A Newspaper Kind of Sunday

My family and I had a lazy time of it Sunday morning in Los Angeles, although we did manage a walk to Larchmont Boulevard and its weekly Farmers’ Market. To get there, we cut through Windsor Square and its beautiful palm-lined streets – always a pleasure.

Later at home, we ignored the Super Bowl (I dislike football). My wife curled up with a paperback, my daughter tackled homework and I sat in my favorite chair and idly thumbed the pages of the Los Angeles Times (guided by some timely pointers from LA Observed). Some impressions:


Fresno and the War in Iraq

Sunday marked the debut of West, the replacement for Los Angeles Times Magazine, and I found myself responding favorably. Rick Wartzman, the editor, struck the right notes in his letter to readers, particularly when he promised to write “to that distinct part of every thinking Californian’s self-identity, to that California sensibility that resides in all of us.” Good!

The contributor line-up looks very strong and conveys the impression that we’ll be treated to more substance and less lifestyle froth.

The debut issue cover story – “The Valley’s Not So Civil War,” by Mark Arax – was superb and contributed greatly to making the magazine’s first issue such a strong one.

The setting is the eastern San Joaquin Valley, California’s agricultural heartland, and its dominant city, Fresno. Arax, one of the paper’s finest writers, drops his readers directly in a hot landing zone with a skillfully written opening paragraph:

Ever since the twin towers came crashing down and the cloud of jihad fogged the land, the crop dusters swooping low over the San Joaquin Valley had taken on a new menace. Even here, tucked away in the farm fields of middle California, fear had settled into the ground. Harvest to harvest, one year to the next, we watched tens of thousands of illegal migrants stream into our vineyards. Not a single suicide bomber was among them. Still, we could never be certain whether it was our vigilance or just dumb luck that kept us safe.

The “Not So Civil War” of the title is the harsh, increasingly bitter and increasingly calcified debate in the greater Fresno community over the war in Iraq. Arax etches sharp portraits of a number of leading participants – Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor and raisin farmer who has found fame as a pro-war cheerleader and anti-liberal scold; John Somerville, a former Marine and Christian radio personality who views support for Israel as ordained by God; and Stuart Weil, a frog farmer and pro-war activist who once ran the local branch of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

But the heart and soul of the story Arax tells belongs to Jeff Hubbard, a football coach and resident of nearby Clovis, the father of three sons, including one who joined the Marines only to be killed in combat in Iraq. Hubbard, as captured by Arax, has views on the war that are dynamic, rather than calcified. Caught between grief and patriotism, he is pushed to a careful assessment of what is at stake.

In the end, a surprising development forces Hubbard into something of a resolution – even if there is a note of ambiguity in his final comments to Arax:

It was late, and he [Hubbard] followed me out to the car. We shook hands and I thanked him for not losing his patience with me. He leaned over and stuck his head near my window. "There isn't one clean answer," he said. "You don't think I know that?" …Maybe I had come for one clean answer, but who was I to push him anymore? It was enough that his struggle—set against the carnival of pundits and self-proclaimed patriots—was quiet and private and real.

Arax’s story is the story of a community, but even more the story of a family and a father – honestly and sensitively told.


If You Make It Up, It's Fiction

The James Frey affair has put Times Book Editor David L. Ulin in a philosophical mood. His Sunday Book Review piece (“The Lie That Tells the Truth”) begins with the premise that “the Frey fiasco raises a more elusive question: To what extent (if at all) is invention, or re-imagining, allowable in a nonfiction work?”

Ulin himself would evidently allow quite a lot of invention. He cites a number of examples – Ann Dillard’s admittedly contrived anecdote about her cat covering her body with bloody paw prints (it opens a work which won her a Pulitzer for nonfiction writing); Vivian Gornick creating an encounter with a street person in her 1987 memoir; and Hunter S. Thompson’s completely made-up claim in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 that Ed Muskie experimented with a hallucinogenic drug.

(To be fair, Ulin acknowledges that Thompson may be guilty of “gonzo excess” but still thinks that what he wrote reveals something true and important about Muskie.)

“For writers like Dillard, Gornick and Thompson,” Ulin writes, “what’s at issue is emotional truth, the need to recreate the sensibility, the tenor, of an experience in a reader’s mind.”

He even posits a literary category – “creative nonfiction,” he calls it.

“[C]reative nonfiction … exists somewhere between truth and invention, in a territory that's still taking shape. You'd be hard pressed to find a work of creative nonfiction that didn't involve some degree of reinvention, whether in the construction of scenes (description, dialogue) or the interpretive filter every writer brings to his or her version of events. Is this dishonest? No more so than memory, with its vagaries and false turns: a narrow, flawed and ultimately subjective window on the world.”

In the aftermath of the Frey affair, Ulin says we are looking at “the signposts of an emerging genre, the rules of which are being written as we read.”

I sure hope not.

I’m strictly an amateur, but when I write nonfiction (such as the personal memoir-style essays collected on this blog) I take the view that fidelity to fact comes first. Yes, I want to capture emotional truth, I want to recreate for readers “the sensibility, the tenor, of an experience” – but not at the expense of actual truth. Truth is correspondence between representation and reality. We may not be capable of more than an approximation, but we should write as truly and faithfully as we can.

In nonfiction, fidelity to the plain truth is an essential virtue. Claims to the contrary strike me as sophistry. Memory may indeed have “vagaries and false turns,” but it is often all we have. Writing faithfully what we remember or experience is the honest work of nonfiction. Inventing incidents or conversations we don’t really remember or that never happened is lying – unless we call what we’re writing a poem, a short story or a novel.

I always viewed Hunter Thompson as a writer who was entertaining, but not to be taken seriously. James Frey, of course, is beyond the pale. I’m not familiar with Dillard and Gornick, but would have to view them with great skepticism now – as I would perhaps view the work of Ulin himself.


Pseudonymous Commentary in Current

One Los Angeles constant in my lifetime has been a profound mutual mistrust between the LAPD and many in the black community. Today, the most prominent point of contention is the Devin Brown case. Almost exactly a year ago, the 13-year-old Brown was shot and killed by Los Angeles Police Officer Steve Garcia as the African-American youngster was backing his car toward the officer following a chase and an accident.

Following an internal investigation, LAPD Chief William Bratton recently ruled that the shooting was a tragic but proper use of force. Last week, he was overturned by the Police Commission – in effect, his board of directors – who ruled the shooting out of policy, but cited confidentiality rules in declining to set out their reasoning for overruling the chief.

Sunday, the Commission was castigated in print on the pages of “Current,” the Times weekly opinion and commentary section, by “Jack Dunphy,” the pseudonym for an LAPD officer and columnist for National Review Online (see "Playing Politics With Cops' Safety," by Jack Dunphy, Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2006). By my count, this is the fifth pseudonymous column “Dunphy” has written for the Times on the Devin Brown case over the past 12 months.

Commentary by contributors writing anonymously or pseudonymously is exceeding rare in the Times. Or such, at least, is my impression. I may have missed it, but I can’t recall seeing any anonymous commentary in the Times prior to the first column by “Dunphy” shortly after the Brown shooting last year.

The perspective espoused by “Dunphy” deserves to be heard. The men and women of the LAPD really do put their lives on the line for the sake of public order and safety, and public debate over issues related to use of force would have little validity if their views were not considered. But “Dunphy” goes well beyond advocating the perspectives of the officer on the street on use of force. His targets are political – the Police Commission and (implicitly) the Mayor who appointed most of them.

In his most recent commentary, “Dunphy” asserts that “politics, not tactics” determined the Commission’s ruling. “More galling than the ruling,” he adds, “was its messenger: commission President John Mack, who for years has been one of the city’s most outspoken police critics.” Much of the rest of the column is an attack on Mack’s fitness to lead the Commission and ability to be fair.

Does an attack that is both highly personal and highly political deserve the protection afforded by a pseudonym? It’s my understanding that the Times won’t run pseudonymous or anonymous letters to the editor. Shouldn’t the requirements for Op-Ed commentary be the same?