Daily Sanity

POOR RUSSELL'S ALMANAC by RUSSELL BAKER 212 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

In the old fairy tale, the grumpy king runs a contest to find a jester who can make him laugh. Unsuccessful contestants go to the block. The winner gets a new suit of motley and the next-to-impossible job of making the king laugh again. In journalism, the dyspeptic despot is usually played by an editor who starts off saying something like "This page is too damn dull. It needs some humor." Serious words are then circulated among the clever headline writers and droll cityroom pinochle players that there is an opening for a funny columnist.

If the editors and readers are lucky, they may get a durable broadax wit like Art Buchwald. If they are very lucky, they find someone like Russell Baker, writer of the New York Times's "Observer" column. At his best, Baker fills his allotted space opposite the editorial page with bizarre, often bleak fantasies about human foolishness. At his second best, he holds a funhouse mirror up to the nature of the consumer state. Baker's "growing family," for example, does not increase numerically but expands through overweight and the excess tonnage of possessions.

Poor Russell's Almanac, Baker's fifth collection of columns and comment, is composed largely of such ticklish visions. The more painful versions often have to do with a variety of middie-aged, middle-management saps who have congealed in mid-marriage and mid-mortgage. "Misery no longer loves company," says Baker. "Nowadays it insists upon it."

Given his schedule and deadline pressure, Baker does a remarkable job freshening overworked subjects. On the myth of progress, for example, he observed that the Wright brothers' first flight went 120 ft., "which is the length of the line you wait in today to get your baggage." History proves a perishable item when a father, failing to convince his son of the patriotic emotion released by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, concedes that it was a day that "really hasn't survived in infamy as well as we thought it would."

Baker can be bitter: "The sinister nature of the American soil is apparent in places like Gettysburg. Fertilize it with the blood of heroes and it brings forth a frozen-custard stand." Baker can be elegiac, as when he raises the tragic ghost of Abe Lincoln, who says, "A man eventually likes to see the record on himself completed and know that everything is fixed and that his life is in order. I groan every time an archivist discovers another hitherto lost Brady portrait of me."

To use the kind of phrases he lampoons in a piece on reviewers' jargon, Baker is a man of range, sensitive intellect and fertile imagination. He is also a fine stylist whose columns frequently unfurl to defend the language against corruption. But to read 212 pages of him at a sitting is a mistake. He is most effective in his newspaper, where the reader can wade expectantly toward him through bloated accounts of disaster, inhumanity, avarice and hypocrisy. Russell Baker can then best be appreciated doing what a good humorist has always done: writing to preserve his sanity for at least one more day.

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