Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

risky, expensive stories, and Capote launched the years-long project with New Yorker money. He called the book that resulted, In Cold Blood, a “nonfiction novel,” a genre that applied journalism to “a serious new art form.” He interviewed the convicts extensively in prison and watched their execution, taking many of the techniques of sensational nineteenth-century journalism and rebranding them as art.

In Cold Blood begat a New Journalism, tinged with amnesia, and not just in the reuse of an old journalistic term. It relied on many innovations of the late nineteenth-century reporters without acknowledging they’d even existed. In a 1972 article for Esquire (“The Magazine for Men”), reporter Tom Wolfe expressed his frustration with an establishment journalism promoted by journalism schools with their focus on distanced objectivity. He found it staid and boring. The writers he liked, by contrast, were taking on what literary novelists of his day avoided: the social life of the great cities. They seized the mantle of realist authors like Dickens to capture the popular imagination: “By trial and error, by ‘instinct’ rather than theory, journalists began to discover the devices that gave the realistic novel its unique power, variously known as its ‘immediacy,’ its ‘concrete reality,’ its ‘emotional involvement,’ its ‘gripping’ or ‘absorbing’ quality.” The writing he most admired could be termed “stunts”: John Sack going through army infantry drills, George Plimpton training with the Detroit Lions, Hunter S. Thompson hanging out with the Hells Angels. But Wolfe did what the stunt reporters could never do—called this kind of work literature, called it good. In his nonfiction manifesto the next year—The New Journalism—he outlined the attributes he thought of as central to this form—a story told in scenes, a distinct point of view, ample dialogue, and use of status detail (which he defined in the Esquire piece as “the everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration” that his subjects used to mark their social rank). It was the kind of writing Bly did so well.

One of the authors he held up as an example was Joan Didion, whose reporting on the Haight in San Francisco during the late 1960s had similarities to that of Nelson and Valesh as they visited tenements in New York and New Bedford. The stunt reporters’ language isn’t as rich—Didion pens an unmatched sentence—but the approach is similar. In 1895, in one of her first stories for the New York Journal, Winifred Black wrote of a five-year-old dying of alcoholism—a ruined liver—in the hospital: “Lucia stood and watched the nurse with lack-lustre eyes. When I rose to go she held out her little hand. It shook like the hand of a man in the palsy.” Black then visited the family in their tenement home and summarized the conversation. The parents said, about the children: “Why should they not have a little sup of good wine now and then, eh, to warm the blood? . . . Too much, that is bad, but who would give a baby too much whiskey? A drop now and again to soothe it? Ah, yes, that was without a doubt, the best.” In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion wrote about a California five-year-old: “I see a child on the living-room floor, wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book. She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only thing off about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick.

‘Five years old,’ Otto says. ‘On acid.’”

The quiet shock and condemnation are the same.

The voice-driven first-person narration that Wolfe championed in the 1970s, though not as new as he claimed, combined with effects of the women’s movement and the civil rights movement to form another strand of this narrative-based nonfiction writing. The personal was political and, thus, worthy of notice. People who were not famous began to write about their lives. These works tended to be distinct from traditional “autobiographies” in that they skipped the parade of accomplishments in the lives of great men—college, marriage, career—and focused on telling stories. They were memoirs. Maxine Hong Kingston wrote about the ghosts of the past that haunted her Chinese American childhood. Maya Angelou wrote about navigating racism and being assaulted as an eight-year-old. Annie Dillard described a year spent looking closely, ecstatically, at Tinker Creek in rural Virginia. Many of these memoirists were women, and so memoir became another “not quite” literary form. It was too popular, too feminine. In Francine Prose’s New York Times review of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, she described the “sensibility, the tonal range, the lyrical intensity and imaginative vision—that distinguish the artist from the memoirist,” and concluded, “The Glass Castle falls short of being art, but it’s a very good memoir.”

In the 1990s, building on New Journalism and increasing interest in memoir and personal essay, MFA programs began offering, in addition to degrees in fiction and poetry, degrees in “creative nonfiction.” In his scathing article about the upstart genre, James Wolcott in Vanity Fair complained of the “slow drip of petty disclosure” and the “big, earnest blob of me-first sensibility.” He dubbed Lee Gutkind “the Godfather behind Creative Nonfiction” after Gutkind started an MFA track in creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, one of the first in the country. Once again, those credited with launching the genre were male, though many of the most successful practitioners were female. Meanwhile, muckraking had turned into investigative journalism, the most hard-hitting, respected form, generally coded as man’s work. Textbooks cited novelist Upton Sinclair and other male writers as its progenitors.

For example, in his book of interviews (and declaration of a new genre), The New New Journalism, Robert S. Boynton critiqued Wolfe for ignoring the debt of New Journalism to the reporting of the late 1890s. The introduction of The New New Journalism gave an overview of journalism history, praising nineteenth-century writers’ “artfully told narrative stories about subjects of concern to the masses,” ability to draw an “accurate, sympathetic portrait of the ‘vicissitudes’ of city life,” experiments with dialogue and perspective, and “muckraking exposés.” Who gets credit for all