My column today is headed “The plague of ‘trash talk,’ &c.” I keep seeing sports videos — maybe I should put that phrase in quotation marks — that celebrate “trash talk” more than the sports themselves. Anyway, harrumph. And that column is here.
One of my items concerns Lance Morrow, the great journalist who died a couple of weeks ago. William F. Buckley Jr. called him “a show-stopping wordsmith, one of those masters associated with Time magazine, in the company of James Agee, Whittaker Chambers, and Robert Hughes.” Morrow was one of the writers who turned me on to journalism in the first place.
There’s an old-fashioned phrase: “turned me on.” Does anyone under 50 use it?
In a column last month, I addressed the subject of influences. George F. Will had just marked his 50th anniversary as a Washington Post columnist. It was Murray Kempton who turned him on to columny. (That was William Safire’s phrase for column-writing: “columny.”) Kempton was a great favorite of WFB’s too. There was no journalist he respected more. “A great artist,” he called him, “and a great man.”
Writing his anniversary column, Will quoted some Kempton. He chose a passage about President Eisenhower campaigning for reelection (1956):
In Miami he had walked carefully by the harsher realities, speaking some 20 feet from an airport drinking fountain labeled “Colored” and saying that the condition it represented was more amenable to solution by the hearts of men than by laws, and complimenting Florida as “typical today of what is best in America,” a verdict which might seem to some contingent on finding out what happened to the Negro snatched from the Wildwood jail Sunday.
A “sinuous” sentence, Will said (75 words), and “stiletto-sharp.”
In my own column, I mentioned that young Richard Brookhiser had been impressed by James Jackson Kilpatrick, writing in National Review. Specifically:
A little after 8 o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, July 11, John W. McCormack came before the Democratic Convention of 1972. He stood at the rostrum like an aging heron on a cypress stump, white-haired, gaunt-eyed. Behind him, at eighty, were sixty years of distinguished service to his party; before him, a sea of indifference. So might the last of the pterodactyls have surveyed the primeval swamps.
“Kilpo” went on to write:
It is a fair guess that one-third to a half of the delegates had never heard of John W. McCormack, lately retired as Speaker of the House. They could not exactly place the name. The old gentleman spoke for maybe ten minutes, competing hoarsely against a swelling babble of conversation in the hall. There came a pattering of perfunctory applause, and when we looked up the stump was vacant and the heron was gone.
In 1995, WFB reviewed a book by Lance Morrow: Heart: A Memoir. WFB said, “He writes as if the language were at once a dutiful son, an enchanting mistress, a Strad violin, and Houston Control Center, programmed to deliver his message to the moon and the stars. The language is at his bidding, as completely as to any other writer alive.” WFB quoted several passages from the book, including this:
My mother and father did not know about the concentration camps then, of course. Later, when they did, the movies and photographs (cordwood corpses, waxy stick-boned arms and legs, the unbearable nakedness and impassioned objectivity of human life-disposal) formed the conscience of a time, formed mine, certainly — melted the raw elements of the mind, as if in some terrible new fire, and left it, when it cooled, reconfigured.
Yesterday, Leila Molana-Allen, a special correspondent for PBS, wrote this, from Syria: “I will never unsee what I saw today.” She had seen a prison, and its human remains. I will not quote the rest of the passage. You can read it here. (And pleased be warned: There are accompanying pictures.)
In his review of Morrow’s memoir, WFB also quoted this: “My father had undoubtedly been marked by the Depression, shadowed by it, chilled by it.” Alcohol played a part in societal hostility. This is how Morrow captures it:
Alcohol always got the boys started. A bully gets inflamed at the black face near, a certain energy of viciousness brought up by the booze needs its release and the energy goes to the boot to kick the nigger. . . . The redneck grievance rises in the drinker’s brain — the opportunistic rage, maybe nothing more complicated than old tribal antipathy, . . . all very basic and mean, no subtleties required.
Not every passage that WFB quotes is so stark. There is some poetic prose about the Bahamas and its waters. When WFB esteems someone, particularly a fellow writer: That arrests the attention.
Like many another American, I spent years reading Lance Morrow on the back page of Time magazine. (And George Will on the back page of Newsweek.) The journalistic environment is different now. But there are still gems, throughout the landscape.