The Personal Voice and the Impersonal Eye

by DAN WAKEFIELD

THE negative sound of the term “nonfiction” always seemed to me sadly reflective of the common cultural attitude toward that vast and various field of writing. The term itself indicates that “fiction” is the standard, central sort of serious writing, and anything else is basically defined by being “not” of that genre. (I have sometimes thought that writers of this “non” category ought to strike back by calling novels and stories “nonreality.”) Among the subheads beneath the general nonfiction category, such fields as biography and history stand up as respectable, if somewhat plodding, cousins to the major literary practice of fiction. There is also an important and large but even less culturally stylish vein of the nonfiction field that, whether it is referred to as journalism, reporting, or, the fancier term, reportage, is usually preceded by the adjective “mere” in discussions of serious literature. And yet, in the past year nonfiction works by Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote have catapulted the reportorial kind of writing to a level of social interest suitable for cocktail party conversation and little-review comment. As Wolfe might put it, nonfiction has suddenly become . . . fashionable.

But long before it was announced that Mr. Capote intended to raise reporting to an “art” — somewhat like a benevolent industrialist disclosing his plans for helping out an underdeveloped country— there was, and has continued to be, a growing amount of imaginative and artfully rendered writing in the field. Since the 1950s, Murray Kempton in his newspaper columns and James Baldwin in his personal essays (most notably in Notes of a Native Son) have demonstrated that journalism can be practiced at the level of art. Increasing numbers of novelists — among them Harvey Swados, Gore Vidal, George P. Elliott, and Norman Mailer —have tried their hand at journalism and often turned out work of unquestionable literary as well as informational merit. The critic Norman Podhoretz has even suggested that some of Mailer’s journalism has been more interesting and important than his fiction.

Whatever the validity or necessity of such comparison, there is no doubt that Mailer’s journalistic pieces, especially the long takeouts in Esquire, are charged with the energy of art. Whether or not his piece in that magazine on the 1960 Democratic convention — “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” — did, as Mailer himself believes, tip the scales of that whole election to John Kennedy in some mysterious, mystical, psycho-hipsterical manner, it certainly proved that a good, factual, and keenly observed account of a political convention doesn’t have to be dull. To cite only one section of one enormous, snakelike, shimmering sentence from that report, Mailer described how

. . . it was in the Gallery of the Biltmore where one first felt the mood which pervaded all proceedings until the convention was almost over, that heavy, thick, witless depression which was to dominate every move as the delegates wandered and gawked and paraded and set for a spell, there in the Gallery of the Biltmore, that huge depressing alley with its inimitable hotel color, that faded depth of chiaroscuro which unhappily has no depth, that brown which is not a brown, that grey which has no pearl in it, that color which can be described only as hotel-color because the beiges, the tans, the walnuts, the mahoganies, the dull blood rugs, the moaning yellows, the sick greens, the greys and all those dumb browns merge into that lack of color which is an over-large hotel at convention time, with all the small-towners wearing their set, starched faces, that look they get at carnival, all fever and suspicion, and proud to be there, eddying slowly back and forth in that high block-long tunnel of a room with its arched ceiling and square recesses filling every rib of the arch with art work, escutcheons and blazons and other art, pictures I think, I cannot even remember, there was such a hill of cigar smoke the eye had to travel on its way to the ceiling, and at one end there was galvanized pipe scaffolding and workmen repairing some part of the ceiling, one of them touching up one of the endless squares of painted plaster in the arch, and another worker, passing by, yelled up to the one who was working on the ceiling: “Hey, Michelangelo!”

That is of course not the style of cold, clipped, just-the-facts-please daily newspaper journalism, and in an effort to categorize it, some observers have referred to that kind of approach as “fictional.” This confuses the issue, and I think it is partly a result of the old prejudice that any “good writing” must by definition be “fictional” writing. Yet the label suggests that the reporting done in such a style is not factual, but rather something the reporter made up. This is not the case. Such reporting is “imaginative” not because the author has distorted the facts, but because he has presented them in a full instead of a naked manner, brought out the sights, sounds, and feel surrounding those facts, and connected them by comparison with other facts of history, society, and literature in an artistic manner that does not diminish but gives greater depth and dimension to the facts.

MAILER is not the first or the last writer to approach an event, person, or subject in this manner, nor is the imaginative method limited to use by novelists. Brock Brower has written persuasively of what he calls the Art of the Fact, and he has effectively practiced that art, along with Gay Talese, Thomas B. Morgan, and later, Tom Wolfe, most often in the pages of Esquire. The graceful, witty, and precise reporting of Meg Greenfield on subjects ranging from The Prose of Richard Nixon to A Tenth Class Reunion at Smith College has brightened and distinguished the pages of The Reporter; and Willie Morris, up from the Texas Observer, has also demonstrated in personal journalistic accounts like his piece on Texas rightwingers in Commentary that reporting has been practiced as an art in our own times.

American magazines have opened up a great deal from the standard cut-and-dried formulaarticle approach that was generally the rule in the post-war era and into the early fifties, yet I think special credit must be given to Esquire for leading the way to many of the newer, freer, more imaginative forms of nonfiction. If their own willingness to experiment has sometimes resulted in an uneven product, in stylistic failures as well as successes, I think on the whole it has had a happy effect on the magazine, the writer, and journalism in general. Esquire’s editorial attitude seems to be anything goes as long as it is interesting and true. The magazine has a research department, and every fact in every nonfiction piece is checked and verified. The license they offer writers is not for distortion of facts but experimentation in style.

The most recent and controversial result of that policy has been the emergence of Tom Wolfe, whose best-selling collection of articles, published last year, was named after one of his Esquire pieces, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” Wolfe had been assigned to cover a custom car show in California, and when he returned, he found he could not put his notes together into any customary magazine-article form. Esquire needed the copy right away, and asked Wolfe to type up his notes so someone else might try to write the piece. Wolfe did just that, addressing his report to the managing editor and writing up his impressions as he might in a personal letter, beginning “Dear Byron.” When the editors read the result they simply struck off the salutation and ran the report as it was. The beginning (it is not a standard “lead”) is the key to what Wolfe was going to do and how:

The first good look I had at customized cars was at an event called a “Teen Fair”, held in Burbank, a suburb of Los Angeles beyond Hollywood. This was a wild place to be taking a look at art objects — eventually, I should say, you have to reach the conclusion that these customized cars are art objects, at least if you use the standards applied in a civilized society. But I will get to that in a moment. Anyway, about noon you drive up to a place that looks like an outdoor amusement park, and there are three serious-looking kids, like the cafeteria committee in high school, taking tickets, but inside the scene is quite mad.

Such a beginning indeed has the quality and tone of a personal letter from someone who respects my intelligence as a reader, who assumes I can get the message without having it watered down into banal language or dressed up with throat-grabbing urgency. There is a sense that the writer is going to tell the story in his own way and at his own pace ("I will get to that in a moment”), that he is going to describe as well as he can the thing he has witnessed, and explain what he thinks its interest and importance are. There is no pretense of omniscience, self-importance, or the sort of pseudo-gravity that passes for “seriousness.” It promises a civilized, casual, and colorful account of a phenomenon unfamiliar to many of us but important to our time; and it delivers.

I think these qualities and characteristics of Wolfe’s style are more important than his notorious and easily parodied use of abundant dots and exclamation marks and italics. Yes, there are times when his leads do not have a “letterlike" tone, but perhaps come pounding out in something like his start to a piece on Baby Jane Holzer;

Bangs manes bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter faces brush-on eyelashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras Mailing. . . .

This descriptive assault turns out to be entirely appropriate to the opening scene of jet-setters attending a concert of the Rolling Stones; and appropriate to the subject of the piece, who moves in such a milieu. The critic should remember that Wolfe’s sometimes “mad” style is after all fitted to the madness of what he is writing about, for his social reporting often comes, as he put it himself, “out of the vinyl deep.”

Wolfe’s critics have accused him of championing the “youth cult” as it is expressed in such phenomena as stock cars, frugging, tight pants, and Beatle caps. This accusation seems to me to miss the whole point of Wolfe’s work. As a reader it is clear to me that Wolfe is describing rather than defending the “vinyl” world he is writing about. Dwight MacDonald, the dean of Wolfe’s critics, surely misinterprets when he cites as an example of Wolfe’s pro-youth and anti-middleage outlook the end of a piece on stock-car racer Junior Johnson, “The Last American Hero":

. . . up with the automobile into their America, and the hell with arteriosclerotic old boys trying to hold onto the whole pot with arms of cotton seersucker. Junior!

It is “their” America Wolfe is talking about, not his; and it is clear from reading the piece that the ending is an evocation of the feelings of the people he has been describing rather than his own. He has described them and their world — a world that is encroaching on us everywhere in this country with an artistry that conveys not the attractiveness of it but the hollowness; it is not an alluring but a frightening view of what seems to be building into the main wave of the future in America. Tom Wolfe is the first and so far the best reporter who has told us about it.

When Wolfe’s collection of pieces first appeared as the KKTFSB, the book was generally received with great praises, including a Time magazine judgment that it “might well be required reading in courses like American studies,” and a verdict that the author was a “genius” in the Sunday Times Book Review. Wolfe was in, until he made the mistake of trying to poke some unsupported gibes at the New Yorker and its editor in two articles for the Herald Tribune Sunday magazine. The furor over that exercise has been comparable in literary circles with the tizzy caused in the sports world by Cassius Clay’s declaration that he had “nothing against them Viet Gongs.” Wolfe’s disrespect for the New Yorker, like Clay’s for his country’s foreign policy, resulted in his becoming a cultural persona non grata. Everyone from Murray Kempton to Muriel Spark jumped to attack him, with such usually disparate spirits as Nat Hentoff and Joseph Alsop joining in the bombardment. Not only had Wolfe written two disrespectful pieces with factual errors, but the criticism included charges that his methods smacked of Communism, and yes, McCarthyism. Attention has been lavished on the two offending pieces as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls, culminating (at least at the time of this writing) in a heavily documented refutation in the Columbia Journalism Review by two young New Yorker staff members, plus a comment on their own comment on Wolfe’s comments by free-lancer Leonard Lewin, which, like a journalistic Supreme Court judgment on the case, ruled that

Although their indictment is diluted by overzealous refutation of trivial errors (who played the trumpet? what was hung on the walls of Thurber’s old office?) they nevertheless make a convincing case, if their allegations are correct, that Wolfe’s articles were informed by a remarkable unconcern over the factual basis of his more serious charges, as well as of his atmospheric touches and of his “documented” literary judgments.

Until the inevitable Ph.D. theses come along on the case, I can only judge by evidence extant that Wolfe botched the job, which is till the more regrettable since the nature and intensity of the furor over it indicate that this particular job, as the New York Post might put it, “cries out to be done.” I am not for condoning Wolfe’s factual errors in these pieces, but neither am I for condemning his entire work, style, persona, and the magazines he has written articles for because on this occasion he muffed one.

THAT sort of blanket condemnation, however, has been made at exhaustive length in two articles on Wolfe in the New York Review of Books by Dwight MacDonald. Mr. MacDonald seems to have appointed himself to play the Inspector to Wolfe’s jean Valjean in an endless hale of Two Articles. MacDonald has also set himself up as a combination detective, prosecutor, and judge over modern journalism, a province one senses that MacDonald feels is his own exclusive turf (“others have discovered our teenage culture, including myself, seven years ago, in a New Yorker series. . . . Mr. Kluger asked me to review it [a Mailer novel reviewed by Wolfe] and I declined for lack of time”).

MacDonald attempts to eradicate Wolfe, the Herald Tribune, Esquire, and some other rival journalists by the invention of the term “parajournalism,”which of course is bad journalism, or not the kind, one assumes, MacDonald writes. He defines this evil method as “a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction.”He identifies the Herald Tribune as the citadel of this heresy, though he points the finger of accusation at Esquire as the place where “the genre originated” and where it has also flourished. He does not mention the fact that he has written for Esquire himself for more than live years, or that he is a regular movie critic for that magazine. Whether his own contributions in that magazine are to be considered “parajournalism,”or perhaps in the case of his movie criticism, “parareviewing,” he does not say. Nor does he explain what he means by the “atmospheric license of fiction,” though it sounds like a license to make things up, a charge which his own experience in being queried by the Esquire research department must surely have illustrated as untrue in the case of that magazine.

It is difficult to pinpoint exact and usable definitions of this parajournalism. But let us try, following MacDonald as he castigates a Wolfe review of Mailer’s latest novel and berates the reviewer as again playing para journalist because his technique was “to jeer at the author’s private life and personality — or rather his persona. . . .”

Surely then, the following passages, taken from a piece written shortly after the death of Ernest Hemingway, could rank as parajournalism:

He was a big man and he was famous and he drank a great deal now and wrote very little. . . .

The position is outflanked the lion can’t be stopped the sword won’t go into the bull’s neck the great fish is breaking the line and it is the fifteenth round and the champion looks bad. . . .

Now it is that morning in the house in Ketchum, Idaho. He takes his favorite gun down from the rack. . . . He puts the end of the gun barrel into his mouth and he pulls both triggers.

It is hard to match that for bad taste, and for jeering at the persona rather than criticizing the work of an author. Surely then it ranks as “parajournalism.”And yet it was written by Dwight MacDonald. You see, this becomes very confusing. After all MacDonald’s complaints about errors, it is surprising to find that in an addendum to the Hemingway piece, in which he included a letter from George Plimpton that refuted much of what MacDonald said, MacDonald admitted on at least the significant point of Heming way’s turning to drinking instead of writing that “I was wrong factually. . . .”Mr. MacDonald was also wrong factually in a nasty piece he wrote about William F. Buckley, Jr., in which MacDonald refers to Buckley’s mother’s “private chapel,”which Buckley claims was actually a steeple on their horse barn; his mother has no private chapel. Mr. Buckley wrote MacDonald a letter about this and other errors, but MacDonald evidently didn’t think it a serious enough matter to correct them when he reprinted the essay in book form. Nor did he, of course, alter his attack on Mr. Buckley’s persona, including the judgment that Buckley is “an indecorous young man.” I don’t think any of this disqualifies Mr. MacDonald as a serious journalist, but perhaps it disqualifies him as a watchdog over the sins of his colleagues.

Bad taste and errors of fact can crop up in any kind of journalism, as indeed in any kind of writing. and I don’t think recent journalism with its freer style is any more guilty of distortion than the older, more traditional forms. The important and interesting and hopeful trend to me in the new journalism is its personal nature — not in the sense of personal attacks, but in the presence of the reporter himself and the significance of his own involvement. This is sometimes felt to be egotistical, and the frank identification of the author, especially as the “I" instead of merely the impersonal “eye,”is often frowned upon and taken as proof of “subjectivity,” which is the opposite of the usual journalistic pretense. And yet, as Thoreau pointed out in Walden, “It is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.”

SINCE I feel that this admission and use of the first person singular is the most exciting, challenging, and potentially fruitful course for modern journalism, I naturally was not inclined to find favor with Truman Capote’s third-person omniscient. “novelistic” account of a murder case, In Cold Blood. By the pretense or device of keeping himself, as the reporter, out of the book altogether, and reconstructing the chain of events leading up to and following the murder in a straight flow of descriptive narrative and dialogue, Capote has produced what he calls a “nonfiction novel.” That may sound like a contradiction in terms, and I think it is.

I don’t think Capote was the Columbus of the “nonfiction novel” because no one had thought of it before, but rather because it had been rejected as a journalistic, if not an artistic, possibility. As a matter of fact, the closest thing to it I know of was not done in serious journalism at all, but in those magazines for men with titles like Male HeMan and Brawny Adventure. A free-lance writer friend of mine in New York used to write sometimes for such publications when he was broke, and he explained to me that the sort of “article" he did for them was called by the editors “factfiction.” The method was to take a somewhat innocuous news account of a murder or accident or other potentially dramatic event and then build it up into a story with invented dialogue and “fictional development” of the characters involved. The technique of invented dialogue is also sometimes used in stories in confessional and “fan” magazines, which, again, are not regarded as organs of serious or responsible journalism.

Now this was, of course, not Capote’s method. He spent countless hours over a period of years examining facts, interviewing, and researching his story. He has said that he is blessed with a memory that can retain the details of twoand threehour conversations, without transcribing them on the spot by notes or tape recorder, and I have no reason to doubt this gift. Nor do I question the repeated assertion in the book that one of the murderers (most fortunately for Capote) was blessed with a “brilliant memory.” But I cannot believe that everyone in the town of Holcomb, Kansas, the scene of the crime, possessed the faculty of total recall; yet that would have to be the case for Capote’s book to be a true, journalistically accurate rendering of dialogue as well as scene and event. Try to remember conversations you had a few weeks ago or even days ago; you can recall the content, but rarely can you remember the verbatim exchange or set it down in the form of a transcript. I am convinced that Capote did as honest and skillful a job as possible in his recreation; I simply am skeptical of the journalistic validity of any such re-creation — and I wince at the thought of the inevitable legions of less skill - fill and less scrupulous imitators ol Capote’s “new form.” They will soon be upon us, wave on wave.

From the artistic as well as the journalistic viewpoint, I am disappointed that Capote chose to go off in the opposite direction from the personal “I” approach in his effort to revitalize modern journalism. If reporting is, as Capote says, “the great unexplored art form of the future,” I think it will develop along the direction taken by a writer who, ironically, is, or at least was once, greatly admired by Capote. In an interview with Capote in the Paris Review published in 1958, he named among those writers who had most influenced him “James Agee, a writer whose death over two years ago was a real loss.”And yet it was Agee, in his great sui generis book on the tenant farmers in Alabama, Let Us Mow Praise Famous Men, who recognized and made art and illumination of the presence and personality of the reporter as he entered and inevitably affected the scene and events he was watching, or as Agee put it, “spying" upon. For Agee this was not a matter of egotism or of art, but a practical matter of honesty and communication. As he explained, referring to one of the tenant farmers he was writing about:

George Gudger is a man, et cetera. But obviously, in the effort to tell of him (by example) as truthfully as I can, I am limited. I know him only so far as I know him; and all of that depends as fully on who I am as on who he is.

Capote, trained in the New Yorker—Lillian Ross school of deadpan journalism, which he first practiced in book-length form in his series on the trip of the Porgy and Bess troupe to Russia (The Muses Are Heard), betrayed or revealed his own view of the nature of reporting in that same Paris Review interview. The interviewer noted Capote’s unusual “detachment” in writing The Muses, and in discussing that and other issues of journalistic style, Capote remarked of the Porgy and Bess pieces: “That was reporting, and ‘emotions’ were not much involved — at least not the difficult and personal territories of feeling that I mean.”

This sort of “detachment” seems to me particularly — and even understandably — sacred in America, where advanced degrees are offered in journalism, and in general the trend is to justify and elevate all endeavors by making them more “scientific” — that is, less personal. But I think it is precisely in those “difficult and personal territories of feeling” Capote rejects that the future of reporting, as an art, will most likely be found.