The Sunday Gentleman Read Online Free

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