Reporters are Writers Too

Melinda Uno

C. Mujal History 124

UC Berkeley Summer Sessions

13 August 2009

Reporters are Writers Too

Style and vocabulary change drastically depending on to whom you are writing, and for what purpose. Novels drench the reader in description and require a plot worthy of a few hundred pages. Poems must create and image with a few carefully chosen words. Journalism tends to be direct and concise to accurately follow a fast paced and ever-changing world. The lines are not always clear for example, prose-poetry developed in America in the late 19th century with writers such as T.S. Eliot and Oscar Wilde. Writers famous in history are often known for the stylistic bridges gapped the revolution of a fresh new voice, and the audacity to speak out against the injustices of society. In the 1960s and 1970s, many common people, not just writers jumped on the bandwagon of open and vocal protest. Perhaps perpetuating the bandwagon journalistically is Tom Wolfe who first used the term New Journalism to describe the fusion of creative literary syntax with (at least partially) factual and concise traditional journalism. Most notable New Journalists include Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Truman Capote, all of whom published novels and articles in prominent magazines including and not limited to The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic Monthly.

In this journalistic style, news articles read like short stories and demand some creativity from the author. New Journalism is a revival of traditional literary social commentary that masks little and attempts to inform the reader and public in a creative way. According to author Tom Wolfe, New Journalism is defined as journalism that reads like a novel, using literary devices from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-consciousness, and to use many different kinds simultaneously to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally. New Journalism grew out of the ambition of would-be novelists in the journalistic field (Wolfe The New Journalism 15). The raw, unfiltered popular novels of the 1950s and the Beatnik generation fueled the notion that anyone could write the great American novel. For many, the reality of a career in writing meant journalism, and it seemed as though the time was ripe for a new literary genre: they had been practically crying for novels by the new writers who must be out there somewhere, the new writers who would do the big novels of the hippie life or campus life or radical movements of the war in Vietnam or dope or sex or black militancy or encounter groups or the whole whirlpool at once… The – New Journalists – Parajournalists – had the whole world crazed obscene uproarious Mammon-faced drug-soaked mau-mau lust-oozing Sixties in America all to themselves (Wolfe The New Journalism 31). As other areas faced change, it is logical that journalism would also adapt to a new cultural climate. It is impossible to discuss New Journalism without taking into consideration the immense radical political and social change that occurred when New Journalism was gaining popularity: “The ferment of social change of the last decades, and the exhaustion of certain forms of fiction that have dominated the novel since World War II, have created new opportunities for writers” (Hollowell 10). In many definitions of New Journalism, such as Wallace’s in Newspapers and the Making of Modern America include a discussion of the youth culture surrounding Free Speech movement and the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements. New Journalism is alternative press defined by: “its atmosphere, personal feeling, interpretation, advocacy and opinion, novelist characterization and description, touches of obscenity, concern with fashion and cultural change, and political savvy”. Youth oriented and fronterist community constructed through this writing (Wallace 126). During the sixties, when New Journalism gained momentum as a literary movement, the social and political events of the time were often driven by the media. Large name newspapers focused on Presidential speeches, riots, protests and assassinations while magazines and smaller papers focused on changing how these events were documented: “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” (Wolfe The New Journalism 31). Others seek to define New Journalism through categorization. It should be understood, furthermore that most New Journalists fall somewhere on the spectrum between these two extremes of a personal, creative art and an objective, researched exposure – and most toward the first rather than the second. in the first there are qualities of honesty, vision, and style that are grounded in the person; in the second those qualities are more a product of the facts, the data, and the form they can be given to make an argument, a scientific knowledge, an objective picture. it seems to me that the first, like the confessional style of much contemporary poetry is more unique to our age and, certainly more typical of New Journalism as a genre of journalistic writing. However, the writers at these extremes, as well as those along the spectrum in between, all share a strong commitment to the effective communication of informative and honest statements about the contemporary human situation (Johnson 88). Antagonized and disillusioned, the youth generation of (primarily) the 1960s is credited for sparking much of the social change in America. Social pressures at home for many of America’s youth perpetuated an anxiety and longing to establish a sense of self that seemed to be shared by most of the country at this time. Quite often, the ambitions of a minority group, whether it be on the basis of race, gender, or age have been suppressed, only to collectively and unintentionally gain momentum as a series of social movements. This is particularly true in the terms of the Free Speech movement of Berkeley in the 60s: “the most important aspect of the youth and radical scene is its character as a counterculture… it stands in clear opposition or indifference to the major American cultural and political scene. The student revolution and rock culture are certainly part of this counterculture, but there are other subcultures which, while they overlap these two, may also be distinguished from them in important ways” (Johnson 130). For New Journalists, this social setting provided an opportunity for change. “…All of these subcultures represent counter-cultural possibilities, alternatives to conventional and generally accepted ways of living, thinking, and feeling, in which many activist students and roc-culture people may or may not participate… Some of this journalism has been written by those involved in realizing these alternatives, some by sympathetic outsiders. Most of it is to be found in the publications of the underground press, but the best of it has appeared elsewhere” (Johnson 130). It is not an easy feat to credit every single New Journalist at this time, especially in consideration of the fact that at this time in history many small, privately owned “underground publications” featured strong and revolutionary writers. Tom Wolfe’s analysis is one of the first to define New Journalism and label certain authors as leaders in this movement. The ambitious-would be novelists, now turned journalists, the New Journalists simply forced the field of journalism to adapt to their skills as literary writers. Without ambition to revitalize the literary world, some of the journalists of this time found a unique niche. Journalistic writing provided interesting conditions for writers “According to Wolfe, the new journalists were reacting to a type of writing in which the novelist did no research and presented characters with no background and no history – even put them in no particular time period” (Shomette xviii). Many literary elements crucial to the novel are now omitted, as page space of a newspaper or magazine is more valuable and limiting than the numerous pages of a lengthy book. While Tom Wolfe is an accurate documentarian of this literary movement, he is also one of its pioneers. In the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe experiments with point of view as well as stream of consciousness to document his travels with Ken Kesey and others. Wolfe’s almost chaotic writing style puts the reader into the heat of the moment: “ Back in the jungle, Cornel Wilde. Heart still banging up to the edge of fibrillation, through the lush shadow danks of the jungle. Well, yessir, lookee here a minute, what’s this. A three sided hut in the jungle, some kind of woodsman’s hut, with a cot in it and a little hoard of mango papaya, some kind of pallid little fruit” (Wolfe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test 217). In this book, Wolfe utilizes slang and regional dialect to put the setting of the story into perspective as well as to describe the personality of the other characters of the novel. Kesey knew his characters intimately and had a personal relationship with them while at the same time he gathered facts for a story: “there was an unusually rich record of Kesey’s thoughts and feelings during this interlude. He had written at length to his friend Larry McMurtry about it at the time, he had made tapes even while he was in the jungle, and I had interviewed his companions in the flight… Much of the direct interior monologue is taken from Kesey’s letters to McMurtry” (Wolfe 204). For some, the idea of New Journalism is somewhat controversial. The book Critical Response to Tom Wolfe is a compilation of articles written in reaction to Tom Wolfe’s works including his bold statements in The New Journalism “Wolfe’s notions of New Journalism are considered somewhat inflated, particularly as he says the new genre “dethrones the novel” as the leading literary genre of the Post-Modern era”(Shomette 57). An article “the New Journalism” by Tom Curran, another perspective of the importance of New Journalism aids Wolfe’s arguments “Without New Journalism we might go on thinking that the sixties were another decade of war and political assassination, of activism and reaction, instead of “the decade when manners and morals, styles of living, attitude toward the world changed the country more crucially than political events”’ (Shomette 69). Wolfe credited the new journalists with creating journalism which reads like a novel – a non-fiction novel – such as Capote’s In Cold Blood. Wolfe recognized some earlier writers with the same efforts…” (Shomette xviii).Capote “a novelist of long standing… said he created a new literary genre, ‘the nonfiction novel’… Capote had spent five years researching his story and interviewing the killers in prison and so on, a very meticulous and impressive job. (Wolfe 28). Unlike some of the other New Journalists, Capote is an example of a writer who transcended literary categorization by adapting the novel to be more like an article: “Capote’s determination to reproduce the techniques of the novel in nonfiction is obvious… he uses the technique of parallel narratives that John Steinbeck was so fond of… One gets a curious blend of third-person point of view and omniscient narration. Capote probably had sufficient information to use point of view in a more complex fashion but was not yet ready to let himself go in nonfiction” (Wolfe 116). Part of what Capote’s contemporaries admire about In Cold Blood is Capote’s accuracy of information and detailed description: “... the dialogue is confirmed to short takes… [as] the reporter could not be present for the events themselves and has to reconstruct the dialogue from what his subjects can remember, and one’s recollection is almost invariably confined to highlights. On the other hand, Capote’s use of status details is quite effective …”(Wolfe 116). Undoubtedly, In Cold Blood is one of the texts credited as part of the origin of New Journalism: “Capote’s skill and experience as a novelist are everywhere evident in the final product. He could not, of course, record all of the events of the Clutters’ lives, nor did he dwell on each minute detail concerning the killers. Instead, he chose the scenes and conversations with the most powerful dramatic appeal” (Hollowell 70-1). It seems as though before New Journalism, the nonfiction novel was considered dry and factual, simply informational without any added personal flair from the author. Capote is credited for his informational accuracy as well as his ability as a writer to convey that information in an appealing way. Norman Mailer and his novel Armies of the Night are often mentioned with and compared to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. “And then, early in 1968, another novelist turned to nonfiction, and with a success that in its own way was as spectacular as Capote’s two years before. This was Norman Mailer writing a memoir about an anti-war demonstration he had become involved in… within the literary community and among intellectuals generally it couldn’t have been a more tremendous success d’estime” (Wolfe 27-8). Like Capote, the basis of the novel at this point in Mailer’s career is based off of fact: “… [Mailer] demonstrates the power of fusing the journalistic idiom with the techniques of the novel. By applying the imaginative resources of fiction to contemporary history, Mailer transcends the cliches and formulas of conventional reportage” (Hollowell 101). In The Armies of the Night, Mailer fuses history and the Novel as well as the Autobiography, documenting events while concurrently creating an atmosphere that reads like a novel with the establishment of setting and character. Mailer, although the author of the text, writes about himself in third person: “Mailer’s arm was being held in the trembling grip of a U.S. Marshal – this trembling a characteristic physical reaction of the police whenever they lay hands on an arrest, or at least so Mailer would claim after noticing police in such a precise state for three out of four times he had in his life been arrested – yes they trembled quite uncontrollably” (Mailer 37). Mailer’s emotional description and unique third-person point of view change the non-fiction novel forever. Now much of the personal experiences of the events of the author are combined with his detachment from the protagonist or subject of the novel. Mailer’s “columns grew increasingly into rants, provoking letters from readers who saw him as both part of the problem and part of the solution… typical of his aggressive, audience-unfriendly approach, was his first column: “Greenwich Village is one of the bitter provinces – it abounds snobs and critics. That many of you frustrated in your ambitions, and undernourished in your pleasures, only makes you more venomous”’ (Wallace 127). Mailer epitomes Tom Wolfe’s definition of a “would-be novelist” working as a journalist until the book is finished. Mailer’s disdain for the upper-middle class “snobs and critics” and, we can assume, the Establishment is highly reflective of the social commentary that is crucial to New Journalism. Another author, Joan Didon, is known primarily for her literary works, as opposed to her journalistic works. However her articles titled Slouching Towards Bethlehem established her as a ranking New Journalist in 1968 (Wolfe The New Journalism 29). Didon’s articles exemplify New Journalism, perhaps without her initial intent from the very first few lines of the article: “This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific, but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains….” (Didon 10). Almost sounding like a fairy tale with its “Once upon a time” opening, Didon’s article “Some Dreamers of the Golden dream” begins with a simple description of the location as well as the characters. Didon even acknowledges her lack of description of the personal backgrounds of the people involved in her story. “Unhappy marriages so resemble one another that we do not need to know too much about the course of this one. There may or may not have been trouble on Guam, where Cork and Lucille Miller lived while he finished his Army duty. There may or may not have been problems I the small Oregon town where he first set up private practice (Didon 15). Didon is one of the New Journalists that pushed the limits of journalism to be more like a short nonfiction story. Now in the 1960s and 70s, magazine articles provide more information than the articles of the past, but still lack the essential defining characteristics of the novel. Hunter S Thompson, well known for his drug-crazed articles and novels really began his career as a New Journalist with his book about the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. “I listened to the war talk and shouting for a while, then hustled down the mountain to call a Washington newspaper I was writing for at the time, to say I was ready to send one of the great riot stories of the decade. On the way down the road I passed outlaw bikes coming the other way” (Thompson 55). This quote from Thompson is stream of consciousness, much like Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This is appropriate because both are similarly “out in the field” but write with a flair of personality to illustrate their experiences. “the rest of the day blurs into madness. The rest of that night, too. And all the next day and night. Such horrible things occurred that I can’t bring myself to think about them even now, much less put them down in print. Steadman was lucky to get out of Louisville without serious injuries, and I was lucky to get out at all” (Thompson 18). Part of what is considered to be important about Thompson’s writing style and journalistic research methods is the sheer amount of danger he put himself through in order to write a story. Thompson willingly follows a violent gang for the sake of documentation and social commentary. These five authors are credited for pioneering and serving as leading examples of New Journalism. Although some, like Capote and Mailer are more well known for their non-fiction novels, while others like Didon are known for their journal articles, each of these authors and many others not mentioned are part of a collective literary movement that redefined literary genres and writing methods. While these authors are not necessarily leaders of the counter-culture movement, they play an integral role in documenting cultural change and forming a new literary movement that also creates a unique outlet in a specific profession.

Works Cited

Didion, Joan Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (FSG Classics).. 2008.

Everette. E, and William L. Rivers Dennis. Other voices: new journalism in America. unknown: Unknown, 1974. Hallowell, John H. Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel. Chapel Hill: Univ Of North Carolina Pr, 1977. Johnson, Michael L. The New Journalism. The University Press: Kansas, 1971.

Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History. New York. 1995.

Murphy, James E.. The New Journalism: A Critical Perspective (Journalism Monographs 34). Columbia, SC : Assn For Education In Journalism, 1974.
Shomette, Doug. The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Thompson, Hunter. The Hell’s Angels, A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York. 2006. Wallace, Aurora. Newspapers and the Making of Modern America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Picador Books, 1958. Wolfe, Tom The New Journalism (Picador Books).. 1975.