SLUMPED OVER A DESK CLUTTERED WITH wobbly piles of books, newspaper clips, gag gifts and a sign announcing that "The Buchwald Stops Here," America's preeminent political satirist is scanning the week's mail. There's a letter from a woman describing her childhood in an orphanage, another recounting a recent bout with depression, a note from the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. It's not the sort of fan mail you'd expect to be addressed to a Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist, but ever since Art Buchwald published Leaving Home (Putnam), a best-selling memoir of his traumatic childhood, he has been besieged by strangers anxious to share their woes. "I didn't know there was anyone who would identify with this book," says Buchwald. 68. "They read into it their own life stories. I call it a button book because it touched people in so many different ways."

A Washington monument since the '60s, when his column lampooning political figures caught fire, Buchwald believes that his anguished early years helped sharpen his eye for folly. "Laughter," he writes, "was the weapon I used for survival." But his gift of glib also kept him from confronting what one reviewer of his book called "the kind of childhood usually associated with a serial killer." Admits Buchwald: "I can be very flip because that's my business." Leaving Home marks "the first time I took the mask off myself and decided not to wisecrack my way through."

Born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., the son of East European Jewish immigrants, Buchwald never knew his mother, Helen, a chronic depressive who was committed to a mental institute when he was 3 months old. As children, Art and his three older sisters told friends their mother was dead. Though she lived until 1960, he never visited her. "When I grew up," he writes, "I didn't want to [meet her]. I preferred the mother I had invented to the one I would find in the hospital."

Buchwald's father, Joseph, a draper, sent his infant son—whose legs were bowed by rickets—first to a foundling home, then to a Seventh-Day Adventist boarding house for ailing children. Unable to support his family, Joseph placed 5-year-old Art and his sisters in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York City and would meet with them each Sunday. "He took me to movies and bought me ice cream," writes Buchwald without rancor, "but I knew that by 7 o'clock I would get on a bus, wave and not see him again for another week."

By the time Buchwald was 15, he had lived in six homes. In 1942 he joined the Marines—bribing a derelict with a bottle of whiskey to sign his parental-consent papers. Buchwald spent much of the war in the Pacific, and he credits Marine discipline with salvaging his haphazard life. "The Marine Corps," he writes, "was the best foster home I ever had."

After the war, the G.I. Bill paid Buchwald's way through USC. Then he headed for Paris where, in 1949, he joined the Herald Tribune and launched his column "Paris After Dark," a tongue-in-cheeky account of his nights on the town. In 1952 he married an American fashion consultant, Ann McGarry, with whom he adopted three children, Joel, 40, now a D.C. television producer; Conchita, 39, a Virginia housewife; and Jennifer, 38, a cabinetmaker in Boston. "I never knew what a father was supposed to be," he says. "My work was far more important than my home life. I was a good father, but I was always thinking about my next column."

He was also increasingly incapacitated by depression. In 1963, a year after he moved to the States and began his Washington column, Buchwald spent a month in a local hospital. "I was ready to kill myself," he says matter-of-factly. "I could not handle the emotional pain." Though hospitalized again for severe depression in 1987, he has always managed to keep writing, with the help of both psychoanalysis and lithium. His friend and Martha's Vineyard neighbor William Styron—who chronicled his own depression in a 1990 best-seller—says, "Art is a man who suffers enormously, but you wouldn't know it. Often he's funny because he's trying to get rid of that horrible burden."

In 1992, Buchwald separated from his wife, whose cancer was diagnosed last summer. (They keep in touch, but the separation is a subject he refuses to discuss.) He now lives in an apartment not far from the White House and leads a quiet life, shunning the weekend party circuit in favor of Lean Cuisine dinners and back-to-back videos with his three grandsons.

While he continues to feel the "terrible loneliness" that has haunted him since childhood, Buchwald has taken some comfort from the attention brought by sharing his pain rather than his wit. "There are so many people who are depressed who want to talk to someone," says Buchwald. "I maintain that if you can get rid of the skeletons in your closet, you will feel much better. What can anybody do to me now for telling the truth about my life? I haven't screwed up. On the contrary, I turned out pretty good."

J.D. PODOLSKY
LINDA KRAMER in Washington