The Voice Behind the Voice: Narration in the Literary Journalism of Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Ross, and Hunter S. Thompson By David Abrahamson Northwestern University Presented at the Western Journalism Historians Conference University of California Berkeley, CA February 26, 2000 ABSTRACT: Though well developed in the study of fiction, the concept of "narrator" in nonfiction -- particularly in journalism -- is far less well understood or appreciated. This study explores the various origins, stylistic characteristics, and thematic purposes of the narrative voice in the literary journalism of Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Ross and Hunter S. Thompson. It argues that each author created and then came to rely on a unique genre of narrator in his or her journalism, and in many ways the nature of the chosen narrative device both shaped and reflected the resulting journalistic product. In the judgment of some, literary journalism is a somewhat elusive concept. It is clear, moreover, that many view journalism as one discreet sphere, and literature another. If true, there is certainly a lightly guarded frontier between the two. As an alternative, however, I would like to suggest a different model: that of overlapping spheres. And in this perspective, one can think of literary journalism as the intersection between literature and journalism. It is also a place where all sorts of quite interesting things happen. Other definitions, of course, are possible. Many students of the form have spoken of the multiple levels of meaning, often found in literature, with which journalism can be imbued. Much attention has also be paid to the use of the devices and language of literature, which often can find a welcome home in the longer forms of journalism.[1] One such device, the topic of this presentation, concerns the use of a narrator in journalism -- what might be called "the voice behind the voice." As a starting point, my hope is that we can agree that every piece of writing, literary, journalistic or otherwise, has a narrator. It is the teller of the story, the voice in the ear of the reader, relating to them what is happening in front of them on the page. I am reminded perhaps of one of the more memorable narrators in the world of American letters, albeit in fiction rather than journalism, who began his tale, "Call me Ishmael." Thereafter unfolded Herman Melville's Moby Dick. There is a significant body of scholarly literature concerning the concept of narrator, but, like the reference above, most of it applies to fiction, and often approaches the topic as a subset of the subject of rhetoric. Important works might include Wayne Booth's classic, The Rhetoric of Fiction, plus more recent scholars such as Michael Kearns, James Olney, and Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly.[2] Well beyond the realm of fiction, however, it can be argued that journalism also makes use of the device of narrator -- though we are often unaware of his or her presence in the nonfiction form. For example, what voice was talking to you, narrating yesterday's events, when you were reading the front page of the New York Times this morning? Or last week's Time magazine or Economist? Or this week's New Yorker? Before proceeding any further, it might be useful to make an important distinction. We must be clear on a pivotal fact: that the author of a given piece and its narrator are different embodiments. The narrator is a deliberate creation of the author, brought into being for the duration of the story to tell the story -- and to serve other purposes as well, of which more in a moment. Moreover, this creation of the author, the narrator, can take a variety of forms. There is, for example, narrator as moral witness. Often used in war reporting, one might be reminded of Walt Whitman's narrator in his reports from the U.S. Civil War field hospitals; Ernie Pyle's narrator telling the story of the World War II death of Captain Washkow; Gloria Emerson's pieces from the Vietnam War; or Joan Didion's narrator bearing witness to the quiet horrors of the revolution and counter-revolution of San Salvador.[3] There are other kinds of narrators as well, including narrator as foil. Stephen Crane, in "Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo Bay," creates a cowering narrator, fearfully groveling in the grass while nearby a few brave Marines stand ramrod straight in the heat of battle, signaling with bright semaphore flags to an offshore battleship to direct its supporting gunfire. They are completely exposed to enemy rifle fire, waving their signal flags as bullets whiz around them. Meanwhile, the narrator (in this case, a war correspondent) cowers at their feet, amazed at their bravery and fretting that they might be shot at any moment.[4] Which, as an aside, raises the interesting question of veracity. We know from the historical record -- from the writings of Richard Harding Davis, Frederick Remington and others, who covered the Spanish- American War with Crane and who knew him well -- that Crane himself was absolutely fearless on the battlefield. In fact, there are a number of references suggesting that he may have had a death wish. At the first hint of physical threat in the conflict, Crane was compelled by an almost-pathological urge to expose himself to danger. Contemporary reporters would ask, "Where's Crane going today?" and suggest that they preferred to cover a different part of the battlefield rather than risk accompanying Crane. And yet, Crane chose to create this narrator that grovels at the feet of these signaling Marines. Upon reflection, there are perhaps at least two explanations. The first is that the narrator is a fictional creation. The second, a more speculative but interesting possibility, is that Crane may in actuality have been behaving with extraordinary courage, even abandon -- and yet, at the same time, was feeling enormous fear. In his own mind, this argument suggests, he was groveling at the feet of far braver soldiers than he.[5] Other forms of narrator are also possible. Some are characters in the story, even the central figure or the protagonist of the story. Beyond that, perhaps even a decidedly heroic voice commanding center stage. In contrast, in other journalists' work, the narrator is an unseen voice, both omnipresent and, at the same time, completely transparent -- a completely detached observer from the action, a voice off-stage, telling us what is happening as the drama unfolds in front of us. If literary journalism does indeed represent the intersection of journalism and literature, then the authorial voice is central to its success. And, as a result, one might argue that literary journalism is a particular arena in which the concept of narrator takes on a heightened centrality. Following up on the work of a number of scholars such as Stephen Clifford and Barbara Olson, perhaps there would be value in examining the literary journalism of Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Ross and Hunter Thompson, with a particular interest in the ways each author chose to create and employ the narrator in their pieces.[6] For study subjects, I have selected a single journalistic piece from each author: Hemingway's "A.D. in Africa: A Tanganyika Letter" published in 1934 in Esquire; Lillian Ross's 1960 New Yorker classic, "The Yellow Bus"; and Hunter Thompson's "Hell's Angels, A Strange and Terrible Saga" from Rolling Stone in 1968. And though one could certainly replace my selections with many others, my hope is that each is both generally representative of the author's work and a fitting example to illustrate the specific nature of narration that each author decided would best serve the tale they were trying to tell. There is also perhaps the added advantage that each of the pieces was created in a different historical moment, and so that each could be seen as both a reflection and a product of a different social reality. Hemingway's style of narrator often was the heroic protagonist, the demanding ego at the heart of the tale. As we know, before he enjoyed great success as a writer of novels, Hemingway was a very widely published working journalist. Much of his work in the 1930s was published by the North American Newspaper Alliance, in the Toronto Star and a variety of magazines such as Esquire. "A.D. in Africa" (A.D. stands for amoebic dysentery) is a self-mocking tale told by a hero- narrator carrying on under difficult environmental and intestinal conditions. The story begins: "To write this sort of thing you need a typewriter. To describe, to narrate, to make funny cracks you need a typewriter. To fake along, to stall, to make light reading, to write a good piece, you need luck, two or more drinks and a typewriter. Gentlemen, there is no typewriter."[7] In the first few sentences, Hemingway convincingly establishes that the narrator of story, no matter what his other afflictions, does not suffer from an under-developed ego. A few hundred words, the narrator speaks of gathering with friends and going out into the African bush. The hunting of lions as the object of their activity. As you read the following excerpt, think of the voice talking to you, of the characterization that's created in your mind as you hear Hemingway's words. "Going out at sunrise every morning, we would locate lions by the vultures circling above a kill. Approaching, you would see the jackals trotting away and hyenas going off in that drag-belly obscene gallop, looking back as they ran. If the birds were on the ground, you knew the lions were gone. "Sometimes we met them in the open plain on their way toward a gully or shallow water course to lie up for the day. Sometimes we saw them on a high knoll in the plain with the herd grazing not half a mile away, lying sleepy and contemptuous looking over the country. More often we saw them under the shade of a tree or saw their great round heads lift up out of the grass of a shallow donga as they heard the noise of the truck. In two weeks and three days in lion country we saw 84 lions and lionesses. Of these twenty were maned lions. "We shot the twenty-third, the forty-seventh, the sixty-fourth and the seventy-ninth. All were shot on foot, three were killed in bush country to the west of the Serengeti and one on the plain itself. Three were full black maned lions and one was a lioness. She was in heat and when the big lion she was with was hit and had gotten into cover the lioness took up her position outside the thick bush. She wanted to charge and it was impossible to go after the lion without killing her first. I broke her neck with a 220 grain, .30-06 solid at thirty yards." [8] Full stop. End of paragraph. Is it fair to say one senses a certain beating of the chest? The question, of course, is: Why is it so effective? Is it the subject matter? When speaking of man as hunter, does this language seem particularly adept? Similarly, are the themes of domination and perhaps ethnocentricity particularly suited to this sort of voice? And lastly, might we wonder whether the expectations of the audience played a role in some of Hemingway's work. By the 1930s, he was already a celebrity, and the adjective Hemingwayesque was already in use. Was the author making a choice, perhaps too easily, based on his perception of what was already expected of him? There's no record to suggest that he was, but it is perhaps an idea worth pondering. Lillian Ross, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has written for the magazine for most of the latter half of the 20th Century -- and is still writing today. Her work is a beautiful example of the unseen, unheard transparent narrator, the fly on the wall, the omnipresent fact- upon-fact neutral observer -- and the exact opposite of Hemingway. To underscore that point, before examining her piece, "Yellow Bus," there might be value in a quick glance at the introduction she wrote to an anthology, titled Reporting, of her work. In it she states a few rules for being a good journalist. Rule Number 9 reads: "Reporting is difficult, partly because the writer does not have the leeway to play around with the lives of people, as he does in fiction. There are many other restrictions, too....Your attention at all times should be on your subject, not on you. Do not call attention to yourself. As a reporter, serve your subject, do not yourself. Do not, in effect say, 'Look at me. See what a great reporter I am!' Do not, if you want to reveal that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes, write, 'I am showing that the Emperor is already naked.' "A few more admonitions: do not promote yourself; do not advertise yourself; do not sell yourself. If you have a tendency to do these things, you should go into some line of work that may benefit from your talents as a promoter, a salesman, or an actor. Too many extraneous considerations have been imposed on reporting in recent years, and it is time now to ask writers who would be reporters to report." [9] The thought occurs, almost by its own volition: One is tempted to wonder how Hemingway would have responded if offered that advice? Ross's "Yellow Bus" focuses on a school trip to New York City by a group of high school students from a small town in the Midwest. It begins: "A few Sundays ago, in the late, still afternoon, a bright-yellow school bus, bearing the white-on-blue license plate of the State of Indiana and with the words 'BEAN BLOSSOM TWP MONROE COUNTY' painted in black letters under the windows on each side, emerged into New York City from the Holland Tunnel. Inside the bus were eighteen members of the senior class of the Bean Blossom Township High School, who were coming to the city for their first visit. The windows of the bus, as it rolled out into Canal Street, were open, and a few of the passengers leaned out, deadpan and silent, for a look at Manhattan: The rest sat, deadpan and silent, looking at each other. In all, there were twenty-two people in the bus: eleven girls and seven boys of the senior class; their English teacher and her husband; and the driver (one of the regular bus drivers employed by the township for the school) and his wife. When they arrived, hundreds of thousands of the city's eight million inhabitants were out of town. Those who were here were apparently minding their own business; certainly they were not handing out any big hellos to the visitors. The little Bean Blossom group, soon to be lost in the shuffle of New York's resident and transient summer population, had no idea how to elicit any hellosÑor for that matter, any goodbyes or how-are-yous. Their plan for visiting New York City was divided into three parts: one, arriving; two, staying two days and three nights; three, departing. "Well, they had arrived." [10] Later on in the story, there is a hotel-lobby scene featuring one of the students in the group: "At 5 p.m. of this second day in the City of New York, the members of the Bean Blossom senior class returned to their hotel and stood in the lobby for awhile, looking from some distance at a souvenir-and-gift stand across from the registration desk. The stand was stocked with thermometers in the form of the Statue of Liberty, in two sizes, priced at seventy-nine cents and ninety-eight cents; with silver-plated charm bracelets; with pins and compacts carrying representations of the Empire State Building; with scarves showing the RCA Building and the UN Building; and with ashtrays showing the New York City skyline. Mike Richardson edged over to the stand and picked up a wooden plaque, costing ninety-eight cents, with the Statue of Liberty shown at the top, American flags at the sides, and, in the middle, a poem, inscribed 'Mother.' "After reading the poem, Mike smiled. "'Where ya from?' the man behind the stand asked him. "'Indiana,' Mike said, looking as though he were warming up. 'We've been on this tour? The whole day?' "'Ya see everything?' the man asked. "'Everything except the Empire State Building,' said Mike. "'Yeah,' said the man, and looked away. "Mike was still holding the plaque. Carefully, he replaced it on the stand. 'I'll come back for this later,' he said. "Without looking at Mike, the man nodded." [11] This is a wonderful example of the jeweler's eye, the layering of detail upon detail, and yet, it is as if there is no actual narrator present in that scene at all. Rather, there's someone standing off on the side, recording everything's that happening, in almost too much detail, but without really having a point of view about it. The question is: Why is it so effective? One can argue that, to keep the narrator so transparent, allows the subjects to tell their own story. I often ask my students when we read this is class: "Do you believe the narrator in this piece is being sympathetic or unsympathetic to the students?" Inevitably, we have a wonderful class argument, debating whether or not the children on this tour are sympathetically represented. Clearly, they're from rural circumstances, and New York is a very strange place. But, I argue, no stranger than if you took New Yorkers and sent them to Bean Blossom, Indiana. I suspect the key here is that Ross's technique is particularly well suited to allowing the reader's imagination have its own way, permitting the reader to project his or her own sensibilities onto the story. Our last narrator is Hunter Thompson, who tends to use narrators who are characters in his stories, but -- unlike Hemingway -- not the central characters. In many ways, their most important role is as foil for other characters, very much in the manner of Stephen Crane. His narrators' reactions -- fear, loathing, etc. -- to the unfolding action create an implicit yet direct subtext for the reader, suggestive clues and guideposts for the reader and influencing their reactions to the stories. Our reading is from "The Hell's Angels, A Strange and Terrible Saga," and it begins with the narrator joining a group of members of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang in a remote rural campsite in California. They are planning on a weekend of serious beer-drinking, and the narrator decides to leave them for a moment and go to the small town not far away. "I listened to the war talk and shouting for a while, then hustled down the mountain to call a Washington newspaper I was writing for at the time, to say I was ready to send one of the great riot stories of the decade." This is all because they were running out of beer and the people in the town didn't want to sell them any more beer because after they'd get drunk, they'd tear the town up. And he's trying to create a narrative saying, "Oh my God, something terrible is going to happen." "On the way down the road I passed outlaw bikes coming the other way. They'd been stopped at the Bass Lake roadblock and pointed up to the campsite. The Frisco swastika truck came by in first gear, with two bikes in the back and a third trailing twenty feet behind at the end of a long rope in a cloud of dust. Its rider was hanging on grimly behind green goggles and a handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth. Following the truck was a red Plymouth that erupted with shouts and horn blasts as I passed. I stopped, not recognizing the car, and backed up. It was Larry, Pete and Puff, the new president of the Frisco chapter....I explained the problem of the campsite. They decided to push on, and I said I'd see them later in town or somewhere, and at that point I thought it would probably be in jail. A very bad scene was building up. Soon the Angels would be coming down the mountain en masse, and in no mood for reasonable talk.... "Given all these fiery ingredients, I didn't feel a trace of alarmist guilt when I finally got a Bass Lake-Washington connection and began outlining what was about to happen. I was standing in a glass phone booth in downtown Bass LakeÑwhich consists of a small post office, a big grocery, a bar and cocktail lounge, and several other picturesque redwood establishments that look very combustible. While I was talking, Don Mohr pulled up on his bikeÑhaving breached the roadblock with his press credentialsÑand indicated that he was in a hurry to call the Tribune. My editor in Washington was telling me how and when to file, but I was not to do so until the riot was running under its own power, with significant hurt to both flesh and property. And I was to send no more than an arty variation of the standard wire-service news blurb: Who, What, When, Where and Why. "I was still on the phone when I saw a big burr- haired lad with a pistol on his belt walk over to Mohr and tell him to get out of town. I couldn't hear much of what was going on, but I saw Mohr produce a packet of credentials, stringing them out like a card shark with a funny deck. I could see that he needed the phone, so I agreed with my man in Washington that first things would always come first, and hung up. Mohr immediately occupied the booth, leaving me to deal with the crowd that had gathered."[12] Further on in the piece, the narrator goes to get the beer for the biker group, who believe that they have satisfactorily negotiated the purchase in advance. But then a vigilante group of townspeople appear to prevent them. "We were almost to Williams' store, and I suddenly remembered my burr-haired inquisitor with his high- powered language barrier. We made a turn at the bottom of the hill and I parked the car as inconspicuously as possible about thirty yards from the store. According to the deputy at the campsite, the sale was already arranged. All we had to do was pay, load the beer and leave. Sonny had the cash, and as far as I was concerned, I was just the chauffeur. "It took about fifteen seconds to understand that something had boggled the plan. As we stepped out of the car the vigilantes began moving toward us. It was very hot and quiet, and I could taste the dust that hung over the parking area. A Madera County paddy wagon was parked at the other end of the shopping center, with two cops in the front seat. The mob stopped short of the car and formed a bristling human wall on the boardwalk outside the store. Apparently, they hadn't been informed of the pending transaction. I opened the trunk of my car, thinking that Sonny and Pete would go in for the beer." Sonny and Pete being two Hell's Angels. "If things got serious I could jump into the trunk and lock it behind me, then kick out the back seat and drive away when it was all over. "Neither Angel made a move toward the store. Traffic had stopped and the tourists were standing off at a safe distance, watching. The scene reeked of Hollywood: the showdown, High Noon, Rio Bravo. But without cameras or background music it didn't seem quite the same."[13] When one reads this particular story very closely, it is clear what it recounts a simple tale: A somewhat scruffy group of motorcyclists rode to a remote location, all got very drunk for two or three days, had to negotiate with some townspeople to buy more beer, were successful in that regard, stayed drunk for another day, and all went home. Nothing really happened. Thompson, however, in creating this fearful narrator, imbues the story with sense of tension and impending violence for significant dramatic effect. Which leads to the closing thought, which, with your permission, I offer as a teacher rather than as a scholar: Implied, taken for granted in all of the above, is the idea of intentionally. The assumption is that what we find in a piece's approach, style, and deeper structures represent an act of will by the author. A deliberate choice by the writer based on some appreciation of outcome. I hold this, not as verifiable fact in each and every case, but perhaps as an article of faith. And in the instruction of my students in the more aspiring, longer forms of journalism, one of the great challenges is to encourage them to make the same kind of choices for themselves in their own writing: Suiting the modality of their prose to the dimensions of the story; selecting the correct stylistic arrow from their journalistic quivers. My ultimate goal is that they appreciate that they, like every other writer, have an extraordinary and powerful tool at their command: The selection and reification of a specific narrative voice which, one hopes, will prove perfectly suited to the tale to be told. ENDNOTES: [1] Norman Sims, Thomas B. Connery and Ronald Weber have, over the last two decades, done much to define literary journalism as a genre. See Norman Sims, Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and The Literary Journalists (New York: Ballantine, 1984); Thomas B. Connery, Fusing Fictional Technique and Journalistic Fact (Providence, RI: s.n., 1984); and Ronald Weber, The Literature of Fact: Literary Nonfiction in American Writing (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1990). A number of defining insights can also be found in Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, eds., The New Journalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). [2] See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); Michael Kearns, Rhetorical Narratology (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000). [3] See Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War (Old Saybrook, CT: Applewood Books, 1993); David Nichols, ed., Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 195-197; Gloria Emerson, Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from a Long War (New York: Random House, 1976); and Joan Didion, Salvador (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). [4] Stephen Crane, "Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo Bay," in the War Dispatches of Stephen Crane, anthologized in Louis Snyder, ed., A Treasury of Great Reporting (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1949), 148- 154. [5} A variety of reactions to Crane and his behavior by his fellow- journalists can be found in Arthur Lubow, The Reporter Who Would Be King: A Biography of Richard Harding Davis (New York: Scribner, 1992) and Michael Robertson, Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making Of Modern American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). [6] See Stephen P. Clifford, Beyond the Heroic "I": Reading Lawrence, Hemingway, And "Masculinity" (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1998) and Barbara K. Olson, Authorial Divinity In the Twentieth Century: Omniscient Narration in Woolf, Hemingway, And Others (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997). [7] Ernest Hemingway, "A.D. in Africa: A Tanganyika Letter," in William White, ed., By-Line: Ernest Hemingway; Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades (new York: Scribner, 1967), 158. [8] Ibid., 160-161. [9] Lillian Ross, "Introduction," in Reporting (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), 3-4. [10] Lillian Ross, "The Yellow Bus," in Reporting (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), 11-12. [11] Ibid., 22. [12] Hunter S. Thompson, "The Hell's Angels, A Strange and Terrible Saga," in Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, eds., The New Journalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 342-343. [13] Ibid., 348-348.