WE REMEMBER STORIES, NOT FACTS:

The Fabulous Fabulists Mencken, Liebling, and Mitchell made stuff up, too. Why do we excuse them? (Jack Shafer, June 12, 2003, Slate)

Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Christopher Newton all fabricated details--mundane and spectacular--in their journalism. But why? Reaching for the simplest explanation, I previously wrote that fabulists make stuff up because they don't have the talent or industry to produce copy grand enough to satisfy their egos.

But if we agree that hacks and loafers resort to lies because they don't know how else to make great journalism, what can we say about reporters from the Pantheon who marbled their journalism with fiction? I'm thinking of H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling, and Joseph Mitchell, all of whom made stuff up. None of them suffered much in the way of reputation injury when their inventions were discovered. What sort of double standard is this? [...]

Liebling's colleague at the World-Telegram and New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell, also diluted fact with fib. In the mid-'40s, he wrote three New Yorker pieces about New York's Fulton Fish Market, which were presented as fact. Only when the stories were collected as a book, Old Mr. Flood, in 1948 did Mitchell offer this disclaimer: "Mr. Flood is not one man; combined in him are aspects of several old men who work or hang out in Fulton Fish Market, or who did in the past." In a 1992 article, the New Criterion catalogs a few of his embellishments: Mitchell assigned Flood his own birthday, July 27; his "gustatory predilections"; his love for the Bible; his high regard for Mark Twain; his taste for columnist Heywood Broun; and his affection for all things old.

If we insist on banishing Blair, Glass, Newton, and all the other confessed composite artists and embellishers (Michael Finkel, Christopher Jones, Jay Forman, Nik Cohn, Rodney Rothman) from journalism, why do we still honor Mencken, Liebling, and Mitchell? [...]

All fabricators share a common motive: They want to make their story better than the plain truth, which they think gives them license to blend characters into a composite, pipe in dialogue, and edit events into a more logical narrative. If the truth refuses to collaborate, they conjure up something more compelling. The leading exponent of this school of journalism was New Yorker staff writer Alastair Reid. In 1984, the Wall Street Journal reported that Reid had constructed numerous composite characters in his nonfiction New Yorker pieces, rearranging events and scenes and inventing conversations. A translator and a poet as well as a nonfiction writer, Reid rationalized every one of his embellishments. [...]

Joseph Mitchell anticipated Reid's grandiosity and self-regard in defending his Fulton Fish Market composite, writing in the preface to the book version, "I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts." This caveat reveals Mitchell's disdain for the quotidian truths of newspapers. One suspects that Liebling's willingness to bend genres hails from the same territory. Reid spoke for all the arty fabricators working inside journalism when he told the Journal, "Readers who are factual-minded are the readers who are least important."

-Literary License: Defending Joseph Mitchell's composite characters. (Meghan O'Rourke, July 29, 2003, Slate)

Joseph Mitchell's Old Mr. Flood is a great book. It's as vivid a portrait of the Fulton Fish Market and of working-class life in New York City as any we have. Old Mr. Flood is also partly invented. Though it was first presented as journalism'Äîmost of it ran as magazine pieces in The New Yorker in 1944--Mitchell revealed in the book's preface some four years later that Mr. Flood was a composite character, as Jack Shafer recently noted in Slate.

With the reappearance of Stephen Glass and the dismissal of Jayson Blair, a certain kind of rule-bending literary journalism has taken it on the chin. Mitchell and other respected sometime-"fabulists"'--including A.J. Liebling and Ryszard Kapuscinski'--have been lightly tarred and feathered along with the black-listed young journalists. After all, the argument goes, the realms of Fact and Fiction are diametrically opposed. There is no truth but the plain truth. The very currency of journalism is fact; to toy with it once is to devalue it (and your integrity) permanently, whether you are a great stylist or a hack.

This line of reasoning is entirely logical. And yet too rigid an adherence to such standards would mean an impoverishment of American journalism'--one that seems unthinkable. There'd be no Old Mr. Flood, no The Honest Rainmaker, by A.J. Liebling; some work by New Journalists like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Norman Mailer would go in the trash. John Hersey is said to have created a composite character in a Life magazine story; does this mean we should think differently of his masterpiece Hiroshima?

Of course, no one wants to encourage budding Jayson Blairs. There is a line between aesthetic enhancement and outright fabrication; what's at stake here is something closer to judicious manipulation of fact than to Stephen Glass' invention-stews. Newspaper journalism always ought to be thoroughly factual. (H.L. Mencken's fabrications in the Baltimore Herald, for example, are indefensible.) [...]

Indeed, there are times when the license of fiction, sparingly employed in the service of nonfiction, results in a great book with no negative effects on the lives of those involved. Old Mr. Flood seems precisely such a book. For one thing, no one real person is defamed in Mitchell's
composite of Flood (unlike Stephen Glass' untruths about Vernon Jordan). Nor does Mitchell's use of a composite detract from the realism of Old Mr. Flood's compassionate, elegant, reportorial portrait of the Fulton Fish
Market. Like a novelist, Mitchell takes license with dialogue in order
to dispense with some of the ancillary randomness that is part of everyday life and arrive at a more highly stylized portrait. The quotes in the Old Mr. Flood are models of eloquent compression, such as you rarely find in real life and usually find in fiction. The point? To create a work that provides more aesthetic pleasure than a less highly wrought one, a distillation that makes us feel something essential about the world described, and thus has a greater chance of being remembered, read, used.

After all, unlike newspaper stories, literary journalism seeks to make or "conjure up" a broader reality--îto bring us into a world. This isn't news of the who-what-when-how-why variety, but news of the kind that V.S. Naipaul said only the novel can deliver--news that resonates with the potency of its presentation. Strictly segregating fact from fiction hobbles literary journalists unnecessarily. Where fiction is an inclusive genre, one that allows for its conventions to be violated, journalism relies on a system of conventions intended to guarantee objectivity. But clearly even these conventions don't make for pure objectivity, which from the start compromises the sanctity of the fact/fiction opposition. [...]

So, perhaps the problem is partly that our culture has no label for this kind of work, and that, systematizing creatures that we are, we need labels.

Maybe we even need a new magazine genre, somewhere between fact and fiction. As for how and when it ought to be used, the only way to determine the answer would be on a case by case basis; in large part it depends on how worthwhile the result is. A system that asks writers to
evaluate their own self-worth (in advance) is not a simple one; take the fact that Truman Capote's rigorous notion of a factually accurate nonfiction novel has quickly given way to a less well-enforced sub-genre, one example of which is Maria Flook's new book about Christa Worthington, a journalist murdered on Cape Cod in 2002. But such a system is theoretically feasible: Fiction writers pillage the lives of friends all the time; we tend to shrug off the negative consequences when the result is Saul Bellow's Herzog or a Robert Lowell poem. Certainly when in doubt, a journalist should assume it's not OK to take licenses like those described here; they're tools to be used rarely. But let's not take Mitchell off the syllabi because other writers lack his judiciousness and talent.

There does seem an essential difference between day-to-day reporting, which should be as factually accurate as the journalist can get it, and essay writing, which seems as much an entertainment as a piece of reportage. Certainly no one reading Joe Mitchell or E.B. White or the other greats of the New Yorker would have thought that they were getting straightforward news coverage.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 25, 2003 4:07 PM