- [Announcer] A production of South Carolina ETV.

(cheerful music) (cheerful music continues) (cheerful music continues) - Hello, from Charleston.

I'm Patti Just.

Our guest is James Kilpatrick, an author with over 50 years of professional experience.

He's a nationally syndicated columnist and a former commentator on "60 Minutes" and "Inside Washington."

His 11 books include "The Foxes' Union," "The Writer's Art," and his latest, "Fine Print: Reflections on the writing Art."

Mr.

Kilpatrick was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, a graduate of the University of Missouri, and since 1989, has made his home here in Charleston.

Thanks so much for being with us, sir.

- It's a pleasure, Patti.

Thank you.

- Well, your background as an investigative reporter and a political observer, is it curious to you that you are now one of our country's leading authorities on the written word?

- I don't know.

Oh, I don't know.

Bill Sapphire is probably the country's leading authority on the written word, at least in terms of popular consumption.

But I'm enjoying it.

I'm kind of the poor man's Bill Sapphire.

The column appears in about, oh, I think about 00 papers around and about the country.

- Obviously you've had a lot of fun with this subject.

- Oh, I had a great deal of fun with it.

The things that annoy people are just amazing about our English language, and so many things do annoy them so intensely.

I was in Washington the other day on a talk show.

A woman called up and was really furious about the distinction between healthy and healthful.

Oh, this is not one of the great distinctions that absorb the attentions of mankind, but it really upset her, and it's not that great a distinction, but she was wrath about it.

She waxed wrath.

Well, I never known what that meant.

- You knew very early that you were going to be a writer.

- I did.

I was so fortunate in that regard.

Great many people I know have trouble in college deciding which direction their careers will take.

I never had any doubts.

I started as a child wanting to be a writer.

I first wanted to be a foreign correspondent, then I wanted to be a sports writer, and then gradually, I got into reporting and editorial writing, but I never had any doubts.

- Your first writing that you actually got paid for was at age six?

- It was.

It was when Charles Lindbergh made his nonstop flight across the Atlantic to Paris.

One of the great events of that time, of course, in that spring.

So I wrote a poem about it.

I don't think it had more than 10 or 12 lines, but I was pretty excited about Lindbergh's flight.

At that time, there was a magazine called "Child's Life," I believe that was the publication, and they carried children's poetry.

So I sent my poem into "Child's Life," and to my amazement, it was accepted.

And that was, not only was it accepted, they also sent me a dime.

I was a thunderstruck, to think that you could get paid for something that was so much fun.

I became a professional on the spot, and I've been a pro ever since.

- There's a typewriter in the house, I know, that old Remington that you learned to type on.

Where was the newspaper influence though?

- On my writing?

- Aha.

- I suppose being, developing the skill to write under pressure of a deadline.

And newspaper writing is, is pretty good training for organization of what you're going to say.

So many writers have problems with that.

One of my former students in Richmond sent me, a sports writer, sent me a sports column he'd written the other day.

He's an excellent writer, but he started up here and then he, a tangent, sort of, impression, he went off there and then he digressed over here.

And he didn't know when he started to write that column where he was going to wind up.

And newspaper writing, after a while, will teach you a sense of organization, the who, what, where, when, why, and how, and get them in some kind of decent order.

And then the newspapering offers great opportunities for the writer who gets into feature writing.

I know you can't do much if your assignment as to, you know, cover the speaker at The Kiwanis Club.

Not much in that.

But if you're permitted to do interviews with interesting people, you're going to wind up writing interesting stories.

- Well, how was it that you ended up in Washington covering that beat?

- Well, I had been in Richmond, I started in Richmond in 1941 as a cover reporter rewriting the obituaries from the outlying counties, and I covered all the beats in Richmond.

This was during the war.

I was unable to get into the war because of bronchial asthma of all things.

It kept me out.

I was a 4F.

So most of the rest of the city room went off to war, and I had to cover all the beats one at a time.

At one point, I was even the outdoors editor, if you can believe that.

I have known a roughed grouse from a dove, "But every man a tiger," was what the city editor used to say.

"Kilpatrick, you're outdoors editor."

I was business editor, political editor, a whole shebang.

It was a great experience.

And finally, I got into editorial writing under Dr.

Douglas Southall Freeman, the famed historian.

He was the only first real full blown genius I ever met in my life.

Amazing character.

But anyhow, Dr.

Freeman was editor of the "News Leader," and he was growing tired of being editor of the "News Leader."

Been editor for 25 years.

He wanted to finish his biography of George Washington.

So he summoned me up from the city room, and I wrote editorials under his tutelage for about six months, then he put on his old felt hat and picked up his lunch pail and got into his car and said, "I resign" and left it to me, and that put me into editorial writing.

Then finally an opportunity came to write a nationally syndicated column, and it was too exciting an opportunity to turn down.

So off I went to Washington - And it was there that you were very happy?

- Oh, yeah, for a political writer especially, and that's what I've done most of my life.

That's where the action is and it's... I found Washington very exciting and I miss it.

Frankly, I do.

To be right in the heat of political controversy, the access to the White House and to the House and the Senate.

It was a very exciting life.

- How did your column work in terms of, what did you write about in those early days?

Things that were making the news then, or things that just struck your fancy.

- It was a straight up political column.

I call it A Conservative View, not The Conservative View, but A Conservative View.

And I did take a conservative land on current affairs.

And the column started in 1964 and continued until January of 93.

So I was writing it for quite a while.

Three columns a week, 750 words to a column.

That's a whole lot of words.

- How much feedback did you get back from the columns?

- Oh, big mail.

But I'm still writing The Writing Column.

I started that about 10 years ago, once a week, a column on the use and abuse of English.

It produces a fantastic mail.

We have about 5,000 clippings a year that pour in over this desk.

I have one of 'em that came in just the other day.

I loved it.

A homophone, I just put it away, from a... They were selling some lumber and they wanted to offer for sale knotty pine, and they spelled it N-A-U-G-H-T-Y.

You just don't hardly find pine trees like that no more.

- That's right.

- Naughty pine.

- Oh, you get wonderful mail and it's sad funny.

So many of the things really are hilarious, the mistakes, but it's sad that they're made in so many good newspapers.

Oh, not to make that many mistakes.

Just... - Let's go back a little bit to one of your earlier books, "The Foxes' Union," which was partially autobiographical.

- Well, it was.

It was about as autobiographical as a book can be, I think.

That was a, a little book that, I still regard it as my favorite book, about how we came to buy our home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and how we built the final house and the people of the country.

I liked the little book.

And so many people still remember it in terms of the letters I started writing to my granddaughter, Heather.

And they were proved to be quite popular.

- And why did you start The letters?

- Break from writing politics.

If you write politics three times a week, 750 words at a shot, pretty soon you get awful sick of writing about politics, politics, politics.

And you wanna write about something else.

It's a change of pace, like throwing a slow curve after you've been throwing nothing but hardball.

- Well, Heather was a nice change of pace for you with three sons and then came your first granddaughter.

- Yeah.

Now, we have five granddaughters and two grandsons.

And Heather's been, it's been a great experience getting to know Heather.

She's 23 now, horizon 24, and spent three years abroad.

She had a year in Togo of all places and a year in Holland and a year in Brussels.

And she traveled all over Europe and now speaks Dutch and French and English fluently.

Not satisfied, she's taking Spanish out at the University of Colorado.

I don't know what she's going to be, a hostess for a flight attendant on a Dutch airline, I suppose, but here we go.

- Let's hear one of he letters, if you don't mind.

- Oh, this was one I wrote when, "At this very hour, minute and second of the 20th century, you were standing free and clear in your playpen on the deck of your grandfather's house which is located four miles from the Scrabble in Rappahannock County, Commonwealth of Virginia, United States of America, planet Earth.

Heather, you will be 1-year-old tomorrow and your pants are wet.

You ought not to be embarrassed years, hence, to have this entirely natural circumstance recorded.

There are times when the whole country, come to think of it, seems to be enduring the same condition, a kind of vague discomfort, not wholly understood, but at least you have a mother to snatch you up, pat you dry, kiss your nose and plop you back down on the playpen all in less time than it takes me to change a typewriter ribbon.

The country is not so lucky.

To continue, you now stand about three inches taller than the top of your playpen, and this is a good thing because it permits you to chew on its edge without seriously bending your neck.

You have eight teeth.

You have the most beautiful black rim, blue eyes, this side of Killarney.

And at last, praise God, you were growing a perfectly senatorial ducktail.

This is at age one, a time of discovery.

In the past 10 minutes since you returned dry pantsed, you have discovered, in addition to the taste of foam rubber, an ant, your left hand, Lorenzo's nose, the feel of fur, sunlight on your arm and a hummingbird poised on a butterfly bush.

You have not discussed all this with Lorenzo.

He is not very interested if the truth were known, but he wants what remains of your cookie."

That piece came off pretty well, I thought, - I thought.

And then you continued to write those letters on her birthday.

- I did until, I think it was about the 18th birthday when she came to me and she said, "Grandfather, will you please stop writing those stupid letters to me?"

- She might have thought they were stupid, but they were certainly popular among the readers.

- She didn't put it exactly that way, but I think she was a little embarrassed among her peers to have these public letters written to her.

But she's a great, great young gal.

I have five granddaughters and I love 'em all.

I love the two grandsons too.

- Well, that time when you lived in a Rappahannock County, Virginia, seemed like an idyllic time for you in terms of being at peace and, - It was.

- Working well.

- It was a beautiful period, and for my wife and me.

She had her own sculpture studio at the time, and she was busy working in her studio, and I had a lovely office to work in.

And need to have peace and quiet but then it was, you know, an hour and a half away from Washington.

So I could get into the House or the Senate or The White House or the Supreme Court if I really wanted to get in for something, cover a committee hearing, that sort of thing, and then go right back out to the country, and those beautiful mountains.

I think they're mountain people and beach people, God bless us all, but we were mountain people.

And getting used to the low country of Charleston has been quite a change in atmosphere, but we love it.

- One thing that I read about when you were talking about leaving Washington, selling your house there and going out to the country, that Washington was a place for doing and not for thinking.

- In general, that's true.

Maybe that's one of the things that's wrong with our republic, is there not enough thinking going on there and too much doing?

I expect that's perfectly true.

But you could do a lot of great thinking out in the Blue Ridge mountains.

Clear air, see the stars at night, don't hear any sirens.

- Did most of your viewers, your readers, think that there really was a place called Scrabble, Virginia?

- No.

They thought I made it up.

As were with Camelot or the Yoknapatawpha County?

No, Scrabble's a very real place.

It appears on some of the maps of Virginia as early as 1840.

And to this day, it appears on the geological quadrangle maps.

Scrabble, not hard Scrabble, Scrabble.

It was probably pretty hard to scrabble around in that red clay, the Rappahannock County.

And it's so rocky up there.

They call it Rocky Hanock, Rocky Hanock County.

But it's a great place.

And Scrabble is a very real place.

Mosby's Raiders during the war were in and out of Scrabble.

Good place to live.

- What about your television career?

23 years in the business?

- It's great.

I mean, I should tell you.

Oh, television's a lot fun.

It's no heavy lifting.

No, except for the cameramen, of course.

They heavy lifting all the time, but intellectually speaking, doesn't require much in the way of heavy lifting.

And pay is good at the level of "60 Minutes" or "Inside Washington."

And H.L.

Mencken had a wonderful line.

Let see if I can recall it.

He says, "It's a latent tendency in every man to strut and roll his eyes."

And, you know, you get a chance to get in front of this camera and you can hammer it up a little bit and make faces.

And, you know, I used to be able to yell at some of my colleagues on "Inside Washington."

I had great time for five years with Shana Alexander on "60 Minutes."

We were lampooned, if you remember, by primetime, what do I, anyhow, "Shana, you ignorant slut."

That became a kind of a famous line.

I never said that to her, of course - I was going to ask if that was a quote.

- I never said anything like that.

She's a very erudite, gifted, lovely, misguided lady, and I'm so fond of her.

- So that ran for five years.

And then what happened?

- I had been four years with Nick von Hoffman before that.

Well, Nick got fired over the one show we did.

Just before Nixon's abdication, we were taping in Washington and by mischance, no one was in New York minding the store.

Don Hewitt and Mary Lieberthal were all away.

So we did our tape.

And when the time came that Sunday night to throw the switch, they threw it.

And here came Nick von Hoffman with that prescient look of his saying, "Ah, Jack, let's face it, everyone knows that Richard Nixon has nothing but a dead rat on the kitchen floor of the country.

The only question is, who's going to throw him in the nearest sanitary receptacle?"

Well, the CBS switchboard lit up like Las Vegas freeway and he got fired.

Nick was very penitent in his way.

He said, "Never occurred to me that anyone would take offense at that."

That's what he said.

But Mr.

Leonard was not at all appeased, and so he fired him the next week.

And Shana Alexander then came on.

We had five glorious years together.

It was fun.

- Did you have quite a schedule then during the television, the column and the writing?

- Yeah, you know, I did.

I was writing three columns a week, doing a good deal of public speaking, the television show and I had plenty of leisure time.

I don't know how, you know.

I could fool around with my stamp collection, I could bang a little bit on the piano.

Now I'm writing only two columns a week.

One on the Supreme Court and one on language, I'm not making much many lectures at all, I'm not in television anymore, and I find I'm busier than I've ever been.

I haven't touched the stamp collection this year and never play the piano anymore.

All I'm doing is working at this desk.

I think I grew old.

I know I grow old.

- Well, what about the coffee table books?

There were a couple that you did.

- Yeah, I did one with photographer named Bill Bake, and he's a great photographer.

These are outta print, but they were pretty books.

Sold pretty fairly well too.

- Very nice.

"The Writer's Art" came along, and as you said at the beginning of the program, that started with the column.

- Yeah.

- What were you doing?

Just kind of fooling around with an idea one day about what to write about.

Came up with it or how did it happen?

- To write about writing, I don't know.

Heck, I really can't tell you how the column happened to start, but Universal Press Syndicate has a wonderful President in John McNeil, and he's just the most agreeable fellow you could ever ask for.

And I proposed to him that I write this column on writing and he said, "Well, give it a try."

And it certainly has succeeded beyond my expectations.

It's been widely accepted and produces a tremendous mail, and now it's produced my second book based on it.

And I'm not gonna, I won't hold it up in front of the camera.

- That's all right.

- In case of a cleansing powder or a toothpaste or something.

May I?

- [Patti] But you are very proud of it.

"Fine Print" it's called.

- I think it's a good book.

It expands on the one I put out about six years ago.

I think it has a lot of my own crotches in it and things that I wish people would do or would not do.

- You talk about writing, being carpentry?

Explain that idea.

- Well, syntax is the business of putting words together.

A carpenter uses a miter joints, tenons and puts things together.

You can have good carpenters and poor carpenters.

And some carpenters are kind of jack legs who would nail it together any old which way.

And it works.

It provides a roof or cow shed or whatever it is you're building.

And then there are other writers who take pains and a go at their carpentry of words very carefully and lovingly and sand things down to get rid of the rough edges and nail them together securely and fill the nail holes so that it doesn't... The analogy applies to writing.

There are writers who take pains and will cast a sentence and not like it and recast it and recast it and then decide, well, maybe that's not a good taste.

Strike it out.

It takes me about three hours to write a 750 word column after the research has been done.

And that's mainly a business of saying this could be better, or this is awkward, or I stumbled over this.

If I stumble over my sentence, you gotta go back and do it over again until you don't stumble.

Syntax is cadence.

There are ways of putting the same words together so that they sound right, and that's really what writing is.

- You're saying it is a skill that can become an art with all that extra tension and time.

- Yeah, I think so.

And it can be taught.

There are the ways to teach editing of copy that will improve anybody's copy, whether you're writing a sermon or a book report or a theme or an essay or a newspaper story.

Certain suggestions, not rules, but certain suggestions and guidelines apply pretty widely.

If you wanna write, well, use active verbs, for example, well, now we're back to fundamentals, just elementary composition, to use active verbs, vary the length of your sentences.

If you get caught in a complex or compound sentence and can't fight your way out, put in a period.

I mean, that's the greatest tool a writer has, is that period right down there on the bottom of the typewriter.

- Stop that thought.

- Yeah.

And break a, the sentence is cumbersome and clumsy and awkward, break it up.

Make that sentence two sentences.

Make it three sentences.

Yeah, these things are easy little dog tricks.

Doesn't do 'em, but they surely will improve somebody's writing.

- You say with this book, that great writers may be born, but good writers can be made.

- That's my thesis.

Yeah.

Well, and serially, some of the great writers were just born great.

McCauley never wrote a clumsy sentence in his life, or Burke or Gibbon, the great writers.

Don't have to teach them how to use active verbs.

They know when to use an active verb and when to use the passive mood and when not.

But good writers can be made better writers.

- You said at one time, that you had a goal of writing one good sentence every month.

- That's still my goal.

1993, I think I had about four months where I didn't write a sentence that really pleased me.

- How do you know when it's good?

Just feels good?

- It just feels good.

It goes dumpty dumpty dump, whopping.

And you know you've got it.

And you sit back and look at that sentence and say, "Did I do that?

Now, isn't that a beautiful sentence?"

As I say, that happened four months outta the 12 and 1993.

So don't get many sentences that really, really please you and say, oh gee, that's great sentence.

I wish I could do that more often.

But wishing doesn't do it.

You have to work at it.

- That's right.

Well, from your book, "Fine Print," what are some examples of the things that just drive you crazy?

- Oh, from my court of crotchets, peeves and irks.

So, well, I just opened as scenario.

I mean, there's a word that has been used to death, scenario.

We ought to get rid of that scenario business.

Oh, I have a real passion on the subject of replica, but nobody else has it.

A replica is a work of art recreated by its original creator.

So when I see that they're advertising replicas of Christopher Columbus' ships, I say, "No way.

People who built those ships died 500 years ago."

Oh.

Oh, everything.

Oh, quality.

That's another one that gets me.

It was a quality performance.

Well, quality is a measure for crying out loud, a degree.

Your have poor quality, average quality, good quality, top quality.

But when somebody who says, "That was a quality performance," you don't know what you're talking about.

As I say, I mentioned healthy and healthful, that doesn't bother me, but it bothers a lot of other people.

You know, people are healthy and foods are healthful.

But I mean, who cares.

Really.

More than.

More than ought to be restricted to something of over, It's distinguished, more than.

You can say, there were over, so many people there, more than is so much better than over because over applies to something that's over your head.

Okay.

Literally.

Oh, "Joan Rivers was literally tongue tied for the rest of the evening."

How do you like that, the idea of Joan Rivers being tongue tied?

Fascinating.

Literally, of course means actually - Right.

Must have been painful.

- Oh, I would think so.

I would think so.

I would imagine that.

- Why do you think that there is so much bad writing?

- Oh, schools.

Teachers have too much to do, so there's not much time to teach writing or spelling or diagramming sentences and emphasizing grammar.

- Don't you think too, it's that we hear things and then you hear it so much, you just start incorporating it into your own vocabulary.

- Well, sure that's true, and in many ways, that's no bad thing.

Our language is not static.

It can't be.

It's always growing and it's casting off spellings and usages and acquiring new ones.

Some of the, every year I write two or three columns just on new words that have come along.

It's fascinating the way people will develop entirely new words to particular uses and apply old words to new uses.

One of my favorite stories from last year had to do with a state trooper in Oklahoma who, investigator in an automobile accident, and a Tulsa paper called him, say, "What was going on?"

He said, the trooper said, "I think the lady broke her leg, but I don't have the exacts yet."

How do you like that?

And another one is to turn the adjective glum into a noun.

Got the glums today.

Have you ever had the glums?

- I'm not sure.

- You have never had the glums.

Well, you're very fortunate if you've never been down with glums.

- Then in closing, you say that you are in semi-retirement now, but this is one of the busiest times of your life with teaching and talking.

- I like it that way.

I'd hate to have nothing to do all day.

No, I'll keep writing until I fall on the grave, I suppose - So after "Fine Print," Will we see another book on grammar?

- No, I think I'm grammared out.

I'm toying with the idea of writing memoirs or some sort, but I'm only toying with it.

Writing a book's like getting pregnant, you know.

I've had this book.

So, no more for a while.

- [Patti] James Kirkpatrick, thanks for being our guest.

- Thanks for asking me.

- From Charleston, I'm Patti Just.

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