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November/December 1999 | Contents
books
With the news media fascinated by everything digital these days, printed words between hard covers seem almost quaint, no longer inspiring the journalistic imagination as they once did. Timely "insider" books filled with gossip can still appeal, but for a book to make big news, it must now have other attributes as well - say, a controversy over the author's methods. James Mackay's biography of John Paul Jones recently garnered press attention, but only because Mackay borrowed wholesale from an earlier study by Samuel Eliot Morison. The scandal might have stoked sales had Mackay's publisher not felt honor-bound to destroy all copies. Morris's approach is not wholly original. Those blazing the trail for him included novelist Virginia Woolf, whose life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Flush, is narrated by the subject's dog. Even so, Morris's approach has provoked cries of consternation in news columns, editorial pages, and TV studios. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd declared Morris "barking mad," a pioneer of "the Ally McBeal school of historiography, in which we regularly cut away from the action for wacky, out-of-body fantasies." Times critic Michiko Kakutani blasted Dutch as "bizarre, irresponsible, and monstrously self-absorbed." USA Today declared in an editorial that Morris's fictionalizing was "no better than a disservice and no less than distortion," while The Boston Globe editorialized that Morris "should just have told the story . . . . The pervasive blurring of fiction and fact in today's culture has no place in a presidential biography." (Or, as the editorial might have added, in the Globe's own, post-Mike Barnicle, post-Patricia Smith pages.) Needless to say, the critics who took shots at Morris helped Dutch shoot to the top of the charts. In fairness, the author of Dutch is not deliberately deceptive. He gives clues to his approach in the text and has freely admitted his fictionalizing on the talk show circuit. In so doing, intriguingly enough, Morris casts a spotlight on a verity many journalists would prefer to remain obscure: that much "news" is created rather than discovered. The interview, the press conference, the photo op, and the reaction story are just a few examples of how reporters and their sources sculpt "reality." CBS-TV's forthcoming Survivor, on which real-life contestants will struggle for sustenance on a desert island, is in principle no less artificial than CNN's Crossfire or ABC News's This Week. Indeed, although news traditionalists still swear allegiance to hard information, much of journalism amounts to concealed artifice presented as factual truth. Morris's artifice is naked by comparison with most, which might help explain the vehemence of journalists' attacks on him and his Dutch - this exhibitionist came too close to blowing their cover as well, so he had to be publicly shunned. Consider the anti-Morris comments of The Washington Post's Bob Wood ward, himself a contemporary history mill. Interviewed about Dutch by Linton Weeks, a Post culture reporter, Woodward declared: "The first refuge of anyone from Nixon through Reagan through Clinton, the first point in which they escape when somebody writes something they don't like is: ‘It's fiction.' Now you have a very well-respected historian coming forward and saying, ‘Yep, it is.' . . . Now it will be said, ‘This is what they all do.'" Woodward has reason to be sensitive. His breathless narratives about espionage, military command decisions, political campaigns, and the Clinton White House - based largely on anonymous sources - have been raising eyebrows for years. Woodward insists that his reporting is solidly sourced. But he tells us so little about his sources that he is not accountable to critics. His stories might be true. Or in some cases they might actually be quasi-fictional - informed speculation presented as the drama of hard fact. Woodward is no isolated case. Like Edmund Morris in Dutch, most journalists experience a professional tug-of-war between the desire to tell a good story and the desire to report thoroughly, analyze, and explain. Narrative journalism - supposedly nonfiction story-telling that uses such fictional devices as scene-by-scene construction - is often far more memorable, entertaining, and emotionally engaging than is analytic or thematic reporting. But its vividness frequently comes at the cost of fidelity to the facts, as it lures reporters toward the edge of fiction. In the summer of 1988, for instance, campaign newcomer Joan Didion accompanied Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and his press entourage on a swing across the United States. Didion was struck by how the journalists privately viewed the campaign with cynical realism as a series of phony events. For instance, at nearly every stop, Dukakis would toss a baseball with one of his aides. These were photo opportunities aimed at revising Dukakis's image as staid, aloof, elite, a veritable killjoy, and the press corps privately ridiculed these sports ops as such. Yet journalists reported the ball toss as if it were a spontaneous glimpse of the real man. Didion concluded from the news accounts of such campaign pseudo-events that the Dukakis camp and the reporters had entered into a conspiracy to advance a particular plot line: that the campaign was real and dramatic; Dukakis was a genuine, compelling character and a strong candidate who could give George Bush a run for his money. Not only was the baseball toss a wink and nod arrangement, Didion wrote, but "the narrative is made up of many such understandings, tacit agreements, small and large, to overlook the observable in the interests of obtaining a dramatic story line." Morris's approach clearly takes narrative construction one step further, from a skewed use of "true facts" to the fabrication of notional narrators. But Dutch and the ball toss are part of the same underlying compulsion in modern nonfiction: to create a sense of immediacy even at the expense of veracity. The baseball toss gave readers the illusion of a peek at the real, human "Dukakis." "Edmund Morris" is supposed to do the same for the Dixon, Illinois, of Ronald Reagan's youth; from the swimming hole to the gridiron, we see Dutch live, through "Morris's" eyes. For this thirst for the now, we can thank television, which has penetrated nearly every crevice of our culture, including the way we use the written word. The world of television is live and immediate: you are there. Nonfiction writing must transport you there as well if it is to compete for the potential reader's time. It is probably no coincidence that a "New Journalism" using fictional devices like dialogue and scene-by-scene development emerged and took hold in the 1960s, as television news started to overshadow print as the nation's dominant news medium. In the New Journalism, as in television, you are there. Dutch is simply New Journalism pushed to a new extreme. The question is whether Morris's creation of himself as a faux narrator will now be the device du jour aped by other biographers and journalists. No way, you might think, given the attacks it has provoked from the journalistic establishment. I'm not so sure, however. Recall the uproar that began circa 1965 over reconstructed, and therefore quasi-fictional, dialogue in such nonfiction books as In Cold Blood. The criticism went unheeded, and such reconstruction is now a standard device in nonfiction prose. Main stream news organizations regularly reprint book excerpts containing reconstructed dialogue. The technique's cinematic qualities have made it irresistible. Bogus narrators likewise help the prosaic leap off the page and threaten for that reason to become regular fare. Indeed, "Edmund Morris," has already infiltrated the pages of Newsweek, which reprinted extensive fictional excerpts from Dutch in its October 4, 1999, cover spread. Morris insists that his use of the fictional narrator in Dutch in no way distorts Reagan's life because every statement about Reagan is based on interviews or documents. Thus, Morris maintains, his approach represents no threat to the factual truth. Unfort unately, that picture is far too simplistic and ignores what might be termed a Gresham's Law for Literary Jour nalism: the fanciful and flaky kind drives out the sort that is more factual and fastidious. Consider, for instance, the New Journalism technique in which the innermost thoughts of a subject are presented as stream-of-consciousness. As Tom Wolfe once put it, "How could a journalist, writing nonfiction, accurately penetrate the thoughts of another person? The answer proved to be marvelously simple: interview him about his thoughts and emotions." That sounded plausible enough until, in The Right Stuff, Wolfe wrote a scene from the perspective of a chimpanzee just back from a Project Mercury test flight, confronted with the press pack. ("[T]here was a whole new mob of humans on hand! Even worse than the white smocks! Louder! Crazier! . . .") What Wolfe did to the chimp, author Joe McGinnis, in The Last Brother, later did to Ted Kennedy, imagining thoughts the senator might have had, then reporting them as real. When Joyce Carol Oates took the same approach one step further in Black Water, her book based on Chap pa quiddick, she had the good sense to call it fiction. More recently, several books initially praised as nonfiction literary gems have been debunked as chock-full of fabrication - among them Sleepers, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and Fragments, (better title: Figments), the purported memoir of a Holocaust survivor that was in fact written by the survivor of a middle-class upbringing in Switzerland. Here was Gresham's Law of Literary Journalism in full force. The Law is also clearly at work in Dutch's final chapter, which describes how "Edmund Morris" was rescued from drowning by Reagan, the teen-aged life guard - an event that never took place, touching though it was on the page. Throughout the 874-page book, moreover, it can be difficult to tell what is factual and what is fictional. And, as Terry Golway pointed out in the October 4 New York Observer, some of Morris's fictional characters eat up far more of the book than do real historical figures. Reagan's influential budget director, David Stockman, for instance, has a total of ten index references; Gavin, the fictional son of "Edmund Morris," rates over sixty. That's quite a ratio for what aims to pass as serious biography. The failure of Morris's literary experiment to illuminate the real Ronald Reagan is particularly ironic when one considers Reagan's own genius for what one might well term literary journalism. As a radio sportscaster, Reagan was called upon to "visualize" and narrate baseball games based on a flow of scant ticker data. He was a master at creating the sense of immediacy that his audience craved. His skills honed by Hollywood, Reagan later applied similar techniques to politics, making up details and tapping myths to convince the citizens that it was Morning in America. He was so convincing that they could practically smell the coffee. Arguably even such problems as Iran-Contra and a monster deficit never quite broke the spell. Not that Reagan, or the public, even remembers those two embarrassments today - Reagan because his Alzheimer's keeps him in a perpetual "now," the public because its collective memory is not much more acute than the Gipper's as it continues to seek immediate sensations, which the mass media are only too happy to provide. Morris's book achieves an ignominious feat for a work of historical nonfiction: it perpetuates confusion about an enormously important administration and threatens to unleash two, three, many "Edmund Morrises" on a public often unable to tell live from Memorex. The subject of Ronald Reagan still demands well-written and engaging analysis that unclouds that president's smoke and mirrors and demystifies his place in history. This will only be possible if journalists and other writers of ostensible nonfiction resist the enticement of drama, immediacy, and embellishment at the expense of context and fact.
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Far
better for robust coverage and sales is a non-annihilating, but still lively
dispute over an author's techniques - ideally involving a book whose topic has
some special resonance for journalists. A recent case in point is Edmund Morris's
Dutch, whose subject has simultaneously attracted, repelled, and fascinated
the press corps for many years. A conventional biography filled with insights
about Ronald Reagan and his times would presumably have in spired at least a
low-level buzz among the mediarati. With Dutch, how ever, the decibel
level went up incalculably as a result of the author's decision to insert several
fictional characters into an ostensibly weighty biography. Morris uses these
make-believe narrators - primarily a bogus "Edmund Morris," born in
1912, nearly thirty years earlier than the real Morris - to provide novelistic
first-person ac counts of the pre-presidential Reagan. (Morris even goes so
far as to manufacture footnotes about the lives of the fake characters.) The
idea, he claims, was to use the insights of "Edmund Morris" to make
the early Reagan as vivid as the Reagan that Morris actually observed firsthand
after becoming the fortieth president's official biographer in 1985.
