The Journalist and the Murderer (17 page)

The subject’s side of the equation is not without its moral problems, either. In their way, MacDonald’s letters to me were as false as mine to him. He was making his pitch to me just as Malley had described it, and was no less intent on “using” me than I was intent on “using” him. Although I tried not to trifle with his hopes, I could see that he never let go of his fantasy that I would write the “decent man in prison” narrative that McGinniss had not written; his twenty- or thirty-page letters were all directed toward that purpose, and were like sledgehammer strokes in their relentless, repetitive, bombastic self-justification. When a letter came, I would put off reading it—the writing was unrelievedly windy—but when I finally read it something unexpected would happen. I would find myself shaken and moved, sometimes to the point of tears. A terrible starkness and bottom-of-life direness permeated these unutterably boring letters that was like the obliterating reality of the paintings of Francis Bacon. Nevertheless, once I began writing this chronicle, I lost my desire to correspond with MacDonald. He had (once again) become a character in a text, and his existence as a real person grew dim for me (as it had grown dim for McGinniss,
until MacDonald’s lawsuit brought it back into glaring incandescence). A long letter from him lies unanswered on my desk. It tells me about developments in his criminal case—“extraordinarily powerful new evidence,” which he is “not yet free to make public,” but which he will send me if I want it. I do not want it. If MacDonald has nothing to lose anymore from his encounters with writers, a writer has little to gain from him. The story of the murders has been told—by Joe McGinniss—and it has acquired the aura of a definitive narrative. Should MacDonald actually get a new trial, and even turn out to be innocent, he will be able to rebuild his life, but he will not be able to efface McGinniss’s story—any more than “powerful new evidence” of Raskolnikov’s innocence would efface Dostoevsky’s fable. (Jeffrey Elliot recently abandoned his book about the MacDonald case—no publisher would touch it.) It is all too natural for people who have been wronged or humiliated—or feel they have been—to harbor the fantasy that a writer will come along on a white steed and put everything to rights. As
MacDonald v. McGinniss
illustrates, the writer who comes along is apt to only make things worse. What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists. If the lesson of
MacDonald v. McGinniss
were taken to heart by prospective subjects, it could indeed, as Kornstein maintained, be the end of journalism. Fortunately for readers and writers alike (as Kornstein’s own fantasy-laden letter demonstrates), human nature guarantees that willing subjects will never be in short supply. Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease
and luxury until the appointed day when their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses—the days of the interviews—are over. And still they say yes whan a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.

A
LTHOUGH writers and publishers like to grumble about the proliferation of libel lawsuits in this country, few would seriously propose that anything be done to reverse the trend. The Ayatollah’s death sentence on Salman Rushdie brings into relief the primitive feeling that lies behind every libel suit, and makes the writer only too grateful for the mechanism the law provides for transforming the displeased subject’s impulse to kill him into the move civilized aim of extracting large sums of money from him. Although the money is rarely collected—most libel suits end in defeat for the plaintiff or in a modest settlement—the lawsuit itself functions as a powerful therapeutic agent, ridding the subject of his feelings of humiliating powerlessness and restoring to him his cheer and
amour propre
. From the lawyer who takes him into his care he immediately receives the relief that a sympathetic hearing of one’s grievances affords. Conventional psychotherapy would soon veer off into an unpleasurable examination of the holes in one’s story, but the law cure never ceases to be gratifying; in fact, what the lawyer says and writes on his client’s behalf is gratifying beyond the latter’s wildest expectations. The rhetoric of advocacy law is the rhetoric of the late-night vengeful brooding which in life rarely survives the skeptical light of morning but in a lawsuit becomes inscribed, as if in stone, in the bellicose documents that accrue while the lawsuit takes its course, and
proclaims with every sentence “I am right! I am right! I am right!” On the other side, meanwhile, the same orgy of self-justification is taking place. The libel defendant, after an initial anxious moment (we all feel guilty of something, and being sued stirs the feeling up), comes to see, through the ministrations of
his
lawyer-therapist, that he is completely in the right and has nothing to fear. Of pleasurable reading experiences there may be none greater than that afforded by a legal document written on one’s behalf. A lawyer will argue for you as you could never argue for yourself, and, with his lawyer’s rhetoric, give you a feeling of certitude that you could never obtain for yourself from the language of everyday discourse. People who have never sued anyone or been sued have missed a narcissistic pleasure that is not quite like any other.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to experience this pleasure when I was sued for libel by the main character of my book
In the Freud Archives
, Jeffrey Masson. I remember well the pile of documents from the lawsuit that collected in my office, to which I would be drawn as if to a forbidden treat, and which I would peruse like a child reading a favorite fairy story over and over again. Of course, my enraptured reading involved only half the documents in the pile—those that had been written by my lawyers. The other half—written by Masson’s lawyers—were of no interest; I scanned each item as it arrived, always quickly perceived its weakness and pointlessness, and never looked at it again. On his side, I am sure that Masson did the same thing. In life, it is hard enough to see another person’s view of things; in a lawsuit, it is impossible. The fatal attraction of a lawsuit—as Dickens showed us in
Bleak House
, with the case of
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce
—is
the infinite scope it offers for escape from the real world of ambiguity, obscurity, doubt, disappointment, compromise, and accommodation. The world of the lawsuit is the world of the Platonic ideal, where all is clear, etched, one thing or the other. It is a world—as Dickens showed with his allegory of obsession—that we enter at our peril, since it is also the world of madness. A few months into the Masson lawsuit, I took Dickens’s warning and drew back from the brink, returning to it only once again: In the summer of 1987, when a federal judge summarily dismissed Masson’s suit, I’m afraid I found myself reading and rereading the judge’s twenty-seven-page order with the old solipsistic rapture. But my feeling of low gloating was soon replaced by a certain weary sympathy for the man whose efforts had come to nothing.
^*

Being sued by a person who inhabits the pages of a book you have written is not, after all, the same as being sued by someone who exists only in life. You know your adversary more intimately than you know most merely real people—not only because you have had occasion to study him more closely than one studies the people one does not write about, but because you have put a great deal of yourself into him. “
Madame Bovary, c’est moi
,” Flaubert said of his famous character. The characters of nonfiction, no less than those of fiction, derive from the writer’s most idiosyncratic desires and deepest anxieties; they are what the writer wishes he was and worries that he is.
Masson, c’est moi
.

•   •   •

I
N HIS
biography of Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov, dismissively citing a theory about the origins of
The Inspector General
, observes:

When the chronicle of journalistic betrayal which forms the contents of this book was first published in
The New Yorker
, certain members of the journalistic community contended that I had not “made up” my story—that is, had not acted in good faith in presenting it as a new story—but had simply served up a disguised version of the Masson-Malcolm lawsuit. My suggestion that all journalists feel, or should feel, some compunction about the exploitive character of the journalist-subject relationship was held up as a covert confession of the wrong I had done Jeffrey Masson—who was promptly harnessed into the project of showing my text to be nothing but the product of a guilty conscience. The feeling of sympathy for Masson that had been aroused in me by the summary judgment was reawakened by the spectacle of him giving interviews to reporters whose sole interest in him was his usefulness as an agent for the development for their “story behind the story”; once they had used him, they dumped him. The vivid, impudent, complex man who had appeared in my book was sadly diminished in his new literary
surroundings. What had they done to complicated, unruly Masson to make him seem so vapid?

However, he served his purpose, and his lawsuit’s charge that I had libelled him through misquotation began to circulate in newspapers and magazines throughout the country—not as an accusation, but as an established fact. It is an unnerving experience to pick up the venerable newspaper you have read all your adult life, whose veracity you have never had reason to doubt, and read something about yourself that you know to be untrue.
^*
The
Times
published a retraction in due course, but the harm was done. As Tom Wicker recently wrote in his “In the Nation” column, “It’s a truism that denials never quite
catch up with charges. Honest journalists who may have mistakenly printed false information know that the most prominent retraction never quite undoes the damage done by the original publication.” The occasion for Wicker’s remark was the death of Owen Lattimore, who had been accused of being a Communist spy by McCarthy, and, after much travail, had succeeded in clearing himself of this and all similar charges. The crux of Wicker’s column was this paragraph:

Because of the
Times
’s story, in some well-informed people’s minds I, too, will no doubt always be tainted—a kind of fallen woman of journalism.

W
HAT
is at stake for the reader in the issue of whether or not a writer has violated the rules of his genre? Contemporary fiction, after all, is full of such trespasses. If E. L. Doctorow can experiment with the form of the novel by mixing fictitious characters with historical personages, and if Philip Roth can go so far as to report the death of a character in the first chapter of
The Counterlife
and then, in the second, send the man to Israel to recuperate from the open-heart operation that killed him on page seventeen (“So I lied”), why can’t writers of nonfiction
fool around in the same way, take similar liberties, conduct their own modernist experiments? Why should the writer in one genre enjoy more privileges than the writer in the other?

The answer is: because the writer of fiction is entitled to more privileges. He is master of his own house and may do what he likes in it; he may even tear it down if he is so inclined (as Roth was inclined in
The Counterlife
). But the writer of nonfiction is only a renter, who must abide by the conditions of his lease, which stipulates that he leave the house—and its name is Actuality—as he found it. He may bring in his own furniture and arrange it as he likes (the so-called New Journalism is about the arrangement of furniture), and he may play his radio quietly. But he must not disturb the house’s fundamental structure or tamper with any of its architectural features. The writer of non-fiction is under contract to the reader to limit himself to events that actually occurred and to characters who have counterparts in real life, and he may not embellish the truth about these events or these characters.

I speak about the limitation on a nonfiction writer’s scope for invention as if it were a burden, when, in fact, it is what makes his work so much less arduous. Where the novelist has to start from scratch and endure the terrible labor of constructing a world, the nonfiction writer gets his world ready-made. Although it is a world by no means as coherent as the world of fiction, and is peopled by characters by no means as lifelike as the characters in fiction, the reader accepts it without complaint; he feels compensated for the inferiority of his reading experience by what he regards as the edifying character of the genre: a work about something that is true, about events that really occurred and people who actually lived or live, is
valued simply for being that, and is read in a more lenient spirit than a work of imaginative literature, from which we expect a more intense experience. The reader extends a kind of credit to the writer of nonfiction which he doesn’t extend to the writer of fiction, and for this reason the writer of nonfiction has to be punctilious about delivering the goods for which the reader has prepaid with his forbearance. Of course, there is no such thing as a work of pure factuality, any more than there is one of pure fictitiousness. As every work of fiction draws on life, so every work of nonfiction draws on art. As the novelist must curb his imagination in order to keep his text grounded in the common experience of man (dreams exemplify the uncurbed imagination—thus their uninterestingness to everyone but their author), so the journalist must temper his literal-mindedness with the narrative devices of imaginative literature.