I know it’s absurd, I know it’s juvenile, I know that awards ceremonies are perfectly ludicrous occasions for everyone except the winners and their mothers, but I am what I am, competitive, and there’s no point pretending otherwise.
I know it’s absurd, I know it’s juvenile, I know that awards ceremonies are perfectly ludicrous occasions for everyone except the winners and their mothers, but I am what I am, competitive, and there’s no point pretending otherwise.
So I will not pretend that receiving the Best Columnist award at the Society of Editors Press Awards dinner at the Savoy last week was anything less than heavenly. But there are other things there’s no point pretending. I’m not actually the best columnist: there are plenty, not least on my own paper, to equal or surpass me; and a few in Fleet Street who are indisputably better. Simon Jenkins on the Sunday Times and Guardian is the best — has been for years. Still, I’m not going to dispute the judges’ decision.
The Tube home from the Savoy, however, was a time for sobering up and reflecting. Public transport has a levelling effect; and no other District Line passenger appeared to notice me, ostentatiously clutching my framed award. I fell to thinking about the judges’ citation, which I seem to remember being about elegantly crafted prose, or ‘classy’ prose, or something like that.
Crafted? Classy? Well, maybe (I thought) sometimes — on a good day. This is what I aim for. I can spend hours trying to get a paragraph right, swapping words around, searching for the right adjective, avoiding repetition, thinking of fresh or felicitous ways of expressing things. In the previous paragraph as first drafted, ‘seem’ or ‘seemed’ occurred three times and it took me a while to eliminate one instance and replace another with ‘appeared’; while in the sentence of which this is still part I was going to say ‘appeared three times’ but, finding this would repeat the ‘appeared’ I’d just substituted for a ‘seemed’, plumped for ‘occurred’ in this second instance.
Of such is a columnist’s morning often composed. And the question arises: what has any of this to do with whether an argument is correct or a judgement wise? column-writing has become a late flowering of the ancients’ art of rhetoric. Often enough I’ll reproach myself for agonising all day over words until, with deadline looming, I rush the column off without actually checking a key fact. Everybody, my Times editor, James Harding, once remarked to me, wants to be a star columnist. ‘But what impresses me is when somebody actually wants to report things. Why don’t I get more applications from students with a passion for reporting?’
Incidental note: there are already three ‘actually’s in this column, and that’s arguably three too many. One is direct speech and can stay; but at least one of the first two should go…
But, no, I shall stay (oops) my axe, because this arsing around with the phrasing of things leads precisely to what I want to say. It’s been lovely while it lasted, but all this ‘fine writing’ stuff, all this palaver about the grand tradition of English essays, may be approaching some kind of a sunset. My generation of sonorous, careful-crafting newspaper columnist may be the last of our kind. I’m not sure if I regret it.
Our means of written communication, public and private, are changing very fast. The old ways still exist but the centre of gravity of what we used pretentiously to call English Letters is shifting in tandem, as it always has, with the technology for publication. The communication of reaction, opinion and argument is growing more instant. You can pen an email, a tweet or a blog in seconds: indeed you must; there isn’t time to weigh words, and your prose would look laboured if you did. Writers in the mass media react quickly and urgently to events, and to what others are saying, for the simple reason that they now can.
Any written communication of any length will carry about it something of the circumstances in which it was framed, and of the circumstances in which its author expects it to be read. A personal letter carries the scratch of the pen, the lick of the envelope. A weekly column carries the air of a pondered framing of arguments, choice of words, the tap of the laptop key, the long pauses, the delete key, the cut-and-paste procedure, the balancing of paragraphs, the final wordcount. All this may survive in magazines like The Spectator, and be sought there; and in books, too. But newspapers are increasingly about almost literally contemporaneous report, quickfire commentary, fast analysis and response.
Where opinion, judgment and reflection are called for (and they always will be) the reader will increasingly feel he wants to be, as it were, with the columnist, alongside him, as he hums and hahs and feels his way to a response. His hesitations, his little internal jokes, his playfulness, his doubts, his half-hints and second thoughts — these will become part of the essay, deconstructed, exhibited, rather than part of its secret history.
Such writing will not — I stress this — be more superficial, more trashy or less intelligent than my kind of column; but it will have a lightness, directness and frankness, and, with all those things a sort of formlessness, a train-of-consciousness quality. We will write more as we think, or speak.
My Times colleague Caitlin Moran, who received two awards at that Savoy dinner last week, my Spectator and Times colleague Hugo Rifkind, and (in a sometimes more swashbuckling way, for Hugo is not swashbuckling) Giles Coren, seem to me to be early exemplars of the new way people will write. I really hope none of these young journalists ‘develop’ into a more classical, ‘considered’ heavyweight style, for opinion-writing is going in their direction, and not the other way round.
Something will be lost, but much will be gained. As for me, ‘fine writing’ will see me out. Next stop: the Lifetime Achievement Award.
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