Over the weekend, the feathers of American literary journalists ruffled lightly in the breeze of a review that appeared in the New York Review of Books. The review, written by longtime New Yorker staff writer Janet Malcolm, was of an upcoming biography of another New Yorker staff writer, Joseph Mitchell, due to be published in the US on 28 April.  Malcolm’s review can be read as a pre-emptive defence of Mitchell’s legacy as one of the giants of American literary journalism. The biographer in question, Thomas Kunkel, has apparently found more evidence of what was already somewhat known: that Mitchell embellished his nonfiction, often condensing characters and facts to smooth out his stories. In one already well-known example, a long piece called Old Mr Flood condenses several men’s stories into the titular Mr Flood. Mitchell admitted this openly in a preface to the book later published under that name.  Kunkel, according to Malcolm, has found more instances of invention and embellishment. And he substantiated all of this by examining Mitchell’s notes, where apparently the true facts are laid out for anyone to see. (I haven’t yet read the biography.)  For Malcolm these tweaks and exaggerations are not, necessarily, a slight on Mitchell’s genius. She notes that most journalists will find this aspect of Mitchell’s work unsavoury. “He has betrayed the reader’s trust that what he is reading is what actually happened,” Malcolm writes, her tone laden with irony:  He has mixed up nonfiction with fiction. He has made an unwholesome, almost toxic brew out of the two genres. It is too bad he is dead and can’t be pilloried. Or perhaps it is all right that he is dead, because he is suffering the torments of hell for his sins against the spirit of fact. And so on.  Malcolm continues on to say that regardless of its status as fiction or nonfiction, she finds Mitchell’s work brilliant:  Every writer of nonfiction who has struggled with the ditch and the bushes knows what Mitchell is talking about, but few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to. This is why they are journalists rather than novelists or short-story writers. They depend on the kindness of the strangers they actually meet for the characters in their stories. There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn’t create a character like Mr Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads. Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.  As often happens when a new piece from Malcolm appears, reactions were swift and angry. Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism at New York University, called her argument “scary” and obnoxious”. Gene Weingarten, a columnist at the Washington Post, complained that she “slimes all journalists!” David Graham, an editor at the Atlantic, was slightly more sanguine, admitting that he did not know if Malcolm was “100% right or 100% wrong”.  The palpable anxiety behind those retorts is hardly surprising. We operate in an era nervous about the boundaries between nonfiction and fiction. And certainly some recent controversies – stretching from James Frey to this latest fiasco with Rolling Stone – have given us good reason to worry that a nonfiction writer’s desire to deliver “a good story” has led them into dangerous sorts of embellishment.  Americans have, however, often been kinder to literary writers who have ventured into journalism – David Sedaris and David Foster Wallace have been accused of embellishing their nonfiction without much damage to their reputations. And the forgiveness Mitchell has gotten on this score may be particular to him. He is something of a cult figure among American journalists, even though the larger public has forgotten him. (A 2000 film about him, called Joe Gould’s Secret and starring Stanley Tucci, made almost no money and flickered out at the box office.) Once he joined the New Yorker in 1938, Mitchell helped make it into the star patron of literary journalism that it is today.  But there may be even better reason to forgive Mitchell. As Malcolm hints, there was always in Mitchell’s work a kind of storytelling about storytelling going on. His subjects, whether “real” or composites, were often inveterate storytellers themselves. In fact, in his last piece, Joe Gould’s Secret, Mitchell wrote of his relationship with a man named Joe Gould, who claimed to be writing an enormous Oral History of the Contemporary World in a set of composition notebooks. Mitchell had profiled him for the New Yorker, partly on the strength of that story. But when Gould died, it turned out he’d never managed to write the book he’d been boasting about all his life, and the notebooks were nowhere to be found. (Eleven of Gould’s notebooks have since turned up in New York University’s Fales Library.)  Mitchell confessed that he’d been deeply angry when he first learned of Gould’s deception, but then:  I had thought about the matter only a short while before I came to the conclusion that he hadn’t been talking about the Oral History all those years and making large statements about its length and its bulk and its importance to posterity and comparing it to such works as The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire only in order to dupe people like me but also to dupe himself.  Drawing a clear analogy between Gould’s fabulism and Mitchell’s writing might be too much. But Mitchell’s long silence after publishing Joe Gould’s Secret has always suggested the man had his doubts. “Talking to Joe Gould all those years he became me in a way, if you see what I mean,” he told an interviewer late in life. It’s one of the satisfactions of Mitchell’s work, anyway, that his work has such rich layers of mystery behind it.
He is long known to have used composite characters and a new biography will reveal more embellishments – but perhaps that’s the magic of his work