Becoming a Centenarian

My father loved dogs, and so did I. Before the Labs, we had two collies, an English setter, a French bulldog, a Boston bull, and a raccoon named Pete, whom Dad brought back from a fishing trip in the Adirondacks. (A forest ranger there had found three starving raccoon cubs with no mother; he offered them for adoption to everyone he met, and Dad took one.) Pete stayed with us for two years, living with the collies in their outdoor kennel and going on bike rides with my older brother, Frederick, and me. We’d take turns letting him ride on our shoulders. Our mother never got used to Pete, and when he nipped one of her friends at an outdoor tea party, his welcome expired. Dad put him in the car, drove for two hours, and released him in the Catskills. Two days later, he was back. Dad then chauffeured him to the Adirondacks. This time, he didn’t return. When I was very young, our grandmother gave us two Persian cats. My mother disliked cats, and she wouldn’t let them in the house. They lived in the kennel with the collies and Pete.

I once wrote a children’s book about an overly friendly mixed-breed dog named Ralph, and a haughty Siamese cat named Lavinia, who live in a house with two children and their parents. Ralph is determined to teach Lavinia how to laugh—cats, as you may know, have no sense of humor—and, in the end, he succeeds. The last scene has Ralph demolishing a dinner party by skidding around on the just-polished wood floor, upsetting tables and scattering drinks, and when it’s over and Ralph has been banished to the basement, Lavinia is discovered under a chair, lying on her back and shaking with silent laughter.

Tomkins with his parents, in the summer of 1933.Photograph courtesy Dodie Kazanjian

February 22nd

Yesterday’s entry reminded me of something that Trippie, my first-born child, said when she was three years old. (Her name is Anne; Trippie came from her love of car trips.) Our dog then, a black-and-brown dachshund named Waldi, had stopped eating, and we were taking him to the vet. He was on her lap, in the front seat of the car, and I could see she was really worried about him. I said, “Trip, he’s going to be fine. You know how, when you get sick, we take you to the doctor and he gives you something that makes you well? It’s just like that.” Trippie was quiet for a while, and then she said, in the sweetly thoughtful voice that still delights me today, “Dad, is Waldi’s doctor a dog?”

February 26th

The New Yorker celebrated its hundredth birthday last night, with a party for four hundred people at a club downtown. The magazine’s first issue came out on February 21, 1925, ten months before I did. Dodie and I rarely go to big, deafening social events, but we went to this one. David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, met us at the entrance with enveloping hugs that made us feel he was touched by our being there. We stayed for half an hour, saw Bruce Diones, Chip McGrath, Calvin (Bud) Trillin, Cressida Leyshon (my editor), and lots of other friends, whose names skittered away from me. On the way out, we bucked an incoming tide of celebrants who were just arriving. The New Yorker, which started out as what Harold Ross, its founding editor, called a “comic weekly,” has held and still holds a unique place in this country’s cultural history.

We subscribed to The New Yorker when I was growing up, and I probably began looking at the cartoons when I was nine or ten. My father read every issue. He sometimes complained that the articles were too long. I remember him saying that he’d get to the end of a very long piece only to find that it was the first of five parts. By the time I joined the staff, in 1960, after three years of writing for Newsweek and contributing short humor pieces, called Casuals, to The New Yorker, the long fact pieces were, at least sometimes, getting shorter—ten or twelve thousand words instead of fifteen or twenty thousand. My first Profile, in 1962, was about a Swiss artist named Jean Tinguely, who made large sculptural machines with moving parts. I had been fascinated by his “Homage to New York,” from 1960, which included bicycle wheels, small motors, radios, a piano, automobile parts, a huge balloon that inflated and then burst, and many other elements from the junk yard. The sole purpose of this ridiculous monolith, which it largely achieved, was to destroy itself in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. I knew very little about art then, and Tinguely’s irreverent approach, which made ample room for humor, set me on a course of writing mainly (but not exclusively) about contemporary art and artists.

March 8th

Juan Hamilton, who attached himself to Georgia O’Keeffe when he was twenty-seven and she was eighty-five, died last month, at his home in Santa Fe. He had started working for O’Keeffe in 1973, a week before I went out to New Mexico to spend a few days interviewing her. After lunch one day, O’Keeffe asked Hamilton to drive us, in her Volkswagen minibus, from her house at Ghost Ranch, north of Santa Fe, to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, so she could see the purple asters in bloom there. I have a vivid memory of O’Keeffe, in a long white dress, bouncing around imperturbably in the back seat as Hamilton navigated the barely visible dirt roads. She talked amicably with the Benedictine monks at the monastery while we were there, and on the way back she said it would be very easy for her to convert someone to Catholicism. “It has great appeal,” she said. “Not for me, of course—but I can see the appeal.”