Here's a book about journalists and journalism that reads like a thriller.
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution also does a great job of explaining why
Tom Wolfe and the other New Journalists are held in such great regard.
But what is New Journalism?
It is a term that was devised to describe the immersive journalism practised by its adherents in the US in the sixties and the seventies. Here's an excerpt from the introduction to the book:
Within a seven-year period, a group of writers emerged, seemingly out of nowhere — Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, Michael Herr — to impose some order ... each in his or her own distinctive manner (a few old hands, like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, chipped in, as well). They came to tell us stories about ourselves in ways that we couldn’t, stories about the way life was being lived in the sixties and seventies and what it all meant to us. The stakes were high; deep fissures were rending the social fabric, the world was out of order. So they became our master explainers, our town criers, even our moral conscience — the New Journalists.
The book is replete with revealing anecdotes and telling quotes. Here's one by
Gay Talese on his writing style:
"I am a reporter who is forever in search of the opening scene. I never start writing until I have that scene, and then I become a man in search of a final scene. This all tends to take a lot of time."
Perhaps that is why articles in the New Journalism style were to be found in magazines such as
Esquire, The New Yorker, and
Rolling Stone rather than in newspapers.
Now here's
Truman Capote on his interviewing style when he was researching the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Kansas. His articles, first serialised in
The New Yorker, were later published in book form as
In Cold Blood:
"Capote never tape-recorded any conversations and never jotted anything down in a notebook during the entire six years it took for him to research the story. After each interview was complete, Capote would quickly retreat to his room at the Warren Hotel and type everything from memory and [stenographer and friend Nelle Harper] Lee's notes, then file it and cross-reference it. 'People who don't understand the literary process are put off by notebooks,' Capote told Life in 1966. 'And tape recorders are worse — they completely ruin the quality of the thing being felt or talked about. If you write down or tape what people say, it makes them feel inhibited and self-conscious. It makes them say what they think you expect them to say.' If Capote felt that he had missed some crucial information the first time around, he went back and interviewed the same subjects over and over again until he had it right."
Here's another insight:
"Capote for years had claimed that he had taught himself to be his own tape recorder. As a memory exercise, he would have friends read or speak into a tape recorder as he listened; then he would quickly write down as accurately as possible what he had heard and compare it to the tape. Over time, Capote claimed, the differences between what was on the tape and what he had written became negligible."
After six years of research into the Kansas murders, Capote wrote a 1,35,000-word story which ran in four parts in four consecutive issues of
The New Yorker beginning with the September 25, 1965, issue. "The series was a hit," writes Marc Weingarten in
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight, "busting all previous sales records for the magazine. When Random House published it in book form as
In Cold Blood, it heralded the arrival of a new form, what Capote called the 'nonfiction novel', and netted its author $2 million in paperback and film sales."
***
Jimmy Breslin is another journalist given star billing in the pantheon of New Journalism. Here is a pithy observation by Breslin:
"The best story ideas are the ones that sound good after the hangover has worn off."
And here's an eloquent description of his working style:
"[Jimmy] Breslin often didn't sit down at his typewriter until 4 PM or later, and then he'd make a mad dash to his 5.30 deadline... He would plunk himself down at a desk in the city room, hunching himself, according to Tom Wolfe, 'into a shape like a bowling ball. He would start drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes until vapour started drifting off his body. He looked like a bowling ball filled with liquid oxygen. Thus fired up, he would start typing. I've never seen a man write so well against a daily deadline.' By the time he pulled the last page out of his typewriter, Breslin's desk would be covered in a sea of crumpled notes and Styrofoam coffee cups, his copy a spiderweb of handwritten cross-outs and scribbled revisions. ...Editor Sheldon Zalaznick characterised Breslin's deadline crunching as 'absolutely heart-stopping but I never remember him ever missing a deadline'."
Now here's the intro to one of Breslin's greatest pieces, "Marvin the Torch".
"Marvin the Torch never could keep his hands off somebody else's business, particularly if the business was losing money. Now this is accepted behaviour in Marvin's profession, which is arson. But he has a bad habit of getting into places where he shouldn't be and promising too many favours. This is where all his trouble starts."
The
New York Times blog, City Room, profiled Breslin a few months ago when he was feted by past colleagues. You can read the post
here.
Now back to
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight and a final word from Mr New Journalism himself,
Tom Wolfe:
"[Tom] Wolfe decided to pursue a career in journalism, if only because it would allow him to write steadily, without the uncertain financial vagaries of fiction writing. Wolfe wrote letters of introduction to 120 papers all over the country and received only one encouraging response from the Springfield Union in Springfield, Massachusetts. 'They hired me, mainly because they were curious about this guy with a Ph.D. from Yale who wanted to work on their paper,' said Wolfe."
Want to know more about
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight? Go
here.
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I called for the dictionary again and the librarian reappeared with his ledger in no time. But this time before he could speak out, I blurted out: “Bhen..Ch… D… do you need your job here or not?” Tears streamed down his face as the ledger disappeared and the dictionary made its appearance on my desk. (Hey presto, it works!) “Saaala, ainda mujhe lecture mat dena (Scumbag, don’t ever lecture me again).” Thus ends the first experiment with a resounding success.
