How creative nonfiction stormed the gates of academia
THE FINE ART OF LITERARY FIST-FIGHTING How a bunch of rabble-rousers, outsiders, and ne’er-do-wells concocted creative nonfiction
LEE GUTKIND 304pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $35).
IN THE MID-1960S a debate got under way in the US about an emerging hybrid genre called “the new journalism”, also referred to as “literary journalism”, “lyric essay”, the “nonfiction novel” – Truman Capote’s coinage for his contribution, In Cold Blood (1966) – “history with a point of view”, “narrative nonfiction” and, regrettably, “verfabula”. Eventually “creative nonfiction” became the generally accepted term, often shortened to CNF. Lee Gutkind’s brisk historical account of how a set of borrowed modalities became “the fourth genre” is deftly interleaved with anecdotes and insights drawn from a lifetime as a practitioner. (The book’s unwieldy title underlines the sometimes fractious infighting that accompanied the rise of the new genre.) He begins with a useful comparison between CNF and another hard-to-define artistic form. Like jazz, CNF “is a rich mixture of flavors, ideas and techniques ... considered by purists as not quite legitimate”.
When the genre first emerged the establishment was dubious. In a sniffy essay in the New York Review of Books (February 3, 1966), Dwight Macdonald tagged the pretender “parajournalism”. This “bastard form”, he wrote, attempts to have it both ways by combining the “factual authority of journalism” with the “atmospheric license of fiction”. He went on to point out, as have many others, that CNF goes back as at least as far as Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Other forebears include Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair, Rebecca West, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, James Agee and James Baldwin. Gutkind comments on several of these, but focuses on a group we might call the seven granite blocks of CNF: Capote, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, John McPhee and Tom Wolfe.
The controversy about the new form was triggered by Wolfe’s collection of magazine pieces, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), followed by The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), an account of the LSD-influenced high jinks of the novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, who careened across the US in a school bus. In 1973 Wolfe published an immensely influential anthology, The New Journalism. In the introduction he excoriated traditional journalism’s “beige narrator”, who speaks in the hushed tones of “a radio announcer at a tennis match”. CNF writers, as the magnificent seven have demonstrated, put themselves on the stage of the s
