Chapter 137: Immersion. And When You Cannot

I am a sucker for “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.” It fills the void I’d experienced since the finale of “Succession:” the absence from my life of the virtual company of spectacularly wealthy people I cannot abide. 

“Feud” features the post-In Cold Blood Truman Capote devoting the hours he is not tormented by writer’s block and destroying his liver with drink in the company of women who, in another era, were known as “hostesses” and “embodiments of style and class” – the wives of powerful and wealthy men, women who themselves did not appear to have much to do other than having lunch with each other, be seen having lunch, drinking a good deal of Poilly Fuisse, and complaining about what louts their husbands were.

I justify the time spent watching – and let me tell you, an episode a week is plenty – by telling myself that there is a journalism component to this. 

Yes, there is. Thank you, Truman.

Be it at their hangout of choice – the long-since shuttered Manhattan restaurant La Cote Basque – or at their vacation homes in Florida, or in their bedrooms on Fifth Avenue, Capote is joined at the hip with “the swans,” listening and listening and when necessary offering advice and a shoulder to weep on after yet another infidelity is discovered. 

He asks questions. He observes. He is less a fly on the wall than he is an amalgam of jester and bestie.

And he is taking it all down. 

As Nora Ephron famously said, “everything is material,” which for Capote means everyone, especially his friends. He does this surreptitiously; he is not a note taker and feels no need to advise those nearest and apparently dearest to him that everything they say is being stored away, perhaps for future use. Which is precisely what he does. 

Seemingly starved for material, Capote writes a thinly veiled – if ever a story needed a warning label it was this one – short story, La Cote Basque 1965. It appears in Esquire. He tells ALL. More precisely, he tells all except for the real names. But the damage is done. The swans feel betrayed and cut him off. 

Capote is baffled. He is an artist. He is an observer of social mores. 

He is hurt. Boo hoo.

Capote was not, strictly speaking, committing an act of journalism. But I suspect that some viewers, given the enduring legacy of his brilliant self-proclaimed “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood, might watch him operate and assume that this is how we work. We gather. We harvest. We take it all in. We betray. 

And while there are journalists who have deceived their way into access to their subjects only to hang them out to dry – the late Joe McGinnis comes first and always to mind – most of us who have done what is known as “immersion” journalism have been straight up with our sources about what we are about, and what they should expect. 

Still, watching “Feud” is a reminder of how exciting immersion can be: you are there, watching the story and all its many parts unfold before you. The door has been left open. You are invited to show up, keep your head down, and your notebook ready as the story starts hurtling your way.

Of the journalists I know who’ve gravitated to immersion reporting, few have done it as well and in such varied ways as my friend Miles Corwin. Miles, who teaches in the literary journalism program at the University of California/Irvine, has written several best-selling books built on immersion. He’s spent months at a time with police officers and a year at a high school in South Central. 

I asked him about the appeal of immersive reporting.

“You see, hear, and experience everything,” he replied. “And it’s the experience that’s most gratifying. I went into journalism because I wanted to experience other people, other neighborhoods, other cultures. Immersion journalism embodies the adventurous side of journalism. Because you are with your subjects for extended periods of time, you can avoid the artifice and superficiality of more traditional types of journalism. This kind of reporting can yield remarkable dialogue and drama and provide startling insights into characters’ worlds and personalities. Immersion journalism is storytelling at its most direct.”

Immersion is a powerful tool. But it is limited by its greatest strength: immediacy. There are many other stories that are over and done with by the time a reporter shows up. So if, as Tom Wolfe wrote in his introduction to his 1973 New Journalism anthology, “the basic reporting unit is no longer the datum, the piece of information, but the scene. . . .” how do you report a scene that took place in the past?

You reconstruct it.

There are some in our business who look askance at the practice. With respect, they are wrong. Reconstruction is an essential storytelling tool, and when done well and fairly can be as exciting as the ringside seat of immersion. Apologies for being overly metaphorical, but if the process of immersion is akin to a firehose, reconstruction can feel like filling a 55-gallon drum with an eye-dropper. One. Detail. At. A. Time.

Reconstruction is not for everyone. I recall telling another terrific, prize-winning reporter I know how much fun I was having going through archives and he looked at me as if I was telling him I’d chucked it all to practice dentistry. How could that ever be fun?

But over time, having chosen to report many stories that took place long ago, I have come to fall in love with reconstruction. 

Now, I am hoping my students will, too.

Given the nature of the stories they’re working on – finding the story in a photograph – the drama is all in the past. They are three weeks into their reporting and as their stories are beginning to take shape and flight, I felt it was time to pause and break down what to my mind endures as one of the great feats of journalistic reconstruction: Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day. The book, which came out in 1964 and became an international best seller, told the story of one day, June 6, 1944 – which for people of a certain age lives in perpetuity by its nickname, DDay: the allied invasion of Occupied France and arguably the pivotal event in the defeat of Nazi Germany. 

I’ve written about Ryan and his remarkable accomplishment in an earlier chapter which breaks down the step-by-step of how he went about it: postcards, followed by questionnaires, followed by interviews with as many survivors of that day. It took him years.

I gave my students a few examples of those completed questionnaires and the transcript of a lengthy interview, followed by those pages in the book where the material appeared. 

They had a lot of questions:
-he was so meticulous about his questions and yet when he writes that the commanding German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel carefully buttered his toast wasn’t he assuming that he did so with care? He noted the bread and the butter in the interview. But care?

-doesn’t he slip into a bit of mindreading as to what a subject is thinking?

-isn’t he asking such broad questions that he risks putting his subjects off?

There were more, and they revealed a good deal about how the students were beginning to see how they might draw on what Ryan had done to do their reporting well. Of all their many questions – they are an especially lively and engaging group – the one that stood out was on the subject of details. What is achieved, one asked, by noting not only the make of shoe that Rommel bought for his wife as a birthday gift, but the size as well: in this case five and half.

Was that a detail too many? Do we really need to know that Frau Rommel had a smallish foot?

The consensus was yes, we do. Not because we much care about her footwear but because in gleaning and using that seemingly small detail that appears in an otherwise lengthy interview, Ryan takes a powerful step in connecting us to the moment, to the scene. We are there. 

There was one final question, and I feel that this one deserves a chapter of its own. It dealt with memory. Granted, the participants in Ryan’s exhaustive reporting were perhaps only ten or twelve years removed from DDay. Still, asked one student, how reliable were their memories? Several students are interviewing elderly people and so assume that over time their memories may have faded, or somehow been jumbled with others.

How much can we rely on what someone says they recall, no matter their age?

With immersion, we are seeing and hearing it all in real time.

With reconstruction, as my students wisely pointed out, we are dealing with what people recall.

“Memory believes,” said William Faulkner, “before knowing remembers.”

What do we believe? 

What really happened? Can we ever truly know?

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every week.