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February 28, 2012

FACT CHECKING GRAHAM GREENE

Apropos l'affaire D'Agata, I came across this amusing and illuminating bit in John McPhee's paean to fact checkers, Checkpoints, collected in the superb Silk Parachutes (FSG 2010):

In "The Third Man," in the immortal Ferris-wheel scene high above postwar Vienna, Orson Welles as Henry Lime implies that he has been selling diluted penicillin to Viennese hospitals but asks his lifelong friend Joseph Cotten if one of those little moving dots down there (one of those human beings) could really matter in the long scheme of things.  On the ground, he adds:

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.  In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce?  The cuckoo clock.

I learned, or Richard learned - we've forgotten who learned - that Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay of "The Third Man," only later published ther preliminary treatment as a novella, and the cuckoo-clock speech does not appear either in the novella or in the original screenplay.  Greene did not write it.  Orson Welles thought it up and said it.

I'm essentially unsympathetic to D'Agata's argument, as I've been to those who came before and forced the rubric "Creative Nonfiction" upon us, which continues to encourage writers to take all sorts of questionable liberties with the facts.  If you want to make it up, as I've always said, write a novel.  On the other hand don't - I don't need the competition.

Posted at 10:38 AM in Obsessions, On Writing, The Conversation |

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Comments

Raymond Cothern

Agree. It is or it ain't. And like 'In Cold Blood' being a "non-fiction novel" as Truman labeled it. Hunh?

Posted by: Raymond Cothern | February 28, 2012 at 02:16 PM

BR

"Creative nonfiction" at its best is taking the facts and making them as entertaining as fiction, and there are plenty of authors who do exactly that. Having the novelist's ear with the journalist's mind is the fusion of creativity and nonfiction-- not just distorting facts to fit a narrative.

Posted by: BR | April 15, 2012 at 12:38 PM

Dan Harper

Carol Reed, who directed 'The Third Man' gets little credit for the better things in that movie. In an interview I once read (with Charles Thomas Samuels), Reed said a great many things in the movie were improvised - like the business of Lime's cat (who liked only Lime) playing with the shoelaces of the man in the shadows. When Martins (Joseph Cotten) sees his shoes, he yells at him to show himself. "What's the matter, cat got your tongue?" Then an angry neighbor throws open the shutters and the light exposes - Orson Welles. Reed also discovered the gypsy zither player who made the film's wonderful music.

Posted by: Dan Harper | May 12, 2012 at 10:27 PM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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