Greed on Grub Street

THURSDAY, MAY 29, 2014
The Weekly Screed (#678)

Greed on Grub Street

by David Benjamin

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” — Samuel Johnson

MADISON, Wis. — The other day, optimistically, I clicked my way over to Vox, Ezra Klein’s spiffy new online news site. But, as soon as I got there, I was irked. Vox’s stories were abundant, varied and lively. I counted 17 different bylines just on the cover page. This was all good. The thing that bothered me — which also bothers me at websites for the Huffington Post, Bloomberg, Yahoo, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, BBC, Google News, USA Today, The Guardian and even the lunatic-fringe World News Daily — is that I just walked right in. No bouncer.

No token. No turnstile. No ticket. Free lunch.

To put the problem in perspective, we have to go back in time, to the first fulltime news job I ever had, in Mansfield, Mass. My boss was an amiable second-generation job-press pro named Arnold, who told me that if we felt like it, we could donate the newspaper — for free — to every subscriber in town, because ads provided all of our serious revenue. “But if you give the news away, for nothing,” said Arnold, “that’s the value your readers assign to it. Nothing.”

Over nine years, I pumped out roughly four million words (earning about three cents a word) as Arnold’s editor. Then finally, I scored a job at a Cambridge consulting outfit where — hearing that I’d been hired to write — one senior consultant scoffed: “What do we need a writer for? Everybody can write.”

We owe a more famous version of this sentiment to basketball coaching great Bob Knight, who once glared down at a roomful of sportswriters and said, “All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.”

To a significant degree, my consultant and Coach Knight captured the spirit of the zeitgeist. If writing is simply a matter of spelling “cucumber” correctly on a grocery list, it has no more redeeming social importance — perhaps less — than the ability to brew a latte or unclog a toilet.

This is the writer’s dilemma. He sees his calling as a craft that begins with talent but requires a lifetime’s application of curiosity, learning, erudition, constant practice, intellectual rigor, thick skin and stylistic razzle-dazzle. He perceives a discipline as arduous as law, medicine, economics, engineering, even management consulting. But among all these professions, only the writer is asked, routinely — even by some of his fellow ink-stained wretches — to work without pay.

Most writers on the Web work for “recognition,” but no money. Hardly any of Arianna Huffington’s countless bloggers ever see a dime for their contribution to her lucrative website — which is free (that is to say, worthless) to its readers.

Those of us who try to do it for a living (or who are driven, by some inner demon, to do it whether it earns a living or not) insist that writing is hard. One of my ironic proofs of this proposition is Jill, whom I knew in high school. She was a goody two-shoes blonde-bombshell who gushed with school spirit and got straight A’s. She ran the cheerleading squad like an incongruously bubbly drill sergeant, dated every team captain and quarterback in the tri-state area, and charmed the flint right of off vice-principal Wendt, the Heinrich Himmler of hallway discipline.

Despite all these handicaps, I adopted Jill, and discovered that beneath her golden aura, there lurked a Makioka dark spot. Jillsey couldn’t write. I mean, she could hammer out a report on the principle exports of Peru or a term paper on Alexander Hamilton’s beef with Aaron Burr. But she labored mightily. She had no sparkle. Her prose failed to flow. Her “A” always derived from superior research, meticulous margins, sublime penmanship, sheer doggedness and midnight oil.

Of course, I made fun of her writing, and kept doing it, for — well, close to 50 years now. But today, there’s a certain hollowness to my mockery. After graduating from Wellesley, Jill studied law and ended up on the faculty at Georgetown, where she rewrote the practice of law writing.

Long before Jill hit Georgetown, she had figured out that writing is hard. But she also divined that anyone can write clearly and effectively by following formula, and that formulae can be designed for all sorts of practical writing.

Jill, having obeyed her English teachers slavishly (unlike me, who tended to feud with them) and followed Strunk & White without doubt or deviation, applied this approach to legal writing. She saw that most lawyers wrote briefs that were disorderly, incoherent, turgid, redundant, often ungrammatical and rarely brief. Summoning her inner cheerleading sergeant, Jill sallied forth to transform legal prose in a series of textbooks, including (with Mary Bernard Ray) her seminal masterwork, Legal Writing: Getting It Right and Getting It Written. Jill, perhaps just to spite me, became the acknowledged writing expert in her field. (And what am I?)

Of course, Jill’s books are hardly Dr. Seuss. Her prose doesn’t glow and lilt. It does not dance across the page, inciting bursts of laughter or tears of rage. Her tightly structured instructionals are functional, pragmatic and formulaic. But they’re also testimony that writing is, goddammit, hard.

I think Jill was able to make herself into a writing teacher partly because she possessed an entirely disparate talent — for music. She plays the piano fluently and sings up a veritable storm. Perhaps subconsciously, Jill applied the mathematical order inherent in music composition to the less tidy carpentry of language.

To illustrate this hypothesis, let’s say a paragraph is like a melody. A music student tinkles out the basic tune of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” on the white keys of the piano. Nice. A little dull. But hand the same tune to Julie Andrews on top of a mountain in Austria, and you have something actually wonderful. And then, taken up by John Coltrane — with Steve Davis, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones — that simple melody becomes an intricate, elusive motif, weaving in and out, turned, colored, expanded and illuminated through 14 minutes of hypnotic improvisation. That basic starting paragraph, “My Favorite Things,” becomes a tone poem in jazz — which, of course, is the least remunerative music you could play.

Jazz musicians often work for little more than drinks — or just for the fun of it, jamming in the wee hours, with only one another to listen. Novelists, also, work on spec, but we don’t even have other novelists to jam with. Not that we’d want to. I mean, Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, mano a mano, flinging metaphors?

Jazz and writing are both hard — sometimes on the audience. A reader who “reviewed” one of my books on Amazon gave up after four or five pages, because she thought I was “showing off. ” Used too many “long words.”

Which brings me back around to Vox, which contains a lot of writing, the occasional long word and probably, here and there, a daring sentence of sheer improv. Most of all — because its journalists are serious — Vox contains a fair measure of painstaking research and fact-checking, exposition and analysis, all of this performed in solitude under deadline pressure. This is hard work that’s worth getting paid for — directly and up-front, by the people who read it — lest they esteem it naught.

Arnold laid it out a long time ago. It doesn’t have to be much — a dime or a quarter. A nickel even. But Ezra! Man, you gotta get something.