Posted on 12/03/2005 4:01:45 PM PST by aculeus
From Evelyn Waugh to Michael Frayn, novelists have portrayed journalists as bibulous, cynical and slothful. But for Christopher Hitchens, the tales of 'unredeemed squalor' and fiddled expenses evoke nostalgia for a vanished age
James Bond does not make an appearance until Part Two of what is perhaps his most polished adventure, From Russia with Love. And when he has been briefed by M and outfitted by Q, and told what is expected of him, he suffers a mild mid-life crisis. What, he asks as the plane takes him towards the Golden Horn, would his younger self think of the man now so "tarnished with years of treachery and ruthlessness and fear", sent off "to pimp for England"? Eventually dismissing this as an idle or feeble mood, he reflects further: "What-might-have-been was a waste of time. Follow your fate and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple - or dead."
Yes, well, that seems to put the profession nicely in its place, and indeed in its context. I read those words when I was a schoolboy in Cambridge in the early 1960s and had already decided that only journalism would do.
Not long afterwards, I was strolling along Tenison Road and saw, I swear, a wheezing second- or even third-hand motor belching towards me. Behind its wheel sat a man of impossibly fly-blown and lugubrious appearance; his skin sallow and wrinkled, an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth; his eyes like piss-holes in the snow. Only one detail was required to complete the scene, and at first my disordered senses almost refused to register it. Stuck in the corner of his windscreen was a faint and tattered card that read "PRESS".
(Excerpt) Read more at books.guardian.co.uk ...
"...I shall have to say that I pity those now in the trade who won't remember the atmosphere of that little enclave between Ludgate Circus and the Strand, with its byways and courts and alleys. Yes, the smell of printer's ink, the thunder of the presses like the engine-room of the Titanic. Yes, the lights blazing in the black-glass palace of the old Daily Express, and the vans swinging out on their way to catch the overnight trains with the first edition. Yes, the fog around Blackfriars Station. Yes, the exorbitant padding of the night-shift by printers with names like M Mouse.
Yes, the suicidal imbibing in the King and Keys, or the Punch, or El Vino. Yes, the demented whims of the latest proprietor. Yes, the overflowing ashtrays and the pounding of ancient upright typewriters. Yes, the callousness and gallows humour."
I said YES!
Great post!
Pinging ...
Far too good to die of neglect.
Hitch showing his chops bump...
The points been made by others but UK Saturday papers are rather good while America's Saturday papers are a waste of time.
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