THE THEORY AND INTERPRETATION OF NARRATIVE SERIES MATTERS OF FACT Reading Nonf iction over the Edge Daniel W. Lehman OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Oolumbu s Copyright © 1997 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lehman, Daniel W. (Daniel Wayne), 1950­ Matters of fact: reading nonfiction over the edge / Daniel W. Lehman. p. cm.—(The theory and interpretation of narrative series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8142-0760-X (cloth : alk. paper).—ISBN 0-8142-0761-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Journalism—United States. 2. Reportage literature, American— History and criticism. 3. Feature writing. 4. Nonfiction novel— History and criticism. 5. Books and reading. 6. Literature and history. I. Title. II. Series. PN4867.L43 1998 071' .3—dc21 97-26663 CIP Text and jacket design by Donna Hartwick. Type set in New Caledonia by Graphic Composition, Inc. Printed by Cushing-M alloy, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 987654321 YOU OAN TELL A TRUE WAR STORY BY THE OUESTIONS YOU ASK. SOMEBODY TELLS A STORY, LET'S SAY, AND AFTER­ WARD YOU ASK, ~IS IT TRUE?" AND IF THE ANSWER MATTERS, YOU'VE OOT YOUR ANSWER. — TIM O'BRIEN, THE THINGS THEY a/\RRIED CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix 1. Nonfictional Narrative and the Problem of Truth 1 2. Writing Inside Out: The Nonfiction Narrator in Scripted and Conscripted History 40 3. Writing Outside In: Implicating the Author in the Narratives of Tom Wolfe and John Reed 76 4. Reading Inside Out: Rupture and Control in the Construction of Reader 115 5. Reading Outside In: Over the Edge of Genre in the Case of Private O'Brien 164 Notes 195 Works Cited 205 Index 213 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS MY FATHER AN D MOTHE R TAUGH T ME first that truth matters and that, despite the "sticks and stones" cliche, words have the power to hurt or to heal other people. And so my first thanks go to them for the ethical grounding of this study. My years as a reporter offered a rich foundation of practical experi­ ence in life writing and fact checking. Of the many reporters and editors who taught me, I would particularly like to acknowledge Jack Newfield, Wayne Barrett, and Beverly Cheuvront in New York City, as well as Bob Gibson and the late Elizabeth Wilson in Charlottesville, VA. Robert McGovern at Ash­ land University took a chance on a veteran reporter and encouraged my scholarship at every turn. The Ashland University Deans Council provided a Summer Study Grant that enabled me to finish this study; particular thanks go to former Arts and Humanities dean John Stratton. Valuable responses to many of the ideas of this book were offered by Ashland University journalism and English students in a seminar on nonfiction narrative, especially Traci Blanchard and T. J. Moraco. At Ohio State University, I learned from John Hellmann, whose Fables of Fact was the starting point for this study; from Walter A. "Mac" Davis, who encouraged an active mind and a restless heart; from Debra Moddelmog, the best reader I've met in journalism or academia; and from James Phelan, who offered patient encouragement at every turn. Portions of this book concerning Freud's Dora and the nonfiction of Tom Wolfe appeared in Style 29:1 and in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 21, respectively. I thank those editors for their permission to reprint and would particularly like to acknowledge Claire Kahane, Audrey Jaffe, and Steven Joyce for their assistance with the Freud project. Peter J. Rabinowitz, James Phelan, and an anonymous reviewer produced particu­ larly helpful readings of the text at several stages of this project. That this book reached publication is due to them and all remaining missteps and ACKNOWLEDGMENTS flaws are mine. At Ohio State Press, I would like to thank Charlotte Dihoff, Ruth Melville, and especially Barbara Hanrahan, who encouraged this proj­ ect when things seemed dark. Tonia Payne found my mistakes, and Beth Ina devoted extraordinary personal care to the project and provided first-rate insights into its ideas. As always, Hadley Lehman shares her wisdom and keeps me hon­ est, while Barbara Lehman provides my scholarly example and is my best friend. This book is dedicated to them. 1. NONFICTIONAL NARRATIVE AND THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH THE CALL CAME LATE AT NIGHT, as I remember it, long after my wife and daughter had gone to bed, and I was alone with the crickets and mosquitoes in the humid Virginia night. On the other end of the line was a distraught woman, a woman whose father had committed suicide the night before. He had scrambled out the window of a center for the treatment of chronic alcohol abuse, walked slowly and deliberately onto a nearby inter­ state highway, and died—head up and arms outstretched—on the grill of a twenty-ton semi truck. I had written the story of his death for the afternoon newspaper, and the daughter was calling to dress me down. Her father had been a bank president and church deacon in life. His alcohol problems, she said, had been kept quite private, and his admission to the sanatorium had been a secret to all but his closest family members. My story that day, sketchy though it was, had aired some of these secrets, even to his own grandchildren, and the daughter could not understand why. Was the idea, she asked, to destroy her family? To parade her fathers pain for profit? What gave me the right, she demanded to know, to have the final say on her fathers life? I tried to explain that I had stuck to official sources, to easily verifiable facts. I told her that the fatality had snarled highway traffic for an hour, that people had the right to know why they were inconve­ nienced, that the police had the obligation to state publicly that the truck driver was not at fault, that we had to try to explain to our readers why a man might scramble over a fence and walk onto the highway to die. But her voice became louder as the conversation grew longer, and I began to wish that I had taken my editor s advice and ordered an unlisted home telephone number. How much safer it would be, I reflected, to write fiction, to hide characters (or myself for that matter) behind assumed names or narrative postures. If I could only guard my privacy, my vulnerability. CHAPTER 1 What I yearned for, in short, was the very same protection—the veil of per­ sona, the cloak of anonymity—that I had denied the caller s father in death. It was in that recognition—reached in the early hours sometime past the midpoint of a professional reporting career—that I first really un­ derstood the stakes of writing nonfiction. I as a writer, the woman as a reader, her father as the subject of the narrative—each one of us was implicated materially and historically by the words on the page. Whether the narrative I had written of the father s life could be defined as true was not the only point. Certainly it had many elements of fact; in no way had it been exposed as lies. It was marketed as truth by the author and by the newspaper that profited from its publication. And yet it had the indeterminacy of text as well, a text produced from other texts like police reports, medical records, morgue files, memories, observation, eyewitness accounts, telling details, quotes. I could no more guarantee it was the true account of her father s death than say it was false. The Implicating Power of Truth But these conventional generic markers—of truth and falsity, of fact and text—were, finally, almost beside the point that night. They had triggered the discussion, but what counted was how this story had implicated its writer and its reader. That anguished call in the night was proof that what I had written that day, while its facts may have been presented in textual form, had a social and material effect different from fiction. On the one hand the circumstances of its research, writing, publication, and consumption were, and are, deeply intertwined with what literary critics traditionally have called the "text." But its full power and problems cannot be understood until the discursive relationships among author, subject, and reader that undergird nonfiction are read as closely as the words and images that make up the narrative itself. This book therefore grows from my interest and training as both a professor of literature and as a journalist, in which latter occupation I worked for fifteen years as a reporter and editor for daily and weekly newspapers. Because I was engaged for so long in the research and writing of narratives that claim to be "history," I have some working understanding of the way that writing and reading nonfiction differs from writing and reading fiction. The writer of nonfiction produces a document for an audience that THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH reads history as both text and experience, an audience that is engaged over the edge, by which I mean both inside and outside the story. This audience will be drawn by the lure of the narrative and by the direct or indirect knowl­ edge of the events and people on which the narrative is based. Certainly such considerations are never foreign from many forms of realistic fiction, which depend on mimetic communication to create possible worlds that in­ terplay with actual worlds.