The Sunday Gentleman Read Online Free PDF Page A

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?
    I was in France when I received a copy of the magazine that contained the article about me. My friends regarded the article as generally favorable, even affectionate in tone. Despite this, the hard angle was obvious: A group of authors existed, of which I was one, who had found the means of making a fortune from novels by writing them after a commercial formula. While this made an eye-catching angle for the story, it was (and the magazine knew it was from what I had told them) the sheerest nonsense.
    If successful novelists had a formula, they would not have failures, and I know of no novelist who has not had a failure at one time or another. If successful novelists had only the acquisition of money for their goal, if they were motivated by royalties instead of a need for honest self-expression, they would find it expedient to give less time, less care, less inner agony to a single work, and in that way be able to produce three novels in the period that it ordinarily takes them to suffer over one. Thus, if lucky, they would enjoy two or three times the amount of income they obtained from a single carefully created book. Yet I know of no instance where an author has been influenced by this economic theorem.
    In short, the angle, based on preconceived opinion, manufactured to titillate its readers, was fanciful, with absolutely no basis in fact. As a result, when my next novel appeared, about one-third of the critics, influenced by the angle in the magazine biography of me, incorporated discussions of a so-called best-seller “formula” in their reviews. While not all of this minority of critics were gullible enough to be taken in by the angle, the fact that they had even repeated it in print did have