Mister Bedi’s letters are very, very good

My recent reading has been off among definite esoterica, unless you’re a Texana fan:  the Letters of Roy Bedichek, edited by William A. Owens (the author and folklorist; probably best known for This Stubborn Soil and Slave Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad) and Lyman Grant.

“Mr. Bedi” was one of the Triumvirate of Texan authors in the middle twentieth century (the other two were historian Walter Prescott Webb and folklorist J. Frank Dobie), and of the three he was the most unconventional.  He didn’t publish his first book (Adventures with a Texas Naturalist) until he was nearly seventy, and didn’t produce all that much as a result, but what he did turn out was lively and vital writing.  (Larry McMurtry’s judgement of him was “an eccentric with a good prose style.”)  That was the reason I bought the book when it came out in 1985, for often a good writer will also be a good letter-writer (see the Letters of E. B. White for a particularly shining example).

So I was horribly disappointed when I started the book, and found the first decade or so of letters written in a muddy and over-done late-Victorian voice; I was so disappointed that I put the book back on the shelf and let it sit for years.  (My mother, who also bought the book because she loved Mr. Bedi and what he meant to Texas letters, agreed with me that the beginning of the book was unreadably dull.  Her copy went back on the shelf as well.)

And that’s why I was delighted when, last week, I pulled the book down again and found that the early letters were a red herring.  As he got older, Mr. Bedi got sharper, pithier, and much, much more readable.  By the late 1930s, his letters reflect the authorial voice that comes out in the Adventures, and it continues throughout the rest of the book.

The letters aren’t necessarily easy going for the casual reader; he had a good education, and quotes easily from the Transcendentalists, the Rubaiyat (a particular favorite), the Romantics, and the classics, these sharing space with observations on the foibles of his friends (for example, his personal feelings about famed folklorist and song-collector John A. Lomax are very mixed), observations on birds, on smell, on education, on defecation, and a thousand other things that claimed his attention.

The following letter, from 1922, is one of the earliest ones in the book that grabbed my attention and forced me to realize he was truly as good as I’d thought before.  In it, he talks about why the media can’t possibly be impartial, and why this doesn’t necessarily have to be an insoluble problem.

January 6, 1922

Editor, All’s Well.

I read in your January issue Mr. Walter Merchant’s letter about the Press—also your own comment  I had just been discussing the matter with our old friend, Philip Cornick, and found, to my surprise, that he agrees substantially with Merchant  He is disgusted with [Upton] Sinclair and considers the New York Evening Post the best newspaper in the world.

In fact, many liberal-minded persons, to say nothing of the great horde of reactionaries and teary-eyed sentimentalists, allow the Press to impose upon them day after day.  They seem never to be able to get the point of view of the Press-wise.  The point is so obvious to us, so invisible to them!  The point is this:  It is not the venality of the Press, it is not the perversion of news, it is not the straight out mendacity—it is not any or all these things, but it is the false pretensions of the Press which nauseates us.  The phrases carried at the head of editorial columns, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” “If You See It In the News, It’s True,” “All the News While It’s News”—these are all labels as lying as any to be found on articles for sale in a Hebrew haberdashery after a fire.  Moreover, we resent the high and mighty air which editors, as a rule, assume toward the public, the silly assumption that the Press deals in Truth, that its main business is to inform, to enlighten, to uplift—much of this, we contend, is rank hypocrisy.

Every practical newspaperman knows that there is an “It” somewhere around the plant who dictates the policy of the paper.  And there is an inevitable interpretation of news resident in the basis of its selection and in the manner of its presentation by any given paper.  As someone has wittily said, “When a striker beats up a policeman, it’s front-page stuff, whereas the clubbing of a woman-picket by a policeman is worth only a one-line head on an inside page.”  This kind of news-interpretation goes on continually.  It will thus be seen that a newspaper is an advocate, not an all-wise and beneficent judge.  A newspaper is bound to be an advocate because all newspapers are run by human beings.  Some newspapers are good, wise, worthy advocates, according to my judgement; and some, by the same test, are rotten, sorry, venal, sell-out-to-both-sides advocates.  Some are sensible, because they agree with me; and some are ‘steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance’ because they do not.

If one can just hold the idea that the newspaper is an advocate firmly in mind, the whole situation becomes clear.  Otherwise, one is as much mystified as he would be if he listened to the speeches of opposing counsel believing that neither of the speakers could possibly present a biased view of the case.

For illustration, I despise the Ku Klux organization.  We will suppose that I consider it to be merely a bunch of bullies organized for the purpose of persecuting petty criminals.  Feeling this way about it, do you suppose that I could be fair to the Ku Klux Klan in a newspaper under my control?  Impossible.  My reporters would be instructed to “treat ’em rough.”  I would spread a Ku Klux killing all over the front page, boxing in black-faced type the more gruesome details, while refusing absolutely (on the ground that it is advertising) to print notices of their little benevolences, except at so much per line.  In other words, I am an advocate, as is everyone with brains enough to have an opinion about anything, and the ownership of the biggest newspaper in the world would not change me.  You can’t make me fair—I don’t want to be fair to something that I consider wrong, but I hope that I am not as petty as is one of my quondam bosses on a metropolitan paper who furnishes his editors with a list of prominent citizens a yard long whose names cannot appear in his paper—an array of names which expands during the social season for it is then that his wife, a climber, stews and fusses and rows with other climbers, maintaining her hard-won though insecure social position with the bludgeon of her husband’s blacklist in one hand and the honey of generous newspaper space and favored newspaper position in the other.  But you may be assured that in my paper news would be handpicked and interpreted by the display given it, and really, after all, that’s what this interminable row is about.

It is in consideration of these things that I cannot get myself into the approved radical rage and denounce capitalistic papers for coloring news—capitalistically.  A big newspaper is itself necessarily a capitalistic institution.  Nine times out of ten it believes in itself and the system in which it has prospered, unless some unhumanly detached person is at the head of it.  The socialist paper, or press service, colors its news socialistically, of course, and even the motion picture shows of Russia are said now to reflect the glories of communism.  So why expect something beyond-man out of an ordinary human institution?

Of course, newspapers are advocates only in two-sided or many-sided questions.  If a fire occurs, the socialist will differ from the capitalistic story of it only in minor details.   But let a strike be called, and the same two papers will see nothing that happens in the same perspective, because one is an advocate of one side and one is an advocate of the other.

I am not taking into account (because they are not worth notice) a great many papers which blunder along, being controlled and edited by men as ignorant as horses, who do not even know that there is such a thing in the world as a labor question or a land question, and who are unable to perceive any difference between a good government and a bad one.

Moreover, you find a paper now and then which is a congenital liar, reflecting exactly the mental perversity of the man or group dominating it.  These papers are rare.

Barring the absurd pretensions of the Press, it is not such a bad institution as capitalistic or profit-making institutions go.  A reader who knows that a certain newspaper is an advocate, paid or otherwise, of certain interests is forearmed and will not be seriously corrupted by what he reads in that particular paper.  Instead of howling like a whipped cur under the lash of Sinclair and others, let the individual paper frankly admit that its policy is thus and so, and let it announce that its readers may expect to find it its news-columns, just as in its editorial-columns, an interpretation of news in accordance with its policy, and much of the criticism of the Press will fall down.  It’s the collection-plate passing rogue that we abominate—the others may be fairly good fellows.

I beg to submit a few sample slogans for newspapers which want to be honest:

“All the News We Dare to Print.”

“The Boss of This Paper Is a Lumber King.  We Believe in Lumber.”

“All the News Not Offensive to Advertisers.”

“We Sell Space Not News.”

”News Is Like Gold—It Must Be Alloyed to Make Money.”

“To Hell with Radicals.”

Roy Bedichek

It’s a pity it took me so long to find this book was truly a hidden gem and not merely a scholarly paperweight, but now I have discovered it, I’ll be coming back to it again.

Hastur should watch for Klamath Falls for the ancient shark.  Fnord.