Dr. Kookie, You're Right.

The Work Ethnic

ON A DAY WHEN this review is two weeks late, there's a most appropriate article by John Blades in the "Tempo" section of the Chicago Tribune. The title is, "When Writers Can't." The subject is procrastination and/or writer's block. Writers and would-be writers at a recent PEN conference told tales of what, in writerly fashion, was called the "dead end of narcissistic despair." A psychologist-writer spoke of the fear of "puting souls on paper." A poet envied journalists and novelists, whose material, she believes, is easier to come by. A magazine-column writer, described as "a hard-core procastinator," called deadlines "dangerous and self-destructive." And a Playboy-type fiction writer concluded, quite understandably, that "writing is no damned fun." Right.

But then I worked backward through the newspaper, as all sensible people do, and there he was, looking out from a photograph at the top of his nearly full-page column, the crown of his head neatly sliced off like the bulbous end of a hard-boiled egg, a three-quarter view of a long, lugubrious Slavic face with the large mouth apparently wrestling with the idea of a smile.

It's Mike Royko, or, to borrow a phrase from Gerald Ford, "the work ethnic," whose Tribune essay-column serves as a five-day-a-week reproach to those of us periodically caught up in the throes of "narcissistic despair." Red Smith once wrote that the test of such a column is to be good twice and adequate once. By that standard, Royko is a success in anyone's book. And that has been the case for three decades, first with the Chicago Daily News, then at the Chicago Sun-Times, which he left when it appeared that Rupert Murdoch, dubbed "the alien" by Royko, was settling in for a long stay, and now at the Tribune.

We are told that Royko's column also runs in 525 other newspapers, here and abroad, and that he has a student fan club in Japan, which, if true, carries inscrutability to sublime levels. But in an almost unique way, he is the voice of this city. It's hard, for instance, to think of Mayor Richard J. Daley, who personified Chicago, without thinking of Royko's book, Boss, which both captured and added to that personification.

In style, Royko also represents what we like to think of as proper in Chicago--short, direct Rudolf Flesch-like sentences, a loathing of cant, a Strunkian contempt for doublespeak, and heavy, unsubtle, and sometimes very effective humor, especially when answering readers' complaints in one of his occasional rainy-day columns. The style may be Chicago, or what is perceived of as Chicago. But the appeal is universal, because he hits chords common to all of us--bartenders, executives, ballplayers, steam fitters, professors, cab drivers, cat owners, Yuppies, Guppies, Puppies--and yes, poor dears, even procrastinating writers. They're not always the same chords. But all of us respond to some of them.

At times, Royko can be very funny indeed, especially when dealing with what he identifies as life's real curses, among them "the rush-hour traffic jam, flavorless tomatoes, devious politicians, or goofs who talk during movies," not to mention the inability of science to eliminate the hangover or develop a healthful martini.

But at other times, at least for a few faithful readers, the humor is less successful and the satire somewhat strained. This is frequently the case when he discusses national politics or when he consults his personas, of whom the Dr. Kookie of the title is perhaps the least successful.

Dr. I. M. Kookie, author of the Book of Kook, the history of how earth came to be an asylum for a distant planet, is "one of the world's leading experts on a lot of things." When Royko needs an opinion on something apparently irrational or contradictory--why in the age of the feminist ascendancy, fro instance, men still help women on with their coats, or hold cab doors for them, or stand when they enter a room--he goes to Dr. Kookie for the answer. The problem is Royko doesn't really need Dr. Kookie, any more than Westbrook Pegler needed George Spelvin. He is sufficiently funny, structured, and satirical without him.

But that's a quibble, and one man's two-best and one-acceptable week's columns needn't be another's. Royko hits a chord and he knows how to play it, and that chord transcends local or regional considerations, as well as considerations of class or caste.

If you live in one of those provincial outposts like New York or San Francisco where little is known about such things as fine dining, proper drinking, salubrious climates, or the annual death agony of the Cubs, where Royko's column is not available, you would do well to buy this collection.

Mr. Coyne, a former presidential speech-writer, is a Chicago businessman.