Good Prose (12 page)

This is highly managed experience. The facts are slight: the pathetic project, the redness of the faces, the body language. Many of the facts are emotional and internal. They come, of course, not from the imagination but from interviews after the fact with the teacher
.

So we have an account of reality that leaves out what at first seemed a salient event of the year, leaves it out altogether. And we have instead a minute description of an episode that most of us would have politely looked away from and promptly forgotten. It’s interesting to note in passing that the first episode, the indiscreet remark, would have been irresistible to the camera, while the second would have been very difficult to film, at least in a documentary format. And it would have been hard to describe in conversation. But I think it proved the right event for the written word
.

Facts and truth: not only are they not synonymous, but they often have a very tangential relationship. Although the truth must always be found in facts, some facts, sometimes, obscure the truth. Sometimes that essential effort of writing, making some things small and others big, includes making something invisible
.

—RT

The world for the nonfiction writer is not a kit full of endlessly interesting parts waiting to be assembled, a garden of flowers waiting to be picked and arranged. If that were the case, life
would still be complicated, but of course it isn’t the case. The writer is part of the world, engages the world, affects and is affected by it. More specifically, nonfiction writers enter into a relationship of some kind with the people they are writing about—or, in the case of memoirists, they already have entered into such relationships, and now want to make use of them for purposes that may not suit everyone involved.

Journalists are asked how their presence has affected the behavior of the people they followed around. The question sounds reasonable, even important, but it can’t be answered fully. No one can capture the ever-changing interaction between a writer and a subject: observing another person and describing one’s observations, and being altered oneself in the process and thus altering the observations. Some writers seem to feel they can cut through this maze by writing in the first person and describing how they conducted their research, but the very terms of the problem make it insoluble. It’s doubtful the problem can even be fully expressed.

It can be confronted, though. Some journalists begin talking to subjects without a notebook or voice recorder and ease into the role of reporter. Others think it’s more honest to open their notebooks at once and keep them open. One aim is to get subjects used to this odd presence, the fact of a reporter in their lives. Custom, just being around a lot, can help bring a subject back to acting naturally.

You are a guest in your subject’s life and ought to behave as a good guest would. Avoid extremes of behavior: talking all the time or not talking at all. Sometimes you may want to challenge or nettle your subject. But you don’t want to supply the subject
with thoughts of your own. To a third party looking in on the scene, it might appear that the reporter is duping a subject into setting wariness aside, into talking too much. But most adults who let a reporter into their lives understand the reporter’s role. Most subjects expect, indeed most want, the reporter to stand back and let them talk.

The real problem begins when you start to write. To try to depict real people is to grant yourself an immense power over individual lives, and the power is easily abused. Again, consider the difference between facts and truth. You can string together a number of facts about someone and create a picture. It may be critical, it may be flattering. That picture may accord with your own best sense of who that person really is, but it may violate the subject’s own sense of his or her identity. What rules govern this delicate process?

There are legal constraints. In the United States, a different standard applies to characters who are public as opposed to private figures. The distinction is an accepted principle of libel law. It is in fact very hard for a public figure to sue successfully for libel. The plaintiff has to prove that the defendant, in making the disputed statement, acted with “malice”—that is, with knowledge that the statement was false or with what the courts have called “reckless disregard for truth or falsity.” Of course good writers want to do better than to stay within the limits of the law, but the point is that the famous get treated differently from the nonfamous.

Readers do not expect a journalist to provide a richly human, sympathetic compassion for the inner fears and demons of, say, a former vice president. It would be interesting and valuable and
great, but no one demands it. Pretty much any information you can get, as long as it’s true, is fair game with vice presidents. But there is a kind of writing whose very virtue is that it follows those who are not usually followed. It illuminates society by looking away from celebrities and turning to subjects who would not otherwise be known to the reader. In such cases, the standards are more exacting, legally and morally too.

Janet Malcolm, in
The Journalist and the Murderer
, has written what many consider the landmark book on the relations between writers and subjects. This is a book journalists love to hate. It features an extraordinary and memorable first paragraph
*
—especially memorable because it appeared in
The New Yorker
, the magazine that has published more distinguished journalism than any other magazine in history. Here was an assertion that the whole enterprise was rotten to the core:

This passage introduces the story of a lawsuit. The defendant was the writer Joe McGinniss, the plaintiff a convicted murderer named Jeffrey MacDonald. He and McGinniss had made a deal before his trial: he would give McGinniss special access to his life and to his defense team at the trial; in return he’d receive some of the proceeds from the book. Plainly, he expected McGinniss to portray him as innocent, and in the beginning McGinniss intended to do so. The two men became friends, but by the end of the trial McGinniss had changed his mind. He came to believe that the man had in fact murdered his family. But he didn’t tell his subject this. Indeed, he wrote him letters of sympathy even as he created in his manuscript the portrait of a monster. The letters are painfully embarrassing to read, and the murderer’s lawyer used them to powerful effect, as does Malcolm. In the end, the suit was more or less successful; McGinniss agreed to pay MacDonald $325,000.

This story could not be more perfect for Malcolm’s uses. Indeed the first criticism of her argument is the very perfection of the story it relies on. Hard cases make bad law, the lawyers say, and this is a difficult case, not the sort of case from which to draw sweeping generalizations about journalists and their subjects. And Malcolm makes no real attempt to see McGinniss’s side; her excuse, the lamest in the journalist’s arsenal, is that McGinniss wouldn’t talk to her. But whatever one makes of the merits of the lawsuit, Malcolm’s analysis has value—especially
for journalists who wish that the matters she deals with had been left submerged.

Few journalists would condone lying in their private lives. And yet many nonfiction writers venerate
In Cold Blood
, for which Truman Capote appears to have lied shamelessly to his subjects. Maybe the moral standing of the person matters. Is it okay to lie to a killer but not to, say, a Rotarian? Most writers feel uncomfortable at best with Capote’s methods, and condemn them even if they celebrate the book. And what about less dramatic cases? What about those little gray areas? How much candor is a subject owed? If for example your subject makes a racist remark, which you would in ordinary conversation object to, do you let it slide by? Probably you do. Do you laugh at the unfunny joke? Nothing wrong with that, surely. Do you smile noncommittally when you hear an opinion you disagree with? If asked outright whether you agree with your subject when you could not in fact disagree more, do you give a little murmur that could be interpreted as assent? Perhaps you say, “I see your point.”

Malcolm argues that something dishonest tends to lurk in all relationships between authors and their subjects. Certainly, all such relationships contain competing narratives. The subject has a story, the writer has a story, and the two don’t coincide exactly. They may diverge radically. Writer and subject each want something from the other. So what? Life is full of people with varied interests striking a deal. But a special moral hazard arises in the journalistic case, in the multiple opportunities for deception and in the imbalance of power. The relationship between subject and author, according to Malcolm, often amounts
to a mutual seduction, in which the journalist inevitably occupies the stronger position: “The moral ambiguity of journalism lies not in its texts but in the relationships out of which they arise—relationships that are invariably and inescapably lopsided.” You and your subject might, for instance, spend some of your time together trading stories about your lives, and you might let yourself imagine that this was a symmetrical part of your relationship, but only if you forget that your subject isn’t writing down
your
stories.

Malcolm makes another point that is instructive and cautionary for writers: “The metaphor of the love affair applies to both sides of the journalist-subject equation, and the journalist is no less susceptible than the subject to its pleasures and excitements.” (She goes on to talk about how Joe McGinniss’s lawyer tried to point out that this part of him, the friend part, was sincere in his dealings with MacDonald, even as the writer part went about his work, and Malcolm grudgingly admits that this is not as crazy as it sounds.) Malcolm continues: “An abyss lies between the journalist’s experience of being out in the world talking to people and his experience of being alone in a room writing.”

She might have gone on about this “abyss.” Surely anyone who has done a long stint of reporting recognizes the truth of the concept. One can sometimes feel a peculiar closeness to a subject, a compound of gratitude and sympathy, something that feels like true affection. And yet when the subject must in fact
become
a subject, must turn into words, that feeling changes. You the writer do not feel the same things you felt as interviewer and observer. And who is to know on which side of the abyss lies the true sentiment? But every journalist knows, and every reader
has a right to expect, that what gets expressed in print usually comes from the clear-eyed, not to say cold-hearted, writer serving the needs of the story.

Some potential subjects seem to understand that they have more than one motive for letting a writer into their lives. Here is an actual e-mail from a potential subject to a writer:

This degree of prior understanding is rare. However, journalists can help subjects think through the implications of letting writers into their lives. The essential precaution is clarity about the nature of the arrangements. Here are some steps one might consider taking: Assume that all potential subjects don’t understand what they might be getting into, and tell them what you know about the possible consequences, especially the unpleasant ones. Explain to subjects that there is no predicting how you will portray them or how they will feel about their portraits, or how readers will judge them, and that they can’t determine any of this because you cannot give them control over what you write. If they want to keep certain areas private, they must name them before your research begins in earnest. Most subjects insist
on boundaries. If you feel theirs are too restrictive, it’s probably better to withdraw than to argue your way to a grudging agreement that might well be taken back a year later. You should also explain that many people find it hard to be scrutinized, and that for the subject, reading your book may be like gazing into a fun-house mirror.