The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (3 page)

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.”

With this burning objective, Orwell moved to London with only one thing on his mind—to write about this oppressed class. Finding cheap lodging near the Portobello Road, Orwell set about submerging himself into the city’s forsaken underworld just as Jack London had. “I knew nothing about working-class conditions,” Orwell was to write nearly a decade later in
The Road to Wigan Pier
. “The frightful descent of a working man suddenly thrown onto the streets after a lifetime of steady work, his agonized struggles against economic laws which he does not understand … all this was outside the range of my experience.”

Orwell abandoned the middle-class appurtenances of London life and booked himself into a common lodging house in the same East End slum where Jack London had done his research for
The People of the Abyss
. In frail health from his Burmese experience, and suffering from an infected foot, Orwell nonetheless plunged into the maelstrom with dedicated mind and spirit.

Orwell’s experiences, which he was eventually to recount in his 1931 book
Down and Out in Paris and London
, transpired over a longer period of time than Jack London’s (in all, Orwell’s life as a member of the working poor spanned three years). Unlike London, who booked another room in comfortable lodgings in order to maintain a “port of refuge … into which I could run now and again to assure myself that good clothes and cleanliness still existed,” Orwell allowed himself no such safe harbor. When his paltry savings ran out, he scrounged around for whatever work he could find, with fitful results. He fraternized with tramps and manual workers and joined up with them in the search for sustainable work. In Paris, he became a kitchen
plongeur
, scrubbing dirty dishes in a hotel restaurant short of hot water, electric light, and suitable pots and pans.

This is Orwell the incipient novelist using an insider’s observations to gird a social critique, a reporter replicating the grinding, unrelenting nature of menial labor using a fiction writer’s tools. Orwell’s descriptive powers create a vividly grim tableau. He and his fellow beggars “defiled
the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the seashore.” A septuagenarian tramp resembled “a herring-gutted starveling.” Boredom “clogged our souls like cold mutton fat.” More so than Jack London, Orwell wanted to transcend the stereotypes and fashion a more nuanced portrait of life lived on the margins. In
Down and Out
, poverty isn’t monolithic; even the tramps themselves have their own subtle class snobbery, and self-loathing drips from their disparaging comments about their fellow beggars.

The irony of
Down and Out in Paris and London
is that its verisimilitude is in some respects fabricated. Orwell admitted in
The Road to Wigan Pier
that “nearly all the incidents described … actually happened, though they have been rearranged,” though what “nearly” means remains open to debate. In the introduction to the French edition of the book, published in 1935, Orwell wrote that “all the characters I have described in both parts of the book are intended more as representative types… than as individuals.” As his biographer Bernard Crick has pointed out, Orwell admired Dickens’s talent for “telling small lies in order to emphasize what he regards as a big truth.” In Orwell’s determination to tell the big truth, he smooths over the messy road bumps of his narrative, conflating characters into composites, or creating them out of whole cloth if necessary.

This was to became a major tenet of New Journalism three decades later—blurring facts and characters like a watercolorist to arrive at some greater emotional or philosophical truth. To this day, journalists grapple with the notion of creating composites, and gifted writers such as Gail Sheehy have been harshly criticized for doing so. For traditional journalists and critics of New Journalism, it’s the antithesis of the well-ordered inverted pyramid technique, but Orwell’s story throws the pyramid’s limitations into bold relief. Lazy journalists can abuse composites, distorting facts into fabulism. But Orwell isn’t excluding or altering facts so much as he’s reordering them, molding the raw material into something compact and cohesive, so that the archetypes can work as representative characters, and his story retains its narrative power.

With the advent of World War II and an epic litany of atrocities to report, journalists brought the global terror home by way of newspaper dispatches and the major newsweeklies, particularly
Time
and
Newsweek
.
A handful of journalists, most notably the Scripps-Howard syndicate’s Ernie Pyle, managed to convey scenes of graphic horror with a painterly knack for the quotidian. But there were limitations to the ways in which correspondents could report on the horrors of war. In a global conflict that pitted the forces of good against evil, there was little room for nuance or ambiguity and lots of opportunities to beat the drum for American triumphalism.

The New Yorker
, a magazine that found many of its male contributors conscripted into the war effort, published the most imaginative war correspondence. A. J. Liebling, a veteran of the
New York World-Telegram
, was a master of the low-life profile. A staff writer for the magazine’s Talk of the Town section, where he was confined to a few hundred words, Liebling flexed his artistic muscle in the longer pieces he wrote for the magazine, where religious hucksters, bookies, boxers, tummlers, and other fast-buck hustlers were lovingly and humorously portrayed. Liebling, who had done some reporting in France for
The New Yorker
just prior to Pearl Harbor for the magazine’s Letter from Paris section (he was on a Norwegian tanker headed back to New York on December 7, 1941), returned to Europe in 1942, this time to devote his energies to reporting on the war. His pieces from the front lines, such as “The Foamy Fields,” his classic March 1943 story about the African campaign in Tunisia, are similar in spirit to Orwell’s ground-level reportage. Liebling plunks himself squarely in the middle of his stories and then applies his sardonic yet clinical eye to the particulars of entrenched warfare life:

One writer who straddled the disparate cultures of both
Time
and
The New Yorker
, and thus moved seamlessly from weekly deadline dispatches to in-depth reportage, was John Hersey, the whiz-kid Yale grad who covered more terrain during the war—in both the geographic and psychological
senses—than perhaps any other journalist of his generation. The son of missionaries based in China, Hersey had a blinkered childhood, unaware of the larger cultural currents unfolding beyond the walls of his father’s mission in Tientsin. When his parents moved to New York in 1924, Hersey attended the Briarcliff Manor public schools, then Yale, where he was a star football player and a contributor to the college newspaper.

Hersey was intent on becoming a journalist from an early age; as an adolescent, he self-published his own newsletter, the
Hersey News
, and was determined to get a job at Henry Luce’s
Time
, which was the endgame for many aspiring reporters during the 1930s. For Hersey,
Time
was “the liveliest enterprise of its type” and he wanted, “more than anything, to be connected with it.” After serving for a short time as novelist Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, Hersey was hired as a
Time
copyboy, but he quickly nabbed a plum assignment when Japan invaded China in 1937. Shorthanded, and cognizant of Hersey’s Chinese upbringing,
Time
pressed Hersey into service. He was only twenty-five years old.

From there, Hersey journeyed throughout Japan, China, and Europe for
Time, Life
, and
The New Yorker;
he witnessed German atrocities in Poland and the Baltic states, and reported on the conflict between Chinese Communists and Nationalists in Shanghai, Ichang, and Peiping. In 1943, Hersey wrote an important antecedent to the impressionistic school of reporting. “Joe Is Home Now” was a piece that drew from forty-three interviews Hersey conducted with returning soldiers.

“Joe Is Home Now” is a key precursor to the wartime New Journalism of John Sack and Michael Herr. Hersey makes no pretense about the story being factual. “I guess I’d been thinking from the beginning, and had been experimenting a little bit with the pieces I did for
Life
, the notion that journalism could be enlivened by using the devices of fiction,” Hersey told
The Paris Review
in 1986. “My principal reading all along had been fiction, even though I was working for
Time
on fact pieces.”