• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“So, Irwin, I salute you now as the Rocky Graziano of American letters—because that is the way I think you want to be saluted. And you will be happy to know that I often get taxi drivers who don’t talk just a little like you. Irwin, they talk exactly like you.

“They’ve also all turned out to be gentlemen like you.

“And how can you claim to be so tough anyway, when you have written one of the most innocent and beautiful stories I ever hope to read? I refer to ’The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.’ This story says that even men in love will look longingly at every beautiful girl who comes along when the weather is warm, but concludes that there is no harm in this.

“Irwin, how innocent can you be?

“Well, I hate to say this with Joseph Heller present….

“Actually, it’s sort of elating to say it with Joseph Heller present….

“Irwin Shaw wrote the best American novel about World War Two, which was The Young Lions. He was the only one of us who had enough wisdom and nerve to write about the European part of that war from both sides of the lines. As a German-American, of course, I was sorry to see him make the Nazis the bad guys.

“But by and large The Young Lions was such a good book that it made Ernest Hemingway mad. He thought he had copyrighted war.

“But the Ernest Hemingway story is a tragic one, and the Irwin Shaw story is anything but that. Look how happy Irwin is.

“I know where a lot of that happiness is coming from, but some of it should surely be attributed to the fact that the publication of Irwin’s collected short stories last year confirmed beyond a doubt that he is one of the greatest storytellers of all time.

“Oh, I know it is cruel on a man’s ninety-second birthday to talk about nothing but the work he did as a youngster. But I have done that tonight for selfish reasons, to celebrate my own youth, when I was so enthusiastic about so many things. That’s what it was to be young—to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.

“And I was so enthusiastic about everything written by Irwin Shaw. He continues to write as well as ever, but I can no longer take pleasure in reading him, since he is my colleague now. I simply can’t afford to like anybody but me. When I read anybody else now, I see his or her words only dimly, as though through a finely divided mist of sulfuric acid or mustard gas.

“I can see this much in Irwin’s present work, though: Despite all the high living he has done far away from us, in Europe and the Hamptons and so on, he still knows how Americans talk and feel. This is highly unusual in our literary history. Almost every other important American writer who has lived elsewhere has soon lost touch with how we talk and feel.

“How has he worked this miracle? I will have to guess, but I am almost sure I’m right about this. Every time Irwin comes to New York, I think, he takes a job driving a taxicab.

“Now that I have let you in on his little secret, you won’t be surprised if you find him driving you home after this banquet in his honor.

“I thank you for your attention.”

• • •

And here is what I said about my friends Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, perhaps the most significant and ridiculous American comedy team alive today, as an introduction to their book Write If You Get Work: The Best of Bob & Ray (Random House, 1975):

It is the truth: Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

And if they know what they are doing, they will have especially respectful words for Bob and Ray, whose book this is. They will say, among other things, that Bob and Ray’s jokes were remarkably literary, being fun to read as well as to hear. They may note, too, that Bob and Ray had such energy and such a following that they continued to create marvelous