Faithfulness to Fact: McPhee v. Malcolm

Defenders of the boundary between fact and fiction recently received powerful support from one of the greatest writers of our time – John McPhee. In his new book, Draft No. 4, McPhee writes,

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.

McPhee’s view clashes with Janet Malcolm’s. In her “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, she excuses Mitchell’s fabrications on the basis of his exceptional gifts as an imaginative writer. 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.

McPhee, in his Draft No. 4, shows how that “electric force” can be achieved without messing with the facts. See, for example, his account of how he composed his exquisitely structured “The Encircled River” (“You’re a nonfiction writer. You can’t move that bear around like a king’s pawn or a queen’s bishop. But you can, to an important and effective extent, arrange a structure that is completely faithful to fact”).