Has Anyone Seen My Toes?, (HASMT?) is an acerbic, comic novel about an overweight, aging screenwriter in the throes of writer’s block. He fears and shows the apparent signs of approaching dementia. He lives “two hours” outside Charleston South Carolina, and is a fast-food and social media addict. He is struggling with a screenplay about the Nazis kidnapping Roosevelt from Bernard Baruch's South Carolina estate of Hobcaw Barony, which was Roosevelt’s trysting hideaway (with Lucy Mercer).
I read HASMT? because my friend Carl sent it to me. I had sent Carl a copy of a screenplay that I had recently written, (based on my first novel “Farewell the Dragon”). Carl is a great letter writer, but his reply seemed to skirt around anything critical of my screenplay. But still his letter had a sly understated tone that I read as,
“Lee are you OK?”
And he told me he was mailing me a copy of Buckley’s book, HASMT?, (which almost sounds like the acronym for “hazardous materials” – humm…). When the book arrived two days later, I tore the brown wrapping paper off the hardcover novel, thinking OK, maybe Carl is sending me a message...
Or maybe I am just reading too much into it. Carl is a very private person, so I will only say we have known each other since high school, where we trained together and competed against each other for three years. We were both decent high school distance runners and I beat him more than he beat me, but – alas - he beat me the last time.
All that was more than fifty years ago, so we are old now. Carl is much the opposite of me. Where I am a vainly boastful, loud, class clown type, Carl is very soft-spoken, shadowy, (his nickname was “The Assassin” for his ability to suddenly “appear” where he had been lurking all along). He’s a man of few (but always meaningful) words. I promptly read HASMT? cover to cover. (As a opposed to starting in the middle and reading it backwards.)
Mr. Christopher Buckley is perhaps most famous for the comic novel and subsequent movie “Thank you for Smoking”. He is the son of the Godfather of the Pre-Trump Conservative movement, William F. Buckley. He is about my age. Both Christopher and HASMT?’s unnamed screenwriter, (who I will call "Chris") have many biographical points in common.
Mr. Buckley also intrudes into my biography because Christopher Buckley went to sea after college, working on a merchant ship and wrote a book about it. It was the last book my father read before he died. Dad gave me the book but I never finished it. It struck a sore point with me because I was supposed to go to sea with Dad after college. Dad was a Chief Engineer in the Merchant Marines. But I punked out of the gig because of my fear of losing my college girl friend (another story I will probably never write). Dad had gone to some length to arrange a very rare “Cadetship” for me with his company, so I could train to be an merchant marine deck officer down the road, but I never took that road. I know it was a disappointment for Dad, and Buckley’s sea story brought that disappointment back up for me during Dad’s last days.
I was a fan of his father’s show “Firing Line”, and later briefly chatted with William F. Buckley, which you can read about here. (Review of Saving the Queen ).
Well, anyway, all that aside, "Chris" the unnamed screenwriter, is married to a woman who slowly becomes concerned about Chris’ forgetfulness and growing confusion between real life and his slowly evolving (or rather devolving) screenplay. From Chris’s point of view it all makes sense, and we ride along on his bizarre AD-HD-like inability to focus. He has a huge trove of historical and literary knowledge stored up in his fragmented mind, and he is constantly Googling offshoots and tangents of his untethered thought process. What makes it so powerful though is how this Googling and tangent chasing mirrors what it is like for many of us in the Post-COVID and possible Trump Interregnum period. (I write this five (5) days before the 2024 election, so I don’t know NOW how this is all going to turn out. ) “Chris” is sly in his slightly hidden disdain of Trump. (“If you can have “alternative facts” why can’t you have “Alternative history?”). But the possibility of a 2nd Trump term lurks behind much of Chris’ fearfully scattered imaginative romps, which is all in search of the “finishing touches” on his Roosevelt kidnapping screenplay, called “Heimlich’s Maneuver” (Heimlich is the Nazi U-boat commander in charge of the kidnapping).
“Chris” is an etymologist, (like Buckley’s father) who constantly searches for the original meaning of words. The running joke through out HASMT? is that "mayonnaise is one of the few words in English of Carthaginian origin". (We finally learn in the post script that Mayonnaise was “invented” in the Minorcan city of Mahon which was named for Hannibal’s brother. A cheap kind of Carthaginian origin.)
While showing disdain for Henry James and Proust, he reveals he is in fact the product of those upper class prep schools that teach “The Western Canon” of the literature of Dead White Men. Much of the story is of “Chris” threading the needle between the enforced political correctness of our age with the eternal truths of those great books that are being read less and less.
He covers much of what we have been living through since 2020 – George Floyd’s murder, Confederate statues coming down, fierce partisan-fueled local elections (in his case the weird South Carolina tradition of electing the local coroner. ) He riffs on suicide, especially about writers who killed themselves. He of course Googles it and we read a long list of self-slaughtered writers. He searches for an appropriate quote to leave behind as his own suicide note. He writes about a 20th century artist (who paints Victorians in Togas) who kills himself and leaves a note that the world isn’t big enough for him and Picasso, but then notes that Picasso never heard of him before or after his suicide.
The novel is filled with hilarious, pathetic self-referential jokes that rotate around and connect with other jokes that appeared earlier, as if they are interior concentric circles of humorous asides that constantly, (and almost randomly) recur. It is the kind of satire that has the reader looking off from the pages in embarrassment at his own reaction of laughter combined with a feeling of deep loss. We (me and “Chris”) are almost at the end of it all, whether we pull the trigger ourselves or let nature do it for us.
He has a “Concierge” doctor, (who he pays a healthy retainer to be on his speed-dial) a beautiful woman recommended by the hound-dog husband of his wife’s best friend. She puts him on some meds to deal with his self-reported, very unspecific ailments. This leads to a pretty good ending which makes it all the more worth getting to that end.
It certainly didn’t read like a “great book”, when I was in the midst of it, but later, after thinking of how it affected me, I think it just might be – a very serious and worthwhile read, maybe even - a great one.
