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Ryszard KapuścińskiDefending his literary license.

By Meghan O'Rourke
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2007, at 5:00 PM ET

Polish nonfiction writer Ryszard Kapuściński died last week at age 74. Many considered him the quintessential foreign correspondent, and his allegorical books about the wars and revolutions he witnessed stand out as exemplars of the genre. Still, his critics are often troubled by the fact that he made up some of the details in his books. In a 2003 "Culturebox" column, reprinted below, Meghan O'Rourke defended literary journalists—including Kapuściński—who bend the rules of literal truth-telling in order to tell a bigger story: "After all, unlike newspaper stories, literary journalism seeks to make or 'conjure up' a broader reality—to bring us into a world. This isn't news of the who-what-when-how-why variety, but news of the kind that V.S. Naipaul said only the novel can deliver—news that resonates with the potency of its presentation. Strictly segregating fact from fiction hobbles literary journalists unnecessarily."

Joseph Mitchell's Old Mr. Flood is a great book. It's as vivid a portrait of the Fulton Fish Market and of working-class life in New York City as any we have. Old Mr. Flood is also partly invented. Though it was first presented as journalism—most of it ran as magazine pieces in The New Yorker in 1944—Mitchell revealed in the book's preface some four years later that Mr. Flood was a composite character, as Jack Shafer recently noted in Slate.

With the reappearance of Stephen Glass and the dismissal of Jayson Blair, a certain kind of rule-bending literary journalism has taken it on the chin. Mitchell and other respected sometime-"fabulists"—including A.J. Liebling and Ryszard Kapuscinski—have been lightly tarred and feathered along with the black-listed young journalists. After all, the argument goes, the realms of Fact and Fiction are diametrically opposed. There is no truth but the plain truth. The very currency of journalism is fact; to toy with it once is to devalue it (and your integrity) permanently, whether you are a great stylist or a hack.

This line of reasoning is entirely logical. And yet too rigid an adherence to such standards would mean an impoverishment of American journalism—one that seems unthinkable. There'd be no Old Mr. Flood, no The Honest Rainmaker, by A.J. Liebling; some work by New Journalists like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Norman Mailer would go in the trash. John Hersey is said to have created a composite character in a Life magazine story; does this mean we should think differently of his masterpiece Hiroshima?

Of course, no one wants to encourage budding Jayson Blairs. There is a line between aesthetic enhancement and outright fabrication; what's at stake here is something closer to judicious manipulation of fact than to Stephen Glass' invention-stews. Newspaper journalism always ought to be thoroughly factual. (H.L. Mencken's fabrications in the Baltimore Herald, for example, are indefensible.) And in an ideal world any partly invented magazine story would come with a warning attached, as did Tom Junod's controversial profile of Michael Stipe in Esquire in 2001. But the combination of fictional technique and factual reporting can get at something that factual reporting on its own can't (even if it is dangerously tricky to regulate). If it didn't, the practice, dating back at least to Daniel Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year (1722), would surely have been squelched by the power of the ethical argument against it.

But can we defend such practice in theory? To buy any defense of Mitchell, you have to accept the controversial but oft-repeated claim that there's aesthetic value in a "truthfulness" that's not strictly factual. Gay Talese explained the storytelling liberties of New Journalism by saying it "seeks a larger truth." Alastair Reid, who used composite characters in pieces for The New Yorker, said, "There is a truth that is harder to get at ... than the truth yielded by fact." Mitchell wrote in his preface to Old Mr. Flood, "I wanted these stories to be truthful rather than factual, but they are solidly based on facts."

Unsurprisingly, this larger-truth defense smacks of pretension in the eyes of the anti-fabulists, who see it as a shameless attempt to "have it both ways." In part, I suspect, they hear "larger" truth as "higher" truth—whereas what Mitchell is talking about is a formal distinction, not a qualitative one. Implicit in his statement is the argument that Truman Capote and New Journalists like Tom Wolfe later made in the '60s: that narrative journalism, like fiction, needs to avail itself of all possible rhetorical techniques—including inhabiting the minds of characters—for the purpose of storytelling.

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Meghan O'Rourke is Slate's culture critic and the author of Halflife, a collection of poetry.
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