Daily Times

For quite some time, I have been writing about serious matters which have made me pretty sombre. This, I fear, may turn into a morbid situation. I have, therefore, chosen to write about a man who took everything in his stride; made fun of situations of all kinds with his scintillating humour and wit, and finished his life happy and contented in a hospice in Washington on January 18, 2007.

Art Buchwald, 81, was an American columnist and humourist, who delighted the entire English-speaking world with his acutely funny and humorous columns. He was largely respected by the most powerful leaders and statesmen of the US. It was because what he wrote impacted the thoughts and ideas of the time; moulding the future politics of his country. Buchwald, who satirized the follies of the rich, the famous and the powerful for over half a century, was the most widely read newspaper humorist of his time. He died on this day (January 18) 12 years ago in Washington.

Mr Buchwald’s syndicated column was a staple for a generation or more of newspaper readers, not least the politicians and government ministers whom he lampooned so regularly. Being a syndicated columnist, his columns at their peak used to be published in no less than 500 newspapers. It was said, “His life was a rich tale of gumption, heartbreak and humour, which resounded around the globe, particularly in the political circles of Washington, Paris and London.”

Buckwald had decided that since his life was so awful, he would make a living making everybody laugh, even if he did not always laugh along with them

In the last years of his life, his kidneys failed to work. Doctors even amputated one of his legs to stop the spread of paralysis. They also told him that he only had a few weeks to live. “I decided to move into a hospice and go quietly into the night,” he wrote three months later. “For reasons that even the doctors can’t explain, my kidneys kept working.”

Refusing dialysis, he continued to write his column; reflecting on his mortality while keeping his humour even as he lost a leg. He spent the summer on Martha’s Vineyard; published a book, “Too Soon to Say Goodbye,” in the fall and even attended a memorial for an old friend. He gave interviews and worked hard writing his columns. In one of his columns, he wrote, “The French ambassador gave me the literary equivalent of the Legion of Honour, and the National Hospice Association made me the man of the year. I never realized dying was so much fun.”

Mr Buchwald found enthusiastic readerships on both sides of the Atlantic. Early on, he had become nearly everyone’s favourite. In Paris, he was revered for his satirical column in the European edition of The New York Herald Tribune. When he returned from overseas to write a new column from Washington, he became even more popular.

He delighted in stirring the pot–never maliciously, always vigorously. “The world was mad (or at least a little nutty), and all he was doing was recording it.” He did it so well that he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982.

It has been reported that across the world stage, he saw a theatre of the absurd and made an effort to immerse himself in it. He went to Yugoslavia to chase goats. He went to Turkey in search of a Turkish bath, writing that he was astonished when the Turks told him that they had so many wonderful things.

During the Cold War, he marched alongside missiles, tanks and troops in a May Day parade in East Berlin. Another time, he rented a chauffeured limousine to tour Eastern Europe. He wanted the people there to know, as he put it, alluding to his plump physique, what a “bloated, plutocratic capitalist looked like.”

Buckwald’s earlier life was very bitter and tragic. He had been reared in foster homes and an orphan asylum. At the age of six or seven, he had decided that since his life was so awful, he would make a living making everybody laugh, even if he did not always laugh along with them. He had at least two serious bouts of depression in his middle years and regarded himself as occasionally suicidal.

Buchwald was born on October 20, 1925, in Mount Vernon, NY, to Joseph and Helen Buchwald. His father, an Austrian, had fled to the US to avoid service in the Austro-Hungarian army. His mother had immigrated from Hungary.

Buchwald virtually never saw his mother. Suffering from delusions, she was admitted to a mental hospital a few weeks after his birth and was confined there for the remaining 35 years of her life. Her son was not permitted to visit her when he was a child and decided not to after he became an adult. “I preferred the mother I had invented to the one I would find in the hospital,” Mr Buchwald wrote in a best-selling 1994 memoir, “Leaving Home.”

With the outbreak of World War II, Mr Buchwald could not complete his high school and joined the U.S Marines. After the War, Mr Buchwald went to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. But when the officials found out that he had not finished high school, they did not promote him further. And 33 years later, the same university conferred an honorary doctorate on him.

Later, he shifted to Paris where his column “Paris After Dark,” became extremely popular and by the early ’50s, The Tribune syndicated it internationally.

In his 14 years in Paris, Mr Buchwald became a great celebrity. Later, he moved to Washington in 1952, where his fame further took off. By 1972, his column was appearing thrice every week in about 400 newspapers in the US and 100 other countries. One of his fellow journalists remarked, “Buchwald is incomparable, and he is brave too, doing one of the hardest things in the world to do – to be funny, in exactly the same sort of way in regard to tone and technique, three times a week.” Besides publishing his regular columns, Buchwald published numerous anthologies and collections of his columns, as well as memoirs.

The writer is a former member of the Provincial Civil Service, and an author of Moments in Silence