Almost a year ago now, Rachel Donadio published “Truth Is Stronger Than Fiction” in The New York Times. In the most recent VQR, Brock Clarke goes toe-to-toe, gutting Tom Wolfe in the process. Why Wolfe ends up a casualty in this particular fight is beyond me, especially since he is not cited in the original Donadio article.
But even the unnecessary vivisection aside (and don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good unnecessary vivisection as much as the next student of literature–after all, it’s part of why I read journalistic criticism), there has been a lot of ink spilled on a rather ridiculous debate. Fiction and nonfiction have coexisted peacefully for quite some time–since Capote’s In Cold Blood at the very latest.
In fact, In Cold Blood may be instructive when we consider the difference between nonfiction and fiction. Remember that Capote referred to this work as a nonfiction novel, and for good reason: though the book is carved from the raw marble of reality, Capote does not deny that he carved it. This is why the genre is called “nonfiction” and not (as in Donadio’s misleading headline–which, to be fair, is most likely not her fault) “truth.” It is at this point I would like to exhume George Plimpton for a moment. In his 1966 interview with Capote, the links between creative nonfiction and fiction become immediately clear.
Capote notes that “journalism is the most underestimated, the least explored of literary mediums [emphasis mine].” When Plimpton asks why this is so, Capote replies,
When I first formed my theories concerning the nonfiction novel, many people with whom I discussed the matter were unsympathetic. They felt that what I proposed, a narrative form that employed all the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless immaculately factual, was little more than a literary solution for fatigued novelists suffering from “failure of imagination.” Personally, I felt that this attitude represented a “failure of imagination” on their part.
Of course a properly done piece of narrative reporting requires imagination!–and a good deal of special technical equipment that is usually beyond the resources–and I don’t doubt the interests– of most fictional writers: an ability to transcribe verbatim long conversations, and to do so without taking notes or using tape-recordings. Also, it is necessary to have a 20/20 eye for visual detail–in this sense, it is quite true that one must be a “literary photographer,” though an exceedingly selective one. But, above all, the reporter must be able to empathize with personalities outside his usual imaginative range, mentalities unlike his own, kinds of people he would never have written about had he not been forced to by encountering them inside the journalistic situation. This last is what first attracted me to the notion of narrative reportage. [emphasis mine]
Note too that Capote disdains those familiar trappings of journalism–notes and tape recorders. By not using them, he can reimagine the words of the people he spoke to (whether he meant to or not) in such a way as to make their words more compelling.
The overlap between fiction and nonfiction comes in the details–the selective literary photographer tells the story by editing the details. The nonfiction writer must decide what merits reporting and what does not. By editing the truth, by editing reality, a writer of nonfiction creates something that is, in essence, neither. It is a subjective narrative, a story as told by the author–the author’s way of sharing how she orders the world. As such, it may contain elements of the truth, may even bear a strong resemblance to the truth, but do not be fooled, dear reader: nonfiction is not truth.
Interestingly, Capote knocks Wolfe as well. Not for the same reason as Clarke does (to “prove” fiction is more vital than nonfiction), but because New Journalism, “James Breslin and Tom Wolfe, and that crowd, they have nothing to do with creative journalism–in the sense that I use the term–because neither of them, nor any of that school of reporting, have the proper fictional technical equipment. It’s useless for a writer whose talent is essentially journalistic to attempt creative reportage, because it simply won’t work.” A true creative nonfiction writer, by Capote’s definition, must use the tools of fiction to tell the story. And Wolfe, according to Capote, does not.
Clarke is using a straw man to knock down the hold nonfiction has on the imagination by using the fiction of a man known primarily for journalism. It is particularly interesting that he decides not to use Wolfe’s nonfiction to further his argument–because the techniques he criticizes in Wolfe’s fiction as either laziness or deficiency due to his journalistic background work to great effect in his nonfiction, a point which Clarke acknowledges:
Basically, this article tells Sherman his life as “Master of the Universe” is over, and his life as a known philanderer, racist, and felon is just beginning. And what is Sherman’s reaction? “He was rocked.” Wait: is that it? What can this mean: he was rocked? It is so generic as to mean nothing… If McCoy were a real person and Wolfe were writing a nonfiction piece about him, he would not be able to say what McCoy was thinking. And unless Wolfe was there while McCoy was reading this newspaper article, he would not be able to see what his visible reaction was, either. In a piece of journalism the sentence “He was rocked” might not seem so lacking. (In fact, at the end of the novel, there is a newspaper article on Sherman which says that “Mr. McCoy’s marriage was rocked by the revelation,” and used in a piece of journalism, “rocked” seems not nearly as lazy as it did when it was the sum and total of Sherman’s point of view.) [emphasis mine]
Comparing the fiction of a writer known primarily for nonfiction and the fiction of a fiction writer seems a bit unfair. Almost like stacking the deck, one might say. The techniques that work in nonfiction may not work as well in fiction–to truly compare the two, we would need a nonfiction piece by Wolfe. Were Clarke actually responding to Donadio, as he implies he is doing in the introduction, he would have to do so by comparing a work of contemporary nonfiction to a work of contemporary fiction to counter her claim that “the most creative energies seem directed at nonfiction.” Donadio is not saying that fiction ought to read like nonfiction (as Wolfe did); she is saying nonfiction is currently more energetic than fiction. The two statements strike me as very different things.
But though Clarke’s defense of fiction strikes me as doubtful at best, I feel I must take up his general point, which I think is correct. As we’ve observed earlier, good nonfiction owes much to fiction’s techniques. And the Frey fiasco only drives this point home; his memoir is rooted in his experience, but reimagined. That sounds mighty familiar–that sounds, in fact, like fiction, a fine and noble endeavor. But it also sounds like a number of other memoirs, not least of which is Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, reviewed by The New York Times in 1957 as a “splendid trick played on future biographers.” The memoir is what McCarthy remembers–which, she is careful to tell the reader, may or may not be the truth. One of the finest and most terrifying passages of the book (where McCarthy is wrongly punished by her then-guardian) is undermined at the end of the section, when her brother, a key player in the memory, does not recall the event happening at all. Unlike Frey, McCarthy is wily enough to warn the reader that she might be lying at any time–which only makes her sound more convincing.
McCarthy bent the medium of nonfiction just as Capote did, and both of them–like many nonfiction writers now–owe a staggering debt to fictional techniques. Perhaps this is because nonfiction and fiction are not so far apart as the current controversy would have us believe.Even Donadio, in her article, points out that this American obsession with nonfiction may, in fact, be fleeting: “Today, the most compelling creative energies seem directed at nonfiction. That is, until the next great novelist comes along to prove the naysayers wrong. Time, as Elizabeth Bishop once wrote, is nothing if not amenable.”
The genre I am reading–fiction, nonfiction, or poetry–is much less important to me than the skill of the writer and so I leave you with a passage from the recently-published unfinished manuscript of Hemingway’s, Under Kilimanjaro. It is a passage about fiction in a nonfiction (well, mostly nonfiction) book, and if we leave out the twice-repeated phrase “of fiction,” Hemingway sums up my thoughts on the matter:
You can’t blame the liars because all a writer of fiction is really is a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men. I am a writer of fiction and so I am a liar too and invent from what I know and that I’ve heard. I’m a liar . . . My excuse is that I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be. That is what makes good writers or bad.