John Bartlow Martin: A Writing Life

During the 1940s and 1950s one name, John Bartlow Martin, dominated the pages of the “big slicks,” mass-circulation magazines, especially the Saturday Evening Post, where he produced multipart articles on such provocative topics as mental illness, divorce, abortion, and desegregation in the South.

A former reporter for the Indianapolis Times, Martin, was one of but a few freelance writers in the country able to support himself from his work. His peers lauded him as “the best living reporter,” the “ablest crime reporter in America,” and “one of America’s premier seekers of fact” in a career that spanned nearly fifty years. What set him apart, however, was his deep and abiding concern with the common man in twentieth-century America. “Most journalists,” he noted, “make a living by interviewing the great. I made mine by interviewing the humble—what the Spaniards call los de abajo, those from below.”

Martin treated his freelance career as though it was a regular job, working from nine in the morning until five in the evening, with a half-hour break for lunch, from Monday through Friday; he took Saturdays off and spent his time on Sundays dealing with correspondence and “other accumulated afflictions,” as well as planning his work schedule for the upcoming week.

Pitching ideas to editors, and also receiving suggestions from them, Martin did not cover breaking news, preferring instead to bide his time. “I won’t touch a story when it first breaks because all the reporters are there, all asking questions trying to outdo each other,” Martin explained. “After that’s all over, I feel that I can get closer to it.”

Whenever he began his research, or “legwork,” as he called it, Martin felt afraid because he believed the people he would be interviewing “knew so much,” while he still knew so little about his assignment. Also, when he worked for a newspaper, he reasoned that he had the right to ask questions, because a newspaper “had an inherent right to keep the public record,” but as a magazine writer, he did believe he had that same privilege. “The only way to cure my hesitancy was to master the facts—to study the public record until I knew more about the case than anybody directly involved,” Martin said (one of his close friends described Martin as “fact obsessed”).

Spending anywhere from a few weeks to more than six months pursuing a story, he kept digging until he had all the facts he could gather, especially the human details that “made the bald facts real.” Writing and editing were important to a story, he later said, but “in the end everything depends on reporting.” There were times when he returned from a trip on a Saturday, repacked his suitcase, and left the next day on another assignment. Such commitment to his craft was necessary because a lot of bad reporting, he noted, stemmed from a writer’s reliance on only a single source.

Digging for the facts necessary to construct his stories, Martin developed a few tricks of the trade for interviews. Whenever possible, he tried to talk to a subject at his or her home, because the person would be “at ease there and the objects that surround him will suggest questions to you and remind him of details.” Although he always used a notebook, and spurned tape recorders, he usually kept the notebook out of sight when beginning an interview.

To get the notebook out of his pocket and start taking notes, Martin asked his subject a question requiring a number for an answer—“when were you born?” for example. “You should always try to establish an understanding, a sympathy even, with everyone you interview, even the villains; they’re not totally evil, only human, and what you want to discover is why they behaved the way they did,” he said. If a subject proved to be reluctant to talk, Martin often began relating his own experiences. “Tell him your story,” he said, “pretty soon he’ll likely tell you his.”

Martin preferred doing interviews face to face, not over the telephone, and always aimed at doing so for at least two hours “because you’ll waste the first 45 minutes, you’ll get your best stuff between then and 1½ hours, and you’ll waste the last half hour.” Martin realized he could not possibly collect all the facts on a subject, and even if it was possible nobody would publish the resulting story, as it would be too long. “A writer has to be selective,” he said. “Complete objectivity is impossible. He’ll pick the facts as he sees them and write them in the light of his own experience. That’s really all he can do.”

On his travels Martin usually went to his assignment, in spite of often feeling apprehensive about flying, via airplane, renting an automobile upon his arrival. He depended, however, upon hitting the pavement to get the material he needed. “If I’m doing a story on slums,” he told one reporter, “the best thing to do is walk around. . . . Any story is made on the street.”

Early on in his freelance career, Martin organized his material on three-inch by five-inch notecards. During his investigation of the Centralia, Illinois, minedisaster in 1947, however, he had to come up with something new due to the wealth of information he collected. For the article, eventually published in Harper’s, he went through his notes and documents, gave each a code number, and then numbered the pages. When he came across an item he wanted to use in the article, he typed it out, triple spaced, and keyed it to code and page numbers. “I then cut up the typing line by line into slips of paper,” said Martin. “I moved the slips around, arranging and rearranging them.”

When he had all the slips arranged to his satisfaction, he pasted them together, resulting in a long scroll that he rolled up, placed on his typing table, and consulted as he began writing, letting the scroll fall to the floor as he worked. When he came to the end of the scroll, he had his rough draft finished. Martin dropped this system when, years later, one of his scrolls measured more than 150 feet long, “running out of my room and out the front door and across the lawn.” He went back to organizing his research on note cards, this time using some measuring five-inches by eight-inches in size.

Martin pounded out rough drafts of his stories on a typewriter in his office, or “workshop,” as he referred to it, at his home, never by longhand or by dictation. Usually starting his work at about 8:45 a.m., Martin took a cup of tea with him into his office, closed the door, and worked until lunch, which often consisted of a bowl of Consommé or Consommé Madrilène and a tuna fish sandwich. Martin wrote quickly, on the average of fifty pages a day, sometimes finishing a story in the morning and starting another one that same afternoon. The room was often littered with notebooks, reference books, and memorandums dealing with the subject he was writing about.

Usually, Martin worked until nearly 5:00 p.m. He never ended a day “written out, with nothing more to say.” Instead, he made sure to finish by typing out a quarter or half page of notes about exactly what was coming next so the next morning he could take up where he had left off. Martin discovered that getting started on a story or a day’s work was the hardest part of his job.

Writing in the days before computers, word processing, and the easy storage of information, Martin made sure to make a carbon copy of everything he wrote, especially his rough draft. He did not keep the copy in his house, but secured it elsewhere, always worried about what might happen if a fire—the ultimate “nightmare” for a writer—ever broke out. (Martin knew of a writer who had worked for two years on a novel in a cabin in the Minnesota woods; the cabin burned down and, with it, the only copy of the novel.)

Tackling a rough draft of a story, Martin did what he called “heavy rewrite,” moving sentences and paragraphs around until few if any sentences from his rough draft survived until the final draft. He tried to cut lines he was “especially pleased with, doing the real polished writing on rewrite, not rough—in spite of all this the basic organization remains the same.” It took him as long to rewrite as to write the rough draft. Martin’s system worked for him, but realized other writers might have preferred a different way. “There is no ‘right’ way to write; there is only your way,” he said.

In constructing his stories, Martin concentrated on using what he called the “three C’s”—conflict, characters tightly related to conflict, and the controlling idea. “I sometimes made a conscious effort to get a fictional effect out of a fact story, inventing nothing, simply handling the material as a novelist might,” Martin said, adding he probably had always been “a frustrated novelist.”

Most of his stories went through as many as six rewrites. Writing, to Martin, was “more like carpentry than art.” He also considered writing to be a solitary profession, one reason it was “both so hard and so rewarding.” When he wrote his stories he imagined someone reading over his shoulder, an editor who, if he was tempted to “overwrite a sentence, or leave one loose, or collapse upon a cliché, or otherwise write something idiotic, the imaginary reader would frown; I would fix it.”