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Mencken on being a newspaper reporter

• With the changes in the news business, will succeeding generations experience what H.L. Mencken did as a newspaper reporter at the turn of the previous century?

In all of the events of H.L. Mencken's eventful life, nothing matched his days as a young newspaper reporter (circa 1899):

My adventures in that character (a newspaper reporter) . . . had their moments – in fact, they were made up, subjectively, of one continuous, unrelenting, almost delirious moment – and when I revive them now it is mainly to remind myself and inform historians that a newspaper reporter, in those remote days, had a grand and gaudy time of it, and no call to envy any man. . . . I believed then and believe today, that it was the maddest, gladdest, damndest existence ever enjoyed by mortal youth.

H.L. Mencken was a newspaper and magazine editor, critic of American letters, and chief curmudgeon of the first half of the 20th century. His sharp wit was always at war with pomposity and hypocrisy and earned him the title, “Sage of Baltimore.”

His experience as a newspaper reporter predated mine by about 60 years, but the feeling was the same. I, too, had a "grand and gaudy time of it, and no call to envy any man."

The passage quoted here is from his memoir Newspaper Days.

The anniversary of the death of a literary light

• Like that of Robert Kennedy, the anniversary of the death of an American who died too young occurred this past week.

Part of our collective conversation this past week has been remembering the death of Robert Kennedy, which happened 40 years ago. Kennedy, shot by an assassin in Los Angeles on the night he won the California Democratic primary, died too young. He was 42 years old.

Those who die too young provoke particular sadness.

Six decades before Kennedy was killed, on the same day that Kennedy died, American letters lost one of its brightest and briefest flames -- Stephen Crane.

Crane's one novel was the Red Badge of Courage, which contained descriptions of the confusion and terror of a Civil War battle so real that veterans of the conflict said Crane got it exactly right. Crane had never been in a battle when he wrote the book. He had been born six years after the war ended.

Crane did see action after the book was published and after he had achieved fame because of it. He took on the role of celebrity reporter for Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World when they were trying by any means to one-up their rival William Randolph Hearst and the New York Herald in covering the Spanish-American War in 1898. The World sent Crane to Cuba, and while he was there, the editors demanded "hair-raising dispatches (and) bombastic scoops on heroism," he said.

The young writer did see action and described it well, even helping fellow reporter Edward Marshall to safety when he had been shot. Crane recorded the last dispatch from the dying Marshall and filed it before he filed his own, which eventually landed him in some hot water with his editors, who accused him of disloyalty when he returned to America.

Crane quit the World and moved to England and continued to write fiction. He had come under heavy criticism from proper Victorians because of his choice of a mate -- a former brothel keeper from Miami who helped him run up massive debts while in Europe. Crane faced a tougher foe than critics or bill collectors, however. He contracted tuberculosis and spent his last months in a desperate attempt to find relief.

That attempt failed, and on June 5, 1900, he died. He was 28 years old.

__________

(Much of the informtion here about Crane's journalism comes from Denis Bryant, Pulitzer: A Life, John Wiley, 2001.)

James Madison on freedom of the press

• We have seen an erosion of freedom of speech and the press in the last few years, so it might be good to remind ourselves of what one of the Founding Fathers had to say about it.

James Madison:

• Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
– First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

• Whatever facilitates a general intercourse of sentiments, as good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people ... is favorable to liberty.
– National Gazette, 1791

• It is to the press mankind are indebted for having dispelled the clouds which long encompassed religion, for disclosing her genuine lustre, and disseminating her salutary doctrines.
– Speech in the Virginia Assembly, 1799

Campaign finance laws, laws against hate speech, mandated disclaimers in political advertising -- all these may seem like good ideas, but they come with a cost. The cost is allowing government (courts, bureaucrats, legislators) to get the idea that it's okay to restrict what people say.

It isn't.

Writers writing: Anthony Trollope

• Anthony Trollope wrote for money. He made out a schedule and stuck to it.

The way writers write - their habits, productivity, quirks, methods of procrastination, etc. - fascinate a lot of people, including me.

One of my favorite stories in this vein is that of Anthony Trollope, the mid-19th century British novelist and author of the Barsetshire series and the Palliser novels. Trollope's books were highly popular in his day, and his work has retained many fans in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Trollope was manic about his writing. He would arise at 5:30 every morning and write for at least two-and-a-half hours. He would produce 250 words every 15 minutes. In his early years as a novelist, he had a job with the Post Office that required some train travel, and he would keep this writing schedule even if he were traveling.

Trollope saw novel-writing as work that had to be done. He wasn't interested in inspiration nearly as much as productivity.

When I have commenced a book, I have always prepared a diary divided into weeks . . . In this I have entered day by day the number of pages that I have written, so that if at any time I slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there staring me in the face - and demanding of me increased labour.

Trollope made no secret of the fact that he wrote for money - something the critics of his day disdained.

• The Anthony Trollope website
  
  
• The Anthony Trollope society

The audacity and hope of Barak Obama, the writer

• Barak Obama wrote his own book -- no ghostwriters or co-authors. He did the literary heavy-lifting himself.

It was with plenty of audacity and no small amount of hope that Barak Obama sat down in the early 1990s to write his life story.

He had just turned 30 in 1991 and could reasonably assume that much was ahead of him -- an assumption that would be true, of course -- but he also knew that his life to that point had been like no one else's whom he knew:

• The son of a white mother from Kansas and an African father from Kenya;
  
  
• Raised in Indonesia, Africa and Hawaii;
  
  
• Intellectually brilliant, confirmed by the fact that he was editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama's defining experience to that point had been his relationship with his father, with him he had lost touch early in life and then re-established contact. Shortly after that, however, his father died, and Obama traveled to Kenya to find out more about the man. There, many of the images he had of his father are shattered. He finds that his father had slid from being a brilliant and respected academic to a drunk and an object of pity.

The small amount of fame that Obama achieved as being the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review netted him a call from a literary agent, a book proposal and a publisher. His first idea was to write about race relations, but that didn't suit him and where he was, according to an article about the book by Janny Scott published this week by the New York Times.

That journey of discovery through the images he had of his father is what he decided he had to tackle. What he produced was Dreams From My Father (Amazon).

He did so with confidence and flair -- even audacity -- using composite characters, invented dialogue, out-of-sequence events and a variety of literary techniques. He has since come under some criticism for his account. Inquiring journalists and political opposition researchers say things didn't happen the way he said they happened.

But there is one fact that no one disputes. Obama wrote his own book.

He struggled with sentences, phrasing and structure. He edited, rewrote and rethought.

The words are his and his alone. He didn't pay a ghostwriter or take on some partner to do the literary heavy-lifting. The writing is his creation. In this age of spin and carefully calibrated public pronouncements, getting an unobstructed look into the mind of a prominent political figure does not happen very often.

Obama wrote his own story. In my book, that counts for a lot.

Links:

• Janny Scott, The Story of Obama, Written by Obama, The New York Times, May 18, 2008
  
  
• Paul Watkins, A Promise of Redemption, New York Times, August 6, 1995 -- a review of Dreams From My Father

Jim Webb, writer - and also a senator

• A writer is supposed to "render to the audience things they haven't seen." So says Jim Webb, writer. He's also a senator.

Politicians who put their names on a book and claim authorship are not unusual. The ones who actually write the book are unusual indeed.

And the politician who says of himself, "I am principally a writer": Now that is rare.

And that is Jim Webb, the freshman senator from Virginia.

Webb makes that legitimate claim as he goes around the country touting his new book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America.

Webb was interviewed by Terry Gross on National Public Radio's Fresh Air this week, and much of the interview deals with Webb's book, his background and the political issues of the day. But about 24 minutes into the 30-minute interview, Webb talks about his becoming a writer, something he "never thought he would end up as," after he had returned from Vietnam and left his military career.

Webb wrote Fields of Fire, a novel about Vietnam, in 1978, and the book has become a classic in the area of writing about the Vietnam combat experience.

Webb has written five other novels and a number of non-fiction works as well. He was an embedded journalist with troops in Afghanistan in 2004.

The duty of a writer, Webb says, is to "render to the audience things they haven't seen."

And the process of writing, he adds, is to study something, think deeply about it, and then "go on the record."

Not a bad trait for a politician.