Cutting Down to Size

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

In his new autobiography, Laurence Olivier remarks that bitchiness can be a "journalist's handiest tool." Perhaps Lord Olivier was thinking mostly of Britain, where the gift for malice, and the appetite for it, is higher than here. An English playwright, Arnold Wesker, once wrote The Journalists, a drama about "the poisonous human need to cut better men down to our size . . . The lilliputian journalist be the interviewee's fame, influence or achievement." That too may be more true in Britain.

In the U.S., however, there is the interview known as a hatchet job: a familiar hazard show business that was extended in the 1960s to politics by the New Journalists. Among its techniques are posing embarrassing questions either to get an offguard answer or, failing that, to describe the subject's evasive tics and mannerisms. Hatchet jobs survive, among other places, in the Style section of the Washington Post, whose good cultural coverage and criticism are burdened by a relentless ambition to be with-it and clever. (In its year-end listing of what is In and Out, the Post proclaims 1983 as the year "when it is really Out to be In," which rendered pointless the whole silly exercise.)

The anatomy of a Post hatchet job can be studied profitably in the paper's recent treatment of Willie Morris, who as editor of Harper's magazine in the 1960s demolition, invited in the New Journalists. To make a target worthy of demolition, first praise him. Reporter James Conaway speaks of Morris' "extraordinary autobiography, North Toward Home," and of his editorship that "many people think was Harper's finest time." But that was years ago; Conaway now finds Morris living in Oxford, Miss., the home town of William Faulkner. At 48, Morris is "drinking bourbon by the fire" in the house of Faulkner's niece. He has, Conaway observes, "grown broad of beam," sitting there with his dog Pete, "a black Lab with the canine equivalent of a beer belly." Conaway sketches in the intervening years: at Harper's, "his stewardship foundered in 1971," so Morris went off "to dwell on the cusp of his own notoriety." His books since are quickly disposed of: one is "a disappointment to his admirers"; another a critic had called "derivative drivel"; a third "did nothing to enhance Morris' reputation."

But Faulkner's niece Dean Wells and her husband Larry admire Willie Morris. Morris had wanted to come back to Mississippi, no longer felt at home in his native Yazoo City, Miss., and wanted to teach at Ole Miss. It was Larry Wells who made this possible, rounding up extra money from businessmen around the state so that the university's English department could afford to take on Morris as writer-in-residence. He had even wheedled $5,000 out of the Ole Miss journalism department.

Morris sips his bourbon (as we are told again) and talks of the book he is about to write. Being gregarious where Faulkner was aloof, Conaway writes, "Morris quickly established himself as a presence in Oxford." He "auditioned the bartenders around town" and picked his favorite. His classes were bizarre but popular. They are no longer sponsored by the English department, though its head says, "The publicity he has brought the university could not be purchased at any price." Some on the faculty thought him a prima donna. Morris counters: "They hate writers." The director of the journalism department, a friend, calls Morris "a major asset. He draws famous people to conferences."

Morris is going on sabbatical to write his book, which in alternate chapters will contrast the Southern experiences of himself, "a middle-aging man, and a 19-year-old black athlete," Marcus Dupree, a University of Oklahoma football star who comes from Mississippi. Morris "invites a reporter to have a final drink at the is Inn" with waiting friends, who have a head start. The bar is noisy with "Morris on a 6-ft. video screen, but then comes a pause. "Morris turns to the reporter and says, 'I'm talking to my friends, and you're taking notes . . . I'm just a writer. I'm trying to write a book, and I'm scared.' " A local insurance man "invites the reporter to step into the back room. 'I'm 'a do you a favor,' he says. 'Willie's not himself tonight, he don't feel like talking.'" The article's final paragraph is "Morris does not look up as the reporter leaves."

It was as if Morris had let the reporter down, this reporter who gives the impression of having come to ingratiate and had stayed to harpoon. The real question is why, a paper like the Washington Post should publish across two pages, full columns in all, a long and wounding hatchet job. Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Post, says, "I thought it was an incisive, good piece." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.