All writing should aim for the great line

In the Donald Trump years, the best single line from a column came from Peter Jennings.

How many newspaper columns have you read over your whole life? How many of them do you remember? If you do recall one, it’s probably because of a single great line. All writing should aim for the great line. The trick, whether in the most concentrated poetry or the most sprawling novel and everything in between, is to produce the great line and yet not look as though you’re straining for effect.

It’s striking that some columns, among the most ephemeral of all writing, do stay with you. Here’s an example. In 1980 I was working at the now defunct Bulletin magazine. Responding to Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan, the Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, wanted to join a boycott of the Moscow Olympics on the basis that the communist monolith’s human rights abuses and regional aggression were too great for business as usual.

A lot of athletes didn’t want to join the boycott. The Bulletin’s editor, Trevor Kennedy, wrote an editorial on the issue, the only time, I think, he ever published an editorial. In a powerful piece of moral advocacy, he urged athletes to join the boycott. And, he ended most unfairly, if they went to the Games instead, their recent form suggested “they won’t even get their 30 pieces of silver”.

This may have been very unfair on Trevor’s part, and I’m not relitigating the issues now. But what a cracker of a punchline. It’s stayed with me these 42 years and I’m still waiting for the right opportunity to use it myself. Another column I read around that period was by Geoffrey Fairbairn, once a big deal in strategic issues. He was writing, I think, about the lamentable, indeed grotesque, treatment by the Whitlam Government of those South Vietnamese who had worked with our embassy and our forces during the Vietnam War, and whom Whitlam denied entry to Australia after the fall of Saigon. As I ­recall, Fairbairn finished his lament thus: “Still, friends are friends. Or at least they used to be.” In this case, I remember the line much more than the actual column. But when you consider how many words – how many columns – a regular newspaper reader consumes (including these days online) over a lifetime, for any individual nugget to stay with you over so many years indicates rare quality.

In the Donald Trump years, the best single line from a column came from Peter Jennings of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Just when we needed Captain America, he wrote, we got the Incredible Hulk.

Jennings also had a great and memorable line about the near paralysis, and slow death by bureaucratic delay, which afflicts our defence organisation. In just about the time it took China to conquer the South China Sea, he wrote, we produced a defence White Paper. One of my favourite American newspaper columnists at work today is Ross Douthat. Among his countless memorable observations, one encapsulates much about politics: if you didn’t like the religious Right, wait till you meet the post-religious Right.

For a long time I thought Leon Weiseltier of the New Republic the finest prose stylist in American journalism. I think it was a column of his which commented that the move from soul to self to brand represented a calamitous fall in the Western sense of the individual.

I have left out novelists and poets, but in a review, which is journalism after all, Evelyn Waugh once remarked: “To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.”

Wow.