Journalists Who Make History

BY ALISTAIR COOKE

THERE is a very odd, and enduring, contradiction between the prejudice of the intelligentsia that today’s journalism is a debased form of literature and history, and the steady belief of historians that yesterday’s journalism is one of the most authentic of documentary sources. Shrapnel on a mouse race, Tynan on a bad play, Gerard Fay on a first glimpse of Moscow delight the breakfast reader and give him a sharp sense of a part of contemporary life, focused and arrested for keeps, that may remain memorable long after passages in his own private life are faded and forgotten. Yet the sensitive hacks scraping a living from the definitive biography or the big novel keep on telling us that journalism is one of the “enemies of promise” and that nothing dissipates the mobilizing of one’s best energies so much as the thousandword dispatch, the five-hundred-word review, the fifteen-minute broadcast. Meanwhile, the historians (who privately share this contempt for journalists alive and kicking) go on salvaging, as precious artifacts of dead cultures, Defoe’s account of fish curing at Bideford, W. H. Russell’s dispatches from the American Civil War, Pepys on almost everything, from the taste of an indifferent dinner to the glance of a pretty girl in church.

There is a strong strain of snobbery in this, a distaste for admiring something here and now that may be thought mediocre tomorrow; it is a protective reflex as strong as that of the three internationally famous museum curators who, faced with a disputed Van Gogh, brought in an “on the one hand, on the other hand” verdict and left it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s chemists to prove the painting’s authenticity. Pepys and Defoe, after all, were hardly literature in their day. One was a fussy gossip, the other a timeserving pamphleteer, a hind let loose. Yet, like all good journalists they kept their eye on the object, and today no synthetic historical account of the Great Plague, put together from no matter how many contemporary documents, can compete in dreadful accuracy with Defoe’s jottings in his journal about a teen-age girl moaning in an alleyway or a desperate father scrawling the fateful cross on his front door. It is possible that we are moved by these fragments today far more than we should have been if we had been alive at the time and seen the raw material of the journal all around us.

My argument against the enemies-of-promise boys must be, then, that either they cannot recognize one species of literature on the wing but must wait for it to be pinned and classified and preserved in amber, or that they are ignorant of the peculiar and demanding craft of journalism in an age which is, above all preceding others, the age of the journalist. Big and little tomes, of varying pretentiousness, are written every year to measure the forces that, say, pushed Franklin Roosevelt into the presidency. And innumerable other tomes are written to gauge the effect of the Freudian doctrine on the sexual behavior of a college-trained generation. Yet the best account of the forces that brought FDR to the presidency, the most vivid, informed, and judicial, is H. L. Mencken’s report to the Baltimore Sunpapers of the nomination of Roosevelt, written on a steaming, sticky night in 1932; and the immortal assessment of the sex mores of the people who study the virility ads in liberal-intellectual weeklies is contained in a casual piece of Westbrook Pegler’s called “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Love.” But the time to say so is now, not in 1990, when applicants for a Ph.D. in the social sciences will diligently discover that Mencken in his day was Bryce with all his senses bristling, or that Pegler had a feel for our peculiarly humorless view of sex that escaped the attested contemporary experts, both Kinsey and Riesman, to say nothing of Freud and, so help us, the writhing D. H. Lawrence. It is pretty safe to say that Harvard and the London School of Economics between them will, in a few decades or so, make the dispatches of James Morris and Michael Adams in the Manchester Guardian compulsory reading for any student of the Suez debacle.

While the juice is still in these pieces, let us use them to honor, as Mr. Auden puts it, “the vertical man.” the writer who must say what is on his mind against the twilight’s deadline, the professional scribbler who stands or falls by his ability to see clearly and write fast and who must learn to overcome the nagging self-conceit of the “serious” full-time writer, whose “craven scruple of thinking too precisely on th’event” is too often rationalized as an itch for perfection. The truth is (and it is as true of Hemingway or Reinhold Niebuhr as of James Reston or Red Smith) that all the pieces cannot be good. Once the journalist understands this and, while straining his pump to the limit, resigns himself to the fact that some pieces flow while others fizzle, he can feed his secret ambition to write the perfect report, the flawless piece, so long as life and curiosity are in him.

There is less difference than the intelligentsia would have us believe between the daily grind of the “serious” novelist or biographer in his cloister and the reporter filing his daily dispatch with the wind of the world in his face. They are both writing “pieces.” The monkish pro has a scene to finish or a chapter to defeat; the secular pro has an event to trap, a flavor to identify. They are, whatever the theoretical conditions of their freedom to pause and polish, both working in spurts and against a measured mile. The disparity between the quality of their stuff is still no more or less than that between two men of different talent; it has very little to do with the accidental binding of one man’s pieces into a book and the scattering of the other man’s pieces into a hundred issues of his paper.

Consider two professional writers, one a novelist, the other a reporter, of absolutely equal gifts. (The task of filling in the names I’d rather leave to you.) One of them groans and labors in his locked study for a year and at the end of it resumes the duties of parenthood and friendship. His work is scrupulously assessed for gold, and he may count on a studious review in the Times Literary Supplement. The other man labors and groans about as hard, but a little faster, in the press rooms of hotels, on the tablecloths of hundred-dollar-a-plate dinners, at the edge of crowds. His stuff is in print next morning, and the professional literary critics, if they even mention him, grant him a certain talent but one crippled by the forced labor attendant on a deadline.

Justice Holmes learned about this prejudice in his first years on the Supreme Court. He was in the habit of studying the opposing briefs as soon as they were argued. He would brood on them for a day or two at most and write and deliver his opinion. This habit, which was natural to his temperament, alarmed his colleagues and spread the rumor that he was a glib and offhand fellow. He accordingly changed his routine while staying true to his bent. He wrote his opinion as before but aged it in a desk drawer for a month or two and then uncorked it for his brethren. He thereby, he later disclosed, acquired that reputation for mellow judgment and judicial restraint which guaranteed his subsequent transfer to Olympus.

Of course, I have overstated the case and seem to be implying that one good reporter is worth a school of novelists. It is true that most journalism is dead the moment it hits the page and that only the dignity of print makes it appear impressive to people whose own private correspondence is at least as memorable. The so-called tabloids, in England far more than in America, have since World War II reached a nadir of cliché and egotism rarely plumbed in English periodical literature, so that the New York Daily News, as the best example, stands out across three thousand miles as a monument to expert popular journalism.

My main point is that journalism is good and bad; it is not bad because it is journalism but because it is abominably written; that is to say, its material is tritely observed, crudely felt, and foggily communicated. The same may be said of a great many medical papers, historical monographs, and nearly all sociological treatises. In truth, the journalist is merely the scapegoat of all professionals who put pen to paper. By now, I hope the reasons have been sufficiently rehearsed why so many otherwise intelligent people condemn him to the literary ghetto.