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 More on books and critics from The Atlantic Monthly. |
Notes on the New Journalism - Page 2 1 | 2 
onsider the mythic hotel fire we were talking about. Today, when a New Journalist tells it, there is likely to be no deference to an official version—if anything, perhaps a semiautomatic disdain of one. There is virtually no interest in the traditional touchstone facts, the numbers—the number of people dead, or saved, or staying at the hotel, the worth of the jewelry, or the cost of damage to the building. Instead, there are attempts to catch the heat of the flames, the feel of the fire. We get snatches of dialogue—dialogue overheard. A stranger passes by, says something to another stranger, both disappear. Rapid motion. Attempts to translate the paraphernalia of photography—the zoom lens, film-cutting. Disconnection. And nearly always the presence of the journalist, the writer— his voice. Our event, in fact—the fire—has seemingly changed in the course of time from (once) existing solely as an official rectilinear fact, to (later) a more skeptically official, looser, more written, human account, to (now) its present incarnation in New Journalism as a virtually antiofficial, impressionist, nonfactual, totally personal account of a happening—which often now is only permitted to exist for us within the journalist's personality.The chief merits and demerits of New Journalism seem then as basic as these: the merit is—who really wants to read about this fire as it is likely to be presented in the New York Times or in a standard newspaper report? For those who do want to, the standard newspaper will give you the traditional facts: the number of people in the hotel, the number of people killed, who owns the hotel, etc. The standard newspaper considers these facts important, because (apparently) the standard newspaper for the last seventy-five years or more has considered these facts important. Here is the beginning of a front-page story in the New York Times on the controversial and emotional subject of housing in Forest Hills: "A compromise plan to end the fight over the Forest Hills low-income housing project has been worked out by top aides of Mayor Lindsay, including former Deputy Mayor Richard R. Aurelio, and has been discussed privately with leaders of blacks and Jews and with high-ranking officials. The plan would call for a scaling-down of the Forest Hills project by about a third and the revival of the project for the Lindenwood section of Queens that was recently killed by the Board of Estimate. The Lindenwood project, however, would be smaller than the earlier one ... " If this is the voice of conventional journalism speaking to us about our world, it is likely to find an increasingly restless, disconnected audience. The voice speaks too thin a language. The world it tells us about so assiduously seems but a small part of the world that is actually outside the window—seems a dead world, peopled largely by official figures, and by procedural facts, and written about in a fashion which is doubtless intended to be clear, and clean, and easy to understand, but which instead is usually flat, and inhuman, and nearly impossible to connect to. If then the merit of New Journalism is that it affords us the possibility of a wider view of the world, a glimpse of the variousness and disorder of life, its demerits, I think, are that these possibilities are so seldom realized, or at such cost to the reality-mechanism of the reader. For instance, in the matter of our hotel fire; there is no need, it seems to me, for a journalist today to relate all the traditional facts (especially since most of them, in this sort of story, are basically concerned with Property); but if he is to tell it as a real story, an account of an event that actually happened, I think there is a very deep requirement on the part of the reader (usually not expressed, or not expressed at the time) that the objects in the account be real objects. If the fire took place at the Hotel Edgewater, probably one ought to know that much, and certainly not be told that it was the Hotel Bridgewater. "But what does it matter?" says the New Journalist. "That's not the important thing, is it?" In many ways it isn't, but in serious ways it is. It's a commonplace by now that contemporary life doesn't provide us with many stable navigational fixes on reality; and that we need them, and have trouble, privately and publicly, when we are too long without. Families. Schools. The Government. Movies. Television. None of these contribute much anymore to informing us of the actual objects in the actual room we move about in. Journalism should materially help us with this, but all too rarely does—is either too conventionally timid, or, with the New Journalist, too often (I think) gives up the task of telling us of the actual arrangement of the objects, or at any rate of trying to find out, get close to it, in favor of the journalist's own imposed ordering of these objects. By no means all New Journalism is careless. Talese, for example, seems to be remarkably meticulous to detail. Mailer's account of the march on the Pentagon seems to have been extremely faithful to what happened. There are other examples, although not, I suspect, all that many. A careful writer. That was Joe Liebling's way of praising a fellow journalist, his highest praise. There are probably few careful writers around anymore. And few careful editors. Few careful generals. Few careful stockbrokers. Few careful readers. This doesn't seem to be a very careful period we are living in. Relationships seem to break apart ... carelessly. Wars are waged ... carelessly. Harmful drugs are put on the market ... carelessly. A soldier kills ("wastes") two hundred unarmed civilians ... carelessly; and his countrymen, when told of this, first don't want to hear, then turn away ... carelessly. The point is not that it is a better or worse era than Liebling's, nor that there is any sure way of measuring it—but it is different. 
nd swirling all about us—still swirling, although the motion has somewhat abated—has been the great sexual lather of the 1960s. It was in the sixties, wasn't it, that we first had the miniskirt. Wife-swapping. Sex clubs. Swinging. The Pill. The sexuality of Kennedy politics. The new dark Grove Press best sellers. I Am Curious, Yellow—and showing at a chic theater. The sexual emancipation of women. Kaffeeklatsches about the clitoral orgasm. All those strident sexy costumes—the cutout clothes, the glaring colors, the threads that lawyers started to wear on weekends, the big wide ties, the sideburns. Esalen. Touch therapy. Everybody (it seemed) committed to being sexy, or at any rate aware of it, or at any rate trying to deal with it. Since then, some of the stridency has quieted down a bit. Sex in writing, for instance, seems to be less insistent and obligatory. We've just had Love Story, haven't we? Fashion magazines have started muttering about a Return to Elegance, whatever that may mean. But it was back in the sixties that New Journalism made its big
push—a debut which Tom Wolfe seems to think derived from some magic confluence of the stars, or at least from some solemn discovery of the Death of the Novel. I wouldn't say that it wasn't at all the way he says it was—but my guess is that a lot of what's happened in New Journalism has as much to do with the New Carelessness of the times, and the sexual stridency of writers (and of nearly everyone else), as it has to do with attempts to evolve freer journalistic techniques.At any rate, the new journalistic techniques have produced a mightily uneven body of work. Some of it as good as, for instance, Wolfe's own Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—but much of it—for example a recent piece in Rolling Stone by Hunter Thompson on the New Hampshire primaries—is slipshod and self-serving. Partly this is because of the times we live in, and both writers and readers respond to the times. Partly, too, it's because—with one, or two, or two-and-a-half exceptions there are virtually no prose editors anymore. Already in reporting, one notes that what used to be called a reporter is now called an "investigative reporter"; the reporter is presumably the fellow who informs us that the President is now standing in the doorway of the plane. And in editing, the person who deals with the bloody manuscript is somebody called the "copy" or "text" editor, and works in a small office behind the broom closet; while the Editor, of course, is the man having lunch with Clifford Irving. Editors today lunch, and make deals, and assign subjects—"concepts"—and discourse airily on the "new freedom" which they now provide writers; which in fact means that the Editor can remain at lunch, and not be much bothered on his return by a responsibility to his writer's story, or to his writer's subject, because he usually has none, claims none. And writers, for their part, just as keen to escape the strictures of traditional editing—as indeed are so many others in our society to escape the traditional strictures of their lives, marriages, families, jobs; and possibly for the same sort of reasons. Writers. Writer-journalists. It is clearly a splendid thing, a sexy thing, to be a writer-journalist these days. Admirals, aviators, bishops—everyone has his day. Today it is the journalist (and some others). He declaims about the end-of-the-novel while he hitch-hikes on the novel. He has small patience for the dreary conventions of the Old Journalism, although he rides upon its credibility, on the fact that most people will buy and read his work on the assumption (built up by his predecessors) that when he writes: "Startled, the Pope, awoke to find the Hotel Bridgewater in flames," it was indeed the Bridgewater, not the Edgewater, and that it was, in fact, the Pope. Even so, this is not the worst of crimes. When people complain too much about inaccuracy, or inattention to detail, it seems to me they are usually talking about something else, perhaps a larger, muddled conflict of life-views. Where I find the real failure in New Journalism, or in much of it anyway, is in the New Journalist's determination and insistence that we shall see life largely on his terms. Granted one knows, by now, the pitfalls of conventional "objectivity." One is aware of the inaccuracies and timidities which so often have resulted from on-the-one-hand ... on-the-other-hand reporting. Still, there is something troubling and askew in the arrogance—and perhaps especially in the personal unease—that so often seems to compel the New Journalist to present us our reality embedded in his own ego. A classic example of this, I thought, was Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon, with its generalities about engineers and scientists—generalities which seemed less concerned with what scientists or engineers might be, even if one could generalize about them, than in the ego-ability of the writer to generalize about them. Lesser talents and egos than Mailer are less noticeable, although it seems to me that much, if not most, routine New Journalism—I am thinking of the dozens of pieces about movie stars and politicians that appear in magazines each year—consists in exercises by writers (admittedly often charming, or funny, or dramatically written exercises) in gripping and controlling and confining a subject within the journalist's own temperament. Presumably, this is the "novelistic technique." But in fact Madame Bovary is a creature of Flaubert's—regardless of whether Flaubert once spent a summer in Innsbruck with a lady who looked vaguely like her, and who expressed dissatisfaction with her husband. Whereas Phil Spector, for example, in the Tom Wolfe piece, or Bill Bonanno in Honor Thy Father, or George Meany in a Harper's piece by John Corry all are real people, nobody's creatures, certainly not a journalist's creatures—real people whose real lives exist on either side of the journalist's column of print. The New Journalist is in the end, I think, less a journalist than an impresario. Tom Wolfe presents ... Phil Spector! Jack Newfield presents ... Nelson Rockefeller! Norman Mailer presents ... the Moon Shot! And the complaint is not that the New Journalist doesn't present the totality of someone's life, because nobody can do that—but that, with his ego, he rules such thick lines down the edges of his own column of print. Nothing appears to exist outside the lines—except that, of course, it does. As readers, as audience, despite our modem bravado, I don't think we show much more willingness, let alone eagerness, than we ever did to come to terms with this disorder—the actuality, the nonstorybook element in life. And it seems to me that, on the whole, the New Journalist (despite his bravado) hasn't risked much in this direction either; and if you think none of it matters, my guess is you're wrong.
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What do you think? Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.
Copyright © 1994 by Michael J. Arlen. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; May 1972; Notes on the New Journalism - 72.05; Volume 229, No. 5; page 61-71. |
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