FREELANCE - Advice Columnists (Michael Greenberg, The Times Literary Supplement, August 14 2009)

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As a boy, I used to fantasize that one day I would have an advice column in one of the afternoon newspapers - preferably in the New York Post or the late "owl" edition of the Daily news. I daydreamed about offering solutions to people's intractable problems, the way my friends imagined being pop singers with broomstick microphones or heroic athletes in the midst of some clock/beating feat.

Many years later, I learned that the first advice column appeared in the Athenian Mercury in 1690, a twice-weekly newspaper in London. "Were there any men before Adam?" asked an Athenian reader. "How can a man know when he dreams or when he is really awake?" wondered another. The job used to require a philosophical disposition as well as a firm moral compass. This no longer seems to be so. On the website Slate, Emily Yoffe, who writes under the name of "Prudence", recently received a letter from a reporter who "stumbled" on nude photographs of her boss's fifteen-year-old daughter in the trash of one of the newsroom's communal computers. The reporter deleted the pictures. prudence upbraids her for passing up "what might be the biggest story of your career". I don't know how the advice columnist at the Athenian Mercury would have responded, but Landers would probably have suggested that she talk discreetly to the girl's mother or even to the boss himself.

Unshakeable cynicsm is one of the chief hazards of the advice columnist's job. Asked by an interviewer what she had learned over the years, Landers replied> "The poor wish to be rich, the rich wish to be happy, the single wish to be married, and the married wish to be dead."

The priestly possibilities of the job attracted me. I tested them once, posting a letter to myself in the hope that, posing as a columnist, I would be inspired to come up with the solution to my problem. The letter (with latter-day improvements) went like this: "I am an eight-year-old boy with four brothers. The one closest in age to me attacks me violently whenever he has the chance. He is jealous, I believe, of the attention our mother pays me. I care about my brother, but I am beginning to hate him. Everyone used to remark at my sunny disposition, but not anymore. Two days ago he tied my hands behind my back with a rope, strapped a pillow case stuffed with cans of tuna fish and tomato soup to my back, and ordered me to act like Quasimodo. I twisted my mouth like Charles Laughton and brayed for water, which my brother threw in my face from a bucket, laughing like a drunk Parisian in rags. I fell, cutting my chin badly. I can't let my mother comfort me, though she wants to, for fear it would set my brother on a new round of attacks. What should I do?

I wrote back, advising myself to collect as many ants as possible and place them in my brother's bed while he slept, with a note warning him to lay off. It wasn't what Ann Landers would have suggested, but it was reassuring to know someone understood the way the game should be played.
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