Raising writers' words from the dead
"The interesting thing about staring down a gun barrel is how small the hole is where the bullet comes out, yet what a big difference it would make in your social schedule."
That's a line from P.J. O'Rourke's 1984 travelogue "A Ramble Through Lebanon." Sound funny? Not to the woman who assigned it. Tina Brown, then editor of Vanity Fair, killed the article, telling O'Rourke, "You can't make fun of people dying." "Ramble" is one of 24 pieces resurrected in the just-published collection "Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print," edited by David Wallis. It is either refreshing or depressing to know that every significant writer of any epoch has had work rejected by small-minded editors.
The 20th century's Mr. Rejection must be George Orwell, considered by many to be the best prose writer of his time. His reportage from the Spanish Civil War, later assembled in "Homage to Catalonia," was spiked by a British magazine for being "unhelpful" to the left. T.S. Eliot was among the eminentoes who schemed to keep Orwell's "Animal Farm" out of print, for reasons of political correctness.
Wallis includes an Orwell book review in "Killed," which describes slothful expatriate businessmen lounging on a club veranda in Singapore while ordinary British subjects were being slaughtered by Japanese troops in the fetid Malay jungles. (Thank heavens these kinds of class disparities have been eradicated in our day!)
Another gem is Ted Rall's scathing Father's Day "tribute" to the man who abandoned him and his mother. After an attempted reconciliation, Rall's father reneged on a promise to pay his son's college tuition, just as the boy was packing his bags for Columbia.
"This year on Father's Day, I'm calling my real dad," Rall writes. "I'm calling Mom." The New York Times Magazine killed the essay. "I heard that it made some influential people on West Forty-Third Street feel `uncomfortable,' " Rall recounts.
Carlo Wolff's review of Mitch Albom's "The Five People You Meet in Heaven," also collected here, is a minor classic. The minute you read its now-famous first line -- "How many ways can you define `superficial'?" -- it seems obvious that the Detroit Free Press would spike the piece. Albom is a much-decorated columnist at the "Freep," where the executive editor decided to spare him the anguish.
Alas, the book ignores the awkward psychological quadrille of story-spiking, to wit, the shared embarrassment, as if a romantic assignation had gone wrong. The editor wishes he or she had never commissioned the piece. The writer wishes the editor were dead but more importantly wonders if he bothered to keep the contract, with its suddenly very relevant fine-print warning that "in the unlikely event that we choose not to publish this work. . ." Those clauses rarely read, ". . .we will cheerfully pay your entire fee, plus a 50 percent bonus for inconveniencing you." "Kill fees" for decommissioned stories range from meager to nonexistent.
For understandable reasons, "Killed" always takes the writer's side. But one can see why some of these articles never ran. British travel writer Redmond O'Hanlon's genitalia are interesting, but not 3,500 words worth of interesting. I understand why Vogue editor Anna Wintour spared her readers Tad Friend's 1993 profile of O'Hanlon. Editors aren't always wrong, just 90 percent of the time.
They kill columns, don't they? You bet! My most notorious slaying occurred in 1994, when three middle-level Harvard employees told me, off the record, that President Neil Rudenstine's administration was failing badly. I wrote a column, quoting only my anonymous sources, and my wonderful, excitable former editor threw it back in my face with the words: "You're not big enough to bring down the president of Harvard!" On the plus side, I enjoyed an afternoon of leave time.
Two months later, Rudenstine abandoned the Harvard presidency for a three-month leave, pleading exhaustion. In my line of work, it just doesn't do to say, "I told you so." Well, maybe a decade later it's OK.
The statute of limitations hasn't expired on my other slain columns, a polite way of saying that the editors who killed them are still at the paper. Maybe I can submit them to Wallis's next collection: "Dead Again: The Editors Return."
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
