Cocaine by Pitigrilli Read Free Book Online Page A

refuge in journalism, as one takes refuge on the stage after doing the most desperate and disparate jobs — as priest, dentist or insurance agent. There are some who fall in love with journalism because they have had distant glimpses of its most glamorous aspects or its most successful representatives, just as they fall in love with the actors’ trade because they’ve seen an actor who played Othello being frantically applauded. I’ll play Othello too, they say to themselves.”
    “And all they ever get is a walk-on part.”
    “And how many walk-on parts there are in journalism! We’re not people who live real life. We live on the margins of life. We have to defend views we don’t share and impose them on the public; deal with questions we don’t understand and vulgarize them for the gallery. We can’t have ideas of our own, we have to have those of the editor; and even the editor doesn’t have the right to think with his own head, because when he’s sent for by the board of directors he has to stifle his own views, if he has any, and support those of the shareholders.
    “And then, if you knew how wretched it is behind the scenes of this big stage. You’ve seen the many rooms, the many carpets and many lamps; you’ve seen the bar, the salle d’armes , the restaurant, but you haven’t yet met the men. What a prima-donna atmosphere. How many ham actors preen themselves in these rooms, and how many megalomaniacs boast about successes they never had.
    “Outsiders believe journalists to be privileged creatures because theaters give them free stalls, ministers give them precedence over prefects and senators kicking their heels in the waiting room, and great artists talk to them on familiar terms. But the public doesn’t know that in spite of their public cordiality all these people privately despise them. Everyone has a low opinion of journalists, from the hospital porter who gives a reporter information about a tram crash to the President of the Republic who grants an interview to the parliamentary correspondent. They are polite to them because they’re afraid of major acts of blackmail or minor acts of meanness; they willingly give them the information they need, and sometimes they actually give it to them already written out or dictate it to them word for word because, knowing their dreadful ignorance, they’re afraid of heaven knows what idiocy being attributed to them. A great musician or fashionable playwright or highly successful actor will be on familiar terms with newspaper critics, but they know perfectly well who and what those critics are: they’re individuals who between the age of eighteen and twenty-five became newspaper reporters just as you or I did, just as they might have gone into the cod-liver oil business or become a bookkeeper to an equestrian circus. Journalism put them in contact with writers, actors, painters, sculptors, musicians, and thus equipped them with a vocabulary extensive enough to write a defamatory column about a genius or eulogize an idiot.
    “Nevertheless I do not wish to imply that journalism is a printing press put at the disposal of irresponsibility and incompetence; in every editorial office there are two or three men of intelligence, two or three decent human beings, and sometimes one or two who have both brains and conscience.
    “In this caravansary in which you took refuge a quarter of an hour ago you’ll find some admirable persons: the editor, the chief sub-editor, the dramatic critic, who is very severe in his judgments and is a playwright —”
    “A successful one?”
    “No; the chief shorthand writer and the German specialist. But the others — they’re superficial types with nothing in their heads but a short list of books they haven’t read, who talk, talk, talk in disconnected fragments, in ready-made phrases without rhyme or reason, so that listening to them is like looking at a bundle of newspaper cuttings and picking out phrases here and there