From Gary Presley, author of the new memoir Seven Wheelchairs:
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I’m surprised no one in my writing discussion group has quoted Oscar Wilde to me. “I may have said the same thing before…but my explanation, I am sure, will always be different.”
Too often when we discuss the art of creative nonfiction, I say that people can roll on the ground, kick their heels, and scream “No!” but creative nonfiction was a real thing long before Gay Talese wrote the inimitable “Mr. Sinatra Has a Cold” or Tom Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Take George Orwell’s “A Hanging.” Or better, read Ernie Pyle’s “The Death of Captain Waskow.”
Creative. Non. Fiction.
Both are as nuanced as Talese’s “Mr. Sinatra.” Talese doesn’t tell the reader that Sinatra is unstable, insecure, sometimes overbearing man with enormous talent, but a sophisticated reader sees all that, and more.
Ernie Pyle’s “Captain Waskow” provides art with the same layered dept, art that opens another window on the human condition, art offering up by the heart of a man worn down by war, a man telling us how hard it is sometimes to be a thinking-feeling creature on this earth.
Oh, there are differences, but those revolve more around subject than style. Talese’s essay on the Chairman of the Board pretends an intimacy that masks it’s ironic distance. Pyle’s lament for Waskow is about Waskow, but the good captain is also symbolic. Pyle substitutes empathy and compassion and stark reality for irony, but there is another deeper, more existentialist layer that allows the reader a glimpse in the mirror of mortality, a place where we each can glimpse our deaths smiling from behind the dark curtain of consciousness.
Gary Presley
http://garypresley.blogspot.com/
http://www.garypresley.net/
Gary’s right, of course. I’d go him one better and say that CNF was common back when they called it “feature stories.” Like everybody else, I read all of Ernie Pyle’s war reports when they were published, but he was far from the only reporter who put himself into the articles he wrote. A few years later I was doing it myself. I don’t know whether anybody would call this CNF, except maybe Gary, but here’s an example from back in the dark ages, when I’d just turned 25: http://carterj.homestead.com/Fortworthpress.html
(It’s from an old clipping, thus a bit hard to read.)
Carter Jefferson, editor
The Internet Review of Books
http://internetreviewofbooks.com