One plus two

Auberon Waugh

With the late publication of Book Four Harold Zvans completes his five-volume manual and gives us the first opportunity of taking the five together, as we were urged to do in ts.e author's preface to Book One in 1972.

irst, a few words about the newcomer.

Pictures on a Page is described as a Manual of photojournalism, graphics and Picture editing. For the reader who is rieither a press photogiap her nor a picture 4Iitor it provides an enjoyable scrapbook of alemorable news photographs, showing in

many cases how they have been cut down or 'cropped' from the original full-frame. Evans is a great believer in what he calls creative cropping — 'creative' here being used as in the expression `creative hairdressing' to mean 'good' — and gives many examples where a photograph has been improved by this means. However, his judgment is by no means infallible — a photograph of three-year-old John Kennedy Jr saluting at his father's funeral is completely spoiled by removal of the tall soldier saluting beside him so the lad looks as if he is scratching his head. His constantly reiterated preference for what he calls the `tighter, closer crop' often seems to reduce the creative element to what, in hairdressing, would be recognised as short back and sides.

He is also absurdly keen on the use of graphics — diagrams, charts, graphs — which can surely be justified only when they are used to illustrate a relationship between numbers which might not otherwise be apparent. They are ugly and fatuous things in themselves, distracting attention from the text without affording visual enjoyment. As a means of breaking up heavy chunks of letterpress they are a disaster — far better use photographs of pretty women, pet animals or Thalidomide babies, according to taste. Almost everything Evans says about graphics is rubbish, but his practice, as editor of the Sunday Times, is even worse, and contributes much to making that newspaper more boring than it need be:

Every day there is plenty of news that cannot properly be told bywords, notably news whose essence lies in visual and spatial relationships, calling out for illustration by graphics. If that sounds a mouthful, consider the headline:

RESCUERS DIG FOR MINERS TRAPPED BY RISING WATER

Spatial relationships are the heart of this drama, and the outsider cannot understand it without graphics — a diagram of the underground workings, locating men, flood water and rescuers, an indication of the scale of distances between them and rate of progress.

I am sorry, but he is wrong on every count. The few words of the headline convey what is happening far more vividly than any diagram. What is surprising is to see the error so baldly stated. Evans reveals a lack of confidence in the power of words to stimulate the imagination which may be at the root of all his trouble. The patronising jokiness of the expression `if that sounds a mouthful' (which might have come straight out of Blue Peter) hides the simple funk of a man who is not at home with the English language.

Probably we should not make too much of this. Evans may not be much good at writing, but I am assured on every side that he has many other qualities. He is brave as a lion his posture over the Thalidomide injuction can only be compared with that of Douglas Bader (played by Kenneth More)

when he faced the Nazi hordes, legless, over Bethune. Evans (or perhaps I should call him 'Harry', which is the usual style for these ritual encomia) is trusty, loyal, helpful, brotherly, courteous, kind, obedient, smiling, thrifty . . . all these things, all these things. But the fact that he can't write must raise the question of why he should choose to teach us how to do it.

What makes a good English sentence? How should you re-write a bad one? These questions, according to the blurb, are answered in Book One: Newsman's English. Let us examine the author's first three sentences:

Anyone who attempts to impose on the public five volumes at one go had better explain himself. This book is the first of the five which forms a series on editing and design, hopefully intended for news and magazine men of different countries and experience. The series did begin as one book.

Now I could easily explain what is wrong with these sentences. In the first, the object should come after the verb; 'at one go' would be redundant even if it were not misleading, since the books took six years to appear; the whole sentence is clumsy and unnecessary. In the second sentence, there are too many Ts and `th's at the beginning, 'hopefully' is redundant, the zeugma between 'countries' and 'experience' is inelegant; 'experience' is redundant. In the third sentence, the simple past historic 'began' should be preferred to the compound auxiliary form. Translated out of Damespeak into civilized English, they might read: 'This is the first in a series of five books on editing and design, intended for the use of journalists internationally. The series began as one book, but . .

But. But. But. Is it really worth saying? If Evans can't see that his sentences are no

good, is it very kind to tell him? Well, he says he hopes to `elaborate principles' which can be 'commended internationally': 'That is too ambitious an objective to hope for more than partial success, but it is one of the two reasons why there are five books instead of one.'

Oh dear, I think we had better hand that sentence over to the Graphics Department: One book plus two reasons equals five books. Get it? The more I study that graphic the plainer it becomes that with a few more reasons Evans will take over the world. The man is dangerous. He must be stopped.

The best volume is number three on subbing: Handling Newspaper Text. This is something, I should imagine, at which Evans is quite good. The volume on newspaper design is scarcely worth reading, since the only things to be said are either obvious or subject to personal taste and changing fashion. Book Three, on newspaper headlines, contains a useful glossary of newspaper printing terms, as well as a fascinating 'Headline vocabulary', listing

all those useful short words which must, by constant repetition, have formed a permanent aisociation with our knowledge of contemporary events: flay, rap, slap, slam (all for 'criticise), flout, rift, row, bid, aid, quiz,slay etc. The odd thing about this list of words is that the editor of the Sunday Times offers them as helpful suggestions in composing a headline, rather than as cliches to be avoided at all costs. Even in five volumes the series will be of less use to the English trainee journalist than many existing manuals because it gives practically no advice on law. If any child of mine wanted to be a journalist, I think I should hide 'these volumes.

But Evans on Good English is the chief horror. Give us Myra Hindley on Child Care or Bluebeard on Married Love but not Evans on Good English: Every word must be understood by the ordinary man, every sentence must be clear at one glance, and every story must say something about people. There must never be a doubt about its relevance to our daily life. There must be no abstractions.

This places newspaper English firmly in the prose camp of Dryden, Bunyan, Butler, Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Orwell, Thurber. The style to reject is the

mandarin style . 'Its cardinal assumption is that neither the writer nor the reader is in a hurry, that both are in possession of a classical education and a private income', wrote Cyril Connolly.

It is strange how soon the non-verbal mind wanders off into inanity — perhaps something to do with the lack of a classical education. Why on earth should Newspaper English always say something about people? Has Evans forgotten Victor the Giraffe, Ferdinand the Beautiful Bull, or bashful Chi-Chi and An-An? What relevance has the moon-shot to our daily lives? Was Evans serious in advancing that extraordinary list of prose models for newspaper English or was he suffering from a brainstorm of the sortwhich apparently makes him want to bite people?

I have many complaints against Evans's Sunday Times: its illiteracy, its vulgarity and above all its crass materialism which sees Thalidomide in terms of money to be poured into the pockets of undeserving parents, rather than as an opportunity for more reflective minds to ponder the fragility of human happiness. I also rather despise any approach to the study of photojournalism which claims to inquire into 'the way photo-journalism changes — as well as reflects — the world we see', rather than treating it as an excuse to ponder the distinction between image and reality, to inquire into the nature of historical truth etc. In fact, the only evidence he offers of photo-journalism changing the world is a photograph of some Biharis being bayoneted on a polo field in Bangladesh which won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Horst Faas and Michel Laurent of Associated Press,

Evans claims the bayoneting was specially laid on for the benefit of these photographers and they unscrupulously took advantage of it while others declined. I sincerely hope our Harry has got his facts right here, or it might prove rather an expensive libel action for Heinemann to defend, if Faas or Laurent has any inkling of our English libel laws.

But my chief complaint against Evans's Sunday Times is that it does assume the reader is not in a hurry, even if it makes the opposite assumptions about his classical education and private income. The whole Insight tradition, giving thousands of words of uninteresting and unimportant detail on every subject, is a monument to this assumption. Sadly, the language of these reports is always inelegant, nearly always offensively so. Evans's chief contribution to British journalism has been in the development of a new style which might be called yobs' mandarin. Its cardinal assumptions are that neither the writer nor the reader reader is in a hurry, that neither is in possession of a classical education or private income, that both share a workingclass background and working-class sympathies. This would be an admirable formula for the Daily Mirror in the new age of unemployment and 'comprehensive' education, but I wish he had left the Sunday Times alone.