Point of View: On the Button

I’ve just reread some of my columns and I am struck by how relentlessly optimistic, how cheery I am, as — if you’ve read me for any length of time, for half a century, say — you will probably agree.

“I’ve been reading you,” a fellow I once met at a Canio’s book reading said, adding, with a sigh — yes, yes, it was a sigh, though not an unamiable one, I thought, one of a fellow sufferer rather — “for weeks . . . and weeks . . . and weeks. . . .”

Maybe it’s the nature of the beast. As Robert Gottlieb has said to the writers he’s edited, or at least to some of them, “Don’t write, type.” 

Ev Rattray once said to me, when I asked him how long I should go on, that a page and a half would do, which is to say about 450 words. It got so that on a typewriter I could almost hit the mark blindfolded. When my synapses began to cease firing, I would take the blindfold off and marvel at how close I’d come.

Norton Mockridge told me when I first began here that I tended to overwrite, and after a while I figured out what he meant. Nothing too much. Get in and get out. Verbose ist verboten. 

Though when computers came along, you could no longer see the page unrolling from the carriage, nor could you anymore delight in exxxing out whole paragraphs, or in ripping pages out, scrunching them up and hurling them toward a wastebasket, invariably wide of the mark. 

With computers, you were less argumentative, you just went along, the screen was clean, there were no smudges, the process was mesmerizing, and if you wanted to know if you were done, you went up to “tools” and asked for the word count, to keep yourself in check, no longer being availed of the  proverbial page and a half. 

And maybe, in some insidious way, computers, as opposed to typewriters, lend themselves to optimism — how depressing — though I tend to think whether you’re an optimist or not dates to infancy. It’s all there, your character is pretty much obvious from the beginning. 

So, how many words is this? Ah, 380. I’ve fallen short of the mark. I must think of something else to say, something significant, well, if not significant, something. . . . Ah, have you noticed all these words that all of a sudden you see everywhere. Words like “buffeted” and “twee” and “roiled” and “reaching out” and “upcoming” and “ongoing.” I fear I’ve been ongoing too long. Ah, 450, on the button!