The Spooky Art (28 page)

So the reporters smell also of this work, they smell of the dishwasher and the pots, they are flesh burning themselves very quietly and slowly in the service of a machine which feeds goats, which feeds The Goat. One smells this collective odor on the instant one enters their meeting room. It is not a corrupt smell, it does not have enough of the meats, the savory, and the vitality of flesh to smell corrupt and fearful when it is bad—no, it is more the smell of excessive respect for power, the odor of flesh gutted by avidities that are electric and empty. I suppose it is the bleak smell one could find on the inside of one’s head during a bad cold, full of fever, badly used, burned out of mood. The physical sensation of a cold often is one of power trapped corrosively inside, coils of strength being liquidated in some center of the self. The reporter hangs in a powerless power—his voice directly, or via the rewrite desk indirectly, reaches out to millions of readers; the more readers he owns, the less he can say. He is forbidden by a hundred censors, most of them inside himself, to communicate notions which are not conformistically simple, simple like plastic is simple, that is to say monotonous. Therefore a reporter forms a habit equivalent to lacerating the flesh: He learns to
write what he does not naturally believe. Since he did not start, presumably, with the desire to be a bad writer or a dishonest writer, he ends by bludgeoning his brain into believing that something which is half-true is in fact—since he creates a fact each time he puts something into a newspaper—nine-tenths true. A psyche is debauched—his own; a false fact is created. For which fact, sooner or later, inevitably, inexorably, the public will pay. A nation which forms detailed opinions on the basis of detailed fact which is askew from the subtle reality becomes a nation of citizens whose psyches are skewed, item by detailed item, away from
any
reality.

So great guilt clings to reporters. They know they help to keep America slightly insane. As a result perhaps, they are a shabby-looking crew. The best of them are the shabbiest, which is natural if one thinks about it—a sensitive man suffers from the prosperous life of lies more than a dull man. In fact the few dudes one finds among reporters tend to be semi-illiterates, or hatchet men, or cynics on two or three payrolls, who do restrained public relations in the form of news stories. But this is to make too much of the extremes. Reporters along the middle of the spectrum are shabby, worried, guilty, and suffer each day from the damnable anxiety that they know all sorts of powerful information a half-hour to twenty-four hours before anyone else in America knows it, not to mention the time clock ticking away in the vault of all those stories which cannot be printed or will not be printed. It makes for a livid view of existence. It is like an injunction to become hysterical once a day. Then they must write at lightning speed. It may be heavy-fisted but true, it may be slick as a barnyard slide, it may be great, it may be fill—what does it matter? The matter rides out like oats on a conveyor belt, and the unconscious takes a ferocious pounding. Writing is of use to the psyche only if the writer discovers something he did not know he knew in the act itself of writing. That is why a few men will go through hell in order to keep writing—Joyce and Proust, for example. Being a writer can save one from insanity or cancer; being a bad writer can drive one smack into the center of the plague. Think of the poor reporter, who does not have the leisure of the novelist or the poet to discover what he thinks. The unconscious gives up, buries itself, leaves the writer to his cliché, and saves the truth, or the part of it the reporter is yet privileged to find, for his colleagues and his friends. A good reporter
is a man who must tell you the truth privately; he has bright, harsh eyes and can relate ten good stories in a row standing at a bar.

Still, they do not quit. The charge of adrenaline once a day, that hysteria, that sense of powerless power close to the engines of history—they can do without powerless power no more than a gentleman junkie on the main line can do without his fix. You see, a reporter is close to the action. He is not
of
the action, but he is close to it, as close as a crab louse to the begetting of a child. One may never be President, but the photographer working for his paper has the power to cock a flashbulb and make the eyes of JFK go blink!

However, it is not just this lead-encased seat near the radiations of power that keeps the reporter hooked on a drug of new news to start new adrenaline; it is also the ride. It is the free ride. When we were children, there were those movies about reporters; they were heroes. While chasing a lead, they used to leap across empty elevator shafts, they would wrestle automatics out of mobsters’ hands, and if they were Cary Grant, they would pick up a chair and stick it in the lion’s face, since the lion had the peculiar sense to walk into the editor’s office. Next to being a cowboy or a private eye, the most heroic activity in America was to be a reporter. Now journalism has become an offshoot of the welfare state. Every last cigar-smoking fraud of a middle-aged reporter, pale with prison pallor, deep lines in his cheeks, writing daily pietisms for the sheet back home about free enterprise, is himself the first captive. It is the best free ride anyone will find since he left his family’s chest. Your room is paid for by the newspaper, your trips to the particular spots attached to the event—in this case, the training camp at Elgin, Illinois, for Patterson, and the empty racetrack at Aurora Downs for Liston—are by chartered limousine. Who but a Soviet bureaucrat, a British businessman, a movie star, or an American reporter would ride in a chartered limousine? (They smell like funeral parlors.) Your typing paper is free if you want it; your seat at the fight, or your ticket to the convention, is right there, under the ropes; your meals if you get around to eating them are free, free sandwiches only, but then a reporter has a stomach like a shaving mug and a throat like a hog’s trough: He couldn’t tell steak tartare from guacamole. And the drinks—if you are at a big fight—are without charge. If you are at a political convention,
there is no free liquor. But you do have a choice between free Pepsi Cola and free Coca-Cola. The principle seems to be that the reporting of mildly psychotic actions—such as those performed by politicians—should be made in sobriety; whereas a sane estimate of an athlete’s chances are neatest on booze. At a fight Press Headquarters, the drinks are very free and the mood can even be half-convivial. It’s like being in an Army outfit everyone’s forgotten. You get your food, you get your beer, you get your pay, the work is easy, and leave to town is routine. You never had it so good—you’re an infant again: You can grow up a second time and improve the job.

That’s the half and half of being a reporter. One half is addiction, adrenaline, anecdote shopping, deadlines, dread, cigar smoke, lung cancer, vomit, feeding The Goat; the other is Aloha, Tahiti, old friends, and the free ride to the eleventh floor of the Sheraton-Chicago, Patterson-Liston Press Headquarters, everything free. Even your news free. If you haven’t done your homework, if you drank too late last night and missed the last limousine out to Elgin or Aurora this morning, if there’s no poop of your own on Floyd’s speed or Sonny’s bad mood, you can turn to the handouts given you in the Press Kit. No need to do your own research. The Kit is part of the free list, an offering of facts with a little love from the Welfare State.

It is so easy, so much is done for you, that you remember those days with nostalgia. When you do get around to paying for yourself, it is a joy to buy your own food, an odd smacking sensation to spring for a drink. It is the Welfare State which makes the pleasure possible. When one buys all one’s own drinks, the sensation of paying cash is without much joy, but to pay for a drink occasionally—that’s near bliss. Ah, journalism!

The problem of going out and searching for experience is, I think, true for very young writers who just don’t have enough to write about. There comes a point where you say, “I want to be a writer. I feel all the urgings of a writer, I feel the penetrating intelligence of a writer in myself, but I don’t really know enough.” This is where journalism rears its ugly head. It’s very hard to enter strange places and learn a lot about them unless you have clout. Kids get into journalism because the moment they flash a card that says they’re a bona fide reporter, people often start talking to them. Of course it’s a false experience. Hopefully, you
develop a sense of how to filter this experience and correct it, refract it into what experience might have been like if you hadn’t had the peculiar advantage of being a reporter.

I discovered this at the beginning of the Sixties, when I started doing journalism and realized it was a marvelous way for me to work. It was vastly easier than trying to write novels, and I was discouraged with the difficulty of writing fiction at that point. I had run into the business of trying to tell a good story and yet say exceptional things about the nature of the world and society, touch all the ultimates, and still have it read like speed. I always had a terrible time finding my story in the novel. My stories were always ending up begrounded. There I’d be in the middle of the dunes, no gas in the tank. I loved journalism for a little while because it gave me what I’d always been weakest in—exactly that, the story. Then I discovered that this was the horror of it. Audiences liked it better. They’d all been following the same events you’d been seeing up close, and they wanted interpretation. It was those critical faculties that were being called for rather than one’s novelistic gifts. I must say I succumbed, and spent a good few years working at the edge of journalism because it was so much easier.

During sports events and political conventions, reporters get together in the evening to exchange stories. In effect, the average reporter gives away the stories that his paper is not likely to print and gets other stories that other newspapers or magazines are not interested in. In this media marketplace, everybody winds up using everybody else’s stuff to some degree. What is worse, however, is that everybody usually arrives at the same general interpretation. To wit, Jack Kennedy is a lightweight, Nelson Rockefeller is a wonderful guy. Whatever the interpretation is for that week—count on it—it will come out as gospel. So much political wisdom is a consensus of this journalistic marketplace. At my end, possessing the confidence of a novelist, I found it was easy to take the larger step of thinking that, yes, the way in which I see this event is likely to be closer to the real story than the way they are seeing it. You can go a long way on that confidence. It’s banal to make the remark that all you have to do is look at what is going on, but the trick is to be able to look. That is not easy for the average journalist, whose vision is curtailed by the unrelenting impositions, limitations, and urgencies of his job.

Almost always a reporter must give a false impression of an
event. That is because journalists cannot afford to have too much interest in the mood of an occasion, particularly if it is a political meeting. Invariably, there is an a priori decision that certain elements of the event must be recorded as literally as possible. If a man is giving a speech, his topic is of cardinal importance, and whatever quotations are taken from the speech had best be given accurately; although if you don’t know the tone of the speaker—peremptory, fumbling, thundering, hesitant, forthright, uneasy, etc.—you really know very little. The journalistic assumption is that the additional stuff—all those nuances!—are not as crucial as the preordained tenets one is programmed to obey. The long-term tendency is to deaden future history into a gargantuan fact machine. One reason it would be dreadful if the novel died is that it is one of the few forms of Western civilization that attempts to deal with the notion of whole experience.

One of the elements I knew was wrong is that all events had to be boiled down to somewhere between three hundred and three thousand words. I thought the trick was to expand, use twenty thousand words, capture the human wealth of the event. I also began to feel that the personality of the narrator was probably as important as the event. Not that the narrator would be important in his own person; it was not that I, Norman Mailer, could be a balance weight to the Democratic Convention of 1960 but rather that I did come in with a set of prejudices. You, as the reader, couldn’t begin to understand this event unless you knew enough about me to reflect upon my bias. Then the reader could say, “Oh well, Mailer is impossibly romantic,” or, “Norman is outrageously nihilistic,” or, “He sure is a fool.” With that sense of superiority, the reader could thus relax sufficiently to enjoy his interpretations of what I reported. It also occurred to me that that is the way we read. We are always saying to ourselves, “Well, John Irving or Updike or Vonnegut”—or whoever it is—“is very good here, but not so good on that.” It brought me to a large but obvious conclusion: Objective reporting is a myth. The reader is entitled to be aware of the bent of the man or woman pretending to be that quintessential impostor, the fair and accurate journalist.

On the other hand, journalism is easier to live with than a novel. Give me the events that history put in order for me and I’m content
—all I’ve got to do then is tell the tale. The difficulty of bringing off a truly impressive novel is equal to asking a singer of the stature of Pavarotti to compose his own music. Journalism makes opera singers of novelists. We’ve got the story, now all we’ve got to do is go in and show our vocal cords.

In a novel, you’ve got to decide whether your character turns left or right on a given street. And you have to keep making those decisions through the book. One major decision gone wrong can ruin the job. What makes journalism easy is, I repeat, that you are given the story. If I’d written
The Fight
as a novel, I’d have had to decide: Does Foreman win or Ali? I’d lose six months deciding. So, you know, there it is; Ali won. A marvelous story.