The truth about non-fiction

By Editor on November 27, 2008 1:43 am

A journalist should be like a good husband, never cheating on Mrs Truth. But in reality many distinguished writers have been outrageous flirts with fiction. Dan Hogan examines some such — from Truman Capote to James Frey.

JOURNALISTS SELDOM TALK about how much fiction goes into their work. Pick up any book on journalistic ethics and it will contain unequivocal statements about the importance of truth-telling. Louis A Day cites the 1947 A Free and Responsible Press:

The first requirement of the press is to provide a: “truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context that gives it meaning.” (p37)

Truth was so important to Ernest Hemingway he put it at the core of his creative process:

All you have to do is to write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know. So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut away that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. (p12)

To the outside world the journalist should be like a good husband — never cheating on his wife, or in this case, Mrs Truth.

In reality many distinguished journalists have been outrageous flirts with fiction over the centuries — especially when it comes to major works of ‘non-fiction’. Some have an occasional fling — John Berendt. Others cheat all the time and keep it secret — Daniel Defoe. As for Truman Capote, he abandoned Mrs Truth and had a full blown adulterous relationship with that shameless hussy Miss Fiction. The rascal.

It is best to start by looking at a controversial piece of Capote’s reportage from 1979: Handcarved Coffins. Capote’s work is similar in theme to In Cold Blood, his 1966 story about the slaughter of a Kansas family by two killers has been credited with inventing the non-fiction novel.

Handcarved Coffins has plenty of authentic detail to give it a sense of reality, or verisimilitude. Capote is very much a part of the action, rather than an anonymous narrator — the role he assumed when he wrote In Cold Blood. To add to the realism Hardcarved Coffins contains transcripts of conversations which Capote, or TC, had during his investigation:

TC: How soon did you come upon the case?
JAKE: Immediately. An hour after they found them I was on my way here with two other agents from the Bureau. When we got there their bodies were still in the car. And so were the snakes. That’s something I’ll never forget. (p465)

It reads like compelling journalism and details how a sack of rattlesnakes, injected with amphetamines, are dumped into the victims’car.

Only one problem — this was a lie. The British Sunday Times Magazine ran its own investigation into Capote’s story in 1992. The cover of the magazine had a picture of Capote and beneath the portrait was one word: CHEAT. The magazine pointed out Handcarved Coffins was not as Capote claimed: “A non-fiction account of an American Crime.” Inside it branded Capote as a hoaxer.

There was an element of hubris about the Sunday Times’s condemnation, because it had earlier paid Capote to serialise Handcarved Coffins. Two important details were missing from his story — an exact location for the killings and there is no resolution to the mystery.

Investigative journalist Peter Gillman was the reporter who exposed Capote. He said in an interview to Interjunction: “From the commonsense point of view if there had been a small town in the Mid-West where there had been a series of serial murders we would have known about it.”

Although there were suspicions about the authenticity Gillman said there was a natural reluctance to doubt Capote’s word: “People got mesmerised by his reputation and the suggestion was he would not lie and cheat about that.”

Gillman’s suspicions grew when he approached the widow of Alvin Dewey, the agent who led the investigation featured In Cold Blood. Marie Dewey told Gillman: You have to remember Truman Capote was a fantasist and a lot of what he said was not true.

This put a new perspective on Capote’s famous claim that he never took notes, or used a tape recorder, when researching In Cold Blood. Capote claimed to recall 94 per cent of conversations and believed taping would intimidate interviewees. Gillman knew certain parts of this non-fiction novel had been fabricated — including the final scene when Dewey has a dramatic reconciliation with a friend of the Clutters in a graveyard. Gillman’s investigation led to an interesting revelation of the source for Handcarved Coffins.

Gillman discovered that Capote had been shown a draft of Dewey’s memoirs. Gillman said: “He ripped off, adapted it, and pretended it was his own.” This was the source of Handcarved Coffins.

It is important to note the story is a terrific read. So why Capote should have carried out such an elaborate hoax? The reason is hinted at in Capote’s 1980 preface to Music for Chameleons when he discusses the motives behind his non-fiction novels. He said he was influenced by the work of the journalist Lillian Ross:

I wondered what would happen if the author let go of her hard linear straight-reporting discipline and handled her material as if it were fictional - would the book gain or lose? (p719)

Capote continued:

For several years I had been drawn to journalism as an art form in itself. I had two reasons. First it didn’t seem to me that anything truly innovative had occurred in prose writing, or writing in generally, since the 1920s; second journalism as an art was almost virgin terrain, for the simple reason that very few literary artists ever wrote narrative journalism and when they did, it took the form of travel essays or autobiography. (Ibid)

That is essentially the problem of Capote’s non-fiction novels. He often left behind the “straight-reporting discipline” and played about with the facts like an artist experimenting with paint.In his book Intellectuals, Paul Johnson exposes the arrogance of some great writers and artists, including Shelley, Tolstoy, Sartre, and Brecht. A common pattern emerges where they trampled on people without any shame. What mattered above all was their art. It is a pattern that Capote followed in writing Handcarved Coffins. Truth was not important — nor the people he exploited.

Gillman said the worst aspect of the episode was the betrayl of Capote’s friend Dewey: “It is astonishing, unfathomable…off the planet.”

A more recent example of the non-fiction genre is John Berendt’s 1994 work, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The blurb for the Vintage edition quotes Edmund White proclaiming the book as: “The best non-fiction novel since In Cold Blood and a lot more entertaining.” In his preface Berendt says:

…quite a few readers got halfway through - and even finished the book - before they discovered that what they had been reading was journalism, not fiction. (pvii)

You don’t have to wait long as a reader for this book to enter tricky ethical ground. Chapter one brings Berendt face-to-face with the victim of a murder. The only problem is the Danny Handford died six weeks before Berendt arrived in the quirky southern town of Savannah. In a 1996 interview Berendt explained why he had created this fictional encounter. He said it was a truthful reconstruction of events:

So in fact I become the only fictional character in my book — until I catch up with myself. I figured it was a fair enough thing to do — we didn’t distort anybody’s story to switch things around like that — the story of the shooting is absolutely accurate. (Recorded Books interview, Spring 1996)

How did the people in the town react to Berendt taking this liberty?

Their reaction to the book — the way I laid it out was: “how smart it was to do that and put the killing after you got there - and make it surprising that way.” They’re very sophisticated about that. (Ibid)

Sebastian Junger was another journalist faced with a similar problem of reconstructing a narrative after the event. His book The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea catalogues the sinking of the fishing boat Andrea Gail 500 miles off the Massachusetts coast.

In his forward Junger says:

I toyed with the idea of ficitonalising minor parts of the story — conversations, personal thoughts, day-to-day routines — to make it more readable, but that risked diminishing the value of whatever facts I was able to determine. (pxiii)

Junger’s answer was, as he revealed in a 1998 interview, “to report in a journalism of equivalence”. This reporting allowed Junger to piece together events on the doomed vessel, by talking with people who were on other boats on the area.

Journalistically it is an honest technique. I’m not passing something off as the real story, but I’m also able to fill in these blank holes and the story with the sort of dramatic material from other people’s experiences. (Talking Books interview, Spring 1998)

Junger’s approach means the reader can sometimes go into some long tangential anecdotes, such as an account of the drowning reflex. It is a laudable attempt to keep non-fiction truthful.

One writer tried an approach more in keeping with Hand Carved Coffins. Yet for James Frey playing fast and lose with accuracy led to a huge loss of credibility. Frey’s 2004 memoir A Million Little Pieces and the sequal, My Friend Leonard, detailed how he endured prison while battling drug addiction. It was later revealed Frey’s criminal record only amounted to a police caution for a parking violation.

As Frey said this year in a 2008 BBC radio interview:

I‘m playing with what is fact and what is fiction. Some of the things you read in the book and might think are fact, are fiction, and some of the things you read in the book which you think are fiction are, in fact, facts. Most of the facts are true — probably 80 per cent of them, and I just think if you enjoy the book it doesn’t even matter. If you look at the books of Dickens and Hugo, who wrote books essentially about London and Paris, does it matter if some of the facts in their books are true or not? (BBC Radio 4, Front Row, August 6, 2008)

Frey has some justification for being aggrieved over his treatment on US TV, by Oprah Winfry, when she exposed him as a fraud in 2006. His 80 per cent truthfulness is far higher than Capote’s in Handcarved Coffins. Many non-fiction works have taken liberties with truth without any harm to a reputation.George Orwell became a hero of the British left-wing for the gritty realism of classics like the Road to Wigan Pier. Yet this book has an interesting confession about another of his works, Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell says of this tale of his surviving French poverty, and then living as tramp in England:

“[N]early all of the incidents described there actually happened, though they have been rearranged.” (p153)

The term “nearly all” would certainly chime with Frey, while Berendt would applaud the rearragements.

This taking liberties with reality has a long past — even dating back before Orwell. One early example of a ‘non-fiction novel’ taking huge liberties with fact is Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Years.The book, which details events during London in 1665, is written in the first person.Yet at the time Defoe was no more than a child of seven when the events took place. Yet the book is the story of an adult struggling to survive and make sense of the appalling suffering he witnessed.

Many non-fiction works contain passages which might be considered stretching truth, or even fiction, to “fill in the gaps,” in a narrative. Many works of fiction are grounded in reality. For example Melville’s classic work of fiction Moby Dick has vast chapters of forensic detail on whaling. So even huge works of fiction contain large chunks of fact. When Horst Zander’s studied non-fiction in South Africa he discovered it was a complex matter to separate fact from fiction — hence he used the term “faction”.

The strangest aspect of non-fiction is the stories often seem better when there is an element of fiction. Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is compelling because of its structure. Capote’s In Cold Blood is a far greater read because it contains wonderful passages — such as the final scene with its long snatches of interior dialogue and observation.

It is ironic In Cold Blood is often shelved under fiction in libraries and bookshops, while Handcarved Coffins will reside in resolutely under non-fiction reportage. Penguin books make no effort to discuss its authenticity in their editon. With 80 per cent of books featured in the New York Review of Books non-fiction it is tempting to ask how many are true?

It is also tempting to speculate why Capote’s reputation is still intact, while Frey’s has been battered. Investigative reporter Gillman finds it hard to explain why Capote enjoys an exalted reputation — despite the scandal of Handcarved Coffins: “I remain baffled and slightly miffed.”

Checkov once said medicine was his wife, while writing was his mistress. The same can be said about truth and fiction in journalistic non-ficiton novels. The fiction adds a little frisson to the otherwise predictable and disciplined world of fact. We learn a lot from fiction. Journalists are great story-tellers, who often use the same narrative techniques of fiction. It makes the reader wonder how many non-fiction novelists are totally faithful to Mrs Truth.

They are like British tabloid news editors used to be lampooned for saying: “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.” Yet it appears some of the finest writers do the same with their non-fiction. It may be unethical and arrogant but the result is a very good read. In the case of Capote there is also an unexpected link between hackery and the literary salon.

Dan Hogan is a UK-based journalist and journalism lecturer, currently researching literary journalism. Read his earlier piece, Sympathy for the Devil.

References

Berendt, John (1995), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Vintage: London
Capote, Truman (1987), A Capote Reader, Penguin: London
Capote, Truman (1967), In Cold Blood, Penguin: London
Day, Louis A (1997), Ethics in Media Communications - Cases and Controversies, 2nd Edition, Wadsworth: Belmont, California
Frey, James (2004), A Million Little Pieces, John Murray: London
Hemingway Ernest (2000), A Moveable Feast, Vintage Classic: London
Johnson, Paul, Intellectuals
Jungar, Sebastian (2007), The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea, Harper Perennial: London
Orwell, George (2001) The Road to Wigan Pier, Penguin: London
Zander, Horst (1999) Fact, Fiction, “Faction:” a study of black South African Literatrue in English, Turtleback

Interviews

John Berendt - interviewed by Recorded Books Spring 1996
James Frey - interviewed by BBC Radio 4, Front Row, August 6, 2008
Peter Gillman - interviewed for Interjunction, October 30, 2008
Sebastian Junger - interviewed by Recorded Books, Spring 1998

Image: Sunil Krishnan

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