The Sunday Gentleman Read online

  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, Gabrielle, 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.

  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 E
nglishman.’ 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.