First Among Columnists

Of all literary forms the column is the least rated and respected. As ephemeral as a sneeze, columns come and go unlamented, their creators supplanted by another often without fanfare. One day they’re here, the next they’re not. Who knows where columnists then go, perhaps to the nearest bar to drown their sorrows. Occasionally, a publisher, overcome with wishful thinking, gathers columns into a book, which - best case scenario - helps fill a Christmas stocking. More often than not, though, there is no resurrection, no afterlife, no sense that they ever existed.

I wrote columns on and off for several decades and was constantly aware that longevity was not part of the deal. When anyone was daft enough to suggest I should consider republishing some of them I always resisted. Who’d want to read them? More to the point, why would I want to reread them? They were the past, history, a moment white - as Burns said of snow falling in the river - then melts for ever. Let them crumble to dust with the newspapers and magazines in which they appeared.

Having said that, I always rescue collections of columns from the indignity of charity shops. These now number several hundred, from cookery columns by MFK Fisher and Elizabeth David, sports columns by Hugh McIlvanney and Roger Angell, political columns by Christopher Hitchens and George Orwell, and humorous columns by Miles Kington, Michael Frayn and Jeffrey Barnard, who was infamous for the non-appearance of his Low Life column in the Spectator (“Jeffrey Barnard is unwell”).

My favourite columnist is Flann O’Brien, one of several pseudonyms used by Brian O’Nolan (1911-66) who, from 1939 to his death, contributed a daily satirical column to the Irish Times. This was an incredible achievement, not least because for much of that time he held down a job in the civil service and was drinking as if every day was Hogmanay. If there was a point to O’Brien’s columns it was to amuse, usually at the expense of pompous panjandrums. A perfect example of this was his inspired “Book Handling” service, which for a fee offered to rough up books owned by philistines to make them look well-thumbed.

The importance of columnists to the places where they appear cannot be underestimated. Readers relate to them in a way that they do not to other journalists, following their travails and trains of thought. Meanwhile, the writers set a tone which helps define that of their parent publication. The best columnists have healthy egos, fertile imaginations, quick wits, rich hinterlands and an ability to write well at a lick. As anyone who has inhabited a column knows, deadlines approach as fast as tax demands and occupy more head space than a PhD. I have known columnists who, once given the green light by their editor, were afflicted by writer’s block. In such circumstances, some succumb to alcohol. Another solution was to follow Beryl Bainbridge’s advice given to aspiring novelists when struggling to make progress: open a book - any book - and ‘borrow’ the first sentence that takes your fancy. Which is fine as far as it goes, as long as you remember to delete it before the finished piece goes to print.

Until relatively recently, columnising was a male-dominated domain. Of the several hundred contributors to The Penguin Book of Columnists (1997), very few are women, even allowing for the rampant chauvinism of another age. The same book has few Scots, surprising given their disproportionate influence in Grub Street’s golden era. One such was well-read Ian Mackay (1898-1952), from Wick. Starting at the John O’Groat’s Journal, he progressed to the News Chronicle, for which over a seven-year span he wrote over a million words. “His subjects,” notes Christopher Silvester, editor of The Penguin Book of Columnists, “were serendipitous and quirky and infused with his learning and his love of Greek mythology, Socrates, Shakespeare, Dr Johnson, Dickens, Sherlock Holmes, George Bernard Shaw and music-hall songs.”

Another Scot featured by Silvester is James Cameron (1911-85), whom many would choose as one of the best - if not the best - British journalists of his era. I don’t doubt his credentials - he wrote eye-witness accounts of the atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, the Chinese invasion of Tibet and the Korean War, as well as portraits of Mao Tse-Tung, Churchill, Stalin and his power-obsessed boss Lord Beaverbrook - but was Cameron a great columnist? Maybe not, but if you are at all interested in what makes a first-rank journalist seek out his memoir, Point of Departure (1967).

So who - I hear you scream - is the best ever Scottish columnist? Ignoring the claims of John Junor, aka the “sage of Auchtermuchty” (catchphrase “pass me the sickbag”), Ian Jack, who was never happier than when writing about trains, boats and planes, and George Mackay Brown, too couthy for my taste, my nominee is James ‘Scotty’ Reston. Who he, do I hear you ask? Born in Clydebank in 1909 and educated in Dunbartonshire, he emigrated with his parents to the United States eleven years later. A controversial figure - not least because of his adoration of Henry Kissinger - Reston (d.1995), twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, broke stories like Donald Trump does promises. He declined the editorship of the Washington Post and wrote copiously for the New York Times. More about him can be read in Deadline: A Memoir (1991). For now, though, here’s a flavour of his columnising from the NYT, 15 February, 1963:

“President Kennedy is a puzzle. One day he pleads with the country to sacrifice, and the next he pleads with it to accept a tax cut. One day he venerates brains, and the next he tries to popularise walking.

“Trying to popularise walking in America is like trying to popularise Prohibition in Kentucky. Asking a citizen to walk instead of ride in America is like asking a Frenchman to drink milk instead of wine. And the last French premier who did that, Pierre Mendès-France, was booted out of office.

“President Kennedy himself is a living symbol of the dangers of exercise. So long as he concentrated on history, literature and politics, he was all right. But the minute he picked up a spade and started digging a hole for an Arbor Day tree in Canada, his back buckled and he’s been a rocking-chair case ever since.”