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Joseph Mitchell (Photo by Therese Mitchell) |
Janet Malcolm’s "The Master Writer of the City" (The New York
Review of Books, April 23, 2015), a review of Thomas Kunkel’s Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New
Yorker, delivers disconcerting news. Malcolm reports that Kunkel’s research
reveals that Mitchell’s “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956), heretofore considered a
classic fact piece, is partially fiction. She says,
What Kunkel found in Mitchell’s reporting notes for his
famous piece “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” made him even more nervous. It now appears
that that great work of nonfiction is also in some part a work of fiction. The
piece opens with an encounter in the St. Luke’s cemetery on Staten Island
between Mitchell and a minister named Raymond E. Brock, who tells him about a
remarkable black man named Mr. Hunter, and sets in motion the events that bring
Mitchell to Hunter’s house a week later. But the notes show that the encounter
in the cemetery never took place. In actuality, it was a man sitting on his
front porch named James McCoy (who never appears in the piece) who told
Mitchell about Mr. Hunter years before Mitchell met him; and when Mitchell did
meet Hunter it was in a church and not at his house.
What is even more disconcerting is that
Malcolm praises Mitchell’s fabrication. She says,
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.
This significantly departs from Malcolm’s position in
her great The Journalist and the Murderer
(1990), in which she says,
The writer of nonfiction 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.
That, to me, is journalism’s fundamental principle. John
McPhee, in his "Editors & Publisher" (The New Yorker, July 2,
2012), puts it this way:
It is sometimes said
that the line between fiction and nonfiction has become blurred. Not in this
eye, among beholders. The difference between the two is distinct.
I agree. Regrettably,
Mitchell’s “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” appears to have crossed the line, carrying
Malcolm with it.
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