EDITOR'S LETTER

Easy Does It

One of my sons received a comment on his most re cent report card that I found strangely unsettling. The teacher, in his evalua tion, denigrated my son's writing, saying that it was “too conversational.” What an impossibly lame thought coming from someone hired to teach writing. Because, I will tell you, for my money good writing is by its very nature conversational. It’s all part of the making-the-difficult-look-easy school of thought—a professional style I’m very much in favor of. A friend in California once told me of sitting in the auditorium during rehearsals for the Academy Awards. Fred Astaire was to receive a special Oscar that year, and for much of the rehearsal afternoon he practiced getting out of his seat and bounding up the stairs to the stage. The night of the ceremony, the audience saw only the result of his efforts: the most gifted dancer in the world gliding easily up to the podium to receive an award he richly deserved.

It s the same way with good writing. A lot of hard work goes into making it look easy. This is a generalization, but I always say that the reader’s appreciation of something written tends to be in inverse relation to the ease with which the writer wrote it. Another generalization: people who say they love writing really don’t do it particularly well. The fact is, the act of weaving words together to look as if they drifted effortlessly onto the page is tough work and certainly not for the faint of heart. Behind every well-crafted sentence is a broken writer, curled in a fetal position with the sheets pulled up around him, his mind a raging cauldron fired by anxieties about deadlines, bills, worthiness, weight gain, and a million other things.

For a columnist, who traffics in opinion in addition to fact, setting the whole thing in a conversational tone is not just an element of the job; it is its essence. Vanity Fair’s two columnists, Christopher Hitchens and James Wolcott, both make it look effortless. And both come at it from very different directions. Wolcott, I know, sweats over every sentence. Each word has been chosen with care—others were considered and rejected. Then the whole is polished over and over until he turns it in. The results, like his masterpiece on television punditry which appears on page 72, are evidence enough of his command.

Hitchens, God bless him, operates somewhat differently. I remember a lunch at a local French restaurant years ago when I was editing another publication. I may have played with a glass of wine to be convivial. Hitchens had five good-size glasses of red, followed by a couple of tumblers of scotch as a palate cleanser.

I came back to the office on fumes; Hitchens was completely unaffected by his intake. We sat him down at a borrowed desk in front of an old electric typewriter and he banged out 1,500 words on some subject or other. And it was so beautifully written as to make you want to cry.

There are few better at writing columns of opinion than Wolcott and Hitchens, but I can say here that, next month, they will be joined by a third peerless hand: Dominick Dunne. Beginning with the March issue, he will—in addition to his larger stories—be writing a bimonthly column based on his daily travels, the stories he is told, and the cases he continues to worry over. And if anyone has redefined the art of conversational writing, it is Dunne. It could be said he is a master at it.

GRAYDON CARTER