ARGUMENTS
117
only for the back section to stop getting it (some wrote me that they
continued to get it for my column).
As
Miss Marshall, until 1953, ran her Books and the Arts section
with complete independence within the magazine, I wrote my music
column with complete independence within her section. I had
begun
in 1936 by taking over the already existing fortnightly record column;
and the increasing interest in it led
The Nation
in 1939 to make it a
weekly column on all musical matters, which in time acquired the
character of a signed column of personal opinion. The choice of sub–
ject each week was mine: what interested me and I had reason to
think-from their letters-interested my readers. For one thing the
many
in
large cities and small towns all over the country-as well as
the ones who bought records in New York-wanted my reports on
music and performances on records. And while they were not interested
in everything that happened in New York, which in any case I couldn't
report on in a weekly column of 1,000 words, they
were
interested in
reports on the New York concerts of outstanding performers whom
they knew from records, and performances of the Metropolitan Opera,
the New York Philharmonic and the other orchestras they knew from
the radio. Also, they were interested in my occasional discussions of the
ideas about music in books, articles and reviews. The writing was mine
too: Miss Marshall was .one of the rare editors who are willing to let
a writer do his own writing
if
they think
him
competent to do
SO;
which is to say that she not only didn't tamper with the writing herself
but, when necessary, protected it against the compulsive depredations of
the copy-editor. Nor is what I have been saying contradicted by the
fact that now and then she would question a word or a sentence which
bothered her, and on one occasion persuaded me to withdraw an
article. It was, she said, one that she couldn't defend; and though she
hadn't told me of such battles on my behalf I had an idea of what some
of them might have been about.
I could recall receiving, one morning in the spring of 1940, a letter
in which Miss Kirchwey asked me why I found it necessary to be so
cantankerous, together with the week's issue of
The Nation
in which
she defended the magazine against the charge that it was cantankerous:
she took it as a matter of course that it was right for
The Nation
to
point out the misrepresentations in a
Times
news report or editorial,
but couldn't see that it was similarly right for
The Nation's
music
critic to point out the misrepresentations in an article by the
Times's
music critic. But she had been persuaded to live up to
The Nation's
proclaimed tradition by publishing my occasional discussions of other
critics' writing though she disapproved of them; and she published
