The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (2 page)

RADICAL LIT: SOME ROOTS OF A REVOLUTION

“N
ew 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 García Márquez—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 wrote, “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 logic 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:

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 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:”

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.