“But You Can’t Move That Bear”: Why Narrative Construction in Nonfiction Is Less Artificial Than in Fiction (Contra McCallum-Smith)

I enjoyed Susan McCallum-Smith’s “Geoff at Sea” (Los Angeles Review of Books, September 1, 2014). But something she says about factual writing bothers me. She equates its narrative structure with that of fiction. She says, “Narrative construction in nonfiction is no less artificial than in fiction, but that does not necessarily imply that Dyer — with his coy self-deprecation and flâneur facade — is more manipulative or his intent less true.” No less artificial than in fiction – is this true? I don’t think so. Reading McCallum-Smith’s observation, I thought of John McPhee’s classic “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977; Book I of McPhee’s great Coming into the Country, 1977), which begins in the middle of a canoe trip down the Salmon River in the Brooks Range of Alaska. The first part is written in the present tense. The writing comes to the end of the journey and then it flashes back to the beginning of the trip. After that, it’s in the past tense, and the piece ends with McPhee in the canoe, somewhere relatively early in the journey, seeing a grizzly bear. The piece makes a circle, enacting its title. In an interview in The Paris Review (Spring 2010), McPhee describes how he conceived “The Encircled River” ’s brilliant structure:

But once I started writing, I had to tell a story. It’s the story of a journey. Within that journey certain things happened, such as an encounter with a big grizzly. That grizzly encounter was a pretty exciting thing, and it happened near the beginning of the trip. That was somewhat inconvenient structurally, because it’s such a climactic event. But you can’t move that bear, because this is a piece of nonfiction writing.

But what if you started telling the piece of writing further down the river, I wondered. That way, when you get to the end of the trip, you’re really only halfway through the story. What you do then is switch to the past tense, creating a flashback, and you back up and start your trip over again. By the time you get to that bear, that bear is at the perfect place for the climax. That’s what’s exciting about nonfiction writing. In this case, it’s a simple flashback, but it also echoes all these cycles of the present and the past.

But you can’t move that bear – right there is the rub, nonfiction’s ironclad rule – you can’t mess with the facts. It’s what makes nonfiction real – much realer than fiction, in my opinion. Fiction writers are under no such constraint. They don’t have to worry about making their story conform to the way things actually happened. Andrew O’Hagan, in his review of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Vol. I, 1907-22, talks about the gap “between what Ernie wanted to happen and what actually happened to him – a vacuum that could only be occupied by myth” (“Issues for His Prose Style,” London Review of Books, June 7, 2012). O’Hagan provides this example:

Hemingway was rejected by the regular army. He was giving out chocolate for the Red Cross when the mortar exploded that damaged his legs. (The subjective correlative in a Farewell to Arms is the basin of macaroni and the wine. That’s how fiction works.)

Nonfiction takes its “plot” from real (as opposed to imaginary) life. As McPhee says in his Paris Review interview, structure in a fact piece “arises organically from the material once you have it.” This, to my mind, is what makes nonfiction’s narrative construction, contrary to McCallum-Smith’s view, far less artificial than fiction’s.

Credit: The above artwork is by Stephen Doyle (photographed by Grant Cornett); it appears in The New Yorker (January 14, 2013), as an illustration for John McPhee’s “Structure.”

Fact/Truth/Creativity

A special shout-out to Lee Gutkind for his observation yesterday in the Los Angeles Review of Books that “it’s possible to write terrific nonfiction narrative and stay steadfast to both truth and fact. One can be creative and truthful simultaneously. It just takes a lot more work” (“Doing A D’Agata,” March 19, 2012). Yes, factual writing is the more challenging art form. It’s refreshing to see this point being made. Writing a fact piece is, in a way, like writing a sonnet: the rule of the form must be obeyed. And the rule that governs factual writing is that the facts can’t be messed with. Everything else – design, voice, perspective, syntax, choice of detail, etc. – is fair game. As the great New Yorker writer John McPhee said in his Paris Review interview: “With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read” (The Paris Review, Spring, 2010).

Credit: The above artwork is by Henrik Kubel; it appears in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (February 26, 2012), as an illustration for Jennifer B. McDonald's "In the Details."

McPhee, Hemingway and the Sequence of Motion and Fact

John McPhee (Photo by Yolanda Whitman)

Harry Levin, in his classic “Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway” (included in Levin’s 1980 essay collection Memories of the Moderns), says “When Nick Adams goes fishing, the temperature is very tangibly indicated: ‘It was getting hot, the sun hot on the back of my neck.’” The same can be said about the way John McPhee palpably conveys temperature in “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977; Book I of McPhee’s great Coming into the Country, 1977): “My bandanna is rolled on the diagonal and retains water fairly well. I keep it knotted around my head, and now and again dip it into the river. The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving.”

Levin, in his essay, notes how Hemingway’s writing often “moves from the external plane into the range of a character’s senses, proceeding serially from the visual to the tactile, as it does when the “Wine of Wyoming” is sampled: ‘It was very light and clear and good and still tasted of the grapes.’” In “The Encircled River,” McPhee follows a similar progression: “The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good.”

Levin also observes that for what Hemingway “lacks in structure he makes up in sequence, carefully ordering visual impressions as he sets them down and ironically juxtaposing the various items on his lists and inventories.” It could never be said of McPhee that his writing lacks structure. He’s one of the great structuralists of all time. But, like Hemingway, he’s also expert at juxtaposing different registers. For example, in the following passage from “The Encircled River,” note the alternation of action and description: “With his bamboo rod, his lofted line, he now describes long drape folds in the air above the river. His shirt is old and red. There are holes in his felt hat and strips of spare rawhide around its crown. He agitates the settled fly.”

In analyzing Hemingway’s style, Levin quotes Hemingway as saying that he always sought “the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which [sic] made the emotion…” That “sequence of motion and fact” is a key aspect of McPhee’s technique, too. McPhee’s descriptions, consisting entirely of fact, are never static. Reading them, you never get the feeling you’re looking at a photo or a still life. McPhee animates his facts. People in his stories are always doing, going, working, moving. He’s a brilliant describer of action. There’s someone or something on the go in almost every one of his sentences. Consider, for example, the following sequence – one of my favorites – from “The Encircled River”:

He borrows Fedeler’s rod and sends the lure on its way. He reels. Nothing. He casts again. He reels. Nothing. Out in the river, there may be less water than salmon, but that is no guarantee that one will strike. Salmon do not feed on the spawning run. They apparently bite only by instinctive reflex if something flashes close before them. Pourchot casts again. Nothing. He casts again. The lure this time stops in the river as if it were encased in cement. Could be a boulder. Could be a submerged log. The lure seems irretrievably snagged – until the river erupts. Pourchot is a big man with a flowing red beard. He is well over six feet. Blonde hair tumbles across his shoulders. The muscles in his arms are strong from many hundreds of miles of paddling. This salmon, nonetheless, is dragging him up the beach. The fish leaps into the air, thrashes at the river surface, and makes charging runs of such thrust that Pourchot has no choice but to follow or break the line. He follows – fifty, seventy-five yards down the river with the salmon. The fish now changes plan and goes upstream. Pourchot follows. The struggle lasts thirty minutes, and the energy drawn away is almost half Pourchot’s. He wins, though, because he is bigger. The fish is scarcely larger than his leg. When, finally, it moves out of the water and onto the gravel, it has no hook in its mouth. It has been snagged, inadvertently, in the dorsal fin. Alaska law forbids keeping any sport fish caught in that way. The salmon must take the lure in its mouth. Pourchot extracts the hook, gently lifts the big fish in his arms, and walks into the river. He will hold the salmon right side up in the water until he is certain that its shock has passed and that it has regained its faculties. Otherwise, it might turn bottom up and drown.

How wonderfully precise, rhythmic, and vivid that passage is! I particularly like the change in register from “The lure seems irretrievably snagged – until the river erupts” to “Pourchot is a big man with a flowing red beard.”

Hemingway equated writing with making. In A Moveable Feast (1964), he says, “Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.” McPhee, too, is a maker. In his Paris Review interview (Spring 2010), he stresses the importance of structure in his writing: “If your structure really makes sense, you can make some jumps and your reader is going to go right with you.” McPhee is a master craftsman. His pieces are like the handmade bark canoes he describes in The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975): “Turn them over – their ribs, thwarts, and planking suggested cabinetwork. Their authenticity seemed built in, sewed in, lashed in, undeniable.”

In the Paris Review interview, when asked which writers he’s liked, McPhee answers, “I was drunk on Hemingway.” I detect traces of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River" in "The Encircled River." Both begin with vivid descriptions of fish seen from a downward looking angle through a river’s surface. In “The Encircled River,” McPhee looks down over the side of a canoe:

Paddling again, we move down long pools separated by short white pitches, looking to see whatever might appear in the low hills, in the cottonwood, in the white and black spruce – and in the river, too. Its bed is as distinct as if the water were not there. Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and their dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.

In “Big Two-Hearted River: Part I,” Nick looks down into the river from his position on a railway bridge:

Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them along time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.

Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.

In both passages, the river is clear, the “gravel” bottom is visible, “shoot” and “shot” are used to indicate fish movement, fish break the water’s surface (“the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air,” “a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water”). McPhee writes, “noses north, into the current”; Hemingway writes, “noses into the current.”

Granted, there are major differences between the pieces, too. For one thing, “The Encircled River” is a fact piece; it’s about real people on a real river encountering a real bear. For another, three sections of it are written in a glorious, streaming present tense. “Big Two-Hearted River,” like most of Hemingway’s stories, is narrated in the past tense. Also, McPhee’s syntax is richer than Hemingway’s, and his sentences are more complex. And his verbs and adjectives are more evocative. His similes are more striking. (Note, for instance, that wonderful “Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins” in the above-quoted passage.) Maybe Hemingway has a keener ear for dialogue. But I’m not sure about that. In “The Encircled River,” John Kauffmann has a line – it consists of only two words (“Good God!”) – that cracks me up every time I read it.

Suffice it to say that “The Encircled River” and “Big Two-Hearted River” are both remarkable achievements. In order to understand how they were achieved, I suggest a good starting point is "the sequence of motion and fact.”

Two "Paris Review" Interviews: Ann Beattie and Janet Malcolm

Two long-time New Yorker contributors, Ann Beattie and Janet Malcolm, are interviewed in the current issue of The Paris Review. Comparing the two interviews, I find Beattie much more interesting and open in her discussion of her “art” than I do Malcolm. In talking about her writing technique, Beattie doesn’t use the word “art”; instead, she says, “I only have a certain bag of tricks.” One of the “tricks” she mentions is bringing into the narrative “something unexpected that has a lot of immediacy.” She says, “If you write a fictional letter, the reader will perk up and think, Oh, a letter. All the rest of it’s been narrative – but this is an actual letter.” She says, “You can also do something similar with songs. Just pick a song that’s well known enough, or a musician whose sound is well known enough, and the reader will play a sound track for you.”

Reading Beattie’s interview, I was fascinated to learn how deliberate she is in trying to avoid what she calls “the temptation of tying it all together formally.” She says, “In general I end my stories before I get a chance to do something more aesthetically pleasing to me.” She’s leery of stories that are written “too carefully.” At one point, she says, “I avoided eloquence as much as possible.” At another point, she states, “In the context of a story, a fairly boring thought in a character’s head can work better than a brilliant one, and a brilliantly laid out structure can be so much worse for a story than one that is more haphazard.” In Beattie’s studious avoidance of narrative closure, and in her decided preference for the haphazard, I detect a distrust of the “well-made story” similar to the one Janet Malcolm expresses in her brilliant review of Donald P. Spence’s Narrative Truth and Historical Truth (“Six Roses ou Cirrhose?”, The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in Malcolm’s great essay collection The Purloined Clinic, 1992), in which she memorably observes, “Our lives are not like novels.”

Interestingly, Malcolm, in her Paris Review interview, doesn’t mention her wariness of narrative truth. What she does say is that,

What nonfiction writers take from novelists and short-story writers (as well as from other nonfiction writers) are the devices of narration. Made-up and true stories are narrated in the same way. There’s an art to it.

Malcolm doesn’t give examples of what she means by “devices of narration,” and the interviewer (Katie Roiphe) doesn’t ask her to provide any. I wonder if she would consider the heightening of drama (or, in Beattie’s case, the deliberate understatement of drama) as such a device. There’s a difference between writing fiction and writing nonfiction: the latter activity is subject to the ironclad rule “Don’t mess with the facts.” Malcolm’s observation that “Made-up and true stories are narrated in the same way” could be true, I suppose, so long as the aforesaid “rule” is borne in mind. But on this point, Malcolm worries me. In the interview, she quotes a passage from the afterword of her The Journalist and the Murderer, in which she says,

The “I” character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the “I” of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the “I” of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way – the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic “I” is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the dispassionate observer of life.

I find it hard to accept that the “I” in, say, Ian Frazier’s work is “almost pure invention.” On the contrary, I consider Frazier’s “I” one of the truest, most reliable narrators in reportage literature. His “I” is true and reliable because, far from setting himself up as “an embodiment of the dispassionate observer,” he is, in his writings, so subjectively, idiosyncratically human. For example, when he says in Travels In Siberia, “Aside from the rain and wind and chill, and the chronically damp clothes, I enjoyed the fish camp,” I interpret his “I” not as an “ad hoc creation,” but as Ian Frazier, the man himself, the guy I've happily accompanied (vicariously, of course) on many a great trip. The same goes for the “I” of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, John McPhee, Susan Orlean, to name a few of my favorite New Yorker writers – writers whose voices on the page strike me as absolutely true, authentic, real, consistent. Joyce Carol Oates, in the preface to her essay collection Uncensored (2005), says,

In virtually none of my prose fiction, with the possible exception of the novel I’ll Take You There, and in that novel only intermittently, do I allow myself to speak in my “own” voice, but in my non-fiction prose, it is always my “own” voice that speaks.

Is Oates kidding herself? I don’t think so. It’s Malcolm who’s got it wrong. It’s time her viewpoint on this matter was challenged.