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Tom Wolfe, Reporter: His Relationship to Old New Journalism and to New New Journalism

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Tom Wolfe, Reporter: His Relationship to Old New Journalism and to New New Journalism Tom Wolfe, Reporter: His Relationship to Old New Journalism and to New New Journalism Doug Cumming Journal of Magazine Media, Volume 9, Number 1, Fall 2006, (Article) Published by University of Nebraska Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jmm.2006.0002 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/773794/summary [ Access provided at 30 Sep 2021 06:07 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] Tom Wolfe, Reporter: His Relationship to Old New Journalism and to New New Journalism Doug Cumming Washington & Lee University [email protected] Continuities and Origins Tom Wolfe ambles from the rear of this enormous ballroom in Boston where about 500 journalists, many of them star writers or future star writers for a variety of American newspapers and magazines, wait in silence. He is a familiar figure to this crowd, though at 74, his sharp-nosed prep-school looks have turned a bit wizen and one shoulder of his trademark white-suit jacket drapes, cape-fashion, over his left arm, which is in a sling. He rises to the lectern to kick off this Harvard conference on narrative journalism, and delivers the day’s key-note address. These are not just journalists, but practitioners of a strand of news writing that consciously claims a literary pedigree going back to the nineteenth century, at least. In its ordinary guise in your local paper, it is merely feature writing, the soft lead, or one of those Sunday stories that runs on and on. But this tradition of American journalism has its occasional outbreaks of revolutionary fire, and one of those was led by Tom Wolfe in the 1960s and ‘70s under the banner of the New Journalism. The techniques used by Wolfe and his critter company in Esquire, New York, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone became absorbed into the bloodstream of magazine and newspaper writing in the 1980s and ‘90s. These techniques, beneath the surface razzle-dazzle, were a handful of methods borrowed from fiction. Wolfe defined the New Journalism by identifying four of these: scene, dialogue, point-of-view, and status detail. The difference—and Wolfe repeatedly claimed this made it superior to contemporary fiction—was that it was all true. This required more than basic fact-gathering. It required what he called “saturation reporting,” vacuum- cleaning every last detail. Okay, but how can a reporter know what was going on inside someone’s head for point-of-view writing? Simple, Wolfe said. You ask them. The writers in the Boston ballroom know all this well. The conference itself, the annual Nieman Foundation Conference on Narrative Journalism, is testimony to a revival of a tradition that was called the New Journalism thirty years ago, but now goes by many names. One recent anthology calls it “Intimate Journalism.” Another “The New New Journalism.” It’s also called the literature of fact, literary nonfiction, or just plain storytelling. It produces long, gripping sagas in The Los Angles Times and St. Petersburg Times. It produces nonfiction books like Black Hawk Down and Moneyball, both of which Wolfe praises. It is the best of the journalism of today’s New Yorker and Vanity Fair, some of whose writers are in the audience. The attendees know their predecessors Journal of Magazine and New Media Research 1 Vol. 9, No. 1, Fall 2006 are lofty, and their futures bright – never mind the worries of newspaper editors these days. Still, it’s nice to be reminded of this by one of their heroes. Wolfe talks about Stephen Crane, the handsome young reporter who was inspired by a Jacob Riis lecture in 1892 to move into the Bowery to learn the speech of the poor. That experience gave Crane the material for his novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, and probably gave him the tuberculosis that silenced him at age twenty-eight. Of the first twenty great American social realists, Wolfe says, eleven were newspaper reporters first. “You’re riding a wave of the most important writing going on today,” he says. “And this country has hardly been explored. If you spend thirty days with your eyes open, you’re going to have enough stories for a lifetime.” Long before the New Journalism was applied to the way Wolfe and others covered the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, there was another New Journalism. In fact, “the new journalism” was originally a label used for the brash style of reporting that emerged in the 1890s at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Heart’s New York Journal. Such newspapers virtually invented beat reporting, in the sense of reporters going down to the police station, the courthouse, City Hall, and certain bars and ballrooms, and coming back to thrumming newsrooms like ants to the anthill. They spun stories out of crime, politics, low life, and high society. It was the age of the reporter, who was increasingly college-educated, and sometimes even sober. Their stories became so feverish, suspended between screaming headlines and comics (both of which were also invented around this time), someone coined the term Yellow Journalism to imply a fetid stench. Their intrusion into drawing-room scandals provoked a couple of upper-class Boston lawyers to declare a right to privacy—an idea somehow overlooked by the Founding Fathers—in an article they published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. But the critics never said this old new journalism was made up, that its news was false. Sensational, perhaps, but it was based on factual reporting. This was before journalism aspired to “objectivity,” a concept that journalists borrowed from the social sciences in the early twentieth century. It was enough simply to be true. But within this commitment to true facts, American journalism has long been divided into two different functions, as the social historian Michael Schudson pointed out in Discovering the News (1978). One is what Schudson calls an informational model, news as pure facts without a frame of reference, marked by scrupulously dispassionate reporting. This model tends to be considered more reliable, although Schudson questions whether this is a sound assumption. The other model he calls the story function. In this model, news takes on an aesthetic purpose. It gives readers an enjoyable experience that helps them make sense of their lives within the city, the nation, and the world. In practice, these functions act together as two magnetic poles of American journalism, one electrode of fact and the other electrode of story. Both were deeply ingrained in the profession in the nineteenth century, and remain so today. All reporters can switch from one to the other as the material requires. It is almost subconscious, the choice you have already made when you sit down to type your first sentence. You know whether you will use an Journal of Magazine and New Media Research 2 Vol. 9, No. 1, Fall 2006 anecdotal lead or hard lead, inverted pyramid or narrative structure. Reporters with any experience at all can easily switch from feature style to straight news. Still, every reporter leans one way or the other, as do newspapers. Attack from Journalism’s Citadel Wolfe’s reception has always been mixed. He has been successful beyond the wildest dreams of any ambitious American writer—successful in terms of making money, always working, producing books of increasing weight, cutting a distinctive image as a celebrity, having fun, and leaving a body of writing, both non-fiction and fiction, that is at once hip, wild, stylish, original, respected, and still holding up well over time. For all that, he somehow maintains a genteel bearing and a deep privacy. (In an e-mail to me, he deflected my request for permission to see his Washington & Lee transcripts by riffing on how, in one of his first newspaper interviews, Duke Ellington told him it’s better to keep out of the history books or you’ll freeze. “I’d better find a new direction, I guess, just in order to make my early days inexplicable,” Wolfe said in his e-mail. “If I fall asleep now, I’ll freeze.”) Yet Wolfe is also despised, immoderately. Critics of Wolfe have weighed in early, often, and without ceasing. “If you can’t sing, don’t try,” novelist John Irving said in a public radio interview recently, trying to describe how much he hates Wolfe’s sentences. Others are more expansive. “To read his breathless prose, shrill with yaps and self-importance, is like having a small dog attack one’s leg,” Alexander Cockburn wrote in 2000, disgusted to see Harper’s 150th anniversary cover juxtapose the genius of Mark Twain with Wolfe’s “modest talents.” Much of the criticism, like that of Irving and Cockburn, seems catty and inflamed, an allergy perhaps to Wolfe’s conservative politics, or to his impertinent two-part put-down of The New Yorker in an upstart magazine in April 1965, or maybe just to his success. The most penetrating line of criticism has come from the upper reaches of the journalistic establishment. This is the charge that the New Journalism may have borrowed more from fiction than just structure and point-of-view; that it also conceals the unforgivable journalistic sin of making stuff up. Wolfe wrote in his introduction to the 1973 anthology The New Journalism that he suspected as much himself when he read a scene of dialogue between prizefighter Joe Lewis and his wife, in a 1962 Esquire piece by Gay Talese. Describing this article as a kind of epiphany for him, Wolfe said he was amazed at the way it was built around scenes and dialogue, like a short story.
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