The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight

Is Gay Talese included? He's underrated, IMO the lost giant of NJ.

What really interests me is the ending. What happened to new journalism and how did it morph into celebrity journalism? I've got my own theories...but however you track it NJ pretty much disappeared by the early 80s. Tom Wolfe's influence lives on mostly in purple flowery leads to a movie-star profiles. The slow death of NJ seems like an unexplored area, ripe for investigation. Maybe not a whole book, but certainly a long essay.

Army of the Night
Review by LUKE MITCHELL

IN olden days, the Hearsts and the Pulitzers could deploy vast armies of shabby, anonymous reporters to find or invent whatever stories they pleased. We should not be surprised that we so easily recall the names of these dusty American lords and barons; we have always paid special attention to the wealthy and powerful among us. What is surprising is that at some point we began to remember the names of the reporters themselves: Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe - an ever-expanding roster of vivid personalities. Wolfe branded them the "new journalists" in 1972, and so they remain today.

Marc Weingarten presents his group biography of these writers (and a few editors) as the tale of "the last great good time of American journalism," a discrete "golden era" in which the best reporters "burned with a Promethean flame." The reading public was first made aware of this new development, Weingarten writes, when Wolfe Oedipally confronted The New Yorker in a 1965 feature - "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" - for a supplement to The New York Herald Tribune edited by Clay Felker, an extraordinarily ambitious editor whose previous achievements included being fired from Esquire. The golden era came to an end in 1977, when that supplement - by then spun off into a stand-alone weekly called New York magazine - was sold to Rupert Murdoch, who remains an almost cartoonishly vivid throwback to the celebrity media barons of old. In between, Weingarten proposes in "The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight," a generation of journalists became "literary rock stars, their bylines familiar to most, their lectures standing-room-only sellouts in universities across the country."

The story is romantic: Truman Capote, lost in Kansas, charming the locals and "inventing" the "nonfiction novel" (for The New Yorker!); Felker and Breslin unpacking their cardboard boxes at the new headquarters of New York magazine, the right to the name of which was Felker's severance pay from The Herald Tribune; Wolfe sending his raw notes to Esquire, crazy punctuation and all, and his editor suddenly getting it ("I read it and thought, 'Well, this is something new' "); Norman Mailer publishing almost an entire book - what would become "The Armies of the Night" - in a single issue of Harper's Magazine; Esquire using that stark cover line for John Sack's story of a Vietnam incursion gone wrong: " 'OH MY GOD - WE HIT A LITTLE GIRL.' "

This was very good writing and editing, but to call the work of these talented, disparate writers and editors "the greatest literary movement since the American fiction renaissance of the 1920's," as Weingarten does, seems hyperbolic. Not just because attaching claims of literary merit to newspaper and magazine articles invites pretension, but also because these writers had so little in common. Indeed, Weingarten is quick to admit that their efforts did not constitute a coherent social or aesthetic movement "in the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Corso sense or in the Abstract Expressionist sense" and that there was nothing especially innovative about the writing itself, which borrowed from a bag of tricks stuffed over the years by everyone from Defoe to Flaubert to Orwell to Liebling. Weingarten cites the quality of the work, which is undeniable. But this, too, is an unconvincing basis for naming a trend. Good newspaper and magazine reporting began before 1965, and it continues (believe it or not) even up to this day.

The new journalists were like any good reporters: they were interested in interesting things; they asked awkward questions and went odd places. They took the acid, they got stomped by the Hell's Angels, they ran through the jungles of Vietnam. Although Thompson and Wolfe in particular are best known for their obscuring stylishness - the odd punctuation and hallucinogenic fantasies - it is their lucid prose that startled readers then and will continue to startle readers well into the future. "The only thing new and unusual about Wolfe's journalism," Thompson said, "is that he's an abnormally good reporter; he has a fine sense of echo and at least a peripheral understanding of what John Keats was talking about when he said that thing about Truth & Beauty."

What was best about what the new journalists did was not new. And what was worst - the celebrity promotion on the parts of their editors, the trend-fetishism, the forced archetyping and false mythologizing - was not journalism. Wolfe, for his part, may have captured the most significant change to his profession in noting that when "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" was published in 1968, he "didn't have enough money to be a celebrity." Reporters still must count all their pennies, but the celebrity comes cheaper every year. If you want to know if this is good news, you need only say quickly - without thinking - the names of the first three reporters who come to mind.

Weingarten, a thoughtful biographer, is a freelance reporter, and he has usefully gathered much of the recent lore of the profession. But the arbitrary grouping of such desperately individual souls as Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion is a surrender to the sort of trend-mongering that has come to define modern reporting. It is more evidence of the flattening lure of celebrity that in processing the singular lives of our best reporters, Weingarten also, in this instance, falls prey to the worst of their collective influence.

Luke Mitchell is a senior editor at Harper's Magazine.

I'd say David Foster Wallace's non-fiction is the closest contemporary equivalent to NJ.

My initial post still sounds more disdainful than intended. In something like Talese's landmark "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold" the back story becomes the story. New Journalists often made the nuts & bolts part of the finished product.

Some degree of (unconscious) hero worship would be pretty hard to avoid in writing a book like this. I'm reminded of Robert Draper's history of Rolling Stone which chronicles the rise of NJ among other phenomenon. It's a thoroughly researched and well-written book but is ultimately dragged down a bit by Draper's infalted regard for dubious(IMO) talents like Chas M. Young. And Draper buys into the self-serving fantasy of earlier contributors: "RS could've been the New Yorker of our generation if Jann Wenner wasn't such a weasal..." welllll

Look I don't claim immunity here either, if I wrote a book about the loose circle of UK writers (Amis/Barnes/MacEwan/Rushdie/Hitchens)who inspired/influenced ME the result would undoubtedly be a valentine.

One more topic for consideration: now-discredited NJ methods like composite characters. Without endorsing the practice, I think it's simplistically portrayed now as "making things up" when it was much more complex at the time -- a slippery slope where writers fell down.
For example a recent NYT review of Nik Cohn's latest cast aspersions and doubt on the entire work because Cohn allegedly "made up" the infamous Saturday Night Fever article. I thought this was grossly reductive and unfair, constructing a true composite from real sources does not = creating characters out of whole cloth.

OK I've got to read The Gang. Hope the library gets it.

i'm trying to think of the names of all those quite capable GQ/Esquire journalists that I read every month and the only name i can come up with is Tom Junod. Yet, I really dig at least one or two pieces in those mags every month.

Don't think I'd be able to attend a Bush press conference and not give in to the urge to stand and shout "YOU LYING SACK OF SHIT!!"

Michael Wolff (sic) of New York/Vanity Fair is fascianting in a train-wreck kinda way. His lunatic confrontations w/media moguls are something else, new journalism taken to a narcissistic extreme.

Ha! and then there is Dominick Dunne. He's Taki, Rex Reed, & Truman Capote all rolled up in one.

I thought "Gang" was okay, good for inspiration, at least. It's nice to be reminded there was a time when writers/editors thought it was worthwhile to try wrestling their lives and times into magazine pieces. But Weingarten spends so much time needlessly recarving Mt. Rushmore--most of the Wolfe/Thompson/Didion/Mailer/Sack stuff has been retailed in plenty of books and articles already--that I kept wishing he'd lower his sights a little. Where there lots of less-knowns who used NJ techniques and did good work but didn't get famous? I wanted a broader sense of how big a movement NJ was. And what? Terry Southern doesn't even get mentioned in the index?