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By LOU HATTER
Rappahannock News Staff Writer ]
“/ count it a high honor to belong < to a profession in which the good ■ ■ men write every paragraph, every sentence, every Line, as lovingly as any Addison or Steele, and do so in ; full regard that by tomorrow it. will have been burned, or used, if at all, to line a shelf. ”
—Alexander Woollcott
So ended James J. Kilpatrick’s talk on The Art of Writing, given last Wednesday night at the Madison County High School. More than 300 people attended the lecture, a benefit for the Madison County Public Library. Mr. Kilpatrick, nationally syndicated political columnist and commentator, enthralled his audience with a combination of humorous personal reminiscences and examples of some of his favorite uses and misuses of the English language.
He told of his lifelong fascination with libraries, beginning with his boyhood in Oaklahoma City, where every Saturday he would “ride the streetcar to the Carnegie Public Library. . .a great Romanesque building. . .with a children’s reading room on the second floor, where I would return the books I had checked out the previous Saturday and revel in getting a half-dozen more. Libraries are wonderful places for little boys and girls—and grown-up boys and girls. You never know what you might do for a boy or girl, finding the right book at the right time. . .careers are shaped by imagination.”
In addition to his well-known political column A Conservative View, Mr. Kilpatrick also writes a syndicated commentary which appears in 530 newspapers titled The Uses and Misuses of Language which draws contributions of mangled English from readers across the country. “Those who write are forest rangers who know the path through the woods” of language, “. . .and we should lead the tenderfeet through the trail of our ideas safely and comfortably, not letting them become lost in the brambles” of confusing sentences or unclear ideas. “Writing is a conduit of communication. . .from the mind of the writer to the eye and ear of the reader. ”
Mr. Kilpatrick exhorted his audience to “read insatiably. . .read, read, read. Read the classics. . .read matchbook covers, cans. . .but read.” Of course he also urged them to “write incessantly: poetry, love letters. . .menus. The more you write the more you get the feel and texture of language—the rhythm and cadence, the nuances of meaning. “Use your senses intently. . .store the images for a time they are needed.”
He gave as an example of a master of imagery his one-time antagonist on Po>nt/Counterpoint, Shana Alexander, quoting from her book on Patty Ilearst, Anyone's Daughter. Miss Hearst, waving to her parents during her controversial and highly-publicized trial: “Below the table, emerging from a tailored sleeve, five pink and perfectly enameled fingers flutter like the frilly fins of a Siamese fighting fish.” In another passage she “is a Madonna dolorosa, a classic image of female suffering. She sits motionlessly, and tears fall from her eyes as from a Sicilian painting. Fine-featured, smooth-skinned, narrow, and pale, she is almost as white as the Pieta of Michelangelo.” Mr. Kilpatrick observed that those images were not chosen by accident. “Shana Alexander had watched Siamese fighting fish, watched their fins flutter” and committed those images to memory. “Those images come back in the use of simile and metaphor.”
Along with those highlights of
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