THE MICHIGAN DAILY

Sunday, February 10, 1,974

BOOKS

VOLFE'S ANTHOLOGY
New Journalism: A bold, flashy
genre searches for an identity

THE NEW JOURNALISM
lited by Tom Wolfe. N e w
fork: Harper & Row. 394
ages; $10.95. BUT: soon to
e in paperback.

By TED STEIN

rfHOUGH TOM WOLFE h a s
spent more than fifty pages
explaining the New Journalism,
and has culled from a decade of
magazine literature a dazzling ,
array of its best representatives,
the genre continues to wiggle
on the hook.
Wolfe's zeal in promoting the
new writing movement far ex-
ceeds his thoughtfulness, making
us wish we were left to make
our own judgments about the
350 pages of New Journalism he
has anthologized.
Wolfe is out for blood on two ,
fronts - busily asserting the
New Journalism's superiority to
traditional journalism and more
ambitiously, to the nobel, Which
he says has been "wiped out as
literature's main event." After
a point, the broadside takes on
the uncomfortable mantle of a
self-serving apology for why Tom
Wolfe himself didn't write The
Novel.
In all fairness to Wolfe, the
New Journalism is an extreme-

ly difficult phenomenon to char-
acterize. From reading exam-
ples of it you get the sense that
there is a tremendous kick to
it, but just what specifically?
The struggle for definition is
worth the effort because of the
powerful impact New Journal-
ism has had on both journalis-
tic and literary establishments.
Even if it means, in this case,
sifting through Wolfe's overstat-
ed, and even occasionally absurd
claims.
WHERE THE New Journalism
began is not clear. Offbeat maga-
zine pieces surfaced during the
early sixties, but the most strik-
ind indicator of the revolution-
ary potential of the form, emer-
ged in newspapers. News stories
for the most part drably portray
a black-and-white world, narrat-
ed in a distant voice Wolfe calls
"a pale beige tone." No o n e
could doubt there was a n-ied for
more absorbing news coverage.
Jimmy Breslin, of the now-de-
funct New York Herald T r i-
bune, was probably the first
practioner of the new mode, but
for Chicagoans, like myself, the
earliest proponent was Tom Fitz-
patrick, a reporter for the Sun-
Times.
Fitzpatrick ran with t h e
Weathermen during their win-

dow-smashing rampage through
downtown Chicago in 1967, then
safely trotted into the Sun-
Times city room and cranked
out a first-person narative of
the melee for the front page. The
first paragraph quickly anounc-
ed the fact that it was going to
be a different kind of n w s
story:
Bad Marvin had been stand-
ing in front of the fire he had
made of the Lincoln Park bench
for thirty minutes, shouting
to everyone in the crowd and
warning them how bad he was.
THE STORY proved to be a
breakthrough. Previously, t h e
print media had been h lpless be-
fore the television news on one
important count - it could not
convey the experience itself
Fitzpatrick's story changed all
that. Telling the sequence of
events in the first person - us-
ing himself as a character - he
evoked the whirlwind madness
of the riot. He carefully describ-
ed individuals and what thev
did, even their facial expressions
at key moments. But most radi-
cal of all, he continually repcrt-
ed his own reactions, which were
sympathetic both to :he kids
who hadn't expected the horrible
maelstrom that occurred, and
to the cops who had the thank-

less job of quelling the dis:urb-
ance.
The story was so absorbing
and sensitive - and so different
from any standard news story---
that it won the Pulitzer P r i z e
for reporting that year and help-
ed launch the New Journalism
movement.
The New Journalism has prov-
ed since that time, that nonfic'
tion writing can read like a novel
and pack as much dramatic
punch. It has continued to claim
for itself a frontier beyond the
traditional bounds laid down by
old-style, objective journalism,
giving full range to the author's
feelings and insights. Suddenly,
the reader is experiencing
through the writer's sensibility.
In technique, the New Journal-
ists have learned, in Blake'
words, that "to gene:alize is to
be an idiot." The most com-
pelling writing, in short, is sub-
jective and particular. A trade-
mark of the New Journalism is
the subtle gesture, the offhand
remark, or the momentary look
which acts as a window to the
deepest realms of numan ex-
perience.
For Wolfe, novelistic technique
sets the new Journalism apart.
He specifies for categories:
scene-by-scene construction in-
stead of historical narrative, ful-
ly-recorded dialogue, character
point of view, and "status life",
the details of a situation that
have symbolic imprt.
This analysis, however, re-
mains curiously exterior to h e
phenomenon. You can't tell a
book from its cover, yet Wolfe
would have us try. It is not the
techniques themselves, but what
they enable the writer to do.
The New Journalism, in fact,
at its worst, bogs down in its
own gaudy techniques. Strings
of adjectives, distracting Capital-
izations, and phony heightening
of tension all go whoosh when you
try to bite into a story without
substance. In journalistic lingo,
this pitfall is called "hype".
FORTUNATELY, the a-hology
provides the reader with plenty
of examples of pieces with both
stylish techniques and content.
One encounters excerpts from
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such classics as Norman Mail-
er's Armies of the Night, Tru-
man Capote's In Cold Blood, Joe
McGinniss' The Selling of the
President, 1968, Hunter Thomp-
son's The Hell's Angels, A
Strange and Terrible Saga, and
George Plimpton's Paper Lion.
Lesser known pieces are like-
wise excellent, and illustrate as3
well how the individual writes
uses a technique to get inside a
character or siutation.,
For James Mill in his fine piece
on a N.Y. detective, description
clues the reader to the potential-
ly-menacing nature of the cop:
George Barrett is a tough
cop. His eyes, cold as gun
metal, can be looked at but not
into. His jaw is hard and square
as a brick and his thin lips
are kept moist by nervous
darting passes of his tongue.
Inside, George Barrett does
not laugh.
And Red Reed probes the des-
peration and pathos of Ava Gard-
ner with dialogue that c t t s
through her tough surface be-
havior:
"What I really want to do
is get married again. Go ahead
and laugh, everybody laughs,
but how great it must be to
tramp around barefoot a n d
cook for some great goddamn
son of a bitch who loves you
the rest of your life. I've never
had a good man."
THE HUMAN resonances gen-
erate in large measure the com-
peling drama of many N e w
Journalism pieces. Behind them
is the overflow of feeling, t h e
empathetic heart, without which
technique would be rendered use-
less.
As in most anthologies, there
are valleys as well as peaks.
What happens when the New
Journalism falls can be seen
best in an excerpt from -dlling
Stone editor Joe Esterhasz'
Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse.
The profile of the war vet who
glans down four people in a small
Kansas town and the background
to his "mad aog dance" are both
superficial.
Although New Journalism has
borne out Wolfe's claim that it is
a more absorbing brand of
journalism, its stature vis a vis
the novel is uncertain.
At its best, The New Journal-
ism profoundly moves us, a qual-

ity it shares with the novel. It
aspires to be literature, since on-
ly a fable or a fiction can make
the formless and haphazard play
of events meaningful. To feel
truly caught up in a story we,
must feel that its characters
and situations are paradig-
matic.
That the New Journalism leans
toward the novel doesn't mean
that it reaches it. There are cer-
tain limits to journalism-new
and old - that can only be ov-
come with a Promethean leap,
if at all.
Wolfe is readier with the beast
than the analysis. Not only has
New Journalism surpassed the
novel, he writes, but the fact
is that it records things that
really did happen, and brings
the "writer one step closer to
the absolute involvement of the
reader that Henry James and
James Joyce dreamed of and
never achieved."
EVENTS-as-they-are, however,
make for bad art. Their form-
lessness seems to defeat the
possibility for thematic develop-
ment. In a sense, then, New
Journalism always is close to
being a "mood" piece, creating
the ambiance of a situation,
stirring the reader's emotions
and intelligence, but finally, not
plugging the particular into a
larger structure or meaning.
Ifthemes are presented they
are often imposed from an un-
wieldy overlay.
This is not to say it is impos-
sible for New Journalism to be
a vehicle for the unique vision
we expect from a novel. The
form is rapidly expanding as new
and different writers join the
ranks. Moreover, a work I i k e
Mailer's Armies of the Night
may already qualify as a con-
temporary "great" novel.
In it Mailer brilliantly trans-
forms the 1967 march on the Pen-
tagon into an emblem of the kind
of noble, moral commitment
found at various times through-
out American history.
IS NEW Journalism, then,
true art? We're better offhnot
wasting our time answering that
one. For there is a far more im-
portant point that can be agreed
on-a contribution that the New
Journalism has made in the last
decade, which the novel has not.
Put simply, it has attempted,


Wolfe



Mailer

Capote

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and often succeeded, in making
some sense of our time.
Yet this traditionally has been
one of the highest goals of the
novel, embodies in what Wolfe
calls the "social realism" of
such giants as Dostoevsky, Go-
gol, Tolstoy, Balzac, Joyce, and
Dickens. Instead, Wolfe says the
pervasive trend now is Neo-
Fabulism, which features para-
bles about everyman, divorced
from specific point in time and
space.
Though his litcrit is more than
a bit rocky, Wolfe scores with
this attack.
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The richest, most absorbing,
literature fleshes out bare-bone
myth or fable with fascinating
specifics of character rd situa-
tion. The writers Wolfe cites
captured characteristics peculiar
to their own time at the same
time they were searching for
universals. Yet in recent times,
only the New Journalists have
attempted to meaningfully por-
tray such things as the war in
Vietnam and the anti-war move-
ment of the sixties.
If the New Journalism can
provide the impetus and the
writers for the task of creating
literature in the tradition of
Dickens and Dostoevsky, then its
contribution to letters will be
substantial indeed.
The results aren't in yet, but
already, it has inspired, with its
splended work, a growing num-
ber of journalists who consider
themselves writers, not report-
ers.
Ted Stein is a senior English
major and the recently retired
Daily Executive Ediftor.


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