Mark Bowden has an interesting piece about David Simon and The Wire in this month's Atlantic Monthly. Bowden explores the despair and futility that underlie the brilliant storytelling, but then the piece turns into something more ad hominem and less interesting. Now that Simon's taking on big city journalism as well as big city police departments and public education, a number of journalists—tentatively, regretfully, while still expressing their love and admiration for the show—have begun to express some skepticism about Simon and his motives. You can see it in the two guys blogging the show in Slate, and you can see it again in Bowden, and what's unfortunate in both cases is how much their argument depends on an ad hominem judgment of Simon himself, rather than a critique of what he's saying (though there's some of that, too). Which is ironic, because part of what they're accusing him of is being overly ad hominem himself, in his attacks on some of his old editors at the Baltimore Sun. The upshot of Bowden's article seems to be that Bowden considers Simon a brilliant artist who is entitled to say what he likes, however dark, about Baltimore, journalism, the state of the world—unless he says something nasty about one of Bowden's friends, in which case David Simon is a bitter, cynical hack.
Now it's entirely possible, of course, that Simon is a brilliant artist and a complete asshole—he wouldn't be the first—but what interests me more than the personal comments about Simon (or Simon's simultaneously reasonable and prickly response to the Slate discussion) is that Bowden's piece reveals a rather naive understanding of what fiction is and how it works. Take this paragraph, for example:
Fiction can explain things that journalism cannot. It allows you to enter the lives and motivations of characters with far more intimacy than is typically possible in nonfiction. In the case of The Wire, fiction allows you to wander around inside a violent, criminal subculture, and inside an entrenched official bureaucracy, in a way that most reporters can only dream about. And it frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair.
Reading the last line of this, my first response was, "Gosh, you say that like it's a bad thing." Maybe it's because I'm a satirist, but being unfair in fiction isn't a dirty little secret, it's an article of faith (see the Kingsley Amis quote in my Commonplace Book, which I wrote out on an index card and taped to my computer monitor while I was writing The Lecturer's Tale). And honestly, I don't think it's just satirists who think this way, I think it's pretty common to most, if not all, fiction writers. Two of my other favorite quotes about writing come from Joan Didion, who said in The White Album that "writers are always selling someone out," and Graham Greene, who wrote that every writer has a little sliver of ice in his heart. I think it's this willingness—no, this eagerness on the part of fiction writers to play unfair, and play it gleefully, that makes professional journalists uncomfortable, especially when one of their own switches sides. To reinforce his point, Bowden gives an example in the next couple of paragraphs:
In a session before a live audience in Baltimore last April, for a local storytelling series called The Stoop, Simon was asked to speak on a topic labeled “My Nemesis.” He began by reciting, by name, some of the people he holds grudges against, going all the way back to grade school. He was being humorous, and the audience was laughing, but anyone who knows him knows that his monologue was, like his fiction, slightly overstated for effect, but basically the truth.
“I keep these names, I treasure them,” he said:
I will confess to you now that anything I have ever accomplished as a writer, as somebody doing TV, as anything I have ever done in life down to, like, cleaning up my room, has been accomplished because I was going to show people that they were fucked up and wrong and that I was the fucking center of the universe, and the sooner they got hip to that, the happier they would all be … That’s what’s going on in my head.
Again, in the context of the article, Bowden seems to be quoting this with a feeling of alarm, or at least profound disappointment. But what may seem like an appalling display of bad faith to a journalist is, for a creator of fiction, just another day at the office. Simon sounds just like me here, in an unguarded moment, and like nearly every other fiction writer I know, and it's hard to work up any outrage over it. (My chief response to the passage above was relief that I'm not the only fiftysomething writer who carries forty-year-old grudges. And yeah, I can name names.) In fact, compare what Simon just said with this passage from Orwell, one of the most famous journalist/fiction writers who ever lived, from his essay, "Why I Write," item number one of his famous list of four reasons for being a writer:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
It's not necessary to agree with everything Orwell says here—take it from me, serious writers are every bit as interested in money as journalists, maybe even more so—but the main thrust of this is pretty self-evidently true. Bear in mind that this isn't the only reason to write—Orwell goes in to list three other, less objectionable reasons—and bear in mind as well that I'm not saying that this attitude is admirable. Nobody talks more bullshit about the Nobility of the Narrative Craft than fiction writers do, especially in those moments when they're promoting a book, applying for a grant, or trying to get tenure, so perhaps we have it coming when outsiders (even writers in other genres, like Bowden) are alarmed when we say what we really think in public. The result of our art often is noble, but the making of it isn't, and the plain truth is, writing fiction is like (pardon the cliche) making sausage: readers, even fans, may not want to know about the mixed motives, desperation, bad faith, and just plain mean-spiritedness that invariably, hell, inevitably goes into the creation of even the greatest works of narrative. No one will ever really know, of course, but I'll bet you anything that some of the nastier characters in Shakespeare, especially the ones in the comedies (I'm thinking in particular of poor, pompous, cross-gartered Malvolio in Twelfth Night), represent Shakespeare's mean-spirited and utterly entertaining vengeance on people who pissed him off in real life.
No, it's not fair, and maybe those hapless Baltimore Sun editors David Simon's sticking pins in don't really deserve it. But if you want an artist to be passionate and ambitious and furious about injustice, then you have to live with the fact that some of his fury may slosh over onto people you know and like. Life is unfair and so is art.
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