Good Prose (13 page)

You might want to phrase this admission more delicately, or recite it over a beer. But it is best to be forthright, and sometimes even forbidding, at the start of a project, when you have nothing to lose except what you think might make for a good story. And it’s wise to have evidence that you have been at least forthright, perhaps in an exchange of letters or e-mails, or in a recording (being sure that it includes the fact that subjects know they’re being recorded).

Such measures can erode the natural sympathy you hope to engender, but they can also prevent the sort of misunderstanding that, well short of a lawsuit, can be devastating to your project. And, most important, these warnings can serve as an acknowledgment that you are something more and less than a friend.

Sometimes subjects actually turn into friends. (And in the case of memoir, friends can turn into subjects, which can be even trickier.) If you feel a true emotional concern about your subjects during your research, do you then intervene in their lives? Adrian Nicole LeBlanc faced this question during the ten years she spent working on
Random Family
, a book that depends utterly on the author’s evident sympathy for her subjects. She sometimes helped out the women she was writing about, by giving them small cash advances, by babysitting for them, by driving
them to the hospital or jail. She was criticized for this, but in the special circumstances of her research, these acts seem only humane and a long way from so-called checkbook journalism, from paying subjects for their stories.

LeBlanc still occasionally sees the people she wrote about. They tell her she’s not as much fun as she used to be. That is because now she really is a friend, treating them as a friend would—speaking up when she thinks they’re doing something foolish, whereas before she felt constrained to remain an observer.

Janet Malcolm’s jeremiad can’t be dismissed. It is, however, willfully oblivious to the many good things that can happen between writer and subject, good things that can far outweigh misunderstandings and wounded feelings. And the Malcolm worldview seems to discount the great work that can be produced.

•

Even outside the pages of crime fiction, reporters are prone to cynicism of the universal-prejudice variety: the worst that can be thought about another human being must be true, simply because it is the worst. This is a quick way to feel smart—to see beneath the surfaces of things without even having to look. But of course cynicism limits, a priori, what can be discovered about other human beings. The truly cynical reporter never knows the pleasure, or relief, of submerging the self to try to understand another self, serving the self by escaping the self.

The source of what we love about a monumental writer like Chaucer is the breadth of his disposition toward humanity. This is the great thing about
The Canterbury Tales
, that there is room
in Chaucer’s philosophy for all his characters, from the bawdy Wife of Bath to the hypocritical Pardoner. Chaucerian room is a breadth of imagination. It isn’t guaranteed by a breadth of experience, which can just as easily narrow as enlarge one’s general view of other human beings. Successful imagination does not imply an endorsement of stupidity, viciousness, and evil, or an abandonment of judgment. A reporter should go out into the world armed with skepticism and disposed to question press releases. And there’s nothing wrong with carrying hypotheses and expectations about what you’re going to find, so long as you also bring along what Ron Suskind calls “the willingness to be surprised.” This isn’t very hard to cultivate, once you discover—a constant in reporting—that your preconceptions were wrong. Finding this out can be bracing. It can feel as if you’re making real discoveries when you first, or once again, discover that the world is too complex to be imagined fully, that it needs to be watched.

There is another, essentially spiritual concern for nonfiction writers. It has to do not so much with loyalty to one’s truth or to one’s subjects’ truth as with loyalty to oneself. George Orwell defines the subject in his essay “Why I Write.” He begins to answer the question by relating a number of influences that writers can easily relate to—he was a bookish child, loved stories, and so on. Then he makes a surprising turn with the following passage:

This passage, written in 1946, only one lifetime ago, seems unnatural to some contemporary ears. The passage can make one dream of an age when there was one cause in the Western world to which all could be subsumed. At the same time, one resists Orwell’s sentiment. This is a reflexive reaction perhaps, because for the whole of most current literary lives no language has been more suspect than the language of political assertion. And much of this suspicion is owed to George Orwell himself, well known for having described the violence that politics can do to the English language.

Most contemporary writers, most of the time, have lived, as writers, by a code very different from the code of political engagement. They have sought truth outside the world of public affairs. This is a code nicely expressed by Mark Kramer in his introduction to the anthology
Literary Journalism:

What a chasm seems to lie between these two worldviews. How modest Kramer’s claim that the “literary journalist” might in some way act politically—act that way, in effect, by not acting that way, by not directly engaging the great forces that dominate our time. This is how many of the current generation of writers have lived, at least as writers. Or so it sometimes seems.

One would never want to say that writing has not played a part in great events, but its power to do so has never been straightforward or certain. James Agee’s
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
is a book of social protest, an enduring portrait of the miseries of Depression-era southern sharecroppers. It is felt to be a classic now, but was ignored during the era it describes. Even John Milton could go unheard in his time.
Areopagitica
, his eloquent plea for freedom of expression, was addressed directly
to the British Parliament, which, we are told, ignored it. But countless writers of the past clearly believed in the
possibility
of affecting their times through writing. Certainly some modern nonfiction writers lack that faith—or have been cured of it. But not all, and many who may indeed lack the faith still strive to write “politically.” The essayists who publish their reasoned protests in small-circulation magazines, for instance. Or the journalists who believe that recounting the experiences of individuals is one powerful means of describing the real costs of an era’s social ills, and who feel that even if their protest isn’t heard, it will be lodged; that there is value in “bearing witness.”

In 2012, an American writer named Katherine Boo published a book about a slum called Annawadi, situated near the international airport and opulent hotels in Mumbai. The book,
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
, is built on the intersecting stories of several families and individuals in the slum: garbage pickers, petty thieves, worried parents, all victims of gruesome poverty and outrageous injustice. This is difficult material transformed by story, by Boo’s skill in making those unfortunate people real—people with hopes and plans and flaws and virtues, all looking for ways to improve their lives, people at bottom not all that different from anyone else, people the reader roots for and occasionally against. One hardly notices while reading their stories that the author is also supplying some of the sociopolitical context in which the stories occur, not a sanitized but a distilled context, so lightly insinuated that we
feel
we understand the forces that afflict these people.

It is only at the end of this book, in her “Author’s Note,” that
Boo addresses us directly. We learn that she spent almost four years in Annawadi, conducting, among other things, both interviews and door-to-door household surveys. (The “vagrant sociology approach,” she calls this. She also collected, laboriously, more than three thousand official documents.) She allows that the story of one slum can never be called “representative of a country as huge and diverse as India.” But, she writes, “I was struck by commonalities with other poor communities in which I’ve spent time.” She writes briefly but persuasively on several big subjects in this note—about corruption, for instance, telling us that one of its great and underacknowledged effects is “a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe.”

And she also tells us her intentions: “When I settle into a place, listening and watching, I don’t try to fool myself that the stories of individuals are themselves arguments. I just believe that better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives.” This is one contemporary author’s “Why I Write.” Her approach is different from Orwell’s but the spirit is much the same. She too, it seems, is trying to make political writing an art.

The passage from Orwell and the contemporary code expressed by Kramer—“Truth is in the details of real lives”—represent a spectrum of possibility for a writer. No one should presume to tell anyone where to fit on this spectrum, but one should recognize that it exists. Even those who have been trained in a language of distance and irony toward everything institutional, and especially toward government, must feel from time to time that there is something that justifies thinking in Orwell’s
terms—that there is something about one’s own time that demands response. But what response, and how to make it? One can only say it is possible that writers live most fully when their work moves beyond performance, beyond entertainment or information, beyond pleasing audience and editor, when it does all that and yet represents their most important beliefs.

H. W. Fowler’s
Modern English Usage
belongs on every writer’s shelf, and there it was on mine, but the book became a real presence in my life only when William Whitworth took over as the eleventh editor of
The Atlantic Monthly.
Whitworth had no connection with New England. He grew up in Arkansas and still had the soft accent of the region, and he had previously worked as a senior editor at
The New Yorker,
but in a way he was more Boston than Boston itself, proper and punctilious. Before Whitworth, most of the editors concentrated on politics, foreign affairs, literary trends, and long lunches, not always in that order. The finer points of grammar and punctuation were handled on another floor. But under Whitworth, commas became everybody’s business. He quickly became known for his acute, if sometimes demoralizing, marginal comments on proofs. He wrote with a mechanical pencil in a tiny but astonishingly legible hand. Most maddening of all was his occasional apology—“I’m reading fast”—appended to an observation that most editors could not have made if they had taken all day. His comments often concerned subtle grammatical violations, and after noting one, such as “a possessive can’t be an antecedent,” he might add, “See Fowler.” “See Fowler” became a popular sotto voce mutter among the temporarily traumatized staff.
We had not thought ourselves in need of reform, but a reformer was upon us
.

Kidder ran afoul of Whitworth’s pencil more than once. He (that is, Kidder: a possessive can’t be an antecedent, remember?) submitted his first manuscript of the new regime on “corrasable bond,” the thin paper that once made life easy for erring typists. “Never again this paper, please,” said the tiny handwriting, darker and more emphatic than usual and suggestive of strong feeling. Kidder, no doubt encouraged by my grumblings, had already formed a low opinion of the interloper who was threatening the clubhouse good spirits of the magazine where we had both been trying to make our mark. Kidder did not take this rebuff well
.