having edited a pathetic weekly at Oakland Junior College and writing features for the high school paper now and then--mostly parodies and puzzles and a sports cartoon modeled on one in the Oakland Tribune, depicting whether the school team had won or lost the week’s football game.
I had never considered a career in writing, which struck me as a pretentious proposition that called for far more talent than I could dredge up on call. Nonetheless, I took the plunge--closed my eyes, held my nose, bid my advertising cohorts so long, and changed my major to journalism in my junior year. I’ve never looked back. I might have been a decent enough ad man, although as a teetotaler even that seems dubious.
Writing, in brief, was the only thing I seemed equipped to do. I had held the usual menial jobs in college, and quickly saw I loathed actual work; I had wisely realized that I would never hack it as a cartoonist; I was not psychologically rigged to spend my life drawing layouts or writing copy, which would mean hanging out with advertising types, who seemed to me bright but boring folks, more interested in partying. I was not only a snob then, but maybe something of a prig as well--workaholic anyway.
When I found that writing came to me surprisingly easily, I immersed myself in actually practicing it, mostly humor at first, inspired by my obsessive worship of Robert Benchley, who seemed to me easily the funniest person ever to hold a pen. I copied his style slavishly and found that it dove-tailed with my own. In time I acquired--stole, actually--a style I could call mine, though it still was traceable to Benchley and others. One such was Max Shulman, who so wonderfully mocked college life in his weekly column in an ad for Marlboro cigarettes that ran in all the college dailies. It was written in a rococo style that I suspect was modeled on S.J. Perelman, whose work I had not yet discovered.
I tried other humorists--Perelman,
Thurber, H. Allen Smith--but they seemed pale by comparison to
Benchley, who could make me laugh out loud, which no other prose
humorist since has, aside from Woody Allen. I was also fond of
Frank Sullivan, a great New Yorker magazine wit now sadly unread
and all but forgotten. They became my great lifetime idols, replacing
the cartoonists of my earlier misbegotten career. I was later
happy to learn that I was following in the footprints of my heroes--Thurber
was, of course, a great cartoonist, and both Benchley and Perelman
had set out to be cartoonists.
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own self-portrait is shown at left. At right, Nachman's portrait of himself as a young adult, which was the cover illustration for his first volume of collected columns from his college days, "The Portable Nachman" (1960). |
It was a lucky discovery, writing, like winning a creative lottery, allowing me to do the only thing I really enjoyed doing and had any facility at and that could get me a paying job as a reporter--something I had little interest in, or talent for. But that was a necessary requirement for anyone who hoped to write a column--my early and only goal. By a fluke, I was asked to write a TV and humor column for the San Jose Mercury, whose editors has been reading me in the college daily. I would not even have to put in time heavy lifting on the police beat, at which I had proved a hideous failure on my internship in the Berkeley bureau of the Oakland Tribune. (Once I even went to the wrong fire.) Later at the New York Post, I acquitted myself with equal reportorial skill by being dumped after a drowsy summer on the midnight-to-8 rewrite beat (but got rehired the following summer and assigned to a features department that saved my writer’s skin.)
I have done all sorts of
writing since then--as a critic, author, freelancer, revue sketch
writer, short stories--but writing a column still seems to me,
after 45 years in the business, the best job there is. I can’t
imagine going to an actual business office and doing whatever
it is people do there.
The few real jobs I attempted--selling shoes, shelving books,
folding clothes in a Laundromat--I proved either utterly inept
at or was so instantly bored by that I left after a few days.
The only work I could stand for more than a week was toiling
in the backshop at the San Jose Shopping News, pedaling proofs
to advertisers and--yes, my children--filling molds with molten
lead from a huge iron ladle to produce ingots for the ancient
linotype machine, the closest I’ve come to splitting rails.
It seemed then, and much more so now, glamorous work--because
even working at a shopper beats most normal jobs. To me, a big
city newsroom feels like the homiest of “work places”
to me--just a version of the old campus daily hangout, but with
more people, most of them as smart and sardonic and eccentric
as those at the college paper.
To write a column seemed
to me easily the cushiest dodge in the world: being paid to express
your opinions any way you liked, in any style you wanted, even
humorously. Somehow I had stupidly stumbled upon a career and
a huge source of personal satisfaction, one that occasionally
got you attention and even a modicum of fame--everything wrapped
up in the same wondrous ball. (It even turned out to be an efficient
way of meeting women, later ruthlessly exploited when I did a
column about the single life during the first phases of the mid-80s
singles-bar era.)
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his first professional job as a newspaper columnist and reviewer. |
Today, if I don’t write for a day or so, the columnist in me begins stirring and I get itchy to crank out something topical and maybe funny, but writing two books in the last eight years has pretty well prevented that. Ten years ago I left daily newspapering after 35 years and jumped into the abyss, landing with a mighty thud when I came up against the hard realities of ill-paid freelance writing, an uncertain life that was almost enough to send me screaming back to art school in desperation. Maybe I could still become a cartoonist, after all. Perhaps I could finally master that bowl of fruit and cloth.
Happily, that wasn’t necessary when I found an editor at Pantheon who liked my proposal to write a book about the golden age of radio, “Raised on Radio,” which came out in late 1998, sold respectably enough to get a paperback deal and then a contract for a second book. It's called “Seriously Funny” and it's about the revolutionary comedians of the 1950s and 1960s who changed the face of comedy: Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman, Nichols & May, Sid Caesar, Steve Allen, Bill Cosby, Phyllis Diller, Tom Lehrer, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, and more. The new book, due out in April, covers an extraordinary period in comedy from 1953 to 1965. (Kindly excuse the crass, shameless plug.)
I haven’t had to worry about wondering what to write for eight years, for the books have absorbed every writing (and sleepless) hour--almost too much writing for a mere columnist accustomed to the brief 20-inch sprint that takes a few hours, unlike the marathon that is a book. It’s forced me to become a quasi-scholar, but it isn’t an easy fit. I’d rather write than research, though the detective aspects of uncovering buried history, sifting through articles and talking to a hundred or so people to produce a book has its own odd rewards. (There is a place in mystery writing for a biographer/sleuth character.)
Book writing is closer
to slogging than the joy of sledding that is a daily column,
where you move breezily from one topic to the next and the next
and the next--a delicious diet of junk food compared to the meat-and
potatoes of a 500-page book. Once this bookish fling is over,
it would be nice to return to my roots, to the cheap thrill of
columning. It’s flattering to go to the Miami Book Fair
and address a roomful of readers and wear a badge that says “Author,”
but not as much fun as ambling into a newspaper office with a
dog-eared press pass and deciding what national inanity or annoyance
you will pick off today. It was something I never tired of doing
and I hated to see the week end. When people in most jobs can’t
wait for Friday, my credo was always TGIM.
Writing has turned out to be much more than an easy way to make
a buck--it has given me a life, and even a kind of identity,
as well as a livelihood.
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in a Fred Astaire mood shows the talent he has for caricature. |
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©2002 by Gerald Nachman.
The Nachman color caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. Nachman's
self-portraits are ©1960 by the author. They're from "The
Portable Nachman," published by the undergraduate chapter
of Sigma Delta Chi at San Jose State College (now a university)
in 1960. The "wanted poster" photos of Nachman are
©1962 by Ron Miller.
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