Abstract
Let's celebrate journalists who think writing matters more than power, says the editor of an anthology of work by Murray Sayle
With the North Vietnamese tanks fast approaching Saigon, the city's fall could only be a day or two away. Even so, Murray Sayle, The Sunday Times' veteran war correspondent, felt there was time for a relaxing glass of beer before taking a plane out the next morning.
Pushing open the door of the Pink Pussycat, a regular watering hole, he was immediately confronted by a South Vietnamese soldier, scowling drunk, who flung a glass at the new arrival and reached menacingly for his gun. Murray retreated back into the night.
Recalling this episode in print, Murray pondered that last thing white journalists could reasonably expect taking their leave of Saigon in the spring of 1975 was anything resembling gratitude. “While not wishing more power to his elbow,” he wrote empathetically of his assailant, “I grasped his point.”
Grasping the point of almost any encounter was one Murray's greatest qualities as a journalist. Although I worked closely with him on occasions at The Sunday Times, I did not fully apprehend this aspect of his talent until I took on the task of putting together an anthology of his life's work.
This involved a long trawl, in terms of both time and geography, of the archives starting with the Sydney University student newspaper, Honi Soit, ending with The New Yorker, and taking in the Sunday People, Reveille, The Spectator, The Atlantic, Prospect Magazine and Times Newspapers along the way, with several other brief magazine encounters interspersed. In nearly all cases, Murray Sayle's contributions tended to stand out from all the rest, not for just the reporting but also for their contribution to a deeper understanding of a situation. And, most of all, of course, for being so readable.
Because he was so prolific, it was often assumed he was a fast, fluent writer. In point of fact, writing did not come that easily or quickly to him. But he had an unusual talent for living out and working out his stories before laying a finger, or in his case, two fingers, on a typewriter.
“How does this grab ya?” he would demand of passing colleagues on The Sunday Times before bending their ears with a recital of the key paragraphs forming in his brain for his upcoming piece. One exasperated journalist complained that Murray was giving his work “an extended provincial try-out” at the expense of those he had buttonholed. Even so, most of us found these encounters enjoyable.
Impossibility of objective truth
In journalism's great subjective versus objective debate, Murray unabashedly leaned towards the subjective side of matters, though this in no way lessened his regard for the truth. His favourite film was Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, the study of a rape and murder seen from the vantage point of several eye-witnesses. Its demonstration of the near impossibility of ever arriving at an objective truth was, Murray felt, the best illumination of every journalist's core problem. In trying to get closest to approximation of the truth, he was all for journalists using every legitimate means at their disposal, including their own egos.
Despite his respect for the written word, Murray never seriously extended his own range beyond the newspaper and magazine business. Many of his contemporaries on The Sunday Times under the editorship of Harold Evans went on to write non-fiction books of their own, and are indeed are still writing them as the names Hunter Davies, John Pearson, Phillip Knightley, William Shawcross and Ian Jack still testify. Murray, who died in 2010, never got around to it, though he did produce an entertaining novel, A Crooked Sixpence.
The “crooked man” was James O'Toole, a fast-talking, slightly bigheaded Australian journalist, fresh off the boat, not unlike Murray, who finds employment with the Sunday San, which bore an uncannily close resemblance the Sunday People, Murray's first newspaper employer in Britain. No trick of the pop journalist's tale, however, rumbustious and cynical is left untold. At one point O'Toole's girlfriend asks him how he manged to get a suspected murderer to deny his crime in way that made you sure he had actually committed it. No problem, O'Toole explained, “This was his first murder case, and about my thousandth news story”
This insight, and many more besides, was lost to readers when the publishers, menaced by a libel action, withdrew the book and pulped all the copies. It left Murray with a distrust of the book publishing world, though A Crooked Sixpence would eventually be published as a paperback in 2007 almost 50 years after it was written when the libel risk subsided.
It's probably true to say that Murray's fidelity to his craft was best exemplified not so much by his feats of derring-do in war zones or by his conspicuous self-generated adventures like sailing single-handed across the Atlantic and scaling Everest, but by his output from the tiny village of Aikawa in Japan.
Aikawa was where Murray, aged 49, and his new wife, Jennifer, settled and raised their three children. With the nearest city, Tokyo, 60 miles away it could hardly be designated a communications hub. Yet in the days before the fax, let alone e-mail, (though both were immensely welcome later) he put together his freelance operation in a book-lined outhouse from which he regularly serviced top magazine outlets in America, Australia, Germany and Britain.
As hot news was in modest supply, his imagination was constantly at full stretch. Out of it would come intriguing new appreciations of the great ogres of the century – Hitler, Stalin, Mao and, of course, Japan's own Emperor Hirohito, for whom Murray developed a soft spot. Threats to world peace, such as global warming, nuclear confrontations and the rise of fundamentalism provided another rich seam.
It had always been Murray's contention that the highest ambition of a journalist should not be the ascent of its slippery executive ladders but the writing of a good piece. This philosophy sustained him for 30 years in Japan and few more in his native Sydney before his remarkable day was done.
