The Undeclared War between Journalism and Fiction Also by Doug Underwood When MBAs Rule the Newsroom: How the Marketers and Managers Are Reshaping Today’s Media From Yahweh to Yahoo!: The Religious Roots of the Secular Press Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700–2000 Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss The Undeclared War between Journalism and Fiction Journalists as Genre Benders in Literary History DOUG UNDERWOOD THE UNDECLARED WAR BETWEEN JOURNALISM AND FICTION Copyright © Doug Underwood, 2013. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-35347-4 All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-46970-3 ISBN 978-1-137-35348-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137353481 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Underwood, Doug. ction: journalists as The undeclared war between journalism and fi genre benders in literary history / by Doug Underwood. pages cm Includes index. 1. American fi ction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Journalism and literature—United States. 3. Reportage literature, American—History and criticism. 4. Press and journalism in literature. I. Title. PS374.J68U83 2013 813(cid:2).509—dc23 2013012090 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my daughters, Marika and Alida Who have bent the boundaries of everything I thought I knew, especially my heart This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction 1 1 Challenging the Boundaries of Journalism and Fiction 29 2 A rtful Falsehoods and the Constraints of the Journalist’s Life 95 3 Hemingway as Seeker of the “Real Thing” and the Epistemology of Art 123 4 The Funhouse Mirror: Journalists Portraying Journalists in Their Fiction 153 Epilogue 187 Notes 201 Index 229 Introduction I was enlisted then on my side of an undeclared war between those modes of perception called journalism and fiction. When it came to accuracy, I was on the side of fiction. I thought fiction could bring us closer to the truth than journalism, which is not to say one should make up facts when writing a story about real people. I would endeavor to get my facts as scrupulously as a reporter. —Norman Mailer The Jungle is a book whose “facts” about the abuses in the meatpacking industry set the United States on a new course of health and safety regula- tion: the “muckraking” author Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks in 1904 investigating the sanitary and workplace conditions in the Chicago meat- packing yards; his publisher, Doubleday, Page and Company, would not publish the book until a group of legal detectives had checked out Sinclair’s allegations; President Theodore Roosevelt was so moved by the book that he set up a presidential investigatory commission; and finally Congress, acting upon the commission’s findings that confirmed most of Sinclair’s claims, passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. As a result, T he Jungle has been deemed, along with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s pro-abolition U ncle Tom’s Cabin , to have had more political impact than any other novels in American history.1 However, for all this, it is sometimes forgotten that The Jungle was a work of fiction—an imaginative construct that, although based upon the facts as Sinclair unearthed them, nonetheless used fiction- alized characters to dramatize his findings and a fictionalized Lithuanian working-class family to illustrate the brutal treatment of workers and the filthy conditions in the meatpacking plants. Willa Cather had a more jaded view of the muckraker’s mission—and she also chose a fictional format to express the thoughts that she had kept to herself while serving as the managing editor of M cClure’s , the muckraking magazine that made famous such figures as Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and David Graham Phillips. Cather’s 1918 short story, “Ardessa,” presented in fictional terms her wry and cynical view of reform 2 The Undeclared War between Journalism and Fiction journalism. Her fictional editor, O’Malley, who is described as blowing into New York City after making his money in mining in South Dakota, buys a magazine, The Outcry , whose reform journalism soon builds its contributors into national celebrities. O’Malley was clearly modeled upon S. S. McClure (McClure made his money with a book serializing syndicate before found- ing his magazine in 1893). “He [O’Malley] found he could take an average reporter from the daily press, give him a ‘line’ to follow, a trust to fight, a vice to expose,—this was all in that good time when people were eager to read about their own wickedness,—and in two years the reporter would be recognized as an authority,” Cather wrote. “The great men of the staff were all about . . . as contemplative as Buddhas in their private offices, each meditating upon the particular trust or form of vice confided to his care.” 2 Despite their different views of the role of muckraking, the socialist Sinclair and the politically conservative Cather shared one outlook: both selected fiction as their preferred literary venue in addressing their concerns about the state of American industrialization and the American press at the turn of the twentieth century. This was the case even though both became deeply immersed in the world of journalism and were well acquainted with journalism’s investigative techniques for examining controversial issues in public life. However, in their different ways, both came to believe in the greater effectiveness of fiction writing—Cather because she decided it was the better way to explore the deeper truths of life and Sinclair because he felt it to be the most moving forum for conveying a message that would touch the hearts and consciences of his audience. Journalists have long recognized the force of “story” and the power of narrative as techniques for communicating the important insights that they have discerned about the world and the people in it. In fact, the tradition of using narrative and storytelling means to attract a periodical audience goes much farther back in journalistic history than the so-called objective method of imparting information—which is typically associated with the term “nonfiction” writing. This ostensibly “neutral” model of writing and reporting is largely a phenomenon of the industrialization of newspapers in the nineteenth century and the coming of the telegraph, the wire ser- vices, and the press’ scientific and empirical pretensions that followed. The inverted pyramid model of news with its who-what-when-where formula for recounting events—which can be seen, in many respects, as the antith- esis of traditional narrative story telling forms of communication—is the product of news organizations that put information onto an assembly line and fashioned it into mass-produced forms in the way that other products were being standardized under the pressures of industrialization. But journalists also have been boundary-pushers, and, like Cather and Sinclair, many did not hesitate to straddle writing genres—including