The Sunday Gentleman Read Online Free Page B

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