. . . So Somebody Took His Words!

Procrustes Hooligan is a young editorial assistant here at The Times.

On Wednesday, June 10, they handed him Page 33 of the View section for Thursday, June 11, pointed to a blank space in the upper-left-hand corner and said, “Hooligan, find something to fill that space.”

Hooligan started rummaging through a stack of photographs, and his supervisor asked him what he was doing. He said he was looking for a shot of six distinguished-looking people in evening clothes at a benefit in Pasadena or Beverly Hills to put in the blank space. “Darn it, Hooligan!” his supervisor snapped, “We’ve already got seven pictures of six distinguished-looking people in evening clothes at benefits in Pasadena and Beverly Hills in that section! We need writing!”

Procrustes put his hand into a file of papers with writing on them and came up with something called Take My Word. He measured it against the size of the blank space and said, “More than enough.” It was, indeed, more than enough, so he found a pair of scissors and started trimming. He cut three lines from here, four lines from there, measured again, trimmed off the last eight lines, and said “Perfect!”

True enough, it was a perfect fit. Unfortunately, the remaining writing made no sense, now that it had lost so many of its accompanying lines. It was as though, in order to fit the photo of a new bride into the paper, they’d cut off everything above the bridge of her nose.

So, gentle reader, if you read a piece under my name on June 11, and, on reaching the end, said, “Huh?” or words to that effect, I’ll try to fill you in on the rest of the story:

I mentioned my maternal grandfather, a Congregational minister from Wales who had been honored at least twice as poet of the year before he sailed to America. I confessed to having never read, or even seen, his poetry (which was in Welsh, so my not having seen it made not a whit of difference). I mentioned that in about the fourth grade, a substitute teacher had told us a story about a little Chinese boy with an incredibly long name:

orumbaharabarabuskin-clangfire-pilgrin-gilgogurkin-drolwellansilio-gogogo. You might remember that. What you don’t remember, because it never made it past the scissors, is that one day the little boy’s mother screamed,

rumba-harabarabuskin-clangfire-pilgrin-gilgogurkin-drolwellansilio-gogogo! Look out for the wolf!” but by the time she got to the “Look out for the wolf!” part, the wolf was picking his teeth with her little boy’s clavicle.

When my wife and I were in Wales about 10 years ago, I bought a post card showing a suspension bridge over a broad, lovely stream. There’s a little town tucked in among the trees there, and the little town, like the little Chinese boy, has an incredibly long name: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllanty-siliogogogoch. My mother had taught me enough about the sounds of Welsh so that I took a crack at that mouthful. That double-l at the beginning of a word is pronounced as a sort of aspirate. It’s “L” pushed out with bilateral gusts of breath between the upper and lower molars. If you can manage a sound something like “kthl,” you’re close. It happens in names like Llewllyn, as in Richard Llewellyn, who wrote “How Green Was My Valley,” and John Llewellyn Lewis, who founded the CIO.

So I started, “Kthlanfairpwllgwyngyllgo,” and I quickly realized that the last part of the Chinese boy’s name was lifted directly from the town in Wales. I’d say it could be the other way around, that the town was named after the boy, but the town’s name is translated on my post card. I gave the translation in my first column, but it didn’t appear: “The Church of St. Mary, in a hollow of white hazel, near to a rapid whirlpool and to St. Tysilio’s Church, and near to a red cave.” I don’t know how young Procrustes Hooligan had the heart to cut that.

There is something inescapably Procrustean in putting out a periodical, especially a daily newspaper. Things must be cut and trimmed and fitted into particular spaces in time to meet an unrelenting deadline. Nevertheless, it’s a blow when you find that a dish you’ve created, worked hard on and taken some pride in has been laid out in its one and only appearance before the world in a form you’d never have understood, much less condoned.

Note to anyone planning to write a letter in defense of Procrustes Hooligan: Procrustes is a great guy. I made him up years ago to represent an editor in New York who used to change all my thats to whiches. He’s my favorite whipping boy, and he prevents me from getting physically violent. He’s a lifesaver. Some day, I’ll buy him a beer; then I’ll teach him to sing “Men of Harlech” (“Gorhoffedd Gwyr Harlech”); and all will be forgiven.