The press
Polysyllabic snobbery
Paul Johnson
Nothing more ill becomes a journalist than intellectual snobbery, and I am sorry to see that the Guardian is going through an acute attack. Ever since the Falklands war it has been obsessed by the Sun newspaper, and its supposed cerebral, moral and literary inferiority. It can't leave the subject alone. Why, you may ask, should the Guardian care? One explanation that occurs to me is that the Guardian suf- fers from a nagging feeling of inadequacy about its own unheroic posture during the conflict. The Sun, strident and even vulgar though it might be, at least had throughout an absolutely clear and consistent policy. The Guardian never succeeded in for- mulating one. It seems to have taken to heart G. E. Moore's famous advice to the Cambridge Apostles: 'Among all the good habits which we are to form, we should cer- tainly not neglect the habit of indecision'. During the Falklands crisis it was plain the Guardian was anxious to do Mrs Thatcher an injury, but all else was shrouded in ver- biage: the paper's policy, to quote Chur- chill, was 'resolved to be irresolute, ada- mant for drift, solid for fluidity, all- powerful for impotence'. No wonder, then, it has developed a secret envy for the unruly Sun.
Be that as it may, the Guardian certainly gives a good deal of publicity to the Sun's doings. On Saturday it devoted a leader to deploring the fact that John Vincent, Pro- fessor of Modern History at Bristol Univer- sity, now writes every week in the paper. The Guardian is horrified that the pro- fessor, who once 'would regularly write a sentence of a hundred words or more' for his 'scholarly pieces in New Society', employing such 'uncompromisingly in- tellectual' words as 'persona', `modus vivendi' and 'declasse', is now a columnist on 'a newspaper which never says in half a dozen words what can somehow be rammed across with only two, or, better
still, two fingers'.
I suspect that the Guardian has underestimated both the intelligence and the good sense of its readers, most of whom will see nothing reprehensible in an academic writing for a popular newspaper. Quite the contrary. In its best days, the Mir- ror made a point of giving first-class writers,_ a platform. For many years, R. H. S- Crossman wrote a highly successful political column, both in the Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial. He used to say that it was admirable training in clear thinking for an intellectual to be forced to marshal his arguments in a way that could be understood by all. I have found this myself when writing for the populars, including the Sun. The sneers at Vincent remind us of the fuss that used to be made about A. J. P. Taylor's popular journalism and TV celebrity, itself an echo of the outrage which greeted Macaulay's frank avowal that he would like his History of England to be found in every young lady's boudoir. Macaulay took no notice of the intellectual snobs; nor did Taylor; and nor should Vin- cent.
In any case, the leader itself suggests the Guardian is not in a particularly strong position to criticise the literary quality of other newspapers. There is no intrinsic merit in writing 'a sentence of a hundred words or more' ; quite the contrary. There is a positive virtue, even on a quality paper, in using two words instead of half a dozen. Any journal would be well advised to beware of the 'uncompromisingly intellec- tual' words cited by the Guardian as ex- amples of posh English. Odd, too, that New Society should be presented as a model. It is a polysyllabic compendium of social science jargon, larded with such phrases (I quote from a recent issue) as `multidisciplinary, multi-agency approach',
`audience maximisation', 'simulated employment decisions' and 'intake caseworker units'.
The Guardian itself is increasingly prone to this semi-literate verbal clutter, the ver- nacular of what I suppose it would call the polytechnocracy. It is fond of brutal neologisms and fashionable imports. Last month I clipped a Guardian book review, by one Erlend Clouston, as an example of ugly writing, dotted with such expressions as 'realeconomik', 'recycled', 'overview', `grapevine' and 'bleeding hearts'. And in the same issue in which the leader com- plaining about Vincent appeared, a sharp- eyed reader pointed out that the Guardian has recently been guilty of such Americanisms as 'inspirational', 'rendi- tion', 'forward of (instead of beyond), `closet' (for cupboard), 'mortician' (for undertaker), 'aside from' (for apart) and `railroad' (for railway).
Finally, it is ungrateful of the Guardian to sneer at downmarket papers since its losses are paid by — indeed its very ex- istence depends upon — its dim downmarket sister, the Manchester Evening News. The Guardian is a kept woman, sub- sidised by the grubby pennies of the proles it despises, just as the Times is kept afloat by the profits of the Sun and the News of the World. It's all rather like 5th-century ec Athens, a loss-making acropolis culture sustained by the servile masses below. The system is unhealthy, and unstable too, as we were reminded last weekend when, without warning, 'Tiny' Rowland threaten- ed to pull the rug out from under the Observer and sell Lonrho's entire newspaper interests in Britain. Tiny has proved a surprisingly supine, indeed benevolent, proprietor, and most of the editorial fears about his takeover have been long since dispelled; so his decision to pull out, which surfaced ironically enough in his favourite outlet, the Sunday Telegraph, came as a nasty shock to his staff. Of course journalists can't have a proprietor both ways: if the Observer establishment had given Tiny more of a welcome and sought to draw him into the workings of the paper, he might not now be so ready to abandon them simply because he is annoyed with the British set-up generally. I hope that Tiny changes his mind; becomes indeed an active newspaper proprietor — the only kind worth having. Failing that, I trust that the process of selling the Observer (with or without Lonrho's Scottish newspaper pro- perties, a totally different business), which looks like being slow and agonising, leaves the qualities as a whole stronger, not weaker.
The ideal solution is for the Guardian and the Observer to be merged into the same undertaking, using the same presses on a seven-day basis. As separate entities, both are always likely to lose money. Merg- ed, they might break even — or even better. There was talk of such a coming-together before Tiny intervened; if he now pulls out, the dialogue could be reopened. But, with the top end of Fleet Street in such a fragile state, please let us have no more scoffing at the lower orders.
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