Black on White

My friend H.W.C., out in Mt. Vernon, N. Y., thinks little of columnists as a class and less of this columnist in particular.

Reluctantly he admits that “sometimes” he does like this brand-new pillar of Anglo-Jewish journalism But it doesn’t have enough “straight-from-the shoulder stuff…. words written at white heat, with the typewriter melting as they strike.”

“Instead of molten lead, what do I get?” he asks, and answers: “Hmph! An occasional shower of lukewarm ashes, with a couple of icicles thrown in for variety.”

After uncharitably analyzing the lukewarm ashes and lukewarm icicles, H.W.C. really gets into stride:

“Gene, it’s a dead give-away. Don’t ever, ever ask readers to contribute. A plea of that sort will only get responses from the print-stuck boobs who want to see their names in the paper and don’t care what appears over them. The reader who pays his money and wants to be amused or aroused for his three cents, gets only a pain in the epiglottis at such undignified appeals for help.

“In Monday’s column you were positively shameless in your request for succor. Give, you wept, with great big glycerine tears that I could almost see coming out of the picture at the top of your column, give or I perish.”

The only consolation, now that I’ve been caught in the act of literary sch#orring, is that the great glittering tears were so patently synthetic. Just glycerine globules. Other readers, if any, must also have seen that these were no product of the lachrymal glands. I am not really perishing. Just showmanship, H.W.C. And it worked. It brought indubitable proof that you read my column. You certainly could not have disliked them so emphatically if you didn’t read them carefully and regularly.

In fact, that is probably why column conductors try so hard to get a rise out of their three-cent customers. They yearn for testimony that someone other than the type-setter reads their stuff.

In the beginning a new columnist leans back on the assumption that his own wife reads him. After a week or two, however, that assumption is exploded. Casually, though with thumping heart, he then broaches the subject to the city editor, the managing editor and the publisher. Surely, he consoles himself, these dignitaries must glance through his daily contribution.

“As I pointed out in my column the other day,” he remarks with calculated nonchalance.

“Did you really?” editor and publisher respond, giving him to understand by their tone that they have more significant work to do than reading his column. After that, he begins to watch his mail, in the faint hope of a letter, no matter how insulting, to prove that someone somewhere has read and misunderstood.

This need for readers, of course, is no more than a superstition. The press is cluttered with regular features and entire departments which, I am sure, nobody has ever read. Their authors flourish on neglect. As soon as some body actually reads them, the myth of their popularity and indispensibility will be bankrupted.

But with me this consciousness that someone somewhere reads my words has become a bad habit. Like most foreign correspondents stationed in dictated capitals, I could always count on one set of earnest and persevering readers. My dispatches might be ignored by the editors and the general public. But at least they were carefully studied by the censors.

For years I thus had a group of able and critical-minded men who were paid to read whatever Lyons wrote, including his personal correspondence. They read not only every line, but between the lines and around them. Whatever the bosses and the paying customers might think of me, I knew that I was not being entirely ignored. This sense of human contact was a warming and stimulating influence. More than once, consciously and otherwise, I was stimulated to write in things especially for the censors, for the one audience of which I was sure, no matter what show I put on.

So you will understand, H.W.C., why I crave contributions from readers attesting that they have read me. Now that the paid censors are no more, I am simply afraid of the dark, journalistically speaking.