PARTISAN REVIEW
299
recent "revivals" of the thirties and forties should set us straight: movies,
pop songs, makeup, hair styles-- these were the true changes, not
unions, fascism, world war. It is style that matters, not politics; pleasure,
not power; status, not class; the illusion of thinking, not thought. New
Journalism is the noticing of the new way.
What about the twenty-three examples of "the first new direction
in American literature in the last fifty years?" Let it be said on behalf of
most of the contributors, the claim is Wolfe's, not theirs. It is a mixed
group, some of it journalism only in the loosest construction. Capote's
In
Cold Blood
appeared several years after the events, had no relation to
what we normally call news, and belongs to an older practice of picking
up stories in the press and
imagining
them into novel form.
It
is the kind
of novel of which
An American Tragedy
is the most distinguished ex–
ample; Henry James's notebooks show him fascinated with similar
sources. Capote and Mailer are smuggled into the book.
Armies of the
Night
is a sustained reflection on events and their meanings, and reflec–
tion is one kind of thinking, or the illusion of such, notably scarce
elsewhere in the book. Some of the pieces grow out of news-making
events, such as Vietnam; others are examples of what we can still call
political reporting, interviews with celebrities, "in-depth" stories of
specific social types (the detective, the Hollywood producer), "human
interest" accounts of murderers and their backgrounds. Some are fine
jobs of reporting, written with insight, sympathy, conviction, and a
desire to communicate a point of view. The Vietnam stories (especially
Michael Herr's), Gary Wills's "Martin Luther King is Still on the Case,"
James Mills's "The Detective," and Joan Didion's "Some Dreamers of
the Golden Dream" are the best. Judged as writing, journalism new or
old, fiction or nonfiction, these are good, worthwhile pieces of work.
In fact there is nothing new in writing narratives of firsthand experi–
ences in contemporary society with dialogue, scene, dramatization.
Edmund Wilson did it better than anyone in the book in his trial cover–
ages in the twenties and in "American Jitters." Wolfe has a section in his
pseudoscholarly appendix called "Is the New Journalism Really New,"
and lists earlier "Not Half-Bad Candidates." He mentions some obvious
names: Mark Twain in
Innocents Abroad,
Stephen Crane, John Reed,
Orwell. (Agee is dismissed earlier as "a great disappointment." True, "he
showed enterprise enough, going to the mountain and moving in briefly
with a mountain family." But "reading between the lines I would say
that his problem was extreme personal diffidence. His account abounds
in 'poetic' descriptions and is very short on dialogue.") But Wolfe misses
the point of the examples. They exist because the phenomenon is as old
as the newspaper. Moreover, since the late nineteenth century it has been
