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AN AFTERWORD: THE SUMMING UP |
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BUT IT’S CLOSING TIME
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Since February 26, when we first began THE MEMOIRS OF GERALD NACHMAN, we have published 34 installments. We now close this series with a few last words by Nachman about his career, his life and his expectations for the future. We are proud Nachman has given us this rare opportunity to publish his memoirs as he was actually writing them. If they are published eventually in book form, a great many chapters that we chose not to use are very likely to be included. Again we thank Gerald Nachman for giving us the chance to share his memories of a truly fascinating life. --Ron Miller, Managing Editor |
By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
As patchy as these online memoirs may have been, it’s time to bring down the tattered curtain, which I realize may be much too late for readers who left early.
Editor Ron Miller deserves major applause for helping to keep these chapters in some ragtag semblance of coherent order despite the author’s tendency to jump back and forth in time, for which my only feeble excuse is that, like most lives, it’s been a bit of a ragtag journey (it worked for Leopold Bloom). Thanks also to those who have actually read these disjointed excerpts and tried to follow them; I sure haven’t. But I still consider this just the rough draft of a life; I’ll make it more intelligible next time, I promise.
My backup excuse is that I hadn’t planned to turn the first few chapters into a full-length autobiography, so things got off on an unbalanced footing by my beginning this messy opus with my adventures in New York at 25, which then ballooned into a long memoir that forced me to backtrack to my life before those opening New York chapters.
In any case, the time has come to wrap it all up (try to keep the cheering to a minimum), the what-did-it-all-mean department. Mr. Miller has asked me to tie up loose ends, professionally and personally, look back, ruminate on what I might have done differently, where I went wrong, discuss any regrets and lingering hopes and dreams for the future, etc. That would require a whole new memoir, and nobody wants that, not even the ever-encouraging Miller.
The “summing up,” as Somerset Maugham titled his memoir, reaches into so many areas that it seems a daunting, even impossible, prospect, with a temptation to get philosophical and even windier. I can say a few things, though, that seem clear: I made one wise, or maybe just lucky, choice--to follow my heart and take a last-ditch detour out of advertising into journalism.
There could be no better, more colorful, more compelling, more meaningful and happier life--one which, even as newspapers are threatened with extinction by electronic journalism--I would do all over again, and wish I could. It was just the right job for me, for my temperament and talents. It has let me sample an unending smorgasbord--or maybe candy store--of events big and little, taking a taste of this and a taste of that.
I might have aimed higher than my early goal--to write a humor column on a New York newspaper--and perhaps made a run at fiction, but my instincts tell me I was cut out for nonfiction, not novels, and probably achieved all that I could, given whatever skills I have. I could have stayed in New York longer and tried to land a magazine job, or taken a shot at TV comedy writing, but the path I chose--or that chose me--provided plenty of joys, far more than I might have imagined as a kid in high school, where I was a wannabe cartoonist with a meager gift that not even art school may have much improved.
I have no regrets about any of the journalism jobs I had, most of which involved writing a column of one kind or another--humor, entertainment, singlehood, middle age--for six newspapers in the Bay Area and New York. Journalism is still one of the few careers that allows you to move around wherever your whim takes you without marking you as a ne’er-do-well transient--in fact, it’s almost a job requirement. You might even call it the literary equivalent of being a cowboy; you can travel light.
Journalism still has a whiff of adventure about it, or does as I look back on it. I was lucky to get in on the tail end of newspapering when it seemed romantic and sort of thrilling (it you’re 25 it may yet), when there were still wild and crazy characters around, before newspapers began to take themselves too seriously in the name of better journalism. A lot of the spirit and spice seems to have been drained out of newspapers, but maybe it’s been siphoned off onto the Internet, which may account for newspapers’ current plight as blacksmiths on the cyber superhighway. Yet I still think of the Internet as an alien literary form, and always will. To survive, I need a daily infusion of ink.
I might have left newspapers earlier were I not so enamored of the work--there is no better, freer, more entertaining life than writing a column three days a week--but I got out just in time to write a few actual books. All those brilliant reviews and columns are crumbling into nothingness but the books have a shot at a shelf life beyond your own. I might have left five years earlier. But a column is still my natural forum, my ideal literary length; I’m a sprinter, not a marathon runner, despite three 500-page books.
So, yes, I still miss it--the addiction of mouthing off several times a week about events of the day, jumping into print with half-cocked opinions, trying to say something amusing about a world that seems increasingly nutty and unfathomable. It’s frustrating not to have a column to rant and rave, or just frolic, in when I see something I yearn to shout about. And I dearly miss the people, the collegiality of a newspaper office with its rows of cynics and wits, sages and screwballs. Most of my closest friends are ex-newspaper people who speak my language, so I still have a network of aging newsroom junkies, some of them now online colleagues.
I’ve been able to spend the bulk of my career writing (alleged) humor pieces and entertainment criticism, nicely allowing me to dabble in the two areas of life that interest me most (not counting women); there really is no way--no job--that could top that.
Personally--speaking of women--a major regret is never finding a life partner, but I’ve not given up hope, though it may have given up on me. The pilot light is still on, flickering bravely. (This is not to brush away a lively 14-year marriage, which lasted as long as it probably was meant to, leaving us fond pals.) My weasely rationale is that I like women too much to choose just one. I can think of six I might have been pretty happy with had I (and they) taken the plunge: Jeanie, Linda, Rachel, Elaine, Susan or Wendy.
Various theories abound to explain my mostly single state: an old friend said I gave too much of my heart to the theater, or to writing, to focus it on one person; an ex-girlfriend, in a related analysis, said my “problem” was that I was so spoiled by fetching female entertainers that I couldn’t accept women as flawed, flesh and blood people--and that I always expected a performance out of a woman. Could very well be; don’t ask me.
My closest New York (bachelor) friend has reconnected with his first girlfriend from high school and, at 71, not 17, is having a late-blooming bi-state romance between Colorado and New York, a playoff series of the heart. They met when his mother died at 92 and he went home to clear out her house. Among her belongings he found a friendship she had maintained with her son’s teenage girlfriend--a story made to order for a movie, a song, a magazine article (like the “Modern Love” department in The Sunday New York Times Magazine.) It does give a codger hope that all may not yet be lost.
So it follows that I missed out as well as on the whole kid thing, an urge I never felt and have never really regretted, though it’s a huge part of life I didn’t experience--but then I never went skydiving or to China either, never smoked dope, been to an orgy or run for office. You can’t do everything. I can’t anyway. It’s been enough of a challenge just putting sentences together that please me and, with hope, a few readers. How people with children also maintain careers is truly beyond me.
Out department secretary at The Oakland Tribune, a mother of three, when I told her kids didn’t really interest me, accused me of being selfish. Perhaps, but I suspect it’s more that I lack the courage (and patience) to take on the responsibility--and chore--of raising another human being. It’s all I can do just to keep me going.
In the hopes-and-dreams department, I’d be happy to write two more books before shuffling off to the great entertainment section in the sky, where I hope there’ll be an empty desk and a typewriter. I have two proposals floating around--one on the joy of musicals, my lifelong passion, and another about audiences--the subtle interplay (and manipulation) between artists and spectators in all the performing arts, an exploration of everything from laugh tracks to people who toss bouquets at divas and ballerinas to movie stars on talk shows to obligatory standing ovations. It’s the most original idea I’ve had for a book, but I suspect it may be too amorphous a notion for most publishers.
The point of these memoirs, if there is one, is that it’s been a writer’s life mainly, but not as solitary as that sounds--a half century spent trying to make sense of the rest of life, or the small pieces of it that entertain or amuse me. It ain’t over till it’s over, or till the fat lady sings, as a wise yogi has put it, and I trust it ain’t over yet just because these fat memoirs have finished their song. My sometime songwriting revue partner Rita Abrams threatens to turn these meanderings into “Nachman: The Musical,” so maybe we’ll bump into each other again during intermission.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Nov. 26, 2007.
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