In 1900, Gerald Stanley Lee wrote, "The difficulty with journalism, is not that it deals with passing things, but that it deals with them in a passing way" (233). Journalist examined life within a narrow frame of reference, Lee found. They described all things as if they were isolated to a particular time or situation, rather than as part of a broader human experience. John Hersey wrote in 1949 that "it is an ironical fact that the great industries of mass communications... --newspapers, magazines, radio, television-- ...have somehow failed to communicate clearly one thing: human truth" (1949, 80). Like Lee a half-century before, Hersey believed modern journalism had failed to express the element of life rooted in the human spirit.

In the 1960s, many writers and critics attributed the advent of New Journalism to the revolutionary atmosphere of the decade. Society and culture, they thought, had reached a level of complexity beyond the reach of conventional journalism to describe adequately. This must, at least partly, be true, for it was in the 1960s that literary techniques surfaced in the mainstream press. Their use in journalism became an issue. Society, however, has always been complex, and journalism has never expressed life as it is experienced. It may have come closer to resembling life in the nineteenth century and before, when journalists often wrote in a personal style; throughout this century, however, critics and writers have been aware of, and have commented on journalism's shortcomings.

Did these critics want more from journalism than it could provide? The examination of human truth seemed to belong to poetry and other literary forms of writing. As Archibald MacLeish wrote in 1958:

The purpose of journalism is to document life, to record events and situations for the sake of their relevance and effect. The dispute between MacLeish's vision of journalism and that of critics like Lee, who wish journalists "to do the timely thing with the eternal touch" (234), is not over journalism's purpose, but how it should go about fulfilling it.

It seems necessary that journalism should "tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man" (Boynton qtd. by Connery, 11). Otherwise, there would be no expression of the subject. There would only be the author "in the presence of a particular occurrence" (11). Throughout its history, and especially in this century, journalists have tried to find the common ground of experience, where people might at least agree upon how to express what it is that has happened. Facts seemed to be the lowest common denominators of an event. Look, to the extent that look can be without feel, can be observed, recorded and thus agreed upon. Feel, however, can always be denied. Emotion can be disputed endlessly. Journalists, therefore separated fact from impression to make experience somewhat substantiative. Journalists backed away from subjectivity and excluded certain aspects of experience for the sake of others. Journalism "rested its weight upon the simple declarative sentence. The no-nonsense approach. Who-What-Where-When" (Arlen, 247).

To deal only with the look of the world seemed a necessary turn for journalism. It is an understandable turn. Journalists chose to concentrate primarily on the substantiative aspects of life for the sake of credibility and authority, which are necessary concerns. The conventions of objectivity and detachment gave journalism an almost scientific aura, and, along with its constant tone of authority, journalism achieved a level and kind of credibility similar to that of a science. Nevertheless, any line between look and feel is artificial. In life they are not separate. By dividing fact and impression, journalism left a void within itself, a deficiency sensed by people like Lee, Hersey, Agee, Orwell, Herr and others like them.

Most writing, even fiction, documents history's passing in one way or another. None, however, do it with the deliberateness and intent of journalism. Other genres of nonfiction document events only as far as it serves their primary purposes. The purpose of journalism leads it to record moments for the sake of those moments, to record history as it happens. While the historian waits until the smoke has settled and then examines all the documents and charred remains, the journalist charges into events as they occur, before hindsight is born and while the confusion of the present swirls about him.

The writer who finds the void of expression within journalism must ask, how can one "tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man," as a journalist must, and to write about the feel of the world as if the same things were felt by every man? The literary journalist's answer is to take the conceptual step that conventional journalists avoid. They assume that feel can be communicated within journalism, that openly impressionistic elements can be included in journalism without reducing the primacy of the subject, without sacrificing documentation to art. The impressionistic qualities of experience which conventional journalists remove to avoid distortion are exactly those be used by literary journalists to reveal the subject.

Literary journalists write about look and feel. They match the eye and consciousness of a deliberate observer with the power of good writing. By working in the real world where there are few lines between look and feel, literary journalists create visions. Their methods allow a chance at achieving some kind of human truth and at filling the void left by journalism's modern conventions. Yet, because literary journalists work with the essential purpose of journalism in mind and with much the same tools as conventional journalism (research and notebook-in-hand documentation) that they are rightly called journalists.

Literary journalism is not, however, a dismissal of conventional journalism. It is not a new journalism that will edge out the old. The ideals for which standard journalism's conventions were formed are not devalued by literary journalism; certainly, some things need be dealt with in a direct and objective way. This is not to say that literary journalism does not challenge conventional journalism, and is not, to a degree, in opposition to it.

Objectivity is a lie. And its value to the purpose of journalism purpose is inflated. "To deny the shaping presence of the reporter because of the theoretical demands of detachment and objectivity is to be fundamentally dishonest with the reader as well as oneself" (Weber, 1974, 18). The principles of objectivity and detachment are useful only insofar as they remind journalists of the importance of evidence and open-mindedness within journalism. Any claim to authority based on those concepts is false.

A journalist is never neutral, never a mere transmission belt. A great journalist must "exhibit an independent intelligence that seeks to wrest meaning from the torrents of event" (Grant, 264). Surely, If the journalist's purpose is to observe and record history as it occurs, he must be allowed the discretion to decide how best to do so. By inhibiting the interpretive intelligence of the writer, conventional journalism shackles itself and "can produce a trained incapacity for thought...

The feeling of personal responsibility can only arise from a sense of purpose. Requiring the journalist to be a "clerk of facts" doesn't allow or inspire him to penetrate the surface of things. The writer's goal is to tell the truth. Granted that he is limited by his own perception, whatever decisions to be made in this direction are necessarily the writer's.

The question of advocacy is an issue for literary journalism. If journalists ask themselves and act upon what they think, does reportage become editorial? The lines between reportage and editorial are never so defined as they appear to be in most newspapers. However, if the reporter acts truly as a journalist, this question is no less relevant to conventional journalism than it is to literary journalism. Journalists document; they do not argue points of view. Nevertheless, in choosing stories and perspectives on which to focus the journalist makes decisions based on what he thinks is important, decisions which unavoidably reflect the decision maker. People who would have made a different decision will call it biased, yet such decisions are an inherent part of journalism. A trace of advocacy is always present in journalism. These subjective elements have to be recognized and addressed. Merrill and Odell wrote in Philosophy and Journalism:

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Literary journalism is often called a mix of literary genres which blurs the boundaries separating fiction, journalism, memoir, history and autobiography. While it may be a practical description, this is not true to the motives behind the writing. Genres, after all, follow writing, not the other way around. Writers must write foremost with regard to the subject, choosing literary form for its ability to reveal the subject. The literary journalist seeks to make this choice within journalism, to choose style with regard to the subject rather than to conventions. Genres and conventions can guarantee nothing; they are only generalizations, terms chosen to represent a certain kind of writing and its general traits.

The responsibility of every journalist is to get at the reality of his subject. Literary journalists use their subjective experience to this end. Their success depends on their ability as an observer and writer, their capacity to capture the essence of a thing and transform it into language. The literary journalist's concern is, as Leon Surmelian wrote:

Literary journalists strive to understand their subjects as the subjects understand themselves. The writer does not merely spread before his readers all of his feelings, motives and biases to allow the reader to pick through them. The writer puts the puzzle together. He can do nothing for the reader until he understands the subject himself. Thus, the writer must be aware not only what he thinks and feels about the subject but why. He examines and culls his own impressions to lead the reader on a path to the discovery of the subject. The literary journalist does not say "Look, there it is. That's how this thing is!" Rather, he tries to get readers to see and understand it themselves by revealing the experience that lead to his own discovery of the subject.

The challenge to the literary journalist, indeed to any reporter, is to have the strength of mind to examine closely and fairly people whom he may despise and issues about which he may have a strong opinion. The literary journalist need not hide his bias, but he will fail at his task if he allows it to blind him. An open mind is as essential to a journalist as a clean sheet in his notebook. Discussing In Cold Blood Truman Capote said:

While the literary journalist's desire is to reveal the subject, self-expression is never out of the picture. Any but the most mathematical of writing reflects the writer to one degree or another. However, the writer of something as contemplated and involved as literary journalism is highly and personally invested in his work. As any serious writer, the literary journalist tries to accomplish something in his work, something aesthetic or something political. George Orwell listed the reasons for writing, which "exist in different degrees in every writer" as:

Ernest Hemingway said he thought it was unfair to dredge up an author's old journalism for literary consideration because it was not written as literature. Reports are written under deadline; their focus is function rather than style. The literary journalist has a different approach to his work. He puts too much into his work not to hope that it will be noticed and read not only for its information but in appreciation of its mastery as a work of literature. Otherwise, it would hardly be worth while.

The role of the literary in literary journalism is a question central to its examination. Do literary journalists make art from fact or use techniques of creative prose to expand journalism? Clearly, they do both. The literary journalist is dissatisfied with conventional journalism's often "hasty summarizing of facts" and wishes to provide a fuller account of the news, but he also has "a hankering for self-expression" (Boynton, 848). As with Orwell's list of motives, these two intentions are present in every literary journalist to varying degrees.

I will not step too far out into the questions of what makes writing literary or artistic. To quote E.W. Boynton, "If political economists find it hard to determine the meaning of words like 'money' and 'property,' how shall critics agree in defining such imponderable objects as genius, art, literature?" (845). Nonetheless, those imponderable objects are relevant to literary journalism, though in a different sense than they are to the more self-conscious forms of art. The motives to create and to record within literary journalism are never separate. The two elements must be distinguished from one another enough for discussion's sake, however. The "literary" is creative, imaginative, personal and artistic. It is the product of the author's creative consciousness and personality. The "journalistic" is the product of research and deliberate observation. It is factual and is the product of a much-scribbled-in notebook. I have attempted to illustrate literary journalism on a gradient between the "literary" and the "journalistic" with some writers leaning more towards one end than the other.

The motivations of some of those working towards a literary form of journalism are primarily literary. They are interested in surveying what Capote called "the least explored of literary mediums" (1974, 188). Capote, for instance, read about the Kansas murders that became the substance of In Cold Blood in the The New York Times. He had already had the idea to do a "nonfiction novel" and was searching for a fitting topic Whitby, 245). He began with a creative vision and chose his subject to serve the idea.

Sometimes literary journalism is written in the third person. The author is not a participant in events and is not identified. He is the researcher and interviewer, writing about the experiences and emotions of others after the fact. By its nature, I think, a literary re-creation is much more interpretive and requiring of imagination than a first-person, eyewitness account. Since the writer does not experience something for himself, he must draw on the emotions of others as revealed in their own accounts. The writer of a re-creation cannot tell you for himself what an experience was like because he was not there. He studies the subject and then imagines what it was like. This is not to say that a reconstructed event is less truthful than an account of an experienced event. A literary investigator, so to speak, may well benefit from his distance from the event. His distance may allow him to see things more clearly than someone involved as a participant. Nevertheless, I think it is because of that greater space for interpretation and creativity writers like Mailer (Executioner's Song), Wolfe (The Right Stuff) and Talese (The Kingdom and the Power) are attracted to re-creations.

Other journalists are moved to write vividly by their own experiences. They come up against situations in which they find that the most significant meaning of the experience cannot be expressed in a conventional report. These writers try to capture, as Hemingway said in Death in the Afternoon, "what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced" (2). Such first-person literary journalists try to put down what is true to themselves in hope that will be true to others as well. Often, though of course not always, the first-person literary journalists are less concerned with art than the reconstructive writers because rather than having been moved to write by a creative goal, these writers are inspired by an actual experience. The reality of the experience is their primary concern. They have no desire to shape or refigure their stories; doing so would be a misrepresentation what it was that inspired them to write. Thus, in general, they do not "creatively interpret" reality or "tap into" emotion, they live it and feel it and try to write about it as it was, with no literary markers or stops other than the experience itself.

This kind of literary journalism is born of intense experience. The strongest examples of literary journalism are ones in which the author not only experiences or participates in the subject, but he is changed by it. The most powerful literary journalism deals with encounters wherein a conception of reality is challenged, where morals and beliefs are put to task. This is where the human spirit is most starkly revealed. These are experiences which have significance beyond that particular day, which are representative of a greater issue or condition. The ability to express these kinds of experiences is where conventional journalism fails, and it is where a literary journalism is vital.

Every subject is best told by a talented writer with a careful eye. Some, however, seem betrayed by anything less. The significance of their subject matter is something any writer must weigh in how he presents it. In writing The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain had a purpose in mind, but he also realized that his story was, as he put it, "only a record of a picnic" (Preface). If it is true that Twain "allowed his imagination to operate freely upon what he saw," he most likely did so for purely aesthetic reasons and because he knew that it would not have a negative impact on the work (Wagenknecht, vi). Conversely, in writing Hiroshima, John Hersey was exceedingly aware that for his work to be a success he needed to present it credibly. He could not, as Twain could, "make the imaginative stroke for the joy of it," for it would detract from his purpose (Branch, 278).

Obviously, a writer's life and sanity need not be in danger for a literary treatment of journalism to bring more to a story than the functionalism of informing and entertaining at the same time. There will always be debate, however, about what subjects are revealed through literary techniques and which are exploited. For instance, one reviewer described Michael Herr's Dispatches as "endless pages of pointless, dreary intellectualizing, of pompous introspection, of left-wing agit-prop." The review ended: "Writers like Ernie Pyle went to war because they loved their country and the men they wrote about. Voyeurs like Michael Herr go because they're bored" (Rehyansky, 600).

Similarly, in criticising the works of Tom Wolfe, Jack Newfield wrote, "His basic interest is the flow of fashion, in the tics and trinkets of the rich" (qtd. by Gold, 300). Newfield thought Wolfe's subject matter scarcely deserved serious consideration. Wolfe, understandably, had a different view of what he was doing. He wrote:

One might argue with Wolfe's opinion, but who could argue with his motives? As far he was concerned, he had his pen on the pulse of history.

In discussing some of the New Journalists, Eric Heyne wrote that "Literary texts are not taken as limited in relevance or significance by the details of their origins" (487). Heyne found that, despite discrepancies of fact or cases of "art triumphing over reality" within works of literary nonfiction, they could be considered adequate representations of reality (481). Other critics believed that if a work of nonfiction is truly literary, it will be accepted as a work of art and will be enjoyed for its own sake long after the lapses of fact have been forgotten (482). If this is true, then the value of nonfiction is dissolved with time and literary works originally intended to be read as fact are "metamorphosed into fiction" (482). While excellent writing certainly can be enjoyed in and of itself, the relevance of a true story does not decay. In fact, if literary journalism loses its worth as nonfiction with time, if it fails to capture something eternal in its subject matter, then it is truly worthless, merely pretty and pretentious reporting.

For a work of literary journalism, the "details of its origins" are what gives it significance. That a work of literary journalism is a true story truly told is the whole point. Of ultimate significance is the experience that inspired the work, not whether it will be accepted as a work of art or not. To strive towards art is an artificial focus. The literary journalist cannot "create art." His goal is to reveal the subject, no other goal can take its place. Whatever the approach to the subject, whether it is a personal experience or a recreation of the experiences of others, the writer can do nothing unless he is able to understand the subject, unless he has an emotional experience of it in one way or another. Without this essential understanding of the truth of the subject as well as the writer's own truth, "the outer vision combined with the inner" (Surmelian qtd. by Berner, 8), there can be no "art," there can be no "literary journalism."

It is only through craft, through a purpose masterfully carried out, that art can come from literary journalism. The same is true in numerous other forms of the printed word. As Boynton wrote, "In history, in private or public correspondence, in the gravest scientific writing, even, one often perceives a sort of 'literature of inadvertence,' a literature in effect, though not in primary intent" (848). Much of the confusion about literary journalism arises because it adopts not only what are usually considered the techniques of fiction but its assumed relationship between writer and reader. As Hersey wrote, when the reality of a thing is rendered in words, its truth takes shape in two minds --those of the writer and of the reader (1988, 79). The reader views the subject through the consciousness and language of the writer, and he gathers from the writing what must be true about the writer. In other words, the reader must tune into the writer's wave length, as in any conversation. At the same time, the writer expresses the subject with regard to what he knows to be true about the reader, about people in general. It's common communication, but as the levels of subjectivity increase, the more a writer tries to express beyond the most obvious of facts, the more must be assumed within the reader-writer relationship. These assumptions are necessarily based upon some idea of a common truth and shared experience.

George Orwell wrote that "one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a window pane" (1968, 1:7). There is always more to the actual than the writer can perceive or express. To understand something outside of oneself is always a struggle. The writer who does not have to struggle to comprehend his subject is only writing about himself. The literary journalist must always be aware of himself and of the subject as separate entities, yet also aware that the meaning of the subject can only be revealed through himself. The writer, thus, observes not only the subject, but the observer --himself-- as well. James Agee wrote in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:

Here, Agee has hit on what must be the most basic motive of any literary journalist, to reach towards the great weight, mystery, and dignity of what actually exists, to describe something real and to show how it is alive.

So often, art is held aloft from life. It is considered the work of an individual and is somehow isolated from reality. Literary journalists try find and to show what is literary is in everyday life. They try to bring the creativity and perspective of art into the living day by recognizing the basic condition of language and of communication. Rather than reducing experience, the literary journalist must try to deal with it in all its complexity.

William Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize address that novelists must write of "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat" (qtd. by Gavin, 45). The same is true of the serious journalist. The most essential of human emotions, motives and morals, lie at the center of any situation or issue. "The human heart in conflict with itself" is the basis for the struggle of life; it is always the lowest common denominator.

To give a picture of reality, to truly document life, the journalist must start by recognizing the possibilities of language and perception. The journalist must base his standards not only on what can't be denied, but on what might be accomplished. The journalist is challenged to look inside the world and to lead his readers there. For lack of fragments of cloth, lumps of earth, phials of odors, and records of speech, the journalist must be a writer.