When I was starting out as a journalist, I was told by a colleague: “This is just marking time. Journalists worth their salt have a novel tucked away in the bottom drawer which they hope to publish soon and become famous.” I didn’t, then or ever, but I had been told my place: novelists first, hacks somewhere at the back.
Years later I met V.S. Naipaul and made a joke about “hack writing.” It upset him. “Don’t look down on journalism,” he said, “It is a very special skill. Some great novelists would make terrible journalists.” Some great novelists had also made the leap from journalism: Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Graham Greene.
And Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who called journalism “the best job in the world.”
“I am basically a journalist,” Marquez wrote, “My books are the books of a journalist.” He founded six publications in his lifetime, and said, “I do not want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude , nor for the Nobel Prize, but for the newspapers.” If it’s good enough for Marquez …
The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings brings together Marquez’s journalism; some profound, some brilliant reportage, and some on searching for a subject for a topical piece. In this latter category is ‘The Postman Rings a Thousand Times’ about where letters that never reach their destination end up. Marquez tells us imagination can enhance reality without distorting it. He began as a writer fully formed.
Here he is on writing a weekly column: “I write (this column) every Friday from nine in the morning, until three in the afternoon, with the same will, the same conscience, the same joy, and often the same inspiration with which I should have written a masterpiece. When I don’t have a well-defined topic I go to bed grumpy on Thursday night, but experience has taught me that the drama will resolve itself while I sleep and will begin to flow again in the morning, as soon as I sit in front of the typewriter.”
Here, on seeing Hemingway from across a street in Paris. Marquez “cupped my hands to my mouth, like Tarzan in the jungle, and shouted from one sidewalk to the other, ‘Maeeeestro!’ ”.
Hemingway, confident there could be no other maestro about, shouted back, “Adioooos, amigo.” Lovely. There is a wonderful description of Hemingway earlier, a few light touches: “He was enormous and too visible … his hips were a bit narrow and his legs didn’t have much flesh on the bones …”
The title piece is reportage from Rome which was published in fourteen instalments. The research and doggedness that make his book News of aKidnapping a classic on long-form journalism can be seen here.
“Writing books,” Marquez says in Misadventures of a Writer of Books, “is a suicidal job.” Themes on writing, writers, Latin America, friends, translation, journalism and more go through the Marquez mill and reappear original, witty and with great power on the page. There’s both magic and realism.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
