Piecework

Early on, I understood why these hurried writings were called pieces. The built-in limitations of the form were the enemies of thoroughness; the very best a journalist could hope for was to reveal fragments that stood for the whole, like an archeologist working in a ruined city. When I started writing magazine articles, with their longer deadlines and expanded space, some of those problems were solved. But I was still at the mercy of the people I interviewed. The journalist can prepare well, listen carefully, and, thanks to modern technology, record what he hears with absolute fidelity. But human beings lie. Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Actors lie. Victims lie. Statistics lie. The objective reporter writes down the lies and tries to check them against other sources. But sometimes one lie is merely countered with another lie and the reporter is forced by the standards of objectivity to print both.

To be sure, at the heart of every story there is a bald fact or two. The body of a man lies in an alley. The body can be measured and weighed and checked for scars or tattoos, thus providing new facts to the cop and his unofficial collaborator, the reporter. The dead man’s wallet might reveal the facts of his identity: a name, an address, an age, his bank, the number of his driver’s license. All facts, if the credentials are legitimate. Wives or lovers or rivals will speak about the dead man and add a few more small facts about his life and death. But the best detectives also know that the facts don’t always reveal the truth, certainly about an entity as complicated as a human being. The facts can’t record the dead man’s final thoughts, or his dreams, desires, confusions and ambiguities. They can’t explain the meaning of his life.

That’s why so many journalists turn to writing novels: to get at the truth beyond the facts, about themselves and others. If reporters stick around long enough, if they see enough human beings in trouble, they learn that the guilty are sometimes innocent and the innocent probably have an angle. Things, as the philosopher said, ain’t what they seem to be. Nor are people. I’ve known many newspaper reporters whose lives were permanently soured by what they had witnessed and their work ruined by a self-protecting indifference. Others survived, usually by fealty to the dailiness of the enterprise. They plunged into the moments of the story and its writing and left it all behind when they were finished. Or they distilled what they knew into fiction. The trick was to see the world as a skeptic, not a cynic, while allowing for the wan possibility of human decency.

After 1965, when I started writing a newspaper column, I was freed from the tyranny of an impossible objectivity. The facts were still the core of the work, of course, but in the column form I was able to express my feelings or ideas about those facts. From the beginning, the form felt natural to me; I was like a musician who had found at last the instrument that was right for him. My earliest columns echoed with the voices of those who came before me, from Murray Kempton and Jimmy Cannon to Robert Ruark and West-brook Pegler; I watched carefully what my friend Jimmy Breslin was doing at the New York Herald Tribune, where he was inventing a new kind of newspaper column. In my early work, I can see the marks that all of them put on me. But I was writing too much, too quickly, to imitate any of them slavishly. For all writers, newspaper work is a valuable shortcut to finding style; its pressures force the writer to do what works most naturally.

In finding my own language, or style, the keys were tone and rhythm. The tone was a matter of understanding the story and being open to its essence; presented with the brayings of some obvious political fraud, the tone was mocking; witnessing some urban calamity, the tone was infused with a sense of tragedy. I thought of the process as “hearing the music.” The rhythm of that music was inseparable from the tone. For one kind of story, simple declarative sentences, as blunt as axes, were best; for others, it was necessary to use longer lines, more complicated rhythms. The style was itself a form of comment or explanation.