What newspapers are like

 Being a newspaper editor in a small town is, as my grandfather would say, like unto this:

A prominent businessman calls you and says that he was arrested — unfairly, mind you — for driving under the influence of alcohol. He asks you to keep his name out of the paper.

You explain that you can’t do that.

In a big city, that would be the end of it. But in a small community, you will bump into this fellow at the grocery store. He will still be angry.

And so, in some small way, every day of your life is a challenge to stand for truth — or, if that’s too pretentious, it’s a challenge to stand for facts that can be verified. It’s not heroic. But then again, you can forget about the idea of ever doing something as mundane as buying tomatoes in peace.

Here’s William Allen White, the editor of The Emporia Gazette, again:

Boston people pick up their morning papers and read with shuddering horror of the crimes of their daily villain, yet read without that find thrill that we have when we hear that Al Ludorph is in jail again in Emporia. For we all know Al; we’ve ridden in his hack a score of times. And we take up our paper with the story of his frailties as readers who begin the narrative of an old friend’s adventures. …

In lists of wedding guests in our papers we know just what poor kin was remembered, and what was snubbed. We know when we read of a bankruptcy just which member of the firm or family brought it on, by extravagance or sloth.

• Source: William Allen White’s essay “The Country Newspaper” appeared in Harper’s in May 1916. I have it in Harper Essays, edited by Henry Seidel Canby; New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1927, pp. 235-45.

The choices that news organizations make

 Matthew Dowd, a political pundit, noted that the major broadcast networks rushed to carry King Charles’s speech. None carried President Biden’s primetime address on threats to American democracy.

It was a telling comment about priorities.

When I was a young reporter, I’d have said that fact reflects the difference between newspapers and broadcast news. I would have argued that the press, by and large, was more serious.

But then I became an editor, and the responsibility of editing a newspaper that was worthy of a literate, diverse and well informed community knocked a little of that hubris out of me.

Now I’d say this is closer to the truth: Newspapers are written and edited by a great variety of people with a great variety gifts and limitations. You’ll find, among writers and editors, enormous differences in politics, competence and talent. About the only thing all these people have in common is that they’re fallible, and their mistakes end up in print. Their errors can be corrected, but not erased.

It’s a humbling experience.

When I saw Dowd’s comment in my daily reading of Michael Leddy’s Orange Crate Art, I thought of William Allen White, the old editor of the Emporia Gazette. He wrote:

Of course our country papers are provincial. We know that as well as any one. But then, so far as that goes, we know that all papers are provincial. How we laugh at the provincialisms of the New York and Boston and Chicago papers when we visit the cities!

I was lucky to work for the newspaper in an interesting place: Galveston, Texas. The people there read the newspaper. They would have expected more about the president’s speech about threats to the democracy and less about the new king.

• Source: William Allen White’s essay “The Country Newspaper” appeared in Harper’s in May 1916. I have it in Harper Essays, edited by Henry Seidel Canby; New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1927, pp. 235-45.

The reverent study of 'bad' books

 If you did not detect a tone of tongue in cheek in yesterday’s note, my apologies.

My first love in college was philosophy, a field in which all, or almost all, the literature is made up of ideas that failed in some way.

The problem of bad books

 I think almost all people who speak of getting “bad” books out of our libraries are dangerous idiots who would have gladly and thoughtlessly joined the Nazi Party in the 1930s. Almost all, but not quite.

John Maynard Keynes brought up the idea of an Index Expurgatorius 101 years ago. He had in mind a process by which bad books would disappear from general circulation. Perhaps, like some Confederate monuments, they’d disappear into museum vaults. But they wouldn’t get in the way of people trying to learn.

Keynes’s Treatise on Probability, published in 1921, had a lengthy bibliography, and by way of explanation he said this:

• He hadn’t read all the books listed.

• The list was too long and included “dead treatises and ghostly memoirs,” i.e., bad books.

• Fewer than 100 useful books had been written on the subject. Libraries of course had more.

Then he said this:

At present a bibliographer takes pride in numerous entries; but he would be a more useful fellow, and the labors of research would be lightened, if he could practice deletion and bring into existence an accredited Index Expurgatorius.

Keynes was no supporter of ignorant people who want to burn any book they don’t have the ability to grasp. He knew that the process of getting rid of the bad, the confused and the outdated could only “by accomplished by the slow mills of the collective judgment of the learned.”

But he was musing aloud because he knew that the way to encourage students to study a challenging topic was to have them read good books, rather than bad ones.

And so we’re back to the idea of a canon.

The problem is always: Who gets to decide which is better — indeed, which is acceptable?

I like Keynes’s suggestion, “the collective judgment of the learned.”

By contrast, I don’t think you could do worse than the State Board of Education in Texas. The board’s judgment is narrow, rather than collective. It celebrates the ignorant and excludes the learned.

Thinking about what you have

 One other note on Tantalos: The idea of what we have is pretty clear in some cases, but the concept can get fuzzy.

A small child is absolutely clear about whether she has the promised ice cream. But when we talk of the relationships we have, it’s not so clear what having is. What claims can we make about the friendship we have with the a god? Can we really claim the love of a child we just put in the soup?

Here’s a trivial example of having, perhaps easier to understand because it doesn’t involve people:

I grew up among rural folks who prized having land. That’s the kind of having they valued. They were proud when they passed land down to their children.

I love public — not private — land. I use it in the sense that I walk it almost every day and look at the changes in vegetation and wildlife. I know it. I’m familiar with it. I love this land, but don’t own it, except in the sense that we are all owners and trustees of public land.

I claim that I have land. My sense of having is different than the one I inherited from ancestors.

A tantalizing story from the acient Greeks

 One of the stranger stories in Greek mythology is about Tantalos, a mortal who got to be an intimate friend of Zeus.

Tantalos was invited to dine on Olympus and returned the social favor at one of his estates. He got concerned about whether there was enough food to go around and so he boiled his son Pelops in the stew.

The gods and goddesses were outraged — except for Demeter. Distracted by grief at the loss of her daughter Persephone, Demeter cleaned up the left the shoulder.

Zeus brought back Pelops by collecting the leftovers and boiling them again in the same cauldron. Gods and goddesses provided the breath of life and some other essentials.

Hephaistos, the craftsman among the gods, had to make a new shoulder blade out of ivory. Otherwise, Pelops was as good as new.

Zeus punished Tantalos by putting him in a creek under the overhanging branches of a wondrous fruit tree. But every time he tried to get a handful of water or a piece of fruit, it slipped away.

I heard my father and his friends use the word “tantalizing.” I don’t hear that word anymore.

The Greeks used the myth to talk about people who have things they can’t enjoy. Some of the tales get to interesting questions about what we humans really do have.

No two versions of the story agree, which is one of the things I like about the Greeks. If someone didn’t like a story he heard from his parents, he changed it.

• Robert Graves’s account is in The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 25-31. Graves says the whole business about “tantalizing” is a misreading of the myth: Tantalos was in agony not from thirst but from fear of drowning.

George Eliot's way with characters

 Virginia Woolf was a wonderful reader. She kept a commonplace book. She wrote reviews and essays. She noticed things that other readers miss.

In her essay “George Eliot,” Woolf famously described Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

I think her observation about fictional characters is helpful to writers:

Thus one can muse and speculate about the greater number of George Eliot’s characters and find, even in the least important, a roominess and margin where those qualities lurk which she has no call to bring from obscurity.

I love that phrase “roominess and margin.” Many of George Eliot’s characters are capable of who knows what. You can sense the potential for crime, social gaffs, quarrels just beneath the surface. And that’s true of characters that are just passing by.

• Virginia Woolf’s essay “George Eliot” was published in The Times Literary Supplement on Nov. 20, 1919.