Lary Bloom
Writer, Editor, Teacher
The Bloom Blog
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Tuesday, December 06, 2005
In Cold Ink
Writers -- at least good writers -- who see Philip Seymour Hoffman's film portrayal of Truman Capote will squirm in their seats. Because they will see themselves in small ways, or large. They will recall times when the story was everything, and all else was of much less consequence.Coming out of the theater, I thought of Janet Malcolm's opening paragraph in The Journalist and The Murderer: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He's a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."
But of course as dramatic as that statement is, it is also too simple. It leaves out the motives of many of the journalist's subjects, and the complexities of the work.
Joseph Mitchell, a nonfiction pioneer, chronicled the most unglamorous characters of New York City, the street people, in mid-20th century. His New Yorker portraits were at once stark and sensitive, and he created a body of work unmatched in the depth of its urban humanity. And yet, after he wrote Joe Gould's Secret, he never published another story, though he came to his office every day for decades. There is nothing but speculation as to why -- Mitchell never talked of it. But I think I know why. Joe Gould, a clever homeless man with a bachelor's degree from the Harvard class of 1911, pulled a con job on Mitchell. And Mitchell understood, well before Janet Malcolm's argument, that he couldn't blame it all on Gould. He had been taken in himself. He had been so careful during his career to print only what he saw as truth, and somewhere along the line his vision was blurred, his judgment foggy. And he began to question everything about his life and work, a circumstance that in his case turned a prolific writer into a blocked and frustrated figure.
It is an occupational hazard. It is not possible to be a writer without self-doubt, and without moral and ethical questioning. It is not possible, that is, to be a good writer without it.
Posted by:Lary Bloom at 2:13 AM
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