Silliman's Papers

Humanity, Rendered in Ink:
The pathos of life and the glories of New Journalism
By Daniel Silliman

I was sitting in a small-town, Midwest courtroom wearing a red tie at 8:35 a.m., Wednesday. I’m not used to wearing a tie on weekdays—I just don’t have to—I’m not used to being somewhere at this time of day, and it’s been nine months since I’ve been in a courtroom. I was there, at that hour wearing that tie in a place that looked like a model of 1950s décor, waiting to hear the sentencing of a fellow student charged with stealing two credit cards and trying to buy two gold necklaces and a bracelet.

In 20 minutes, before the college day began, I saw four men—two young, two old—appear before the court for destroying their lives and I saw them swear that everything was different now, and promise to change everything. Drugs, alcohol, driving with a four-year-old girl in the front seat of a pickup truck unbuckled while running a red light and drinking the fifth beer—these men were confessing their sins and testifying to their salvation.

“I’m starting intensive counseling tonight” … “I understand, sir” … “I had to look in my little girls eyes” … “Yes sir” … “This is the fifth time you’ve been arrested for this” … “You’re getting older. The next time you come through here won’t be easier” … “I don’t want to see you in here again in a month” … “Lay off the hard stuff. Have a pop with your kid” … “You need to change.”

What I saw, on the way to the story, was humanity.

Not that humanity was good to see. Humanity had a dumb look in its eye and had forgotten to shave and its suit didn’t fit and it was lying and it knew it was hurting others and didn’t care. I know because I saw it Wednesday morning before class while sitting in a courtroom in the middle of a Midwest town waiting for a guy named Ed who had blown his future when he decided to buy a gold chain with somebody else’s credit card.

Tom Wolfe, the New Journalist (pretty much the definition of New Journalism) and now a famous novelist, said writers should never cover politics. They should avoid the world of Associated Press reports; releases stripped of humanness and filled with “information” as they can be. Writers who were good and writers who wanted to be good should turn to features: they should cover crime, or culture, describing the life of men and the world we live in.

“All I ever did was write about the world we inhabit, the world of culture, with a capital C, and journalism and the arts and so on, with exactly the same tone that I wrote about everything else,” Wolfe said in an interview with Rolling Stone.

Wolfe didn’t discover this New Journalism, reporting the vivaciousness of life by representing it vivaciously, sitting in a little courtroom. He took to New Journalism (or literary journalism or gonzo journalism or parajournalism or whatever journalism), after years of playing with the ideas and tendencies. He was covering a hot-rod and custom car show in New York City. It should have been a dull story. Car shows—along with animal shows and old men’s hobbies and drunk driving charges and local fires—are for the cub reporters, the young punk who still needs to show he can handle a story. Wolfe looked at the car show and found a subculture. On the way to a story, a typical story written too many times, Wolfe found humanity and in the discovery found a way to render humanity in newspaper ink.

Wolfe wrote of LSD trippers, Manhattan high-class groupies, tough astronauts, rock tycoons, teenage lovers, high-powered real estate brokers, stockbrokers, meat packers, and politicians. Wolfe wrote of all them, using the medium of journalism and the technique of realistic novel. Recognizing the natural drama of life, Wolfe—and the others that took the same style—transported the techniques of fiction into feature writing. They built the stories scene by scene, recorded full dialogues with all the variances of speech and thus involving the reader in the nature of the character, introducing the narrator to the story, and recording everyday gestures.

The techniques are interesting, but they aren’t the key to New Journalism—the thing about New Journalism, the thing that made it “new” and the thing about it that was really old, was putting people on the page. This was the thing that every feature writer in every paper in every town wanted to do but couldn’t get past stories that were all syrup and the novel. The feature writers and an awful lot of the news writers were looking at the newspaper as a motel, as Wolfe put it, a stopover to build up some experience and work the fat of your writing while you prepared to write The Novel. But, Tom Wolfe showed the world that humanity doesn’t need The Novel, all it needs is a few more inches and black ink and a good eye for detail. Then it will come spilling onto the page—lazy, aggressive, weeping, grinning, laughing, playing, waving its hands and doing all the things that make it human, right their on the printed page.