Second-String Aristotle

In Chicago, where many newspapermen still work in the Front Page tradition, Chicago Daily News Columnist Sydney J. (for Justin) Harris, 35, uses a more intellectual text as his guide. Says he: "I'm just a second-string Aristotle." By serving up his batch of high-and lowbrow opinions on everything from neon signs to neo-Thomism, Columnist Harris has become the most quoted newsman in the city. He has also become the center of countless arguments, whether discussing free love ("It frequently takes a man a long time to learn that free love is more expensive than any other kind") or setting readers straight on Nietzsche ("No great writer ever wrote more nonsense . . and his penalty has been that the nonsense alone is quoted, while his valuable insights have been quite overlooked"). When Har ris objected to "mass-produced" college teaching, eight university presidents answered him. A year and a half ago, when the News asked its readers how they liked Harris, more than 2,000 letters poured in in a few days, with verdicts ranging from "He's a conceited ass" to "Keep him always . . . always."

Harris also appears regularly on a "What Is the Great Idea?" TV program, gives lectures on such subjects as "Are Women People?" (Answer: "They're so busy being women they don't give themselves much of a chance"), and teaches a course in the Great Books at the Union League Club, because "I thought they needed it worse than anybody else."

Two Parts Grease. Last week in his "Strictly Personal" column, syndicated in 16 papers around the U.S., Harris walloped writers of swashbuckling historical novels; rose to the defense of unstuffy clergymen ("Dull[ness] and pompous[ness] . . . has nothing to recommend it, neither piety nor good sense"); punctured the idea that Europeans are more "romantic" than Americans; criticized a congressional investigation of obscene books ("There is not, and has never been, any real evidence that literature, even of the lowest order, has ever 'corrupted' morals") ; and tossed off a few of his typically irreverent "Purely Personal Prejudices" ("Whenever I meet a man who seems to be inordinately proud of his 'get-up-and-go,' I want him to get up and go." "You can be sure that a letter marked 'Confidential' is usually more important to the sender than the receiver").

British-born Columnist Harris, who came to the U.S. at six, studied at the University of Chicago, went to Yale for six months, then quit to go back to Chicago. There he worked on newspapers, got a job as an editor of an encyclopedia, founded his own magazine (it flopped), and finally went to the News as a feature writer. When Publisher John S. Knight bought the paper in 1944, he gave Harris a try at a column. Harris caught readers' eyes by shocking and amusing them. In one of his early columns he wrote; "Southern cooking is composed of two parts grease and one part tree bark . . . Southern hospitality is an even greater mirage --that ruddy, mint-julep colonel in the whisky ads would set the dogs on any damn Yankee who as much as reached for a glass. [Southerners also believe] even a putty-faced cretin is a beautiful belle as long as she murmurs 'you-all' bats her eyelids seductively and wears a picture hat down over her ears."

Later Harris took out after liquor ads: "In the glowing universe of whisky ads, nobody ever gets potted, or falls down elevator shafts, or makes a pass at other men's wives ... If those whisky ads don't get down to earth . . . they will be legislated off the map again, as sure as I'm a man of distinction." Once, when he complained that sportswriters are the "sloppiest and dreariest purveyors" of the English language, the News ordered him out to cover a baseball game. Wrote Harris, in a rare moment of humility: "I never knew how hard it is to report a baseball game until I tried."

Working Off Neuroses. Harris prefers to find his friends on the North Side gold coast rather than in the city room. Once he airily told a Chicago Sun-Times staffer he met at a party: "If you want to talk shop I'm going to be an awful bore, because I never read the papers." But he works hard at his job, makes the rounds of dozens of cocktail parties, dinners, receptions and theater openings a week. He reads from midnight until early in the morning--then sleeps till noon. He seldom makes notes for his column, is sustained by a glass of dry sherry while writing it.

After nine years, hardened Harris readers see signs that their favorite columnist is mellowing. Recently he wrote a "Prayer for the President" ("O Lord . . . give him the courage, not of his convictions, but of Your commandments"), which dozens of readers mailed off to President and Mamie Eisenhower. Columnist Harris thinks the softening in tone is all to the good. Says he: "I have my audience now--I don't have to shock them to get their attention. And then, as you get older, you realize that a lot of what you thought was objective comment is realty just a way of working off your own personal neuroses."

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