The New Journalism
Edited by Tom Wolfe and E.W Johnson
By Shola Adenekan
The title suggests a long essay by Tom Wolfe, accompanied by samples of what the essay is about. What we get are three chapters of Wolfe egoistic but intellectually enriching essays, followed by an anthology of works by diverse writers and journalists. A clear case of the nose wagging the dog. The book's 23 pieces include predictable but attractive items like passages from John Capote's "In Cold Blood," Norman Mailer's "The Armies of the Night," Plimpton's "Paper Lion," Thompson's"The Hell's Angels," and McGinniss' "The Selling of the President 1968,"; like snatches of Wolfe himself. But then there is also Rex Reed on Ava Gardner, Joan Didion on the Miller murder case in Carlifonia, and Terry Southern on the Dixie National Baton Twirling Institute in Mississippi.
Blam blam! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Wolfe single handedly gunned down the gang of tired feature writers encamped in New Yorker magazine bunker! No more narcoleptic pseudo-objective institutional blowjob dispatches, no more sycophantic formulaic post-hypnotic feature writing! It is time to put your hacking boots on, your reporter's notebook in your back pocket and stride into the open air and write about what the hell is really going on in the world! The writing is remarkable, almost without exception, and if this is New Journalism, one can hardly denied the genre as an art form is as refreshing as ever, even in 2001.
Is New Journalism really new? Wolfe doesn't like the label, but labels apart, is there even anything there to be given a name at all? Do these writers have anything in common beyond the time and the country they live in, a certain insistence on their own personalities and a willingness to do a lot of legwork for a story? These are not enough, perhaps.
Wolfe thinks it is primarily a question of technique, and lists rather academically the four basic devices of the school; scene-by-scene construction, "resorting as little as possible to sheer, historical narrative"; lots of dialogue; a marked point of view within the story, often not that of the narrator but that of a character, reconstructed from tapes or interviews or letters or diaries; and the recording of details of what Wolfe called 'status life'- "the entire pattern of behaviour and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be." These seem bleak, unpromising reductions, and the book happily defeats the expectations they are likely to set up.
In New Journalism Wolfe was fighting war on two fronts, against the old journalism, and against the novel. Against the old journalism for its pose of meek, fake, cultured objectivity, its "pale beige tone." And against the novel because it has turned its back on the fertile fields of social manners and mannerism, and gone in for myth and fable. I'm entirely in favour of the attack on old journalism, and the pro-establishment objectivity of Time, the 'holier-than-thou' snobbery of New Yorker magazine. Wolfe seems to think, against all the evidence and against his own brilliant practice, that an attention to the real world can be guaranteed only by the rather rickety narrative structures of the old realists like Dickens, and Dostoyevsky. He also seems to think, curiously enough, that he himself is not a mythological writer.
What really characterises the New Journalism as represented in this book, is first, a certain elusiveness on the part of the writer. The more he puts himself forward, hopping about inside his own story, nattily dressed, bearded, drunk, eccentric, sniffing cocaine, the less we seem to know about where he stands, because he has made it his job to hide his opinions, or to hint at them only indirectly, or perhaps even to have none. This is especially clear in the pieces by Rex Reed on Ava Gardner, by Joe Eszterhas on Charlie Simpson, and by Hunter Thompson on the Kentucky Derby. The writers keep very low profiles, as the saying goes: an unwillingness to judge, or an extreme discretion in judging. Perhaps these writers are been objective, albeit egoistically.
And with this comes an interesting obliquity, a wonderfully skilled and powerful form of understatement. A piece of gossip or dreariness - Ava Gardner's drinking, the minds of rural, stay-at-home hippies, the bar at Kentucky races, the art of baton twirling- is moved, brightly lit, to the centre stage, while in the corners, at the edges, vast, scaring implications about American life quietly gesture to us, not really wishing to intrude. This is how we understand the desperation and dignity in Ava's raw life, the large destruction implicit in the misunderstanding and madness of small American towns, the general ruin inscribed in those Louisville faces. This is how we learn that Faulkner's funeral has taken place the day before Terry Southern arrived in Oxford, Mississippi, that James Meredith would try to register at the University of Mississippi the summer after Southern's visit to the campus.
But perhaps the most general feature of the New Journalism is its insistence on the resemblance between fact and fiction - whereas the older journalism worked haard at playing those resemblance down. With his heavy reliance on the technical resources of novels and short stories, the New Journalism is not suggesting that its stories are not true - on the contrary, an immense amount of research has gone into getting the facts straight. Consequently, it is not suggesting, either, that we cannot distinguish any more between fact and fiction. What it is suggesting is that fiction is the only shape we can give to facts, that all shapes are fictions.
And at this point we come so close to the universe of myth and fable that the New Journalist, understandably alarmed, rushes out into the real world again, on a new assignment, to be reassured by the tangible, shapeless, incontrovertible facts of motiveless murder and random war.
The Oxbridge types, and American literati might dismiss new Journalism as Gonzo, or parajournalism, but its style remains stimulating and refreshing as ever. I love it, love it, love it, love it, love it, and I'm getting high on it!
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