UNDERGRADUATE PAGE

The Editor and I

By BRIANWIDLAKE (Clare College, Cambridge) THE editor of the Universal Magazine regarded me across his desk. It was an impressive editorial desk, with an intercommunication machine and a suitable number of telephones. The editor had a wrinkled, tramlined face, kindly and humorous, but very wary with a hint of oriental passivity. I had' come\to Fleet Street to prospect in journalism. Outside the window the traffic grumbled and roared. Inside the room, lined with past and present copies of Universal Magazines, the editor talked.

" So you want to write ?" His voice dipped at the end of the question into an ironical query. " Yes," I replied.

" And you have a year to go at Cambridge ?"

" Yes.'

He took down the details on an informal little pad, and then he leaned back and sighed. How many young men, I wondered, equally spruce, intelligent, and enthusiastic, had sat in this chair before me and with bright eyes and faltering voices proclaimed that singularly trite and ambitious phrase " I want to write." From the expression on the editor's face they must have been depressingly numerous. He had at least saved me the embarrassment of saying it for myself. " Have you had any experience ?" the editor asked. I told him.

" Journalism is a rat-race," said the editor. " You start in the provinces—that's the best way—learn the technique, and then come to Fleet Street. By that time you've got accustomed to seeing good prose and intelligent thinking carved into unrecognisable shapes. Then you join a paper and struggle to earn your living. I starved for four years." He said the bit about starving with a smack of gloomy satisfaction. It was evidently intended to induce a certain amount of misgiving. I duly raised my eyebrows to an angle of surprise and said, " But that's a philosophy of depression."

" It's true," the editor reassured me. " Goethe said that the tragedy of life is that at fifty you become what you wanted to be at twenty." I wanted to write ! The editor spread his hands and looked serious.

" I take it you want to write well ?" he asked.

I said, " Yes," aware that I was committing myself to an ethical indiscretion.

A triumphant light shone in the editorial eye. " So did most of us," he said. ' Instead, we saw full stops substituted for semi-colons and bad prose preferred to good."

Irrelevantly I started to think about the lines on the editor's face. I wondered how many full stops for semi-colons each line represented, or how many pieces of bad journalism for good the wrinkles round his eyes denoted. But the editor brought me back. " My advice to you is to get into a bowler hat and striped trousers and earn money." He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together to, give his point added weight. " You can always write in your spare time. Journalism dulls the edge of good writing. If I had my life again. . . ." Just then the door opened and a young man walked in.

" Isn't that so, John? " said the editor, addressing the young man.

John said yes and sat down.

"Take Sidney Cinchcombe or William Angel-Blithe," the editor said. " They're both journalists and established nove- lists. Not good ones, but they're well known. They're broke," the editor said flatly, with raised eyebrows and a final, funereal gesture. He recited a dozen more names. At the top of the pillar of penury stood James Joyce. The young man John illustrated the moral from a few contemporary journalists. I stopped listening. I was thinking about those novels of mine and how they were going to be written. After a hard day's work in Grub Street? After a day in striped trousers?

' Between dull cocktails and duller dinner-parties? Between selling nylons and braces in a general store and supper over a gas ring in a bed sitting-room? My mind reverted to the problem of marrying a wealthy heiress : beautifully written novels in a secluded estate, months abroad, Riviera sunshine; I need never see Fleet Street. But I even had ideals about heiresses.

" Go for the money every time," the editor was saying.

" But," I said, " I don't want to be in striped trousers. ' The editor looked at me and screwed up his face. He took a cigarette and hunched himself into the corner of his chair. " Ah," he said. " Ah," said the young man John. " And anyway," I asked, " aren't some of these peoph happy? "

The editor shifted uneasily. Abstracts evidently made him feel uncomfortable. He thought a moment.

" That's a comparative word," he said. " And it's certainly comparative in journalism."

Slowly the editor, my future, journalism, and my novels merged into a confused backcloth of unhappiness, money, and striped trousers. Behind the mask of lines on the editor's face I saw the dismal journalistic past; and in the confident young man John the disillusioned journalistic future. Each of them, I supposed, had his private dream: the editor's was striped trousers; the young man's may have been something like my own.

" It isn't what it was," said the editor. " It used to be fun once, with bohemians and poets, even when you starved. Now it's an industry." I half regretted I'd had my hair cut and not worn a pair of green trousers or tossed epigrams at the editor's head until the walls resounded with them. It was too late now; sober-suited and sober-minded I had listened. Occasionally I had inter- jected. Passionately I wanted to tell the editor that he was a cynic and a pessimist, that an hour's talk had revealed he was a spiritual and literary dyspeptic. An hour ago I had entered his office buoyed up with enthusiasm. In the first five minutes I would have jumped on a chair and preached the politics of enthusiasm till I was breathless. But the editor had talked. There were Sidney Cinchcombe and William Angel-Blithe and there had been James Joyce, and they had all been bankrupt. There were striped trousers and thumb and forefinger—the symbols of money and security. And there was the literary prostitution of Grub Street. With unsubtle brutality he had shown me the whole panorama. We got up to leave. The editor tore my details off his little pad, screwed them into a ball, and threw them into his basket. " I do hope," he said, " I haven't been too depressing." I suddenly felt very sad for him. By the lift he .reiterated urgently his advice about striped trousers. " Meanwhile send me something—anything." I walked into the gloom of Fleet Street. The second Eliza. bethan Age, I said to myself. At a news-stall I bought a paper, and happened to glance at one of the hoardings. It was about the Test Match. Rain stopped play.