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Baker did not see himself as a humorist when he started the column, he says, and still doesn't really. His intention was "to write plain English, Anglo-Saxon root words and short sentences for readers of the Times, who were suffocating on polysyllabic, Latinate English." If he had models, he says, they were E.B. White's "Talk of the Town" pieces for The New Yorker and his mentor at the Times, James Reston. Says he: "Reston taught the Times to write English."
When Baker began to write the "Observer," he says, he had no notion that failure was a possibility, only a determination not to let his columns fall into an easily identifiable category. "You get onto a columnist, you know. There's foxy grandpa, there's the font of wisdom, there's Mr. Inside Information, and I was trying to mix it up, like a junk-ball pitcher in baseball keeping them off balance." He laughs. "You get older and lose your fastball and there's more junk. It was easy to be angry, but I felt you couldn't go the distance being angry. God's Angry Man is delightful for the first six months, and then you wish he'd shut up. It wasn't easy to shut up when the Viet Nam War came along, and every once in a while I'd let out a shriek. People seemed to like that, as long as I didn't do it too often."
Baker's writing voice still darkens easily, though not often, from genial irony to grim satire. Every few weeks a sour mood fills the "Observer," as it did some time ago when Baker discussed the advantages of a return to public hangings, with the additional suggestion that if the society went back to killing people for the crime of murder, perhaps it should again cut off hands for theft and notch the noses of incurable double parkers.
Writing is hard work for him now: "You go into a dark room ind close the door, and you're alone inside your head." One pulls things out of the mental attic to use in the column, he adds, and the attic is depleted. You don't have time to add much to your store. "How many column ideas are there?" he asks. "There's the plumber, and your teenagers, and your car, and your house. If you're really desperate, you can write about your wife, and then it's time to hang up the typewriter."
Intensely personal columns by other writers make this private man uneasy. "It's a terrible problem examining one's entrails in public," says Baker. John Leonard, also of the New York Times, is a columnist whose bouts with existential despair are on weekly view, with results that range from considerable heroics to embarrassing displays of bad taste. Baker has never exploited his family for material, with the forgivable exception of some memorable columns celebrating the archetypal awfulness of vacation car treks along the New Jersey Turnpike. Now and then he rules out a topic for a while because he is tired of it or thinks readers are. Just now he is avoiding women's liberation, although its solemnities are "a gold mine," because the mail he receives when he mentions the subject is abusive.