Chapter One
RADICAL LIT: SOME ROOTS OF A REVOLUTION
“New Journalism” is a slippery phrase. When Tom Wolfe made it the
title of a 1973 anthology featuring pieces from such writers as Gay
Talese, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, and others, he
meant it to be a declaration of independence from any journalism
that had preceded it. But there were others-particularly the New
Yorker crowd that had been stung by “Tiny Mummies”-who criticized
Wolfe for trying to trademark a technique that had existed for over
two hundred years. They contended that there was nothing new about
New Journalism.
They were both right. New Journalism had been flitting around the
edges of American and British journalism since the earliest
newspaper days. It was also true that writers such as Wolfe,
Thompson, and Mailer didn’t emerge fully formed from the empyrean.
But had anyone ever really written like Wolfe, Thompson, or Mailer?
No literary movement emerges from a vacuum, however, and here are
some of the writers and movements that paved the way.
In his introduction to the 1973 anthology, Tom Wolfe makes a strong,
self-serving argument for the literary supremacy of creative
nonfiction over the novel, which he felt had suffered a precipitous
status slippage.
He has little use for fiction writers like Jorge Luis Borges and
Gabriel Garcia Marquez-too enamored of myth, too “neo-fabulist.”
Modish experimental writers Donald Barthelme, John Hawkes, and John
Barth, with their abstruse word games and dense allusiveness, were
too busy with literary trickery to bother looking out of their own
windows.
“In New York in the early 1960s,” he writes, “what with all the talk
of ‘the death of the novel,’ the man of letters seemed to be on the
rise again. There was considerable talk of creating a ‘cultural
elite,’ based on what the local literati believed existed in London.
Such hopes were dashed, of course, by the sudden emergence of yet
another horde of Visigoths, the New Journalists.”
Wolfe compares his journalism contemporaries to eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century giants Dickens, Balzac, and Fielding, writers who
accurately portrayed their times in social realist fiction. The new
fiction of the late sixties and seventies, with its inward turn away
from the “hulking carnival” of contemporary American culture, left a
huge void for New Journalists to fill.
Suffice it to say, Wolfe’s theory had a few logical holes. There
were novelists who were laying claim to the cultural landscape of
America in some of the best postwar fiction-Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
and James Baldwin’s Another Country, for example. But Wolfe’s
contention that contemporary journalists were for the first time
working up the literary hierarchy was true. They had come from a
very long way down to do so.
Wolfe’s notion of New Journalists as the new “Visigoths,” a threat
to the established order, stretches back to the earliest days of
print media. Beginning with the Tudor era in fifteenth-century
England, the British monarchy maintained an iron grip on the
dissemination of public information. The history of journalism is in
many ways a history of oppression and censorship. Countless
government decrees in Great Britain-the Privy Council’s assumption
of a censorship role, the suppression of the press by Oliver
Cromwell in 1655-forced newspapers underground. A black market
emerged in the middle of the seventeenth century, as broadsheets
that reported on specific news events were distributed
clandestinely.
All of this iron-fisted regulation on the free exchange of ideas in
the press created a thriving market for satire. Satirists could get
away with more pointed protest than straight journalists, because
they were moving targets who attacked with playful
misdirection-subversion as comic entertainment. Jonathan Swift, a
Dubliner born to English parents, witnessed the corruption of
English politics while apprenticing under Sir William Temple, an
English diplomat and a retired member of the Irish parliament. In
1710, Swift became editor of the Examiner, which became the press
organ of the Tory party. A fierce critic of the English government’s
dominion over Ireland, Swift wrote a series of impassioned
broadsides condemning Great Britain’s foreign policy. His 1729 essay
“A Modest Proposal,” which advocated eating Irish children as the
best palliative for the country’s overpopulation and food shortage,
laid Ireland’s abject poverty at the feet of the Brits, but
disguised it as a mordantly funny satire:
There is likewise … great advantage in my scheme, that it will
prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice of women
murdering their bastard children, alas! too frequent among us!
sacrificing the poor innocent babes I doubt more to avoid the
expense than the shame, which would move tears and pity in the most
savage and inhuman breast.
Two hundred and forty years prior to Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo
journalism, Swift was practicing a particularly virulent kind of
savagery in print, despite his close ties to the Catholic Church.
In 1836, twenty-one-year-old Charles Dickens was a parliamentary
reporter for the British newspaper the Morning Chronicle when his
editor, John Black, suggested that he focus less on matters of state
and more on the streets of London. So Dickens ventured out,
recording the mores of daily life among the working and middle
classes. The result was a series of five articles called “Street
Sketches,” which became so popular that Dickens wrote forty-eight
more sketches for the Chronicle and a rival paper, the Evening
Chronicle.
Writing under the pseudonym Boz, Dickens created a series of modest
portraits that captured ordinary working men and women-bank clerks,
shopkeepers, bakers, market men, laundresses-who went about their
business with little ceremony or ambition, the silent majority of a
society that adhered closely to a rigid class code and had little
use for the human flywheels of the industrial economy. Dickens’s
writing existed in a shadow region between speculative fiction and
reportage, which gave Dickens the license to speculate on the inner
lives of his characters with great specificity. Here, Dickens trains
his focus on one such man, one of the “passive creatures of habit
and endurance:”
We thought we almost saw the dingy little back office into which he
walks every morning, hanging his hat on the same peg, and placing
his legs beneath the same desk: first, taking off that black coat
which lasts the year through, and putting on the one which did duty
last year, and which he keeps in his desk to save the other. There
he sits till five o’clock, working on, all day, as regularly as the
dial over the mantel-piece, whose loud ticking is as monotonous as
his whole existence: only raising his head when some one enters the
counting-house, or when, in the midst of some difficult calculation,
he looks up to the ceiling as if there were inspiration in the dusty
skylight with a green knot in the centre of every pane of glass.
Here is a journalist filling in the blanks of his subject’s life as
he saw fit. The success of the Boz series would give creative
license for other writers to do the same.
It’s a stone fact that New Journalism emerged from the gutter, not
only via reformist-minded writers with real concerns but also via
exploiters who milked the class-based prejudices of the working
class for every last drop of profit. The literary art of the scandal
sheet can’t be overlooked. Tom Wolfe has always regarded the best
tabloid reporting as the apotheosis of New Journalism. It’s where
the high-beam writing style, the racy description and zippy
dialogue, really ratcheted up to full throttle.
In the nineteenth century, the most clever and enterprising scandal
monger was Joseph Pulitzer. A Hungarian immigrant who found work as
a reporter for Carl Schurz’s German-language weekly Westliche Post
shortly after arriving in St Louis in 1868, Pulitzer quickly
insinuated himself into the civic fabric of St. Louis despite his
foreign heritage, becoming a member of the Missouri State Assembly
in 1872. The next few years found Pulitzer reporting for Charles
Dana’s New York Sun (he covered the disputed presidential election
between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden in 1876), traveling
across Europe, and buying and selling shares in various newspapers.
In 1878 Pulitzer brought the St. Louis Evening Dispatch out of
receivership for $2,500 and merged it with the Post, which he had
bought previously.
Pulitzer cast himself as a champion of the disenfranchised, offering
his readers long investigative pieces that exposed the chicanery of
St. Louis’s venal robber barons, corrupt politicians, and other such
villains of the industrial age. The Post-Dispatch ran stories that
dug deeper, with more factual accuracy, than any other newspaper in
the country. But the Post-Dispatch also trafficked freely in
sensationalism, the better to keep its working-class readership
entertained. Under the stewardship of managing editor John A.
Cockerill, the Post-Dispatch ran scurrilous gossip items on the
city’s prominent social families as well as breathless accounts of
grisly murder, adulterous sex, and public hangings. Within four
years, the Post-Dispatch was the leading paper in St. Louis.
Pulitzer brought his serious reporting and tawdry gossip to New York
in 1883, when he bought the New York World from financier Jay Gould
for $346,000. The competition was much stiffer in New York, where
the Sun, the Herald, the Tribune, and the Times
jostled for market share. But Pulitzer would be not deterred by the hothouse
atmosphere of New York’s Park Row press culture. Instead, he took the high road
and the low road at the same time, espousing causes that benefited
the workingman: a front page story in the May 24, 1883, issue
passionately argued for the newly constructed Brooklyn Bridge to be
toll-free for all who used it.
The New York World’s funhouse brand of journalism made Pulitzer a
wealthy mogul, but other papers were leaning toward a more
responsible, less subjective approach by the turn of the century.
Not everyone was enamored of Pulitzer’s trickery; an expanding
educated class was demanding a more substantive approach to news
gathering. The New York Times under the stewardship of managing
editor Carr Van Anda was creating the template for the modern
newspaper, with its scrupulous and thorough reporting and its use of
the “inverted pyramid” technique. The inverted pyramid, which was
widely adapted by American newspapers at the turn of the century,
organized a story with the lead stating the salient theme in the
opening paragraph, the body of the story in the middle paragraphs
and the sharp, clever kicker at the end. The inverted pyramid, which
organized the who, what, where, when, and why of a story into a
compact format, legitimized a story’s claims to factual accuracy. It
was an airtight system, and newspapers regarded it as unassailable.
Reporting techniques became more refined. Writers were now placing
stories in their proper historical context, instead of writing about
events in a vacuum. The newspaper business was, in short, becoming
downright respectable and honorable. If an audience existed for
well-ordered news stories written in a measured style, there was no
need for a reporter to get his or her hands dirty in the muck of
idle gossip and circulation-boosting stunts. By 1921, the New York
Times, with a circulation of three hundred thousand (five hundred
thousand for the Sunday edition), had proven that serious journalism
could engage readers as effectively as yellow journalism.
But the lure of the gutter is eternal. In the late nineteenth
century, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal had supplanted
Pulitzer’s World as the foremost purveyor of populist reporting,
with a staff that had been poached largely from the World itself.
Although the Journal’s overheated tone presaged the shrillness of
supermarket tabloids, Hearst was not averse to hiring good writers
who could leaven the junk with substance.
This impulse to mingle with the disenfranchised was strong among the
more ambitious American journalists of the era. The rapid rise of
modern capitalism at the turn of the century created a new class of
protest writers, determined to record with documentary accuracy the
indignities of those who dwelled on the margins. It also simply made
for very good copy. Jack London put himself squarely at the center
of his 1902 chronicle of lower-class London life, The People of the
Abyss. Going undercover as a denizen of the East End of London,
which at the time was the most depraved slum in the world, the San
Francisco native experienced the stinging lash of social neglect.
London’s underworld is otherworldly; the notion of the abyss is used
as a running metaphor throughout the book, the slum as an infernal
black hole where no one escapes.
“I went down into the under-world of London with an attitude of mind
which I may best liken to that of the explorer,” London writes in
the preface to The People of the Abyss. “Further, I took with me
certain simple criteria with which to measure the life of the
under-world. That which made for more life, for physical and
spiritual health, was good; that which made for less life, which
hurt, and dwarfed, and distorted life, was bad.”
He found little that was good, and by the end of the book had no
reason to think that conditions would improve, barring the complete
abdication of the country’s ruling class that had cruelly tamped
down the East Enders. The People of the Abyss is advocacy journalism
in the guise of a minutely observed chronicle of institutionalized
despair.
Eric Blair developed his social consciousness from a relatively
privileged perch. As the son of an agent in the Opium Department of
the Indian Civil Service, Blair and his family (which he once
described as being “lower-middle-upper class”) were inextricably
linked to the British Empire and comfortably insulated from the
deprivations of imperial India-even though the country’s contrasts
of gilt-edged Raj opulence and squalor were plainly visible. Blair
was inscripted into the usual educational career track-prep school
at Sussex, then the prestigious Wellington and Eton secondary
schools-and it stoked his desire to be a writer.
At Eton, he read the great social satirists Jonathan Swift and
Laurence Sterne as well as Jack London’s The People of the Abyss,
which swung his political views against the very system that had
nurtured him. Rather than follow the prescribed path of Britain’s
learned class (Oxford, Cambridge, etc.), Blair, who began using the
pen name George Orwell in 1933 while writing criticism and essays
for the New Adelphi journal, enrolled in the Imperial Police Force
to gather experiences for his writing, serving in Burma for five
years. The Empire’s benign neglect of Burma and its exclusionary
elitism repulsed him. Disgusted with being a functionary in the
Empire’s vast machine, he resigned in 1927. Orwell could not be a
party to “every form of man’s dominion over man,” he wrote in his
1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier. “I was conscious of an immense
weight of guilt that I had to expiate. I wanted to submerge myself,
to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on
their side against the tyrants.”
(Continues…)
Crown
Copyright © 2005
Marc Weingarten
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-4914-8
Excerpted from The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight
by Marc Weingarten
Copyright © 2005 by Marc Weingarten.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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