The Sunday Gentleman (2 page)

There were moments of mean compromise, and aftermaths of bad conscience, of course. I often remembered a character of W. Somerset Maugham’s remarking that a true artist would let his poor mother starve to death rather than write potboilers. Apparently, William Faulkner read this, or subscribed to this tenet on his own, for in 1956, he told a reporter from the
Paris Review
that a writer’s only responsibility in life was to his art, adding, “Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”

It was because I believed in this responsibility of the writer to his art as much as I believed that he had other responsibilities beyond writing. It was because of this ambivalent feeling toward my work, that I determined that six days a week were enough to give of myself to avoid debtor’s prison. The seventh day of the week, I felt, belonged to me. And so almost every Sunday, during those twenty magazine years, I devoted to factual articles and stories that were more honest, if less commercial, because they were entirely my own. On Sundays, I wrote without any periodical or reading public consciously in mind, wrote only those articles and stories that interested me totally and interested me alone. I hoped that they would appear in print, and that I would be paid for them, but if they were not accepted and published, it did not matter. At least one day a week, I could appear to myself, and perhaps before the world, as a Sunday Gentleman.

This book then is a partial product of my twenty years of Sundays, and half of it found its way into magazines and half did not, and while it may not represent art, it does represent those reportorial and observation pieces that I wrote simply because they interested me and I wanted to write them. In these pages, you will meet one writer as he wrote when he was a Sunday Gentleman—and by “gentleman” I do not mean the gentleman of the dictionaries who is “a well-bred man of fine feelings, good education, and social position”; I mean the gentleman Defoe was on Sunday, by my definition “an honest man, full of sensitivity, racked by insecurities, determined one day to be a free and independent soul, to speak and write what is in his mind and heart without fear and compromise, to write in concert with truth or his own desires.”

Eventually, there came a time in my life when Sundays were not enough, when being a gentleman only once a week galled me. When that time came, I gave up writing for magazines and began writing books, because books represented to me that last refuge for the writer who wished to write as he pleased, alone, without compromising with committees, without concern for pleasing any special public. If one could write the books he wished without making concessions, and somehow derive a livelihood from them no matter how meager, I reasoned, then such a one could be a gentleman, a freeman, an independent man, not merely one day a week but seven days a week.

When I began my book-writing career, my fight for seven days of Sunday a week, I was told by book writers who had been published that I was seeking a Utopia that had no existence. Few writers in America, very few, wrote books and only books and yet stayed out of debtor’s prison. There were, I was told, men who wrote books and taught in schools or had working mates or mates who possessed an inheritance; and there were housewives who wrote books and had husbands with regular employment; and children who wrote books and had free board and room and weekly allowances. But any dream of an unsubsidized author writing books without compromising them, and yet surviving, was impractical and foolish. I did not believe my veteran part-time author friends. I thought that they were merely speaking out of bitterness, out of a cynicism born of defeat. I was wrong.

Actually, when I quit magazines in the hope of devoting myself entirely to books, believing it could be done, I should have known better. For, to be quite frank about it, I had never not written books. I had written them while hardly out of puberty. I had written them in high school, in college, in the army, and in the Sundays of my magazine years. But I had never had a single book accepted for publication. Looking back now, I still find myself astonished, and frightened, at the number of books I wrote in the loneliness of so many small and strange rooms, and by how thoroughly and totally (despite occasional encouragements) my books were rejected. The gravestones on my stillborn are imprinted indelibly on my memory, and when I think of them, I buy another bond, overeat, and knock wood.

When I was seventeen, I wrote half a book.
Heroes of Today
, recounting the lives of men I admired, who ranged from Clarence Darrow to Walter Reed. It was rejected, never published. When I was eighteen, I wrote half a book. Sorry but
You’re Wrong
, exploding the fallacies of popular folk beliefs. It was rejected, never published. When I was nineteen, I wrote my first complete book,
My Adventure Trail
, an enthusiastic recounting of a journey I had taken into the Honduran jungles. It was rejected, never published. When I was twenty, I wrote another complete book,
The Sunday Gentleman
—yes—a biography of Daniel Defoe. It was rejected, never published. When I was twenty-two, I wrote one-third of a book,
Roman Holiday
, a biographical account of the first twelve Caesars. It was rejected, never published. When I was twenty-two, I compiled and rewrote a book.
Etcetera
, a collection of some newly written articles together with many I had already had published in magazines. It was rejected, never published. When I was twenty-five, I wrote
Japan’s Mein Kampf,
a documentary account of the infamous Tanaka Memorial. It was rejected, never published. When I was twenty-seven, I wrote a full-length book.
With Their Pants Down
, a candid memoir of celebrities I had met and interviewed in my writing career. It was rejected, never published. When I was thirty-four, I wrote two chapters of a book,
Gabriell
e, a detailed history of the pretty French murderess, Gabrielle Bompard. I was discouraged, never submitted it. In those years, I wrote at least one or two chapters of a half-dozen novels, but became doubtful about each, and never finished them or submitted for possible publication what I had finished.

This was my illustrious record when, at the age of thirty-seven, I so cavalierly left magazines to write books seriously seven Sundays a week. Actually, I had always written books “seriously.” But at the age of thirty-seven, the effort was more “seriously” because I intended that my new career not be an avocation but a vocation, and I felt that I was bringing to it more experience, more understanding, more wisdom, and more passion than I had possessed when I was younger.

Between the years 1953 and 1959, I wrote and had published four books: three nonfiction books of biography and one novel. All were minor critical and minor financial successes, and combined they did not earn me as much money as I had earned, or was able to earn, in one year from other writing sources. My friends were right, after all. I could not make a living from the writing of books—a week was not meant to be made up only of Sundays—yet I had found that if I could not live from books, I certainly could not live without them.

From the first book to the fourth, I did everything I could to buy time for the next one, and to keep my wife, my two children, and others of my relations alive. I scrounged through every literary and pseudoliterary alley I could find in search of money that could buy Sundays that could mean books. I had turned my back on magazines, and so I went elsewhere for sustenance. I wrote countless tricked-up idea outlines and present-tense original screen treatments, on speculation, to submit to the film studios. I wrote numerous screenplays, on salary, for every major movie studio. At my lowest point, I wrote ten television scripts for six producers on order.

I am not complaining about this. It was a plush hell, an infernal region dominated by double-dealing, politics, feuds, pettiness, thievery, cretinism, where the writer suffered indignity, disrespect, disdain, and where he could make more money than he could possibly make in any other salaried medium of writing. There were also, in this region, good people, honest people, highly creative people, and sometimes the product of their collective talents produced a motion picture or television film that equaled or exceeded in artistic value the best current books or plays. But these talented ones, and their best products, were in the minority.

In those days, for that money, for that survival and books-in-the-future money, I worked harder and longer than I had ever worked in my magazine years. But for me, for one like myself who likes to create on his own rather than adapt, and who prefers to work alone, and rise or fall by his own efforts rather than collaborate with other writers, directors, producers, actors, it was a miserable period. I found that the big money was too costly to earn, emotionally. In the magazine world, at least, I could do a skilled craftsman’s work six days a week, and know that the seventh day would be Sunday. In this frenetic, competitive world of celluloid, at least for me, there were no Sundays, none at all.

But somehow, out of all of this, some victories were gained. I did find the time (mostly nighttime, not Sunday time) to write my first four books. And I learned a good deal that I had not known before about dialogue, about scenes, about story construction (although there was also much that had been lost, and that had to be learned anew, like subjective writing, descriptive writing, inner monologues, and the necessity for story to emerge from character rather than appending characters to story). I came away with this knowledge, and the four hard-earned books, and a new determination, almost blind and savage, to write books and nothing else. In fact, I came out of this world with everything except the one thing I had gone into it for—money.

More impractical and foolish than ever, I returned to writing books with no more security than a house of my own that was not paid for, a small savings account, and a fierce desire to write a fifth book, a novel that possessed me and engaged all my senses. I wrote this fifth book. It was an immediate international best seller.

Here was the miracle I had dreamed of in my youth. At last, free, independent, confident, I wrote my next book, and my next, and my next, and my next, and each was an international best seller. By wildest luck and unbelievable good fortune, combined with a love of what I was doing and a love of the stories I had to tell, and the freedom to tell them in my own way. I had won my seven days of Sundays.

In the years since I quit magazines, and then motion pictures and television, and ever since I began to work entirely on my own as a novelist, I have become even more desirable to executives in those entertainment mediums. No month passes that I do not receive some inquiry from New York or Hollywood asking if, with few imposed restrictions, I will not write a series of articles or short stories, or produce motion pictures based on my own ideas, or create and supervise my own television show. I have always been flattered, and always declined, because my week of Sundays has been too hard-won ever to forfeit it for more money.

I might add at this point that I do not mean to say that in the various fields of writing only authors who write books are free and independent men. Usually, there are two conditions under which a man’s life can be free and independent—the first is to have youth without responsibility; the second is to have maturity with sufficient savings in the bank, or earning power, to make him beholden to no one on earth.

There are a handful of magazine, screenplay and television writers, I am sure, who may write as they please, but only a small handful. There are undoubtedly playwrights who are wholly their own men, too, although many of the ones I know have told me that their control of their material exists as a clause in their contract but not in its execution. If a playwright requires a big-name actor or director to get his play produced on Broadway, or needs either of these to assure his play’s success, this actor or director may demand major excisions or revisions. The playwright must then choose between doing what others want him to do in order to see his play produced, or refuse to bend to compromise and face having no play performed at all. But again, in exceptional cases, if a playwright is an important name himself, and possessed of a bull’s head and a backbone of iron, he may dominate the actor or director, and ultimately, see his work produced exactly as he wrote it.

In the publishing world of books there is less necessity for the creative person to bend to the wishes of others. The. author has neither actor nor director to contend with, only a publisher and/or editor. Unlike the play producer, who must gamble a large financial investment, the book publisher can bring out a novel at relatively small cost, and so can afford to be less nervous about investing in a work that may be in a form that does not please him entirely.

Yet, in all honesty, I must state that complete integrity can be maintained by a book author only when the publisher needs him more than he needs the publisher. If an author has written a biography or novel on his own, and his publisher or publisher’s editor insists that he radically change portions of it to suit the publisher’s or editor’s own critical and creative ideas, the author must often comply in order to see his beloved book in print. Of course, it is usually not quite that cut-and-dried: Writers are often permitted to retain material the publishers do not like simply because of publishers’ traditional respect for the individuality and mystique of the creative artist; and often writers will eagerly make most changes suggested to them because they are insecure about the quality of what they have written, or because they feel that an experienced editor’s suggestions may actually improve their work.

Compromises in the publishing field, minimal though they be, do exist, for reasons of an editor’s personal prejudices or a publisher’s economic concerns. After spending years preparing and writing my first published book,
The Fabulous Originals
, and receiving an advance of $1,000 and a beribboned contract from Alfred A. Knopf, I was stunned when he forced me to surrender a degree of my creative autonomy before my book went to press, a surrender demanded on economic grounds only. I was stunned because I had regarded Mr. Knopf as entirely a creative publisher with respect only for the well-written word. I had not realized that he was of necessity also a tough and shrewd businessman, like most other publishers. Even though my book was not unduly long, Mr. Knopf insisted that he wanted it considerably shorter, in order to make its publication cheaper and its profits (the equivalent of 9 1/2 percent of the retail price was to be mine, I was reminded) greater. It was my first about-to-be-published book. Fearful that it might not reach the printer if I defended the Word against the Profit Ledger, I conceded. Of the volume’s nine chapters, I was forced to pull out one chapter in its entirety, and cut out two-fifths of another. In short, I needed this publisher more than he needed me, and against my better judgment, I compromised.