Newspapering’s days of glory

By Dan K. THOMASSON

Tribune News Service

WASHINGTON

As the newspaper business grinds seemingly inexorably toward extinction, it has left behind a treasure trove of literary material to be mined either as fiction or history or a little bit of both. The romance of the ink-stained wretch may be here a long, long time.

The latest, and a most certainly worthwhile, example of such creativity comes from Crockett White in a debut novel that in 336 pages portrays the byplay, pathos and struggles between journalism and politics before the tweets and Twitters. All the elements are there – greed, rampant ambition, hate, love, tragedy, success – presented by an author who obviously has firsthand knowledge of his subject.

If you recognize some of those who flow across this landscape, don’t be surprised. “West End” presents a cast of characters who can only be described as universal. Had you strolled into any city room of the day or knocked on the door of any courthouse or state house in the land, you would have likely found the characters’ duplicates.

White’s Horatio Alger, a character named David Arthur, hails from the “wrong side of the river” and narrates with a mixture of awe and dismay, alternating between utter dislike for some and genuine affection for others while rising from his lower-class upbringing and the bowel s of the newspaper morgue to the top of the reportorial ladder covering presidential politics.

It’s an amusing journey for him, one filled with bizarre anecdotes and delicious tales of newspapering in almost the last of its better days, put forth in a descriptive style not uncommon among the premier Southern writers of the Irish variety. White’s storytelling is imbedded with choice nuggets that remind one that the Irish could have ruled the world without lifting anything heavier than a pen or sharper than their tongues.

Poetic fashion

From the opening – an introduction to the fascinating, pathetically decaying figure of Seth Tatum Weston III, a scion of old Southern aristocracy and privilege – to the final pages – scenes featuring Arthur’s legendary former newspaper boss, a one-time aide to Robert Kennedy – White strings together words in an eloquent and frequently poetic fashion.

It would be easy enough to sell this book on the writing alone. But that would be to shortchanging it. The scenes are too real, often too poignant. The characters are too-well-developed, and the message he scrawls, often in remembrance of things past, too pungent for that. White without a doubt is writing about something he knows intimately and loves passionately. His own legacy has to be inseparable from the tale he is spinning. A solid guess would be that like all good novels, it is autobiographical.

In the end, one must decide whether this is just a good read or one that goes beyond that, a well crafted reminder of something truly important. That while the wind of technology has blown away a culture monumental in the salvation of our democracy, the lessons we learned should be preserved no matter what the delivery system. It was a grand adventure for those of us privileged to have been a part of it. Newspapers had souls, and those who breathed life into the papers, as flawed personally and spiritually as they may have been, were heroes more often than not. If that analysis seems a bit over the top, so be it. Chalk it up to 60 years of living the experience and loving every moment.

Dan Thomasson is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service and a former vice president of Scripps Howard Newspapers. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.