'Not a Terribly Populated Premise'

An old reporting colleague reminds me of a column I wrote for our newspaper in 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait, during the prelude to the first Gulf War known as Operation Desert Shield. Hundreds marched down Central Avenue in Albany, N.Y., protesting President Bush’s “saber-rattling,” as the anachronistic cliché has it. I walked with the crowd, gauging the mood, which I recall was largely celebrative rather than sullen or angry, and talking to marchers about why they were protesting. I sensed that many of the older marchers were indulging in nostalgia for their younger days.

The reason my friend remembers the column is that I included lines from a W.H. Auden poem, a gesture that still strikes him as amusingly eccentric. “Who else would do that?” he asked. We can no longer remember which poem it was, and my clipping of the column is lost somewhere in a file cabinet, but I see no conflict between reporting and the use of an appropriate literary tag, especially in a column, a form in which you’re granted more stylistic flexibility. Obviously, the thing to avoid is pretentiousness, showing off one’s high-toned culture.

The column reminds me of how much I enjoyed leaving the office and talking to people – old-fashioned street reporting. A.J. Liebling used to say that a good reporter reports with his feet. The notion of a journalist sitting at his desk all day rather than working his beat is repellent and doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Another reporter at the same paper used to say when working his beat that he was “on the run from editors and creditors.” I’m reminded of an interview Murray Kempton did in 1994 on CNN’s Booknotes when he published Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events. The host, Brian Lamb, asks where he works, where he writes:

“I go to the office, yes. I usually go down to the street and try to find something to cover. The inside of my head is really not a terribly populated premise, so I usually try to go around and get a story about somebody else, not me, and then feed off – I’ve often said I’ve never written a good piece that didn’t have a quote from somebody else, even if it was only in a book, so that I do like to get around. I think that’s the fun of journalism.”

[In the comment below, a resourceful reader finds the column in question. Thank you, TSI. I see that I misremembered the date and have no memory of that drunk.]