From Grub Street to Gonzo and the Algorithmic Blues

In this year of worldwide elections there’s been no escaping the blitz of news coverage, but the crossover between fiction and journalism has always been disputed territory.

Like many schoolchildren I read Robert Browning’s narrative poem, ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ without understanding a word of it. I think the teachers loved it for the pounding rhythm and aa bb rhyme scheme. Although it commemorates no specific event but the warring history of sixteenth century Flanders, it dramatizes the sheer physical energy required to deliver urgent news in that time.

And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight
Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate,
With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim,
And with circles of red for his eye-sockets' rim.

The narrator’s horse is the only one of the three that set out left standing, just about, and is rewarded with a jorum of wine at Aix.

At the risk of sounding like an ‘oul wan’, it’s a universal truth that communications have changed radically in a relatively short time. They continue to do so. Already we know that AI can generate authoritative reports on pretty much any subject but where will that leave truth and the use of journalism as a fictional device to expose truths?

 One of the most famous novels featuring a journalist protagonist (hardly a hero!) is Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, first published in 1971 in two parts in Rolling Stone. Its freewheeling account of a drug-fuelled trip to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400 races is scathing about newspapers and parodies the editorial process with ‘transcripts’ from garbled tapes.

Subtitled ‘A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream’ it scuppers belief in that dream under Nixon. ‘ “Consciousness Expansion” went out with LBJ . . . and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.’ This narrator, Raoul Duke, styles himself a Doctor of Gonzo Journalism, starting a trend in which the journalist puts him or, rarely, her, self front and centre of the article.

  Although Thompson later disparaged it, his innovation contributed to the development of the ‘New Journalism’ championed by Tom Wolfe. The principle here was to reinvigorate both journalism and fiction writing by cross-pollinating the two forms. Journalism was to deploy tools such as scene, dialogue, point of view and status detail in ‘saturation reporting’ (forerunner of ‘immersive journalism’).

Like Wolfe in his foppish white suits, storytelling tends to be tailored for a smaller, knowing audience. . . . And it finds its natural subjects in the spirit of individualism and improvisation. It is the journalism that believes, as Wolfe is always saying, that everybody has a story.[1]

Inevitably, this led to the charge that Wolfe’s journalism was untrustworthy. Nowadays that accusation is levelled at many media outlets which purport to offer ‘hard’ news. Wolfe then challenged himself to write a serial novel in the manner of his hero, Charles Dickens. Bonfire of the Vanities was first published over 27 issues of Rolling Stone 1984-5, with a journalist, Peter Fallow, at the centre of the plot. Here, Wolfe reversed his journalistic dicta to present social truths through fiction, using thinly disguised real events and people.

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For his epigraph to Fear and Loathing, Thompson quotes a much earlier journalist, Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-84), ‘He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man’.  Johnson was a Grub Street journalist, contributing regular essays to The Gentleman’s Magazine, often regarded as the first magazine and comprising articles from other sources.

He also wrote accounts of parliamentary debates, based on hearsay and knowledge of a speaker’s views. Fact or fiction? It was never clear but it shows that fake news ain’t new. Johnson established the Rambler and the Idler as outlets for his essays. The portrait of his troubled friend, Richard Savage, included in Lives of the Poets, shows the vicissitudes of the jobbing writer on Grub Street (now named Milton Street after the Cromwellian bard).   

  While Johnson’s original comment disparages intoxication (once an occupational hazard for journalists) it touches too on disillusion, another hazard for journalists, whose work can bring them close to the dark side of human behaviour. The word ‘beast’, however, occurs in another classic satire of the press, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938) featuring rival newspapers, The Beast and The Brute. The former, in turn, has lent its name to the online news outlet, The Daily Beast.  

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This bestial association reflects an abiding view of journalists as venal, a view dramatized by the nineteenth century French novelists, Balzac and Maupassant, in their works, Lost Illusions (1837) and Bel Ami (1885), respectively. The two writers knew the press intimately, publishing in various periodicals, and, in Balzac’s financially ruinous case, owning a couple. The young protagonists owe their careers to women, whose salons were the first social networks.

First, the women dress the characters Lucien Chardon in Lost Illusions, and George Duroy in Bel Ami, then advise them to add an aristocratic ‘de’ or ‘du’ to their names. When Chardon is told to write a negative review of his friend’s work he spells his own demise. Duroy, however, climbs in and out of the beds of several women in his ascent to near messianic status:      

“La Vie Francaise” had gained considerable prestige by its connection with the power; it was the first to give political news, and every newspaper in Paris and the provinces sought information from it. It was quoted, feared, and began to be respected: it was no longer the organ of a group of political intriguers, but the avowed mouthpiece of the cabinet. Laroche-Mathieu was the soul of the journal and Du Roy his speaking-trumpet.   

Roy is a version of ‘roi’, king. No coincidence perhaps that the self-obsessed family of media moguls in the hit series Succession, is called Roy.

From there, it’s a short step to another very different Roy, Arundhati, who, having won the Booker prize in 1997, for The God of Small Things turned to journalism, using her reputation to protest human rights and environmental abuses. Twenty years after her Booker success she published a highly political and sprawling second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Among its many characters is a journalist, Naga, who has abandoned his student radicalism to become an instrument of the state, a ‘speaking trumpet’ for the government.

  Today, journalists are almost obsolete. AI and Algorithms feed us our news and drive us into virtual tunnels. Whither then the novel that shows us how the media manipulates us and invents its own truths? Has the beast, or the horse, become a machine?

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[1]Doug Cumming, Tom Wolfe, Reporter: His relationship to Old Journalism and to New New Journalism, 2006, Journal of Magazine and New Media Research Vol. 9, 1. (Shenandoah, spring 2007).

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Answers here please!!