Robert S. Boynton, who teaches magazine writing at NYU and wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and most significantly, The New Yorker, suggests in this book of interviews that we are now in perhaps the fourth stage of a new American journalism, an accelerated form of telling the stories behind the news, nearly unique in the world. The method, Boynton maintains, stems from the “force, magnitude and sheer overpowering energy of the American experience,” and may be traced all the way back to 1833, “when The New York Sun began the transition from the partisan and mercantile press [four-page dailies stressing editorial opinion and financial news], to the practice of conveying events through “stories.” This meant wrapping facts in atmosphere and salting them with entertainment— institutionalized in the so-called “penny press” and “penny dreadful” (magazines) of the mid-19th century.
Gradually, pieces about hatchet murders in brothels and winged creatures on the moon, presented in the florid prose of men like James Gordon Bennett of The New York Herald, gave way to the editorial inclinations of more responsible personalities, such as Charles Dana of the 1880s’ Sun, who considered the newspaper story an art form; Dana combined “a focus on the everyday with a concern for vivid [writing].” One of his scribes, Jacob Riis, concentrated on New York City’s immigrant poor, and lent a muckraking quality to daily journalism that eventually produced the kind of reporting Lincoln Steffens did in McClure’s Magazine, and Stephen Crane published in The New York Tribune and other places — Steffens codified the emerging philosophy of the second New Journalism by insisting that the basic goals of the artist and journalist were the same: subjectivity, honesty, empathy. Out of this eventually came Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr, John Sack, Gay Talese — the Esquire and New York magazine crowds of the ’60s and ’70s, arguably the third incarnation — and now, according to Boynton, Ted Conover, Jon Krakauer, Alex Kotlowitz, William Langewiesche, and 15 others, a more reserved, less “flamboyant” crew of “new” New Journalists, a fourth dimension . . .
Ahem. Categorization is tricky when you get away from hard science. Boynton is absolutely correct in identifying a change from the Wolfe gang to the Conovers and Krakauers — a seemingly greater modesty, an emphasis on what he calls “immersion journalism,” in which the writer not only seeks to penetrate the subject’s head — as Tom Wolfe did so effectively in “Radical Chic,” his landmark New York cover story on Leonard Bernstein’s liberal slumming — but his/her life. Thus Ted Conover became a prison guard at Sing Sing for a year to report his book Newjack; and a cabdriver in Aspen in order to write Whiteout, about the excesses of cocaine celebrity culture there in 1991, when Don Johnson and Sheena Easton were king and queen of the priciest downhill slalom in the U.S. Likewise, Jon Krakauer haunted the trail of a young man, Chris McCandless, with whom he identified as an against-the-grain individualist and postmodern romantic in Into the Wild. McCandless was a Washington, D.C., native who buried himself in the Alaskan wilderness for unfathomable reasons, and eventually starved to death in 1992. Off the great success of that Outside magazine article and its book version, Krakauer was offered the chance to climb Mt. Everest with a heavily promoted guided expedition, and when the ascent proved fatal to eight of the 23 people who tried it in May 1996, he was left with another best-seller, Into Thin Air (his editors weren’t taking chances experimenting with titles). Again, Krakauer risked his life in the adventure, though he went as a reporter. Others of Boynton’s “new” New Journalists — Richard Ben Cramer, Jane Kramer, Alex Kotlowitz — are famous for spending enormous amounts of time eliciting essences from or about their subjects . . . Ben Cramer’s famous 13,000-word Ted Williams profile in Esquire, for example, or Kotlowitz’s finely detailed account of the lives of two Chicago brothers living in one of the city’s poorest housing projects, a 1991 book called There Are No Children Here.
But, having worked as a writer/editor for Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine, I’ve lived through stages III and IV of the New Journalism and the New New Journalism, and wonder if the differences in “immersion” are as dramatic as the changes in writing style are? I happened to be with both Gay Talese and John Sack socially while they were working on books, and was humbled by the intensity of their reporting: Talese, sitting in a MacDougal Street coffee house in the ’70s, left the table six times in two hours to pin down points in an interview he’d just conducted for his book Thy Neighbor’s Wife; he described the meticulousness of the interlocutory process — which was about “the sexual revolution”— and even began to quiz me on my attitudes toward fidelity (I was newly married); he said he’d done close to 300 interviews so far, and wasn’t finished, and that his writing process, painfully slow, would sometimes yield only a couple of lines or paragraphs a day; he was so concerned about the flow of his sentences that he would scan typed pages, pinned to a corkboard from across the room, with binoculars . . . Sack would literally exhaust people with the intensity of his questioning: in An Eye For an Eye, his enormously controversial account of reprisals taken by Jews in Poland against Germans in the aftermath of WWII, some of his subjects turned on him, refused to cooperate further, and disconnected their phones! For The Confessions of Lt. Calley, about one of the chief perpetrators of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which a U.S. Army unit exterminated a hamlet of mostly civilian Vietnamese peasants in a “free fire” zone as “Viet Cong,” he grew so close to his subject that his book—though a best-seller — was excoriated by critics for being “soft on fascism.” I remember one early morning in Esquire’s offices when Sack and Calley, after having been out on the town all night, horrified the staff by skipping down the hall together, holding hands.
It’s hard to imagine any New New Journalists immersing themselves any deeper than that. Krakauer got into some arguments with Anatoli Boukreev, one of the guides on the Everest climb after the fact, because he felt Boukreev left the mountain before all his clients were off, and because Krakauer was feeling guilty about profiting from such a tragedy; Alex Kotlowitz set up trust funds for the two ghetto brothers, Lafeyette (sic) and Pharoah, who were the subjects of his There Are No Children Here book, and the subsequent Oprah Winfrey made-for-TV movie of the same name. In the mid-’80s Ben Cramer bugged everyone on Islamorada Key in Florida from the mailman to Ted Williams’ bar buddies, barbers, gardeners, and fishing pals in order to build up a minute portrait of the hyper-reclusive baseball legend . . . But is this much different from Talese’s feat in perhaps the classic New Journalism (III) story, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” published in Esquire in 1965, in which the reporter never actually interviewed Sinatra on the record (or perhaps at all). The story was built up by impressions of him gathered from fly-on-the-wall sightings at recording sessions and nightclub outings, and by accretion, the best portrait of the mega-star’s personality yet recorded?
Furthermore, aren’t these techniques and methodologies classic in the “modern” writing canon? Ben Cramer himself cites Joseph Addison (who founded The Tatler in 1709, and with Richard Steele The Spectator in 1711, in London), as an inspirational influence: “I think of what we do as going back to the kinds of profiles [he] did. Addressing the reader and telling him a story. Promising . . . that if he spends time with your story then certain benefits will ensue, certain truths will be elucidated. I want my books and articles to have the same impact a novel has on a reader.” And in fact, it could be argued that François Rabelais’s 16th-century epic Gargantua and Pantagruel, based on true folk tales (in turn based on real events), was an early form of . . . dare I say it? Or that François Villon’s 15th-century poetry and ballads of theft and betrayal (“Ballad for my Girlfriend”), because of their spontaneous street slang, dark subject matter, and cynically brilliant velocity, were within the same line. Villon’s vernacular art certainly influenced Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer (1873). And going to extremes, Gorgias the Sophist’s (485-380 B.C.) arguments with Socrates and Plato, were in a certain populist narrative tradition that eventually included Euripides, Aristophanes, and skipping way ahead, Thomas Carlyle’s A History of the French Revolution, Parts I and II (1837), which reads amazingly like a noble version of Tom Wolfe. One could also claim Charles Dickens’ fiction and non-fiction, and the works of Lincoln Steffens and Stephen Crane, cited above. Then there were Upton Sinclair; Sinclair Lewis; Jack London; Celine, the French “novelist” (Death on the Installment Plan; Journey to the End of the Night, 1930s); Nelson Algren and James Jones (The Man With the Golden Arm; From Here to Eternity, respectively), who were two more American Celinian “novelists” in the ’40s and ’50s; Gregory Corso, the America Villon of the ’50s and ’60s (The Vestal Lady on Brattle; The Happy Birthday of Death); Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood; John Hersey, Lillian Ross, right on up to the stylistically radical journalists who preceded the “stars” who opened this piece. These predecessors included Lionel Olay and his protege Hunter S. Thompson, Gene Marine, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Gary Wills, Ron Rosenbaum (curiously included by Boynton as a New New Journalist), Lucian K. Truscott IV, J. Anthony Lucas, Sally Kempton, Barbara Long, Joan Didion, Jill Johnson, etc. An unrecognized line of “New Journalism” that is patently ancient . . . .
Boynton’s selections, though uniformly excellent and informative, are mostly restricted to New Yorker-style writers, a category of seemly traditionalists with whom the author is most comfortable, and whom one might imagine dressed in old Abercrombie & Fitch or Ben Silver catalogue clothing. Henry James and Edmund Wilson over Carlyle, Celine, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter Thompson’s infamous “gonzo” every time. Here’s Boynton again: “With their muckraking and intensive reporting on social and cultural issues, the New Journalists have revived the tradition of American literary journalism, raising it to a more popular and commercial level that neither its 19th- or late-20th-century predecessors ever imagined [!]The debates over ‘journalism’ and ‘literature’ — between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ reporting — weigh less heavily on this generation, freeing them to combine the best of both genres. Having done so without manifestos [a slap at Wolfe’s New Journalism Declaration of the ’70s], the New New Journalism has assumed a premier place in American literature.”
Some of his own examples in this book, however, undermine his case. I’m thinking of the Wolfean explosiveness of Ben Cramer on Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio, for example; or the extraordinary emotional empathy of Jane Kramer for Henry Blanton, whom she memorialized in her book The Last Cowboy; or William Langeweische’s precise humanity in The Atlantic Monthly’s “American Ground,” the story of the political fallout of the clean-up battles following 9/11 at the World Trade Center site. These writers bring a mature emotion to their reporting lacking in the neat, privileged formulations of Conover, Kotlowitz, Krakauer, and especially Michael Lewis, who all concentrate their laser focus on getting the facts and not overdoing it.
The result has been a growing Brooks Brothers writing grayness over the last 20 years, that may be a function of the devolution of U.S. culture as a whole. My late friend Mark Kram, uncollected and unremarked by The New Yorker but a damned fine stylist for Sports Illustrated and Esquire when those magazines were still breaking ground, used to call it "stenography": a certain insistence on calm and good cheer as the hurrican threatened to blow you off the front porch: "Beware the flattening of the culture, buddy," he warned, only half-kidding. "The cutting edge of the middle of the road will kill you."

—John Lombardi

Self-styled literary tough Leon “Hit ’em Where they Think” Wieseltier took the contract on Haverford’s own Nicholson Baker’s latest novel with obvious relish: “This scummy little book,” he began in his Sunday New York Times review of Checkpoint, Baker’s 10th effort, and then proceeded to furl and unfurl the stars and stripes over his subsequent mugging, to obscure the bloodshed a little . . .
What had Baker done to deserve this? Published the first fictional cri de coeur from a serious man of letters against the war in Iraq: “[The] book treats the question of whether the problems that now beset our cherished and anxious country may be solved by the shooting of its president,” Wieseltier avers, getting max shock leverage before correcting his own neocon propaganda in the very next line: “Nicholson Baker’s novel does not advocate the assassination of George W. Bush,” he sneers, “ . . . [Checkpoint] . . . is more cunning. [It] comes armored in ambiguity about its own character” — by making Jay, the protagonist, an obvious loser; and by providing a rational foil, a friend named Ben, who acts as a conscience, and in the end talks his man off the point.
Morally, though, these are just hypocritical devices that barely mask the unexamined hysteria that motivates most liberals today, according to Wiesel. As the literary editor of The New Republic, a pro-Israel hawk, and guardian against American “soft” thinking wherever it pokes up its fluffy head, he regularly operates as a kind of rightist Madame Defarge. A few years ago, in a piece I did for New York magazine on the late John Sack’s controversial non-fiction book An Eye for an Eye, about a group of Polish Jews who’d turned the tables on their Nazi tormentors and presided over the deaths of 60,000 of them in their own (German) concentration camps, he told me: “I’m not embarrassed to say that as part of my job of policing the culture [sic], I felt that the sooner we stopped this book the better.” (The strategy worked; the book was largely ignored, despite a supportive report on “60 Minutes”.) Wieseltier was justifying his position because he was afraid Sack’s book would prove useful to traditional anti-Semites. So he commissioned a hit to a Harvard Holocaust expert. This man ignored much of the subtlety of Sack’s reporting, and Wieseltier allowed it on the grounds that Eye was “one of the stupidest books I’ve ever read, and I frankly resolved to do as much damage as I could.”
Smarter than Thou, then. Against Nicholson Baker, this tactic manifests as a reductionist critique: “Most of the novel is taken up with Jay’s denunciations of the war in Iraq,” and like his other “creepy hermeneutical toys” (The Mezzanine, 1986; Room Temperature, 1990; Vox, 1992; The Fermata, 1994, etc.), “is much too close to its subject . . .” For which read “emotional,” and as tightly focused as a Michael Mann film—no-nos, except for when Wieseltier himself is filleting someone he disagrees with.
Baker’s working method, to take deceptively limited situations and then exhaust them in the micro/macro traditions of our recent cultural past, such as Don DeLillo’s death of rock ’n roll novel Great Jones Street; or Robert Persig’s wondrous Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; or Bob Dylan’s truly hermeneutical It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) — but on his own post-postmodernistic force-field — bugs Wieseltier. It’s self-indulgent and sub-intellectual, he sniffs. Mezzanine, for example, happened on a lunch break, for God’s sake, and saw Him through the cataloguing of footnotes on ice-cube-making and the dynamics of straws (!); Room Temperature was ostensibly about feeding a bottle to a baby (the whole novel), but really plumbs the psychodynamics of nurturing; Vox was phone sex as technological highway back to the primitive . . . Checkpoint is a wonderfully nutty Sid Caesar/Carl Reiner TV skit that polevaults over protest to reconnect with bellylaugh exegesis: “Actually, Cheney’s first job in Washington was working for Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity—Johnson set that up to help poor people,” Ben tells Jay. “Then Nixon took over, and he went, ‘We’ll show those poor people, heh, heh, heh’ . . . ; “Soon they’re going to discover some hormonal thing that leads to right-wing behavior,” Jay guffaws back, “some very specific deficiency combined with an overdose. You end up mean-spirited, with a high, whiny voice . . . ”; “I swear the CIA was a magnet for every drunk and . . . paranoid wack flake . . . who’d gotten a college degree,” he continues, “ . . . the people who are drawn like moths to covert action, the guys who want to lie and spoof their way through life ... depressives who keep trying to lift their mood with higher and higher stakes” [one thinks immediately of the current threats to bomb Iran’s nuclear reactor.] . . . So then you have a whole government agency filled to the gills with sneaks and wackos, and the money is flowing like wine. Obviously they’re going to screw it up every single time . . . . Every covert action we’ve ever engaged in has made the world worse. Every one.”
The most valuable things about Nicholson Baker today are his willingness to irrigate current politically correct truisms with humor; to make a holy fool of himself if need be; and to try to crack through the graduated layers of numb that have been encircling us like a forest of Disney trees since, oh, TV and computers began to flatten our notions of how to communicate. It’s as if he wanted to preserve messy shards of tactile reality as an endangered species, like mountain gorillas, or the duck-billed platypus . . . to belch and break wind against an Iraqi “war” he sees as “ushering a new kind of terribleness into the world” (civilian contract soldiers as mercenaries and torturers) . . . the U.S. military’s death toll hovering near 2,300, the Iraqis’ at close to 32,000, while William Kristol rationalizes with his “sad, sickly smile,” and Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes (of The New Republic!) “cheerfully chat” on TV . . . .
So neo-cons like Wieseltier mistrust such emotion so severely they feel the need to brand it “dumb,” the ultimate sin in a Web-site world. Thus: “There are those who believe the Democrats cannot succeed without the politics of the sewer”; and “ . . . there are no good reasons to be rid of intelligence in our public life,”political lines worthy of Mary Matalin, masquerading as literary criticism.
Since he’s an alumnus, though, let’s give Nick Baker the last word:
“ . . . people really have a desperate need to keep the lid clamped on for as long as possible, because when that kettle blows, and that foulness spews up toward the sky, then we’re going to see how rotten it’s been . . . . A great and shining nation . . . tripe . . . a bunch of greedy meddlers who don’t know the first thing about the countries we’re dealing with,” Jay howls.
And Ben, more reasonable, replies: "Generally we know the first thing, but not the second and third."

—J.L.

By Edmund Faltermayer '49
Clouds Go Wild
The late Edmund Faltermayer, who graduated with honors in English and went on to gain a master of arts from Harvard in Russian Studies in 1953, and who worked as a journalist for The Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine for most of his career, produced a children’s book as one of his last acts. (He passed away of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, “Lou Gehrig’s disease,” in 2003.) The book, Clouds Go Wild, is an environmentally sensitive story about the wonders of nature and the dangers of over-development, told in a style reminiscent of Dickens combined with Borges’ “magical realism”; it combines brilliant description with moral impetus as narrative drive. Based on some real-life situations, it tells how sixth-grader Roderick Ringley is able to use his love of snow to block a project that would have replaced a beautiful cross-country ski area with an ugly strip mall:
“Snow was war and peace: giggling snowball battles by day and incredible quiet at sunset . . . icicles dripping, tires spinning, shovels clinking . . . . Tall, bare oak trees . . . etched against a cold pink-orange sky . . . and the small of log fires. . . . where dinner was steaming away . . . . Right after a new snow, life is as close to perfect as it gets.”
Faltermayer began Clouds Go Wild after the blizzard of February 1978, when 18 inches of snow hit the Westfield, New Jersey, area where he lived. As his disease progressed, he let his wife Frances and daughter Charlotte Faltermayer Dolling, a Time magazine contributor, know that since he’d labored so long and lovingly on his work of fiction, he’d prefer that it not be heavily revised, as is the case with most journalism during the normal editing process. (It’s a sentiment dear to non-fiction writers everywhere.)
So after a period of negotiating with New York publishers, Frances Faltermayer and Charlotte Faltermayer Dolling decided to self-publish, and that process is in the works. At present, both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble are involved; copies also may be ordered by visiting www.cloudsgowild.com or by calling AuthorHouse at (888) 280-7715.
Charlotte Faltermayer Dolling gave birth to her son Max on January 4, 2005, exactly two years after he father died. She says she believes "There is some kind of completion there."

-J.L.