Gay Talese in Fame and Obscurity

Before 1960, there was no such thing as a literary journalist. A journalist daring to imply that reporting had an aesthetic dimension, would have been sniggered at. The Novelist was the omnipotent literary artist, the holy of the holies. The Journalist was the well-known alcoholic bore with the dirtied pedestrian mind, the sluggish spirit and the faded personality to complement the ashtraybreath and droning deskvoice; a wannabe writer who never quite made it to the big leagues.

And then in the early 1960s, what writer-journalist Tom Wolfe called "a curious new notion, just hot enough to inflame the ego, had begun to intrude into the tiny confines of the feature statusphere." A new literary style originated in journalism which made it possible to write journalism that read like a novel. The rise of the New Journalism, with its lack of sacred rules, caused an artistic, anarchic excitement in journalism; a radical step to fuse the empirical eye of the reporter to the moral vision of the novelist. New Journalists were not scared of asserting their opinions, visions and impressions. They challenged the myth of journalistic objectivity and embraced the fictional element inevitable in any reporting, trying to imagine their way to the truth.

Journalists like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin realised that a who-what-where-when-why-how style of reporting could not even begin to capture the apocalyptic mood of 1960s America, where everyday reality was even more bizarre and elusive than the most fantastical fictions ever written by the best novelists. Daily events blurred the cosy distinctions between reality and unreality, between fantasy and fact.

For these New Journalists, the essence of journalism was to report events from the inside out; to submerge themselves in the Age of Aquarius with its exploration of the generation gap, the counter culture, black consciousness, sexual permissiveness, the death of God and the psychedelic movement. As Tom Wolfe wrote, "The - New Journalists - Parajournalists - had the whole crazed obscene uproarious Mammon-faced drug-soaked mau-mau lust-oozing Sixties in America all to themselves."

Brandishing any and all literary devices to draw in the reader intellectually and emotionally, the New Journalist discovered it was possible to write accurate non-fiction with techniques usually associated with novels and short stories.

No longer was the reader left to fulfil a passive role. He was now forced to become involved in the joys of detailed realism and its strange powers of persuasion.

The New Journalists passionately learnt the techniques of realism, especially those employed by Dickens, Gogol, Fielding, Smollett, Balzac and Dostoevsky, to place the reader in a world not his own. They used fictional devices like scene-by-scene construction, realistic dialogue, point-of-view (alias stream of consciousness), interior monologue, status details and composite characterisation (see next page) to create an immediacy, a concrete reality and emotional involvement. They rediscovered punctuation marks and typography that had been lying dormant - the use of italics, exclamation marks, the lavish use of dots, dashes, and punctuation that had never been used before [ ... ] - and put themselves in direct opposition to traditional journalism.

And to attain a psychological depth to their work, they conducted a more intense kind of interviewing and research called saturation reporting. This dogged, close-to-the-skin reporting is the key to the New Journalist's success. In his work on In Cold Blood, Truman Capote interviewed hundreds of individuals, accumulating documents sufficient "to fill a small room".

The variety and vehemence of criticism that the New Journalism has provoked since the mid-'60s is an indication of its impact. Critic Dwight MacDonald wrote the following about Wolfe's "parajournalism": "It's a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric licence of fiction." By the late '60s, the New Journalism began to be confused with advocacy journalism. According to critics, this "parajournalism" risked turning the reporting of news into mere entertainment. They labelled it dangerous, fearing that the historical tradition of objective reporting would be eroded by "a cult of egotists intent upon imposing personal viewpoints on the public."

And then there was that niggling little problem of the thin line between reality and fiction ...

But despite these snubs and gripes, by 1969, no one in the literary world could simply dismiss this New Journalism as an inferior genre.

The New Journalism had found a snug home in Esquire, New York magazine and the New York Herald Tribune. "Offbeat" newspapers like the Village Voice and Berkeley Barb practised the new style, and the Underground Press Syndicate was formed. There were even whole books in the new form; Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels: The

Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang and Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night.

The New Journalism did not replace conventional reporting, nor was that ever the intention of its writers. It offered a new voice for the formula-ridden world of journalism, where the "inverted pyramid" reigned supreme. Tom Wolfe wrote, "The status of the New Journalism is not secured by any means. In some quarters the contempt for it is boundless ... even breathtaking ... With any luck at all the new genre will never be sanctified, never be exalted, never given a theology ... Let chaos reign ... louder music, more wine."

Scene from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe:

With the narrator of Acid Test, the reader roots for the hero to evade the Mexican Federales who have tracked him to a sequestered village:

"Haul ass, Kesey. Move. Scram. Split flee hide vanish disintegrate. Like run.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrev revrevrevrevrevrevrevrevrev or are we gonna have just a late Mexican re-run of the scene on the rooftop in San Francisco and sit here with the motor spinning and watch with fascination while the cops they climb up once again to come git you [ ... ]

[ ... ] COME ON, MAN, DO YOU NEED A COPY OF THE SCRIPT TO SEE HOW THIS MOVIE GOES? YOU HAVE MAYBE 40 SECONDS LEFT BEFORE THEY COME GET YOU

..."

Fictional Devices Employed by the New Journalists

Point-of-View or Stream of Consciousness: Portrayal of character as if the reader understood the person's mental processes, or, alternatively, from the viewpoint of others significant in the character's life. The reader must be led directly into the mind of the character, experiencing his world through his central nervous system.

For example, in Wolfe's Esquire article about stock-car driver Junior Johnson, the narrator feigns the voice of a character (a moonshiner) from Johnson's native Ingle Hollow, North Carolina:

Working mash wouldn't wait for a man. It started coming to a head when it got ready to and a man had to be there to take it off, out there in the woods, in the brush, in the brambles, in the muck, in the snow. Wouldn't it have been something if you could have just set it all up inside a good old shed with a corrugated metal roof and order those parts like you want them and not have to smuggle all the copper and all that sugar and all that everything out here in the woods and be a coppersmith and a plumber and a cooper and a carpenter and a pack horse and every other goddamned thing God ever saw in the world, all at once.

Composite Characterisation: The creation of a person who represents a whole class of subjects.

Gail Sheehy's book, Hustling, begins with a sketch of Redpants, a composite of several Times Square prostitutes Sheehy had interviewed:

The girl in red pants walks into the Belmont Plaza allnight drugstore.

"Got a hammer? My heel came off in a chase."

She is thin as a needle, tracked in the arms and urgent around the eyes. The druggist produces a hammer. She lifts one long, exquisitely bolted leg in an arabesque - every eye in the store bleeds because her legs are still dazzling - and she says to the druggist, "Tap it on for me, will you, sugar?"

called Redpants lit up this street like fireworks.

Status Details: Achieving psychological depth by recording "the everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration ... by which [people] experience their position in the world."

For example, Rex Reed's portrait of aging star Ava Gardner:

She stands there, without benefit of a filter lens against a room melting under the heat of lemony sofas and lavender walls and cream-and-peppermint-striped movie-star chairs, lost in the middle of that gilt-edge birthday-cake hotel of cupids and cupolas called the Regency ...

Realistic Dialogue: Dialogue has to be recorded in full rather than with the occasional quotations or anecdotes of conventional journalism. How the character speaks becomes as important as what he says.

In Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Kesey and a close friend, guitars in hand, sit facing each other on stage while improvising a talking blues:

"I took some pseulobin and one long diddle ..."

"WE BLEW IT!"

"... Ten thousand times or more ..."

"WE BLEW IT!"

"... so much we can't keep score ..."

"WE BLEW IT!"

"... just when you're beginning to think, 'I'm going to score'..."

"WE BLEW IT!"

"... but there's more in store ..."

"WE BLEW IT!"

Interior Monologue: A distinctive use of point-of-view. Events are reported as if a subject were thinking them rather than through the direct quotations of the speaker.

For example, in The Kingdom and the Power, Gay Talese reveals the thoughts and attitudes of A.M. Rosenthal, whose new policies as assistant managing editor of the Times angered and upset many veteran reporters:

Rosenthal momentarily looked up from the stories that he was reading and gazed around the room at the distant row of desks, the reporters typing, talking among themselves, sometimes looking at him in a way he suspected was hostileÑthey must despise me, he thought, being both irritated and saddened by the possibility, they must really hate my guts.

Scene-by-scene construction or Dramatic Scene: Structure is based on a dramatic rather than a chronological narrative of events.