# The National Letters: The Renaissance of Lying **URL:** **By** Jeff Riggenbach **Published:** September 1, 1981 --- “Earlier this year when a young Washington Post reporter named Janet Cooke became, however briefly, the best known American fiction writer of her generation.” Earlier this year when a young _Washington Post_ reporter named Janet Cooke became, however briefly, the best known American fiction writer of her generation, the event which catapulted her so suddenly into that position of eminence—her abrupt resignation from the _Post_ after returning the Pulitzer Prize she had just been awarded—occasioned quite a flurry of agitated but, alas, mostly profitless discussion in the opinion columns of the nation’s newspapers and magazines. As all the world knows by now, the problem with Ms. Cooke’s receipt of a Pulitzer Prize lay in the fact that she did not receive the prize for fiction, but rather for newsfeature writing, and the fact that the work for which she received it was not a newsfeature, but a piece of fiction, a very traditional, quite competent short story, in fact, about “Drugs, Depravity, Hopelessness, and Despair on the Wrong Side of Town,” and written in a contemporary version of the “naturalistic” style of Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane. I compare Janet Cooke’s style to Bierce and Crane, rather than to Hemingway or John O’Hara or Sinclair Lewis, all of whom might seem more obvious choices, because on the one hand it was Bierce and Crane (along with Mark Twain) who taught Hemingway, O’Hara, and Lewis much of what they knew about writing, and because on the other hand Bierce and Crane make much better symbols than Hemingway, O’Hara, and Lewis—they less ambiguously embody and cast into relief the peculiar characteristics of the fiction writer who is also a news reporter, a journalist. Both Bierce and Crane earned their livings as newspaper reporters, and both of them published their most famous works—_The Devil’s Dictionary_, _The Red Badge of Courage_, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” “The Open Boat”—in the pages of newspapers. By contrast, Hemingway, O’Hara, and Lewis only began their careers as newspapermen before moving on to _The Novel_—never mind that their novels were read in their own time as they are still read today: as journalism, as more or less accurate portraits of World War I (_A Farewell to Arms_), the Spanish Civil War (_For Whom the Bell Tolls_), 1920s vintage small town respectability (_Appointment in Samarra_), and 1920s vintage evangelical Christianity (_Elmer Gantry_). It might be objected that such topics as these fit better today under the heading “History” than under the heading “Journalism.” But this is mere sophistry and hairsplitting. “History” is only another name for very old news. And “Literature” is yet another. “Literature,” Ezra Pound said, “is news that stays news.” There are, after all, only three possible subjects which any writer can address: he can write about the past, whereupon he will be called an historian; he can write about the present, whereupon he will be called a journalist; or he can write about the non-existent—the future, the purely fanciful, the purely theoretical—whereupon he will be called a fiction writer, a seer, or a sage. Whichever of these subjects a particular writer may choose, however he may come to be labeled by those who read his works, it all comes in the end to the same thing—reporting. We all live in the same world, the only one there is—and, therefore, the only one anybody has to write about. “The man who writes about himself and his own time,” George Bernard Shaw wrote nearly a hundred years ago in the pages of Benjamin R. Tucker’s _Liberty_, “is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.” But Shaw did not go far enough. The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes at all. “I should not talk so much about myself,” said Thoreau on the first page of _Walden_, “if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.” So it is, of course, for everyone. What can any man write about but his own experience of life, including what he reads and thinks and daydreams as well as what he does and has done to him? Inevitably, all authorship is autobiography. There is a sense, then, in which all authorship is journalism—though not, of course, in the same degree. The _sine qua non_ of journalism is that it be concerned in its subject matter principally with news. And what is news? Simply, whatever is new in whatever field one may be writing about. Ask a politician, “What’s new?” and you’ll get a different answer from the one you’d get if you put the same question to a literary critic or a baseball fan or a paleontologist. But whether you write of what’s new about the past; or of what’s new about the present; or of what’s new about the conceptual and imaginative frontiers of human creativity; or just about what’s new with you, you are a journalist. Whether you write non-fiction or fiction or something in between the two, if you write about news, you are a journalist. If it seems odd, even perverse, to speak of fiction writing as a species of journalism, this is only because we have somehow forgotten what we once knew very well about the history of modern fiction generally — and American short fiction in particular — and the ways in which that history has been bound up from the beginning in the history of modern journalism. Why do I say particularly the history of short fiction? Because most news is written for broadcast or periodical publication, and it is precisely the character of almost all such writing that it is short, succinct, pithy, to the point; that it respects its readers’ chronic lack of time. “The increase within a few years of the magazine literature,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote nearly 150 years ago in the column called _“Marginalia”_ which he intermittently conducted during the 1840s in the pages of four leading American magazines, the _Democratic Review_, the _Southern Literary Messenger_, _Graham’s Magazine_, and _Godey’s Lady’s Book_, is but a sign of the times—an indication of an era in which men are forced upon the curt, the condensed, the well-digested — in place of the voluminous — in a word, upon journalism in lieu of dissertation.... I will not be sure that men at present think more profoundly than half a century ago, but beyond question they think with more rapidity, with more skill, with more tact, with more of method and less of excrescence in the thought. Besides all this, they have a vast increase in the thinking material; they have more facts, more to think about. For this reason, they are disposed to put the greatest amount of thought in the smallest compass and disperse it with the utmost attainable rapidity. Nearly a hundred years later, as we all know, the situation Poe describes is the same, only more so. The idea that we are confronted by an information glut has become not only a cliché but also an understatement. ment. We can agree unqualifiedly with Poe. It is a sign of the times that to deal with facts, ideas, knowledge, is to be always behind, always racing to catch up. We can agree with him also that it is this state of affairs which has elevated journalism, and most especially magazine journalism, to a position of special intellectual and literary importance—that is, as he put it in another of his _“Marginalia”_ columns, The whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward. The Quarterly Reviews have _never_ been popular ... their ponderosity is quite out of keeping with the _rush_ of the age. We now demand the light artillery of the intellect.... On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery—by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press.... Whatever talent may be brought to bear upon our daily journals, and in many cases this talent is very great, still the imperative necessity of catching, _currente calamo_, each topic as it flits before the eye of the public must of course materially narrow the limits of their power. The bulk and the period of issue of the monthly magazines seem to be precisely adapted, if not to all the literary wants of the day, at least to the largest and most imperative, as well as the most consequential portion of them. Poe was no mere talker either; he was willing to put his career where his mouth was. As late as 1844, only five years before his death, he wrote the following description of the strategy he had followed in building his career: “Holding steadily in my view my ultimate purpose — to found a Magazine of my own, or in which at least I might have a proprietary right, it has been my constant endeavour in the meantime not so much to establish a reputation great in itself as one of that particular character which should best further my special objects. Thus I have written no books and have been so far essentially a Magazinist....” And in fact, all his major works, the tales and essays — and many of the poems too, though mainly the tales and essays — which have made his one of the greatest international reputations ever earned by an American writer, were originally written for and published in the pages of magazines ... and, more significantly, newspapers. Why more significantly? Because for all Poe’s apparently singleminded devotion to the magazine medium, it was in fact in the pages of daily and weekly newspapers that he enjoyed most of his biggest popular successes and published a number of his most famous pieces — including _“The Raven,”_ _“The Gold Bug,”_ and _“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,”_ his famous tale of the man who was mesmerized on his death bed and proceeded to remain conscious and rational and without visible signs of deterioration for seven months after his death—to be exact, until the very moment when he was awakened from the hypnotic trance, whereupon “his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less shrunk — crumbled — absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putrescence.” This story was first published in 1845 in the _Broadway Journal_, a weekly tabloid, not unlike the modern-day _New York Review of Books_ in conception, which Poe edited during the second of his nearly five years as a resident of New York City. It was offered not as fiction — something the _Journal_ theoretically didn’t publish at all—but as a factual article on a series of extraordinary but real events which had taken place only a couple of months before publication. And it was widely accepted at face value. Mesmerism was in the news in 1845, just as heroin is in the news today. It was an article of common knowledge in 1845—one of those things which “everybody” knows, with that complete intolerant certainty that is the characteristic product of ignorance—that mesmerism was a momentous scientific discovery whose possibilities were almost limitless. Today, of course, it is an article of common knowledge that heroin is a drug which enslaves and destroys all who use it, and that heroin use is encouraged and spread by satanic “pushers” who commonly choose defenseless children as their victims. When Poe published his fictitious account of an amazing experiment in mind over matter through mesmerism, common knowledge insured that many of his readers would accept it as truth. When Janet Cooke published her fictitious account of the home life of Jimmy, the eight year old junkie, common knowledge insured that many of her readers would accept her story as truth. After “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” first appeared in the _Broadway Journal_, it was quickly reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic, drawing fan mail from students of mesmerism in Boston and Edinburgh, causing a sensation in London (where it was reprinted in both the _Morning Post_ and _The Record_, a widely circulated weekly), and taking in so many American readers that Poe felt obliged before the year was out to explain in a letter to one of his best friends that the tale was “a hoax, of course.” After “Jimmy’s World” first appeared in the _Washington Post_ a year ago this month, it was quickly reprinted by other important newspapers all over the country, touching off a search of the Washington, D.C. ghetto for some sign of Jimmy himself, advancing Janet Cooke immediately and dramatically in the newsroom pecking order at the _Post_, and winning her a Pulitzer Prize. There was, of course, one big difference between the case of Poe’s hoax and the case of Janet Cooke’s. “Judging from the reaction in the industry,” Nicholas Von Hoffman wrote this past July in _The Press_, “an innocent reader might think that printing fiction is an unheard of occurrence in our business, a sin so mortal that anyone suspected of committing it will sure as shootin’ be drummed out of our Daily Bugle news corps.” But no such hypocritical reaction followed upon the exposure of Poe’s mesmerism hoax. Why should it have? Poe’s readers and fellow journalists knew that he had done the same thing before, and more than once, though most notably only about a year before, in April of 1844, when the story we know today as “The Balloon Hoax” was published in the daily _New York Sun_ as a straight news story under the headline “Astounding News by Express via Norfolk! THE ATLANTIC CROSSED IN THREE DAYS.” As Julian Symons writes of what happened next, in his recent Poe biography _The Tell-Tale Heart_ (Harper \& Row, 1978), “The story caused excitement of a kind not known again until Orson Welles’s _War of the Worlds_ was broadcast nearly a century later. According to Poe, the square surrounding the _Sun_ building was besieged, ‘ingress and egress being alike impossible,’ for several hours. The regular Saturday edition announced the news, and then the extra was delivered, containing full details of the flight. Again according to Poe, they were bought up regardless of price. ‘I saw a half-dollar given, in one instance, for a single paper, and a shilling was a frequent price.’” In another account of the hoax, Poe described it as having made an “intense sensation.” And there can be little doubt that it was instrumental in advancing his career. His authorship of the story and its character as a hoax were both common knowledge within a few days, and within a few more days he had been offered a position as a columnist with the daily _New York Evening Mirror_, a job he had to give up after only a few months in order to take another offer his hoax had brought him: the editorship of the _Broadway Journal_. Poe got himself a reputation as a Very Clever Fellow in 1845 for doing the same thing that got Janet Cooke drummed out of the newsroom in disgrace in 1981, not only because Poe had already given his profession and his readers fair warning that he was a perpetrator of hoaxes, but also, and more importantly, because his readers and fellow professionals did not regard short fiction as we do today, as essentially and inherently different from short non-fiction. Both were published as a matter of course by both daily newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines. Sometimes the fiction was clearly labeled as such; sometimes it was only identifiable as fiction because it strained credulity beyond endurance if it was taken as fact. In 1845 the phrase “short story” meant nothing more than a story which was short—irrespective of whether the story in question was true, or even factual. It seemed to the journalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, apparently, that they were all really in the same business, the business of telling stories. And it seemed to them, apparently, that it made no difference whether the details of any particular story — the persons, places, things, and events which in the most fundamental sense _are_ that story — were drawn from the real world or simply “made up” — that is, drawn from the world of the imagination, a world which is different for every writer. They seem to have realized, these early journalists, that it is entirely meaningful to speak of a work of fiction as true or false, accurate or inaccurate, factual or packed with misinformation, just as it is entirely meaningful to speak in such terms of a work of non-fiction. Where is it possible to find so factual, so accurate, so altogether _true_ an account of what is now happening in the American economy as in the pages of Ayn Rand’s science fiction detective thriller _Atlas Shrugged_? And where is it possible to find such a false, inaccurate, distorted compendium of misinformation on the same subject as in the pages of Lester Thurow’s recent tract, _The Zero-Sum Society_? It is perfectly reasonable to look to fiction for accurate reportage. One finds it there often—quite as often, in fact, as one finds highly imaginative invention in works of non-fiction. And is it even necessary to specify the reasons not only why this should be so, but why it should be inevitable? Or are they so obvious to common sense that to name them is to insult the intelligence of one’s readers and bore them silly to boot? Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. “Newspaper men like to think of news as something wholly objective,” H.L. Mencken wrote in “A Note on News” which he published in the Baltimore _Evening Sun_ in May of 1937 (for by that time what had been the common knowledge of every journalist in Poe’s day had been utterly forgotten), “but it can be so only under exceptional circumstances. In its ordinary forms it is not merely a statement of overt facts; it is some concrete individual’s opinion of the truth and significance of those facts.” “It is, in truth, this admixture of opinion,” Mencken continued, “which gives good reporting all its savor. The minutes of Congress include all the essential facts about its proceedings, but no one wants to read them in that form: they are too dull, and what is more, they are largely unintelligible. What the reader wants is not only a report of what went on, but also an interpretation of it. If the reporter in the gallery is a good one, he produces a clear and vivid picture of the show. He does so by getting his own view of it into his report, and by illuminating that report with whatever wisdom he may have at his command.” Even the reporter who believes “that he is there to discover and publish the truth,” Mencken argues, will run up against the obstinate fact that “the definition of truth differs among reporters as much as it does among other men, and in consequence every one of them is thrown back, soon or late, on his habitual attitudes of mind. He can see only through his own eyes, and he can weigh conflicting evidence only in the balance of his own judgment. That judgment may be better in some men than in others, but in none is it completely unbiased.” How could it be? Think of the influences and pressures ranged against the very possibility. “There is,” Mencken wrote, “primarily, the influence of congenital philosophies. Every Englishman, said W.S. Gilbert, is born either a Liberal or a Conservative. This is, again, the powerful effect of schooling, and of the worldly experience that runs parallel with it. Finally, there is the tremendous effect of everyday associations — of the ties of friendship and common interest, of customary wont and habit. The reporter succumbs to these pulls just as every other man succumbs.” And any news report, therefore, is no more likely in principle to be accurate or true than a frank fiction or blend of fact and fiction written about the same subject. All writing of any kind is inescapably the presentation of some individual’s perspective on the world, as that world is revealed in some particular event(s). And no two indivduals are totally alike. This is why the magazine and newspaper writers of Poe’s day made no distinction between their fictional pieces and their non-fictional pieces, but thought of both and frequently referred to both as “articles.” This is why newspapers and magazines of current issues and events routinely printed outright fiction in their columns, not only in Poe’s time, but before it and long after it: American newspapers were still printing fiction as a matter of course as late as the 1930s. This is why it has been common practice ever since Poe’s time for American newspapers and magazines to employ eminent novelists and writers of short fiction to cover major events of various kinds, from the days when Stephen Crane covered the Spanish-American War to the days when Ernest Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War to the days when Ray Bradbury covered the moon landing to the days when Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer cover the political conventions. This is why every distinctly and unmistakably American fiction writer of even the slightest importance in the past hundred and fifty years has begun his career or spent some significant portion of his career as a working journalist, writing about current events and ideas for newspapers and/or magazines. This is why the overwhelming majority of these American fiction writers have worked entirely or primarily in the medium of the short story and have commonly made their livings as writers of fiction for magazines. Journalism has been central to the American literary tradition because America has been from the beginning of that tradition a nation in a hurry. Poe wrote of the vogue of journalism arising out of “the rush of the age,” reasoning correctly that an age in a hurry needed a literature in a hurry — which was what Matthew Arnold called journalism: “literature in a hurry.” But what made America a nation in a hurry except the industrial revolution which had been touched off by its creed of individual freedom and its system of near-laissez-faire capitalism? The industrial revolution had begun in England, of course, which was why journalism emerged there first. But where conditions were freer, the industrial revolution grew all the bigger all the faster, and the pace of change and the sheer volume of new ideas, new information, and new inventions became even more unmanageable even more quickly. Since around 1840, if not before, any American who feels a strong interest in the doings and comings and goings of ideas of his own age has found himself with too few hours in the day to keep up with it all. And he has therefore demanded, as Poe said, the brief, the compact, the succinct, the pointed: the light artillery of the intellect. He has demanded that he be both amused and informed by anything he reads. And he has demanded that any lengthy thing he reads justify its length by providing him with detailed knowledge of some aspect of American life which cannot be compressed into the compass of a few thousand words. Long before modern philosophy and modern theoretical science began implanting an extreme skepticism in the minds of almost all American college graudates, American writers had been writing exactly the sort of thing Janet Cooke recently became so famous by writing for the _Washington Post_. And their reason for doing so seems to have been not so much philosophical or scientific as broadly political: it seems to have originated, that is, in the individualist doctrine that, no two individuals being exactly alike and every individual being unique, it is inevitable that any two pieces of writing about the world by any two different individuals will inevitably be personal statements whose real subject is not so much the world as the mind of the individual doing the writing. American writers seem to have understood that journalism is an art long before Seymour Krim got around to announcing it officially in his indispensable essay “The Newspaper as Literature” (1967) and long before New Journalists like Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson got around to proving it conclusively at about the same time Krim was making the announcement. Both the announcement and the proof had been offered before, many times over. If it is now commonplace that most of our best contemporary writers are engaged in journalism rather than in some other kind of writing, this is only because our writers have learned long since, intuitively if not consciously, that there _is_ no other kind of writing. And if many in the American newspaper business today have somehow eluded the discovery of this fact so far in their own careers, and have lately joined in a rousing chorus of damnation against those who “besmirch the profession” by “lying in print,” it is our part not to follow such fools, but to suffer them gladly—and hope they will live to see wiser days. LR West Coast editor Jeff Riggenbach is a 15 year veteran of the news business who has worked in various radio newsrooms and written for various newspapers and magazines in Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.