1 Column a Week: Cutting Back After 5 Million Words

Having written more columns than Pete Rose has hits, I am accepting the inevitable and retiring from my Monday-through-Thursday column at the end of this month.

For those who may miss me, I am happy to say that I will continue to write one column a week.

The Times did not urge me to take this step; in fact, I have had nothing from The Times, for more than 30 years, but hands-off support.

I simply feel that I have worked hard enough long enough and hope that I may enjoy some relief from my arduous schedule. My wife is afraid I will do nothing but drink beer and watch television. She may be right.

I suspect, though, that writing one column a week will be almost as hard as writing five, which I did for 20 years. Before that, I did three a week for 10 years. I will think about it each week until it is done and then, at once, I will start thinking about the next one, which will be coming toward me like a train on a track.

I do not think, either, that having to write only one will make the product any better. Every column I have ever written was the best I could do, at that time. Many, of course, were dreadful; but the reason one writes a regular column is that one must. The deadline is, finally, the motivator.

Marilyn Hudson, co-hostess of the Round Table West, once said that writing a daily newspaper column is like making love to a nymphomaniac. When you’re finished, and think you’re through, you have to start all over again.

A column is an essay. It usually examines one idea, or notion, which it turns over briefly and then abandons. A columnist hopes to be provocative or, if he’s lucky, funny. Often he is dismissed as peddling trivia. I never thought of anything I wrote as trivia.

I have often been asked, “What is your column about?” My answer is that it is about being me and living in Los Angeles. Consequently, I hoped, it would be about everybody who lives in Los Angeles.

E. B. White once said that “the essayist is sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.”

Recently a reader wrote that he had counted 35 I’s in one of my columns. He said that was enough. He wasn’t reading me anymore. I’m sure I’ve used I more than 35 times in one column.

In a review of White’s collected essays, Richard Freedman said, “The greatest gift of the essayistic mind: to extract a momentous truth from the most seemingly trivial event or artifact.”

If my material has sometimes seemed trivial, I assure you that it was chosen in the hope of yielding up a momentous truth, though I have no doubt that such truths usually escaped the reader.

When Russell Baker told his editor he was going to quit writing his Sunday column for the New York Times, the editor told him to write a final column explaining why. “Are you asking me to abandon good taste by talking about myself?” Baker asked.

“Then,” he said, “I thought: Why not? Abandoning good taste is one of the things newspapermen do best, and talking about myself is one of my favorite pastimes.”

After 15 years, Baker put his finger on the problem: “Fifteen years, more than 700 columns of about 800 words per column makes about 560,000 words of what was supposed to be inventive prose. Nobody can be that inventive.”

When Charles Champlin retired after 13 years as The Times’ film critic and critic at large, he calculated that he had written more than 2.2 million words--”a sobering thought on a lovely spring morning.”

In 30 years I have probably written more than 5 million words. Some philosopher once said that nobody had more than three good ideas in a lifetime. To write 5 million words, I have had to do a lot of recycling of my three good ideas.

I cannot leave my career without thanking the thousands of readers who have supported me over the years. Their letters sustained me. Most of my columns were drawn from them. I read every one. I intended to answer every one, but I could not keep up. To this day, I have cardboard boxes full of letters I hope to answer.

To those that did not receive an answer I want to say that your letters were read and appreciated, every one, even those that said they wished I would drop dead. Sometimes those made the best columns.

I hope, when I’m writing only once a week, for the Monday paper, you won’t forsake me.