This is highly managed experience. The facts are slight: the pathetic project, the redness of the faces, the body language. Many of the facts are emotional and internal. They come, of course, not from the imagination but from interviews after the fact with the teacher.
So we have an account of reality that leaves out what at first seemed a salient event of the year, leaves it out altogether. And we have instead a minute description of an episode that most of us would have politely looked away from and promptly forgotten. It’s interesting to note in passing that the first episode, the indiscreet remark, would have been irresistible to the camera, while the second would have been very difficult to film, at least in a documentary format. And it would have been hard to describe in conversation. But I think it proved the right event for the written word.
Facts and truth: not only are they not synonymous, but they often have a very tangential relationship. Although the truth must always be found in facts, some facts, sometimes, obscure the truth. Sometimes that essential effort of writing, making some things small and others big, includes making something invisible.
—RT
The world for the nonfiction writer is not a kit full of endlessly interesting parts waiting to be assembled, a garden of flowers waiting to be picked and arranged. If that were the case, life would still be complicated, but of course it isn’t the case. The writer is part of the world, engages the world, affects and is affected by it. More specifically, nonfiction writers enter into a relationship of some kind with the people they are writing about—or, in the case of memoirists, they already have entered into such relationships, and now want to make use of them for purposes that may not suit everyone involved.
Journalists are asked how their presence has affected the behavior of the people they followed around. The question sounds reasonable, even important, but it can’t be answered fully. No one can capture the ever-changing interaction between a writer and a subject: observing another person and describing one’s observations, and being altered oneself in the process and thus altering the observations. Some writers seem to feel they can cut through this maze by writing in the first person and describing how they conducted their research, but the very terms of the problem make it insoluble. It’s doubtful the problem can even be fully expressed.
It can be confronted, though. Some journalists begin talking to subjects without a notebook or voice recorder and ease into the role of reporter. Others think it’s more honest to open their notebooks at once and keep them open. One aim is to get subjects used to this odd presence, the fact of a reporter in their lives. Custom, just being around a lot, can help bring a subject back to acting naturally.
You are a guest in your subject’s life and ought to behave as a good guest would. Avoid extremes of behavior: talking all the time or not talking at all. Sometimes you may want to challenge or nettle your subject. But you don’t want to supply the subject with thoughts of your own. To a third party looking in on the scene, it might appear that the reporter is duping a subject into setting wariness aside, into talking too much. But most adults who let a reporter into their lives understand the reporter’s role. Most subjects expect, indeed most want, the reporter to stand back and let them talk.
The real problem begins when you start to write. To try to depict real people is to grant yourself an immense power over individual lives, and the power is easily abused. Again, consider the difference between facts and truth. You can string together a number of facts about someone and create a picture. It may be critical, it may be flattering. That picture may accord with your own best sense of who that person really is, but it may violate the subject’s own sense of his or her identity. What rules govern this delicate process?
There are legal constraints. In the United States, a different standard applies to characters who are public as opposed to private figures. The distinction is an accepted principle of libel law. It is in fact very hard for a public figure to sue successfully for libel. The plaintiff has to prove that the defendant, in making the disputed statement, acted with “malice”—that is, with knowledge that the statement was false or with what the courts have called “reckless disregard for truth or falsity.” Of course good writers want to do better than to stay within the limits of the law, but the point is that the famous get treated differently from the nonfamous.
Readers do not expect a journalist to provide a richly human, sympathetic compassion for the inner fears and demons of, say, a former vice president. It would be interesting and valuable and great, but no one demands it. Pretty much any information you can get, as long as it’s true, is fair game with vice presidents. But there is a kind of writing whose very virtue is that it follows those who are not usually followed. It illuminates society by looking away from celebrities and turning to subjects who would not otherwise be known to the reader. In such cases, the standards are more exacting, legally and morally too.
Janet Malcolm, in The Journalist and the Murderer, has written what many consider the landmark book on the relations between writers and subjects. This is a book journalists love to hate. It features an extraordinary and memorable first paragraph*—especially memorable because it appeared in The New Yorker, the magazine that has published more distinguished journalism than any other magazine in history. Here was an assertion that the whole enterprise was rotten to the core:
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the book or article appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
This passage introduces the story of a lawsuit. The defendant was the writer Joe McGinniss, the plaintiff a convicted murderer named Jeffrey MacDonald. He and McGinniss had made a deal before his trial: he would give McGinniss special access to his life and to his defense team at the trial; in return he’d receive some of the proceeds from the book. Plainly, he expected McGinniss to portray him as innocent, and in the beginning McGinniss intended to do so. The two men became friends, but by the end of the trial McGinniss had changed his mind. He came to believe that the man had in fact murdered his family. But he didn’t tell his subject this. Indeed, he wrote him letters of sympathy even as he created in his manuscript the portrait of a monster. The letters are painfully embarrassing to read, and the murderer’s lawyer used them to powerful effect, as does Malcolm. In the end, the suit was more or less successful; McGinniss agreed to pay MacDonald $325,000.
This story could not be more perfect for Malcolm’s uses. Indeed the first criticism of her argument is the very perfection of the story it relies on. Hard cases make bad law, the lawyers say, and this is a difficult case, not the sort of case from which to draw sweeping generalizations about journalists and their subjects. And Malcolm makes no real attempt to see McGinniss’s side; her excuse, the lamest in the journalist’s arsenal, is that McGinniss wouldn’t talk to her. But whatever one makes of the merits of the lawsuit, Malcolm’s analysis has value—especially for journalists who wish that the matters she deals with had been left submerged.
Few journalists would condone lying in their private lives. And yet many nonfiction writers venerate In Cold Blood, for which Truman Capote appears to have lied shamelessly to his subjects. Maybe the moral standing of the person matters. Is it okay to lie to a killer but not to, say, a Rotarian? Most writers feel uncomfortable at best with Capote’s methods, and condemn them even if they celebrate the book. And what about less dramatic cases? What about those little gray areas? How much candor is a subj
ect owed? If for example your subject makes a racist remark, which you would in ordinary conversation object to, do you let it slide by? Probably you do. Do you laugh at the unfunny joke? Nothing wrong with that, surely. Do you smile noncommittally when you hear an opinion you disagree with? If asked outright whether you agree with your subject when you could not in fact disagree more, do you give a little murmur that could be interpreted as assent? Perhaps you say, “I see your point.”
Malcolm argues that something dishonest tends to lurk in all relationships between authors and their subjects. Certainly, all such relationships contain competing narratives. The subject has a story, the writer has a story, and the two don’t coincide exactly. They may diverge radically. Writer and subject each want something from the other. So what? Life is full of people with varied interests striking a deal. But a special moral hazard arises in the journalistic case, in the multiple opportunities for deception and in the imbalance of power. The relationship between subject and author, according to Malcolm, often amounts to a mutual seduction, in which the journalist inevitably occupies the stronger position: “The moral ambiguity of journalism lies not in its texts but in the relationships out of which they arise—relationships that are invariably and inescapably lopsided.” You and your subject might, for instance, spend some of your time together trading stories about your lives, and you might let yourself imagine that this was a symmetrical part of your relationship, but only if you forget that your subject isn’t writing down your stories.
Malcolm makes another point that is instructive and cautionary for writers: “The metaphor of the love affair applies to both sides of the journalist-subject equation, and the journalist is no less susceptible than the subject to its pleasures and excitements.” (She goes on to talk about how Joe McGinniss’s lawyer tried to point out that this part of him, the friend part, was sincere in his dealings with MacDonald, even as the writer part went about his work, and Malcolm grudgingly admits that this is not as crazy as it sounds.) Malcolm continues: “An abyss lies between the journalist’s experience of being out in the world talking to people and his experience of being alone in a room writing.”
She might have gone on about this “abyss.” Surely anyone who has done a long stint of reporting recognizes the truth of the concept. One can sometimes feel a peculiar closeness to a subject, a compound of gratitude and sympathy, something that feels like true affection. And yet when the subject must in fact become a subject, must turn into words, that feeling changes. You the writer do not feel the same things you felt as interviewer and observer. And who is to know on which side of the abyss lies the true sentiment? But every journalist knows, and every reader has a right to expect, that what gets expressed in print usually comes from the clear-eyed, not to say cold-hearted, writer serving the needs of the story.
Some potential subjects seem to understand that they have more than one motive for letting a writer into their lives. Here is an actual e-mail from a potential subject to a writer:
I suppose if I am honest one prominent reason I’d enjoy doing this has to do with my respect for you as a writer, and the narcissistic pleasure I imagine I would take in having my portrait drawn. This is probably naïve. Inevitably, if the portrait is true, there will be features that make me uncomfortable. Equally important, I hope, is the value in having people get a more intimate, detailed picture of what it is like to [perform my job].
This degree of prior understanding is rare. However, journalists can help subjects think through the implications of letting writers into their lives. The essential precaution is clarity about the nature of the arrangements. Here are some steps one might consider taking: Assume that all potential subjects don’t understand what they might be getting into, and tell them what you know about the possible consequences, especially the unpleasant ones. Explain to subjects that there is no predicting how you will portray them or how they will feel about their portraits, or how readers will judge them, and that they can’t determine any of this because you cannot give them control over what you write. If they want to keep certain areas private, they must name them before your research begins in earnest. Most subjects insist on boundaries. If you feel theirs are too restrictive, it’s probably better to withdraw than to argue your way to a grudging agreement that might well be taken back a year later. You should also explain that many people find it hard to be scrutinized, and that for the subject, reading your book may be like gazing into a fun-house mirror.
You might want to phrase this admission more delicately, or recite it over a beer. But it is best to be forthright, and sometimes even forbidding, at the start of a project, when you have nothing to lose except what you think might make for a good story. And it’s wise to have evidence that you have been at least forthright, perhaps in an exchange of letters or e-mails, or in a recording (being sure that it includes the fact that subjects know they’re being recorded).
Such measures can erode the natural sympathy you hope to engender, but they can also prevent the sort of misunderstanding that, well short of a lawsuit, can be devastating to your project. And, most important, these warnings can serve as an acknowledgment that you are something more and less than a friend.
Sometimes subjects actually turn into friends. (And in the case of memoir, friends can turn into subjects, which can be even trickier.) If you feel a true emotional concern about your subjects during your research, do you then intervene in their lives? Adrian Nicole LeBlanc faced this question during the ten years she spent working on Random Family, a book that depends utterly on the author’s evident sympathy for her subjects. She sometimes helped out the women she was writing about, by giving them small cash advances, by babysitting for them, by driving them to the hospital or jail. She was criticized for this, but in the special circumstances of her research, these acts seem only humane and a long way from so-called checkbook journalism, from paying subjects for their stories.
LeBlanc still occasionally sees the people she wrote about. They tell her she’s not as much fun as she used to be. That is because now she really is a friend, treating them as a friend would—speaking up when she thinks they’re doing something foolish, whereas before she felt constrained to remain an observer.
Janet Malcolm’s jeremiad can’t be dismissed. It is, however, willfully oblivious to the many good things that can happen between writer and subject, good things that can far outweigh misunderstandings and wounded feelings. And the Malcolm worldview seems to discount the great work that can be produced.
•
Even outside the pages of crime fiction, reporters are prone to cynicism of the universal-prejudice variety: the worst that can be thought about another human being must be true, simply because it is the worst. This is a quick way to feel smart—to see beneath the surfaces of things without even having to look. But of course cynicism limits, a priori, what can be discovered about other human beings. The truly cynical reporter never knows the pleasure, or relief, of submerging the self to try to understand another self, serving the self by escaping the self.
The source of what we love about a monumental writer like Chaucer is the breadth of his disposition toward humanity. This is the great thing about The Canterbury Tales, that there is room in Chaucer’s philosophy for all his characters, from the bawdy Wife of Bath to the hypocritical Pardoner. Chaucerian room is a breadth of imagination. It isn’t guaranteed by a breadth of experience, which can just as easily narrow as enlarge one’s general view of other human beings. Successful imagination does not imply an endorsement of stupidity, viciousness, and evil, or an abandonment of judgment. A reporter should go out into the world armed with skepticism and disposed to question press releases. And there’s nothing wrong with carrying hypotheses and expectations about what you’re going to find, so long as you also bring along what Ron Suskind calls “the willingness to be surprised.” This isn’t very hard to cultivate, once you discover—a constant in reporting—that your preconceptions were wrong. Finding this out can be bracing. It c
an feel as if you’re making real discoveries when you first, or once again, discover that the world is too complex to be imagined fully, that it needs to be watched.
There is another, essentially spiritual concern for nonfiction writers. It has to do not so much with loyalty to one’s truth or to one’s subjects’ truth as with loyalty to oneself. George Orwell defines the subject in his essay “Why I Write.” He begins to answer the question by relating a number of influences that writers can easily relate to—he was a bookish child, loved stories, and so on. Then he makes a surprising turn with the following passage:
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is make political writing into an art.
This passage, written in 1946, only one lifetime ago, seems unnatural to some contemporary ears. The passage can make one dream of an age when there was one cause in the Western world to which all could be subsumed. At the same time, one resists Orwell’s sentiment. This is a reflexive reaction perhaps, because for the whole of most current literary lives no language has been more suspect than the language of political assertion. And much of this suspicion is owed to George Orwell himself, well known for having described the violence that politics can do to the English language.
Most contemporary writers, most of the time, have lived, as writers, by a code very different from the code of political engagement. They have sought truth outside the world of public affairs. This is a code nicely expressed by Mark Kramer in his introduction to the anthology Literary Journalism: