The Undeclared War between Journalism and Fiction

Journalists as Genre Benders in Literary History

D. Underwood

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137353481
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this volume, Doug Underwood asks whether much of what is now called literary journalism is, in fact, 'literary, ' and whether it should rank with the great novels by such journalist-literary figures as Twain, Cather, and Hemingway, who believed that fiction was the better place for a realistic writer to express the important truths of life.

Chapter 1

Challenging the Boundaries of Journalism and Fiction

“True things quite often don’t sound true unless they are made to.”

—John Steinbeck

As a New York city editor and reporter in the 1890s and early 1900s, the muckraker journalist, Lincoln Steffens, has become well-known for two experiments in newspaper journalism that have been held up by historians as illustrations of the good and the bad that the daily press can contribute to the public weal—and which, by extension, can be seen at the heart of the debate about journalism’s contribution to the literary tradition. Steffens’s first demonstration was to show that a so-called objective newspaper could create a “crime wave” simply by sensationalizing the typical crime stories that show up on the police blotter under big headlines and with fear-stoking editorial commentary. Steffens’s second demonstration was to exhort his reporters to forswear dry, formula-based accounts of the activities of the city and to personalize the stories of common people by writing them in frank but artful language that appealed to both literary savants and the average reader. A particular feature of this kind of writing—that would become the credo of the “new” journalists of the 1960s and 1970s—was to treat journalism as if it had the potential to be literature, and to use narratives in ways that would bond readers with the subjects of newspaper stories and create a natural sympathy for their struggles and difficult circumstances. “Our stated ideal for a murder story was that it should be so understood and told that the murderer would not be hanged, not by our readers,” Steffens wrote of his aim as the city editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser. “We never achieved our ideal, but there it was; and it is scientifically and artistically the true ideal for an artist and for a newspaper: to get the news so completely and to report it so humanely that the reader will see himself in the other fellow’s place.”¹

In both experiments, Steffens set out to prove that daily journalism was anything but a neutral medium of communication, and that the way a story was told contributed greatly to the press’ deleterious impacts upon society, as well as what he considered to be its potentially positive role in creating public understanding of social problems. Steffens’s friend and muckraking ally, Upton Sinclair, shared Steffens’s journalistic philosophy of empathetic writing as a catalyst for reform, but he tweaked it in his creation of The Jungle (1906) in ways that moved his expose of the brutalities against workers and lack of sanitation involved in the American meatpacking industry into the realm of fiction.² However, one thing that Steffens and Sinclair agreed upon was the following: the value of a written work, whether journalism or fiction, should be judged by whether it addressed an important social, political, or economic problem, and the way the story was cast, whether in fiction, nonfiction, or something in between, should be presented so that the “facts”—as unearthed by the literary or journalist investigator—supported the case for social action.

That Sinclair came to believe that the investigative details of his probe into the abuses of the meatpacking industry could best be framed in a fictionalized account can seem jarring in our era, where many journalists, scholars, and critics have drawn a strict line between the methodologies and practices of what is defined as nonfictional journalism and the imaginative liberties taken by fiction writers. Today, journalistic reporting as the basis for important literary expression is only rarely recognized outside the contribution of nonfictional artists, such as the practitioners of the “new’ journalism. This movement was launched with the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in 1965 and has been carried on by such high profile writers as Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Gay Talese, David Halberstam, John McPhee, Michael Herr, Tracy Kidder, Calvin Trillin, Gloria Emerson, and Frances Fitzgerald, as well as Robert Boynton’s “new new” journalists. Boynton notes that this newer generation of literary journalists (some do not even like this label) have put more emphasis upon journalistic research and maintaining a careful demarcation between fictional and nonfictional techniques than some of their flamboyantly stylized writing predecessors.³

The excitement generated by Capote’s accomplishment in researching and writing about the murder of a Kansas farm family—and his success in creating what he called an “immaculately factual” “non-fictional novel”—has led to debate ever since about his methods for blending journalistic research with literary narrative techniques. Although small inventions and factual discrepancies can be found within In Cold Blood (Capote believed his techniques allowed him some freedom to juxtapose events for dramatic effect, re-create conversations, and even speculate about what his characters were thinking), many scholars and journalists (although certainly not all) have been willing to grant his work the designation of nonfiction because of his declared goal of using journalism’s research methods and factuality standards as the foundation of the book, as opposed to Sinclair, whose fictionalization of the findings of his probe of the meatpacking industry is seldom analyzed within the purview of scholars of literary journalism, despite The Jungle‘s empirical underpinnings.⁴

And yet, Sinclair’s use of “reportage” as the basis of a major piece of fiction put him in the footsteps of Daniel Defoe and his groundbreaking, semifictional novel, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), and looked ahead to Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel, An American Tragedy, with its fictionalization of a real-life New York state murder case, and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), which he imaginatively framed from his research into the 1930s Chicago murder trial of a young African American man that Wright used to illustrate his concerns about the alienation and marginalization of members of the black urban underclass. Sinclair defended the underlying factuality of his novel, but he also felt that packaging it as fiction would have greater public impact then presenting it as nonfiction. In this way, his strategy was reminiscent of the design of A Journal of the Plague Year, where Defoe took a heavily researched, nonfictional tract he had written about the potential dangers of a coming plague and refashioned it into a fictionalized narrative account with a protagonist who dramatizes events by wandering London and ostensibly witnessing the consequences of the plague that hit the city 57 years earlier. Defoe’s transformation of his discursive and didactic tract, Due Preparations for the Plague—which was based heavily upon his research into the municipal records of the 1665 plague in London—into a best-selling blend of fact and fiction has been mimicked ever since by writers, many of whom emerged like Defoe from a journalistic workplace.

Throughout history, the tension has been high between the practice of journalists writing journalism and journalists writing fiction—although only recently reaching a level of self-consciousness that would lead Mailer to describe it as a “war” between the two modes of writing sensibility. The eighteenth-century journalist-literary figures Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Anthony Smollett all advertised themselves as realists in their groundbreaking fiction and defended their forms of narrative writing as credible and authentic in presenting an honest picture of the world, including in comparison to their journalism which they tended to see as connected to the practical affairs of society and something that required compromises (such as shaping their accounts based upon the taking of subsidies from partisan benefactors) that wasn’t necessary with their imaginative prose. By the mid-nineteenth century when the journalists-novelists Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope saw their serialized fiction embraced both by regular readers and by significant segments of the critical community, the novel as an identified art form and the term applied to a work of lengthy imaginative prose writing had been established.

However, the emergence of the novel as a popular form of diversion brought with it an increased critical consciousness among the defenders of a “high art” tradition, who often identified with traditional religious views of art as a method of moral teaching or the romantics’ notion of literature as a spiritualized form of aesthetic truth-telling. Among those who saw it as their critical duty to apply literary judgments and standards of discrimination to prose writing aimed at the marketplace, Samuel Johnson, George Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf looked with skepticism upon some of their fellow writers from a similar journalistic background, whom they felt (as Poe did about Dickens, for example) committed a grievous wrong by trying to appeal to popular tastes.

The rise of the industrialized newspaper and mass-produced forms of prose entertainment only exacerbated these divisions. William Dean Howells—as the self-appointed “dean” of American Victorian letters—was torn between his campaign to promote the “realistic” writers who had emerged from modest, print-shop or newspaper backgrounds like himself and his concerns about the intrusion of mass-market publication into the domain of the literary artist once dominated by such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry W. Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. With Howells as a powerful advocate, Stephen Crane was viewed as a literary virtuoso and a popular writing hero for his ability to meld the practices of the gritty urban journalist and intrepid overseas correspondent writing for the yellow press newspapers of Hearst and Pulitzer with the high-art tradition that he manifested in such works as The Red Badge of Courage and ”The Open Boat.” Ernest Hemingway arrived on the scene at the height of the high-art community’s view of journalism as a mundane craft in service to institutionalized news gathering standards and fiction as the pathway to literary reputation and the achievement of artistic immortality. Although Crane, Hemingway, Dreiser, Jack London, John Dos Passos, and other journalist-literary figures continued to produce journalism along with their fiction, by the 1920s the tradition of a “literary” form of publishing that dated back to the days of the “great” nineteenth-century journalism of Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Carlyle, and Lord Macaulay had lost much of its vitality, and only a handful of well-known writers (including H. L. Mencken, George Nathan, and E. B. White) took journalism seriously enough to harbor aspirations that it might lead to a lasting literary reputation.

In fact, it took a deep chasm within the minds of twentieth-century intellectuals as they conjured up their impressions of the journalist versus the novelist in order for Capote and Wolfe and Mailer to imagine that they were revolutionaries by fusing together the fictional and journalistic traditions in their “nonfiction novels” and literarily augmented journalistic prose. To think of “new” journalism as “new” was a commentary upon the divergent historical trajectories of two linked writing modes that emerged out of the narrative experiments of the disgraced editor, Defoe, who pretended to see little difference in the truth-telling qualities of his journalistic and fictional writing, and then separated under the forces of industrialization, the commercialization of the publishing industry, and the cultural fragmentations within mass society. In reality, one could argue that it was only the public relations savvy of Capote and the “new” journalists—combined with the journalism community’s ahistorical views of its own professional heritage—that allowed them to convince their former colleagues that they were doing something pathbreaking in challenging the exclusive categories of journalism and “the novel” that had become fixed in place by the 1960s.

The Power of Story and the Contest between Fact and Fiction

I conceived the whole adventure as a . . . non-fiction novel—the first . . . I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry.

—Truman Capote

As contemporary scholars and journalists have wrestled with what “new” (or what now is more commonly called “literary” or “narrative”) journalism is and where and how the line should be drawn between fictional-and factual-based writing, “intentionality” increasingly has been cited as a key issue in determining which side of the divide a piece of realistic writing should be placed. Since the launching of Wolfe’s and Capote’s movement almost 50 years ago, this judgment has been relatively easy to make (although not always so) as a cadre of contemporary writers have embraced their methods and defended the idea that one can stay in the realm of the factual while still embellishing a work with literary narrative techniques. A few of these older figures, such as McPhee and Talese, have been very firm in their intent to remain clearly in the nonfictionist camp while others have felt freer to “tease” readers with their claims of a work’s factuality, as Mark Kramer says of what Mailer called his “true life novel,” The Executioner’s Song, about the period leading up to the execution of Gary Gilmore. “Although such truth-in-labeling doesn’t explicitly demarcate what parts are actual, it’s a good-faith proclamation to readers that they’ve entered a zone in which a non-fiction writer’s covenant with readers may be . . . a device [that] doesn’t quite apply,” Kramer says.⁵

One of the curiosities of the contemporary literary or narrative journalism movement is that it has challenged conventional journalism’s practices for how to produce compelling prose writing while largely embracing the news industry’s methodologies for defining what is “fact” and “nonfiction.” This has meant that works are judged generally to be nonfiction as long as they stick to what can be confirmed as “accurate” by the standards of the typical, contemporary journalistic organization—for example, what the writer himself or herself observes or witnesses, what people the writer interviews say they know to be the case or have seen or observed, and what documentation by sources that society considers to be authoritative indicates is true. The use of second-hand information is more questionable—although commonly used if the person is willing to put his or her name to a quote and allow it to be attributed to a real person. The dividing line between what is considered fact and fiction tends to be, even for writing based upon a foundation of journalistic reporting, that it does not add imaginative to realistic and real-life details, that the writer does not pretend to know what other people are thinking or feeling, and that characters are identified by their real names (although nonfiction writers tend to operate on a sliding scale on a number of these matters—and some do more embellishing of confirmable details than others). Speculation about others’ motives and actions, reconstructed dialogue, the creation of composite characters based upon real-life people—all of these devices appear in some of what are considered the “great” pieces of literary nonfiction, but they have engendered intense debates among scholars, critics, and other writers as to whether they are permitted in so-called factual writing. In fact, it is a virtual certainty that if a writer who purports to be presenting nonfictional material deviates from the factual methodology of conventional journalism, that person should be prepared to be criticized (both by many of today’s literary journalists and narrative nonfictional writers, as well as by the members of the establishment press).

Although the following of the fact-gathering and truth-determining methodologies of conventional journalism is defended as the best way to maintain credibility with the public (and certainly with the traditional journalism community), it also can put a variety of techniques out of bounds that some would argue can be vital to telling the “whole” story and to providing a meaningful and contextualized interpretation of events. As is the case in the American legal system, the press’ conventional methodology assumes that it is better to let certain circumstances go uncommented upon than to speculate wrongly or unfairly. In the United States’ press system, news reporters are given less latitude to interpret and analyze activities in the public arena than in many parts of Europe, where newspapers more often acknowledge that they have a political orientation (as also was the case in the days of the party press in the United States) and do not make claims that they operate from a neutral or “objective” perspective.

At the core of these different approaches is a very different interpretation of what is meant ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Challenging the Boundaries of Journalism and Fiction
• 2 Artful Falsehoods and the Constraints of the Journalist’s Life
• 3 Hemingway as Seeker of the “Real Thing” and the Epistemology of Art
• 4 The Funhouse Mirror: Journalists Portraying Journalists in Their Fiction
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index