The Sunday Gentleman (3 page)

Years later, when I had a good number of books in print and they were being widely read, and numerous publishers desired me more than I desired them, my new publisher suggested that my novel.
The Prize
, might be improved if I made two major changes in the manuscript before it went to press. These were not arrogant demands, but well-intentioned suggestions for literary improvement. After giving the two changes considerable thought, I rejected the first because I felt it was wrong, that it tampered with my own vision of the story, that the concession would make the book less the novel I had conceived. However, I agreed that the publisher’s second suggested change was an intelligent one, worth considering as a definite improvement, and I agreed to do some rewriting. The important difference is that I was not being forced to compromise a single paragraph as a condition of publication, and the decision to rewrite was, in the end, my own. In no other field of writing have I ever encountered such absolute freedom.

Because full-time creative independence was a primary drive in my writing career, once I had achieved it with books I never again, as I have said, had any desire to return to magazine writing. Since the writing of my first published book, I have written only four magazine articles, but none of these are articles such as those I used to write six days a week, or such as those in this collection that I wrote on the seventh day. My recent articles are subjective rather than objective, and they concern the creation of my books and were inspired by an occasional need to defend or explain my novels. The only exception, perhaps, is the most recent article I have written, which is about a personal experience and forms the final chapter of this book. This article was motivated less by a desire to explain how I had researched my novel.
The Man
, than to set down on paper, more for myself than anyone else, my memory of several visits to President John F. Kennedy’s Oval Office in the White House shortly before his assassination.

Looking back now on twenty years of writing for magazines as a livelihood, I think I can fairly evaluate the pleasures I derived and the difficulties I endured in that profession. I have already spoken of the most disagreeable aspect of my magazine career, the lack of opportunity to write as I pleased about subjects that pleased me. There were several other aspects of this field of writing that irritated me. There was the editorial attitude that the magazine article or short story must always be subservient to the advertisements. Of course, interesting stories were required to attract a large reading public, which, in turn, would attract advertising accounts. But if an abundance of last-minute advertising was received for a certain issue, then the stories scheduled for that issue would be coldly re-edited and slashed, without regard for the adverse literary effect or story damage this caused, to accommodate the profit picture. The last article I wrote as a full-time magazine writer—an interview I had in Essen, Germany, with Alfried Krupp—was reduced from a thorough piece to a half-intelligible pygmy of reportage due to this sort of commercial emergency. When the article appeared, I winced with pain at what had been done and what readers whom I respected would think of such an incomplete, superficial story, never knowing that I had originally written it quite differently.

Another annoyance, infrequent but terrible when it did occur, was censorship. Sometimes I would submit an article that ran counter to the magazine’s editorial policy, or contained material that might be offensive to an important advertiser or to a prejudiced publisher or his wife. Then either the article would be rejected without appeal, or the offending material cut out, no matter how inaccurate this made the story or how much it threw the story out of balance. One classic example of censorship occurred to me in the summer of 1949. With a firm assignment based on an idea I had suggested, I wrote a two-part article on the controversy surrounding the Nobel Prize awards made by Sweden and Norway. In one portion of this article, I attempted to evaluate the impartiality of the Nobel Prize judges from factual voting records, and I concluded that the Nobel judges had unreasonably favored candidates of Scandinavian and German citizenship, but boycotted Russian writers and scientists, because Russia (under both the monarchy and Communism) was Sweden’s historic enemy. I’ pointed out that Sweden had given the Russians only one and a half medicine prizes, no chemistry prizes, no physics prizes, and only one literary prize (to a White Russian, Ivan Bunin, living in exile—while Tolstoi was voted down nine times, and Chekhov and Gorki were ignored) in the first forty-eight years of prize-giving. While the editors of
Collier’s
accepted this as objective reporting, the passage came to the attention of a non-editorial executive of the firm, a man who saw Red at an early age and who had never recovered. He decided that the writer of this article was a Communist sympathizer (let alone a Czarist lover) and that the article, assigned or not, must be rejected. Only after his staff prevailed upon his sense of fair play did he relent, permitting the two-part article to be accepted and published—on the condition that the factual section on the Swedish judges being anti-Russian be obliterated. It was unreasonable censorship, clear and simple, but I bowed to it in order to salvage the rest of my article and the income it would provide, after months of work. Not until I entered the freer world of books was I able to tell the whole of the Nobel story, to interweave the omitted facts with a fictional plot, in my novel
The Prize
. But that was fourteen years later.

Another form of censorship sometimes came from the subject about whom one wrote. I remember interviewing the late Raymond Chandler, the brilliant writer of hard-boiled mysteries and the creator of private detective Philip Marlowe, in 1946. I enjoyed and admired him without reservation, and found him refreshingly candid in his opinions of himself, his craft, his fellow authors. As I finished my story about him, I was particularly pleased by the following passage:

“Chandler’s favorite conversational topic is the mystery story and its practitioners. He spares neither himself nor his fellows.

“S. S. Van Dine? ‘I can’t read him. Philo Vance is utterly detestable. He’s just a second-rate imitation of the stage Englishman.’ Dorothy Sayers? ‘I like her as a writer, but her mysteries are lousy.’ Agatha Christie? ‘Her stories are phony, and worst of all, they cheat. Though
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
was a good stunt.’ Ngaio Marsh? ‘I read her for a while, but now I find her tiresome.’ Freeman Wills Crofts? ‘A plodder.’ R. Austin Freeman? ‘Strictly gaslight and hansom cab, but one of my old favorites.’ Rex Stout? ‘Enjoyed
The League of Frightened Men
, then got weary of his work. Always liked Archie, but Nero Wolfe’s eccentricities are beginning to bore me. Of course, it’s hard to maintain eccentricities through a long series of stories.’ Ellery Queen? ‘I don’t like him at all.’ A. Conan Doyle? ‘I never shared the great admiration everyone has for Sherlock Holmes.’ Erle Stanley Gardner? ‘I like the books he’s written under the name of A. A. Fair, but his own Perry Mason stinks, and you can quote me. Erle is touchy, and he probably won’t ever speak to me again after this.’ Dashiell Hammett? ‘He probably influenced me. He’s tops, but I think he can be done better.’ Raymond Chandler? ‘His specialty is insulting people. He’s a poor plotter, a bad constructionist, and he finds it easier to criticize than to create.’”

While my article on Raymond Chandler was being readied for publication, a New York columnist heard about this explosive passage and mentioned it in print. The next day. Chandler was on the telephone. He insisted that I kill that overly frank passage in my story at once. He admitted that he had said what I had written, and had said it all for publication, but now some of his fellow writers had been in touch with him and had convinced him that complete candor, in itself, was not a virtue. Reluctantly, I agreed to this censorship, and was forced to present a less candid Raymond Chandler to the magazine public.

One of the unhappiest aspects of magazine writing, a subtle but persistent dishonesty that was necessary for survival, was that of giving almost every article a strong angle. The necessity of having an angle in every article still survives in the magazine field. But it was more widely in demand, although less harshly used, during the time when I wrote for magazines. It was not enough to think of a likely subject to write about, and then write about it as one truly found it (since this might invite waste, dullness, lack of instant audience appeal). To secure an assignment, the writer had to find in advance something in a prospective subject’s life that was unusual or bizarre—a “narrative hook,” an “attention grabber”—and promise to prove it true and to build the story around it, as well as use an offbeat point of view or theme. Once the assignment was obtained, with this prefabricated angle pledged for delivery, the writer had to research and interview to prove the validity of the angle, to build it up, so that it could support all the remaining facts. If the writer then found that the angle really existed, and did have the importance he had claimed for it, he could use it in his prose creation and present it in full honesty. If the writer found that he had been misinformed about the truth or the importance of his angle, he could risk developing another angle (even though it did not conform to his assignment) and hope to get by with it, or as was more usually the case, he could weight the emphasis on certain facts, at the sacrifice of all his findings, to shore up his original angle. Worst of all, the magazine writer gave himself little room in which to move about during his search for truth. He had already settled upon a truth, and wearing his angle blinders, he obsessively sought it at the sacrifice of the more important facts. This partnership in sin between editor and writer usually did not produce a story that was outright dishonest, but rather one whose accuracy was distorted by reliance on predetermined opinion, by emphasis on what was desired rather than what existed.

I was, in my magazine-writing career, as guilty as my peers and colleagues of participating in this technique of angling. I offer no excuses, only apologies, and bring up one fact to mitigate my guilt. Like the majority of my colleagues, I never stayed with an angle or used it in my writing, if I found it to be utterly false. I angled my stories only when my researches proved the angles were true. But even though they were true, my angles, like those of my colleagues, were frequently distorted by editors suffering countless pressures of their own.

This happened when I wrote an article for a leading magazine about the Basques, an unusual and mysterious race. (“They are neither Spanish nor French nor anything known. No one has any firm idea where they came from. Archeologists can find no clues scratched on stones or monuments; historians can locate no written records; philologists can find out little about their ancient guttural language—a frog in the throat of Europe.”) This defiant people had an active underground in Spain, working out of France, battling to gain independence from Francisco Franco’s oppressive Fascism. My angle was that these Basques were Catholics, yet they had defied the Vatican when they joined left-wing groups in an effort to overthrow Franco’s Catholic regime. In Paris and San Sebastian, I found proof that this angle was true. I wrote about it, and submitted what I wrote, along with my proof of the angle, to the editors who had assigned the story.

The editors accepted my angle and evidence, even liked it, but appeared to be worried about international Catholic reaction. After much soul-searching, the editors began to cut and condense the material pertaining to my angle. What remained, after the article had been published, was not a story devoted mainly to a unique people who were a part of Spain and who were 99 percent Catholic, yet fought Catholic Franco, but a story concerned largely with the oddity and strangeness of the Basques as a race. The primary point of my story. Catholics in revolt against a Catholic leader, had been reduced to a passing mention in three paragraphs.

Actually, in fairness, I must add that the periodical had displayed considerable courage in publishing even that much. Still, commercial timidity had, by omission, sorely diminished the factual completeness of the Basque story. In this case, the sin, if sin it had been, was largely that of an editorial policy. But in permitting the bowdlerization, I suppose I was a minor partner to the vitiation of what had started out as balanced reporting.

But I was to learn that sometimes our compromises come home to roost. We who have sinned in even the smallest ways are occasionally made to realize the import of our transgressions when we, in turn, are sinned against. Recently, by chance, such a turnabout happened to me. With passing years, my life had changed. As I had once written stories about other men, I found others now writing stories about me. I had created controversial novels. They were being read and discussed, in different editions and many languages, by millions of people. I was fair game for the new magazine writers and editors—and their angles.

Late in 1963, my New York agent telephoned me that a leading magazine was interested in researching and publishing a biographical article about me. Would I cooperate? I agreed to cooperate because the request to be so publicized as an important personage or a zoo animal was flattering, and moreover might be valuable in acquainting many more people with my books. However, my agreement to receive the magazine’s writer, who was being flown from New York to Los Angeles, was tinged with apprehension. For the magazine in question, like so many similar ones, was noted for creating stories that were sometimes based on inner editorial prejudices and half-substantiated rumors. Yet the same magazine had featured many excellent biographies of contemporary authors, and I decided that a publication so devoted to the popular novelist could not be all bad. It was my wife, more realistic than I, who first spoke the unspeakable. “What’s their angle?” she said. “They must have an angle.”

The magazine’s young writer spent three days with me and my friends—a marathon of questions and answers—and after the first day, I could discern no angle. It was only after the second day, after he had begun to interview my friends, that the gleaming point of his angle became visible. His angle, or the magazine’s angle, was to show an example of the new writing phenomenon, product of, caterer to, the new commercial age: an unliterary pasha feasting on exotic peacock tongues, caviar, champagne, surrounded by unsheathed concubines, served by relays of uniformed attendants, occasionally consulting his indexed card file of best-seller formulas in order to dash off another book on his cash register. Yet, the visiting writer confessed to me, neither I nor my mode of living fitted his publication’s preconceived notions, derived from the contents of several of my novels and the publicity about my income in their files. The young writer faced the magazine writers’ classic dilemma. What to do? Drop the story? Stick to the original angle and write the lie? Strike a compromise between fact and wish?