THE FACT IN FICTION
445
and feature stories, and his specialty, you might say, was police
reporting-he visited suspects (usually female) in prison, inter–
viewed them, and wrote up his impressions; he also reported
trials. Victor Hugo too was a confirmed prison-visitor; his
"impressions" of prisons and of current political events–
demonstrations, tumults, street-fighting-are collected in
Choses
Vues.
Tolstoy first became widely known through
his
reports
from Sebastopol, where he was serving as a young officer in the
Crimean War; he was telling the news, the true, uncensored
story of the Siege of Sebastopol, to the civilians back home,
and throughout Tolstoy's work, most noticeably in
War and
Peace
but in fact everywhere, there is heard the scathing direct–
ness of the young officer's tone, calling attention to the real facts
behind the official dispatches-the real facts of war, sex, family
life, glory, love, death. As he wrote in his second sketch from
Sebastopol (which was immediately suppressed by the Czar),
"The hero of my story . . . is-the Truth." Coming to the
twentieth century, you meet the American novelist as news–
paperman: Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, O'Hara,
Faulkner himself. The American novelist as newspaperman, in
the 'twenties, became a stock figure in the American myth, so
much so that the terms could be inverted and every obscure
newspaperman, according to popular belief, had in his desk
drawer, besides a pint of whiskey, the great American novel he
was writing in his spare time.
There is another kind of "fact" literature closely related to
the novel, and that is the travel book, which tells the news of
the exotic. Melville's first book,
T ypee,
was a book of travel,
and you find something of the travelogue in Conrad, Kipling,
and a good deal of D. H. Lawrence:
Aaron's Rod, The Plumed
Serpent, Kangaroo,
"The Woman Who Rode Away." There
is very little difference, really, between
Kangaroo,
a novel about
Australia, and
Sea and Sardinia,
a travel book about Lawrence
himself and Frieda in Sardinia. Hemingway remains half a war
correspondent and half an explorer;
The Green HiUs of Africa
