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He writes on Sunday afternoon for the Tuesday paper, Monday afternoon for the Sunday magazine 20 days hence, and Thursday afternoon for the Saturday paper. He makes no effort to store up ideas. "It's like analysis; you block out the time and see what comes out." If he writes what he thinks is a bad column, he does not wad it up and start over. He publishes it. "Observer" is not a single point in space but a curving line of ups and downs, and the sagging author figures he will have another shot at splendor in a couple of days.
Last July 4 Baker hit splendor dead-on with a misty, elegiac column called "Summer Beyond Wish." The piece was set in the rural Virginia of his boyhood. It was full of love, the rich, buzzing emptiness of a country summer and the sense that poverty was near.
For Baker, it was. He spent his early years in Morrisonville, Va., a crossroads between Leesburg and Harpers Ferry. "It was primitive, no electricity," he says. His father Benjamin was a stonemason who died when Russell was five. The parallel with Thomas Wolfe, another lanky, literary Southerner whose father was a stonemason, is striking. Baker says for that reason he was unable to read Look Homeward, Angel until he was 45. "I heard those train whistles in the night, and they spoke of something else to me than the wonder of America." What they spoke of, he says, was trainmen out of work as the Depression deepened.
When Benjamin Baker died, in the teeth of the Depression, his family was destitute. The only job in Baker's extended family belonged to one of his mother's brothers, who made $35 a week selling butter in Newark. So that is where Russell, his mother and his oldest sister went. Other impoverished relatives would arrive from time to time, generally in the middle of the night. "It gave an interesting texture to life," Baker recalls.
When he was eleven, the tribe moved to an apartment just off Baltimore's Union Square, where that famous curmudgeon H.L. Mencken lived. The future "Observer" satirist was unaware of that, though today he suspects that Mencken was the elderly gentleman who one day called the cops to chase Baker and some fellow ballplayers out of the square. In high school, young Russell was well liked, athletic (he ran the quarter mile) and showed promise as a humorist with a senior-year essay for
English class, "The Art of Eating Spaghetti." He barely remembers it and no copy has survived. Young Baker heard family stories of his mother's cousin, Edwin James, who was managing editor of the New York Times from 1932 to 1951, and understood the moral: words were a way out. He won a competitive scholarship to Johns Hopkins in 1942 and ambled through his first year with nonchalance.
Baker did not know how to drive a car but in the fall of 1943 he enlisted in the Navy as a pilot. "I loved it," he says. "I felt I was dashing. I was very disappointed when I got out after two years of training, without getting overseas and without killing myself." He went back to Hopkins on the G.I. Bill, met Miriam Emily Nash, married her, wrote a novel that went unpublished and after a time began working nights for the Baltimore Sun, at $30 a week.