The Dotted Line Between Fact and Fiction

One may conventionally think of fiction as stories authors have invented -- out of the ether, as it were. But at times, not just inspiration, but certain details, come from life, viewed or experienced.

The first character one encounters in "Ulysses," -- 'stately, plump Buck Mulligan' -- is largely based on a man named Oliver St. John Gogarty, and to those who knew him, obviously so. Likewise, various other characters in James Joyce's epic can be linked to actual people. And Joyce clearly incorporated versions things that happened to him in his book.

In my novella, "Manhattan Morning," the final scene at an eatery in Grand Central Terminal is very close to an actual occurrence. After I had the experience, I thought it would work well as the final scene of a story, serving as a foil, mainly in the realm of values, to what had gone before. It is also a sympathetic and somewhat poignant portrait of a woman attempting to balance a demanding job and motherhood in a hectic world -- a good story.

I doubt that readers find such linkages distressing. But what about the reverse -- when something represented as fact turns out to be made up?

This has unfortunately happened from time to time in the news business, often with serious consequences. One thinks, for instance, of Janet Cook who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a story about an  eight-year-old heroin addict.She eventually admitted the piece was fabricated, resigned from "The Washington Post" and returned the prize. In the process, the credibility of the newspaper and its editors suffered a major blow.

I mention this because the April 27, 2015, issue of "The New Yorker" ran a lengthy review of a largely sympathetic biography of a man named Joseph Mitchell, himself a staff writer for the magazine from 1938 until his death in 1996. Interestingly, Mitchell submitted nothing for publication during his last 32 years there despite coming into work regularly.

But before the great silence, he was considered one of "The New Yorker's" best writers, a man who specialized in depicting not celebrities or important people, but folks identified as living on the margins.

"You can still see unmistakable signs of his influence -- blocks of foursquare declarative sentences, a patient layering of detail, passages of precisely rendered dialogue, a tone of quiet amusement." says Charles McGrath, the author of the book review. "Mitchell was genuinely interested in his subjects as human beings, remarkable because they so vividly demonstrate that one way or another, we are all a little weird."

It's not until one is well into the review that McGrath tells us that during the process of writing the Mitchell biography, Thomas Kunkel discovered that "more than we knew, or wanted to know, he (Mitchell) made things up."  Some of the people he wrote about where composites as opposed to actual individuals and it was not unusual for Mitchell to rework or massage quotes.

Is this a scandal?

Apparently Kunkel, the biographer, doesn't think so and McGrath, the author of the book review, agrees.

He (Kunkel) "says that the results are more literary and artful than an untouched transcription might be, and in this he is certainly right. Mitchell's best work is lovely and stirring in a way that a documentary or a recorded interview could never be. George Hunter, an elderly black man and Staten Island Resident, and the subject of a story that is probably Mitchell's masterpiece, would be less interesting if we had to read what he actually said. And the piece gains immeasurably from being presented as factual, an account of scenes and conversations that really took place. If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out." So writes McGrath.

Where else has or does this sort of thing go on? Who knows, although McGrath speculates that Mitchell's variety of  invention may be more difficult now because what people actually say can be easily picked up on smartphones or by video. "Lovely and stirring" -- a potential casualty of the surveillance society, it appears.

And what about "The New Yorker's" famous fact checkers? Where were they when this was going on?

In the end, however, I write this post not to beat up on "The New Yorker," but to air out another dimension of the nature and, for some at least, the purpose of fiction.