The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution Read Online Free PDF Page A

the bouillon? Take that can of water off the stove. Never mind the washing up, chop this celery. No, not like that, you fool, like this. There! Look at you letting those peas boil over!”
    This is Orwell the incipient novelist using an insider’s observations to gird a social critique, a reporter replicating the grinding, unrelenting nature of menial labor using a fiction writer’s tools. Orwell’s descriptive powers create a vividly grim tableau. He and his fellow beggars “defiledthe scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the seashore.” A septuagenarian tramp resembled “a herring-gutted starveling.” Boredom “clogged our souls like cold mutton fat.” More so than Jack London, Orwell wanted to transcend the stereotypes and fashion a more nuanced portrait of life lived on the margins. In
Down and Out
, poverty isn’t monolithic; even the tramps themselves have their own subtle class snobbery, and self-loathing drips from their disparaging comments about their fellow beggars.
    The irony of
Down and Out in Paris and London
is that its verisimilitude is in some respects fabricated. Orwell admitted in
The Road to Wigan Pier
that “nearly all the incidents described … actually happened, though they have been rearranged,” though what “nearly” means remains open to debate. In the introduction to the French edition of the book, published in 1935, Orwell wrote that “all the characters I have described in both parts of the book are intended more as representative types… than as individuals.” As his biographer Bernard Crick has pointed out, Orwell admired Dickens’s talent for “telling small lies in order to emphasize what he regards as a big truth.” In Orwell’s determination to tell the big truth, he smooths over the messy road bumps of his narrative, conflating characters into composites, or creating them out of whole cloth if necessary.
    This was to became a major tenet of New Journalism three decades later—blurring facts and characters like a watercolorist to arrive at some greater emotional or philosophical truth. To this day, journalists grapple with the notion of creating composites, and gifted writers such as Gail Sheehy have been harshly criticized for doing so. For traditional journalists and critics of New Journalism, it’s the antithesis of the well-ordered inverted pyramid technique, but Orwell’s story throws the pyramid’s limitations into bold relief. Lazy journalists can abuse composites, distorting facts into fabulism. But Orwell isn’t excluding or altering facts so much as he’s reordering them, molding the raw material into something compact and cohesive, so that the archetypes can work as representative characters, and his story retains its narrative power.
    With the advent of World War II and an epic litany of atrocities to report, journalists brought the global terror home by way of newspaper dispatches and the major newsweeklies, particularly
Time
and
Newsweek
.A handful of journalists, most notably the Scripps-Howard syndicate’s Ernie Pyle, managed to convey scenes of graphic horror with a painterly knack for the quotidian. But there were limitations to the ways in which correspondents could report on the horrors of war. In a global conflict that pitted the forces of good against evil, there was little room for nuance or ambiguity and lots of opportunities to beat the drum for American triumphalism.
    The New Yorker
, a magazine that found many of its male contributors conscripted into the war effort, published the most imaginative war correspondence. A. J. Liebling, a veteran of the
New York World-Telegram
, was a master of the low-life profile. A staff writer for the magazine’s Talk of the Town section, where he was confined to a few hundred words, Liebling flexed his artistic muscle in the longer pieces he wrote for the magazine, where religious hucksters, bookies, boxers, tummlers, and other fast-buck hustlers were lovingly and humorously portrayed. Liebling,