Postscript
Ton-up
P. J. Kavanagh
To write a column about writing a column is almost as bad as writing a Poem about writing a poem (which does happen), or making a novelist the central character in your novel. It is a sign of desperation.
Nevertheless, having filled this space for nigh on two years now, this might be the moment for taking stock, or at least for a urlee-in-a-hundred indulgence of that kind. What is it like, writing a weekly column for the first time? Well, first of all, it doesn't take long. (Would it took him longer, you growl.) The writing doesn't take long once you have the idea, but the absence of an idea, or of one that seems suitable and will run the course, can weigh down the whole week. When I began I used to include two or three ideas in one column, the connection between them evident to me but difficult to make clear in the space. I now see I should have stuck to one idea, which would have been econo- mical, and kinder. to the reader. The danger lies in beginning to think like a columnist, because we tend to think alike, as far as topics go. There was a startling example of this the other day. A year ago I planned a column on Ernest Vifeekley because, like Menelaus, he has not been taken with the seriousness he deserves. He seems remembered only as the man whose wife D. H. Lawrence ran away with. Weekley's grand-daughter (and Frieda's) came to stay with us for Christ- mas, I gave her one of her grandfather's books, and took some notes from it before I did so. He was Head of Modern Languages at University College, Nottingham but was also a distinguished, and popular, etymo- logist. His The Romance of Words was reprinted nine times between 1912 and 1924. His definitions have salt in them: did You know that 'Hooligans were a spirited Irish family whose proceedings enlivened the drab monotony of life in Southwark towards the end of the nineteenth cen- tury'? That a form of the word 'assegai' appears in Chaucer ('launcegay'), that Tammany' was an Indian chief and that Van Helmont is responsible for that rarity a wholly new, underivated word, 'gas', though he admitted 'the word "chaos" was vaguely present to his mind.' Perhaps you did, or perhaps modern etymologists dis- agree with him, but Professor Weekley Comes across as an attractive man. Anyway, the column was never written but the notes were kept because there might come a day when my mind was entirely blank and no letter from the Editor had yet arrived commanding me to pack it in. (Such a letter may be in the post even now.) But I was certainly surprised when last week Miles Kington wrote a column about — Ernest Weekley. The moral, I suppose, is to get your column in before somebody else thinks of it. But I do know something Kington could not know, because it came from near the horse's mouth. When asked about Lawrence, dur- ing the lonely, humiliated years, Weekley never said anything, not a word, except, 'brilliant student!' As I say, you cannot help liking the man. Is it pleasant, writing a column? Yes; it is like being allowed to write a personal letter to the world. The drawback is the reverse of the reason for the pleasure: you can get tired of your own voice. Someone said the prevailing vice of columnists is vanity, and though I hope I am insufficiently vain to claim that I am not, it is true you get tired of the display of personality, your own, as well as that of others. Nevertheless, when someone told me that these columns read as though I wrote them in the bath, I was both pleased and annoyed. Pleased, be- cause as Yeats said, something may be the result of labour: Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Annoyed, because — a final spurt of vanity as the ton goes up on the board, a wave of the bat, an adjustment of the cap — to misquote Sheridan, 'your easy reading makes your vile hard writing' and my friend seemed not to know this.
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