20 - 26 September 2001
Issue No.552
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20 - 26 September 2001 Issue No.552 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
For love and money
I am not against combining journalism with literature. For an author to expend his energy consistently on this or that article, to be published here or there -- squandering his life's blood, as it were -- would probably have a dire effect on his writing; yet an involvement in the media can strengthen his literary powers, giving him an immediate and exciting edge. Many authors in the past were also journalists. Abbas Mahmoud El-Aqqad, for one luminous example, made his living as a journalist; so did Ibrahim Abdel-Qader El-Mazni and Mohamed Hussein Heikal. Even Taha Hussein, "the dean of Arabic literature," was a respected journalist.
The second generation of writers arguably included even more journalists. Novelist Ihsan Abdel-Quddous, for example, was a first-rate author and a first-rate journalist at one and the same time. All these managed to maintain a healthy balance.
As for myself, I was too concerned about my writing to take journalism very seriously. After a reasonably successful start, I decided to devote myself wholly to literature in 1936. I could afford to abandon journalism entirely because my daily bread depended on my government post. When I reached retirement age, the then editor Mohamed Hassanein Heikal kindly invited me to publish my fiction on Al- Ahram's pages. But in 1976 I was asked to write a regular article for the newspaper, some 40 years after I had given up journalism. The interim was so long I was initially worried about the readers' response.
In our society no one can survive on literature alone. The point is not to get too embroiled in one's work to write. And in the case of journalism, the risk is significantly greater, since it is still writing, however different.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page