UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
The Road to Fleet Street
AD it not been for the illness which obliged me to post- pone my final examinations last summer. I might never have appreciated the pitfalls of modern journalism. For although many undergraduates have passed from the well- phrased preciosity of university magazines to the reality of Fleet Street, few have returned from the Blankshire Gazette to the his and retained their sanity. The strange thing is, however, that 1 am still ambitious of becoming a journalist. I still wish to enchant the occasional reader and cause him to pause awhile in his condemnation of the world.
Towards the end of May the doctor pronounced his verdict, and 1 departed from the third floor of the ivory tower. At the time I was neither moved nor elated. Now I see that the gods were preparing their lesson for the intolerance of youth ; it was to be hard and instructive and almost enjoyable. After recovering from medical treatment, I manoeuvred my way before the editor of the local paper and suggested to him that I was the ideal person to contribute a weekly column.
" Yes, we might as well see what you can do. Let me intro- duce you to the assistant editor ; he's the man who'll take care of you and prevent you from making a fool of yourself."
I decided, ten minutes later, that the assistant was a man to be respected. He glanced through one of the articles I had previously submitted, readjusted his cigarette and peered at me. " Hm. This first one is not badly written. At present you are rather fond of finding yourself in print, but that'll pass off. 1 hope. This sort of thing "—he flicked the top page—" is all very interesting, and I don't deny it has its points." (I was indecently proud of the paragraph he was reading, for in it I had alluded to a distinguished amateur cricketer who annoyed me by scoring runs after Hutton had failed.) " ' X batted in the manner of a small-town merchant intent on counting his gains.' Third-rate Robertson-Glasgow, you know. Our readers don't %Nam it. If you can write cleverly in that vein, try the Guardian ; if not, cut it out."
The editor intervened: " And don't forget that this is a Conservative paper. You can eat and speak with Socialists. you can marry one, but never write about 'em. Our directors wouldn't like it."
Five years previously I had stood before an irate group captain and heard his comments on my mislaying a file ; these two journalists implied more in softer tones. As I listened I cast my mind back to the obstreperously golden young men in the Isis office. Cleverness would avail me nothing now. Somehow I had to achieve integrity. The last words confirmed my worst suspicions. " Bring me your copy early on Thursday mornings and I will discuss it then. I have my own blue pencil." 1 re-wrote the first article three times, and had the temerity to accuse my mentor of ruining the rhythm of a sentence. I even defied him to phrase it with my elegance. He grunted and con- tinued to scratch and scribble. • " You'll learn. Just after the war we had a man who wrote far better than you do, and he came along the hard way. For the past eighteen months he's been doing very nicely in Fleet Street. You keep your Fourth Leaders for posterity ; it's sure to applaud them."
He finished butchering my article and re-placed the cork in the paste. "There, I think that anyone can take it in at a glance. . . . I don't suppose that Maugham is sufficiently fashionable in Oxford to serve as your model? It doesn't matter ; have another look at Swift. He must be in favour. being dead so long." The succeeding months witnessed my conversion to a plain unadorned style. I no longer purred and preened myself on conceiving the fastidiously phrased paragraph unless it was neces- sary to the context. Instead of sleeping with Cardus or the later James at my bedside, I dozed fitfully between trips with Ashen- den. Our Theatres in the 'Nineties was stylistically invaluable. although I often experienced malignant pangs and wished that Shaw had been allotted seven hundred words in which to pink and ridicule Sir Henry. Tree and Daly. Soon I came to regard modern prose masterpieces as a Puritan might have regarded the court of Charles II, inevitable, sinful and always to be avoided on the days preceding gestation.
I never came to review a production of Hamlet. but I am sure that if I had I should have included a detailed synopsis of the plot. A far cry from the halcyon university days when a casual reference, and the words " an artistic failure." unenclosed by quotation marks, might have provoked countless conversations on the merits of The Cocktail Party. After the initial impact the most bucolic colonel ceased to find heresy in my articles, and bishops_settled down serenely to spiritual administration. If I spoon-fed the public with subjects they could understand with- out the benefit of a literary education, they reciprocated by taking me for granted. Then the new year disturbed me, and 1 returned. in slam pupillari, to Oxford.
From here the Blankshire Gazette stands foursquare as a symbol of sense and sensibility. Are its politics reactionary, its style turgid and circulation vast? Reluctantly, I admit they are. Does it compel its readers to use their brains, to snort and kick with impatient indignation? It does not. Has it ever possessed a music critic who would calmly inform Beecham that the strings of his orchestra were ragged and his conducting beneath criticism? Not since it came under new management in 1823. Can it possibly be that I have embraced the sentimentality of the provinces and find it more restful than the irascible behaviour of the common room? I ask myself these questions and am amazed at their irrelevance. The provinces, the bourgeois un- dnterprising provinces, are wider than a university, are less brilliant and more tolerant. They substitute honesty of a kind for beauty, and eschew the subtler forms of premeditated spite. They consist of people who instinctively pay homage to the past and suspect the future, who were suspicious of change long before the revolution of 1945. Their standards are less demand- ing, and they are content with the mediocre, whereas a university demands all and spies mediocrity everywhere save in itself.
The essential difference between my two journalistic spheres can be summed up simply. In the outer world the reader is merely a disinterested onlooker ; in the university he devours as a critic. After a while the writer grows accustomed to either ; he may respect the one and condone with the other, yet both remain customers whom he needs must satisfy. My own per- sonal problem at the moment is to re-learn the art of saying nothing in many words, of disagreeing with authority for the sake of principle. And one day perhaps. when I have assimilated the best of both worlds, I ma% become a journalist.
Previous page
