A few days ago, I posted a note on BlueSky: “Dear writers of creative nonfiction: Creative nonfiction is more than just writing about how you’re writing what you’re writing.” It’s an observation that’s neither new nor original. Back in 1997, James Wolcott published an article in Vanity Fair titled, “Me, Myself, and I” in which he called writers such as Philip Lopate, Anne Roiphe, and Laurie Stone as “navel gazers” and complained that “Never have so many shared so much of so little.”
Though almost three decades have passed since Wolcott’s piece, the tendency of some authors to inject themselves into a nonfiction narrative has not only continued unabated but been embraced as the defining characteristic of what makes it “creative.” In his 2024 biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Glad to the Brink of Fear, for example, James Marcus opens his fourth chapter with a little personal essay about a winter walk: “I am writing these lines on a December afternoon, surrounded by tall, gray, columnar trees that have lost their lower limbs and resemble the masts of ships,” and notes that “Thanks to man-made global warming, still contested by one in three Americans, there is no snow.” The winter scene leads to a memory of his father’s funeral and eventually returns to Emerson through the subject of grief. There are only a few such intrusions in Marcus’s book, which to me begs the question of whether they were really necessary, but they didn’t dissuade the Times Literary Supplement and others from naming it as one of the outstanding books of the year.
The idea that creative nonfiction depends on the active presence of the author was not foremost in the minds of those who championed the label when it first became widely recognized in the early 1990s. Lee Gutkind, often referred to as the father of creative nonfiction for his numerous books on the subject and his founding of Creative Nonfiction magazine in 1991, described it as simply, “Capturing and describing a subject so that the most resistant reader will be interested in learning more about it” in The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality, published the same year as Wolcott’s essay. Well before Gutkind stepped forward, others were using the term without any implication that the hand of the author needed to be an overt aspect. In their 1969 college anthology, Modern American Prose (Perspectives in Literature), Patricia J. Costello and Charles A. Conefrey refer to John Updike’s 1960 essay about Ted Williams’s last game with the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” as “‘creative nonfiction’; it is prose based soundly on fact but with the added dimension of a creative touch.”
Still, the overt presence of the author, whether as the “I” of a first-person narrator or as a persona (the “Mailer” that Norman Mailer was fond of using as ironic (iconic?) alternative), remains a dominant feature in much creative nonfiction. This tendency, in my view, discourages writers from employing other approaches that have as much or more potential to illuminate their subjects. So, as a counterpoint to the egocentric school of creative nonfiction, I want to offer a few examples, mostly neglected and mostly published before the term came into use.
- • Pull Devil, Pull Baker, by Stella Benson and Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec De Savine (1933)
- In April 1931, the English novelist Stella Benson, living in Hong Kong as the wife of a diplomat, encountered an elderly Russian man in a charity hospital who introduced himself as a count, a member of “one of the most distinguiched aristocratic famelys of Europe.” He had written a memoir that he pressed upon Benson, hoping she would get it published and pass along the resulting royalties.
She did get it published, but not after grappling not merely with the Count’s highly idiosyncratic prose but with the fundamental questions of fact his narrative raised. First, she had to abandon the invisibility of the traditional editor of a memoir:
The dislocation between author and editor is usually more discreetly glossed over than it is in our book. At any rate, in our book, the Count says what he means, and I say what I mean, and, although our meanings are often mutually contradictory, at least I do not interpret him, as some editors have been known to interpret authors who are no longer sufficiently alive to insist on interpreting themselves.
For the essence of the Count, she comes to realize, is fiction. He has created a persona for himself, and his memoirs are the story of the life of that persona, which may or may not resemble fact, but which do remain faithful to the truth required to maintain his persona. After accepting the fictionality of the Count, she writes:
I could edit an armadillo now, if I had to. I have seen and talked to the Count; I have not seen or talked to the Jew Taylor [a Jewish tailor in Warsaw the Count accuses of blackmail] or the armadillo, but to describe Count, Jew or armadillo I have no recourse but to invent. I know nothing about the Count de Savine, either, except what he looks like and what he says and what he writes.
And, indeed, she proceeds then to retell the Count’s tale of the dastardly Jew Taylor in the person of the tailor himself. Knocked unconscious by the Count, the tailor comes to and thinks, for a moment, that he has died and gone into an afterlife of nothingness. He is frightened, then comforted by the sense that all his worldly cares and burdens are now gone. When he finally realizes he is still in Warsaw, still a tailor, still a small-time moneylender, and still a Jew, he — or rather, Benson as the tailor — understands, bitterly, “For a minute I was free … now I am the slave of a slave.”
In the end, Benson concludes, “There is, perhaps, no thing called Truth in any book — or at any rate that can be arrived at by appraisal from a standpoint outside the book itself.”
And if that ain’t creative nonfiction, I’ll eat my hat. Pull Devil, Pull Baker is, in my mind, a landmark work that has yet to receive its due. [Pull Devil, Pull Baker was reissued in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press in 2022.]
- • As I Remember Him: The Biography of R. S., by Hans Zinsser (1940)
- As I Remember Him is one of the more unusual experiments in autobiography. The book is written in two voices: one of the unnamed author, the other of R. S. — the initials standing for “Romantic Soul.” The author sets R. S.’s material in context or comments — not always positively — upon it. After trying and failing in several professions, including painter and soldier, Zinsser entered medical school, graduating in 1903, and soon became one of the leading experts in the new field of bacteriology. Adding R.S. as a character allows Zinsser to reveal some uncomfortable truths about himself, such as the fact that he often disappeared on benders with the poet Hart Crane in the cantinas of Mexico City when he was supposed to be helping stem an outbreak of typhus.
Zinsser began writing As I Remember Him after being diagnosed with leukemia, then incurable, in 1938, and he survived long enough to see the book published. Even with the creation of a fictional self, however, Zinsser struggles to overcome the constitutional diffidence of a scientist and introvert and too often relies on purely factual passages, usually mini-histories of diseases such as syphilis, instead of delving into personal matters, so his experiment is not, I think, a complete success. Zinsser gives in to the pull of the tradition of autobiographies as seamless chronological narratives instead of building his story more as a collage of fragments, as is better accepted now, and it would be an interesting editorial exercise to attempt to redo As I Remember Him as more of a deliberate cut-and-paste job (more on cut-and-paste jobs below).
- • Earth Could Be Fair, by Pierre van Paassen (1946)
- Earth Could Be Fair is the story of one Dutch town’s experience in World War Two, told through six prisms: five of van Paassen’s classmates and himself as orchestrator. It’s a patiently assembled mosaic that starts in 1907, when a tremendous rainstorm destroys dozens of buildings and threatens to flood van Paassen’s hometown of Gorcum, and leads up through over 300 pages to the German invasion in May 1940. Then, he follows his classmates through the next five years of occupation and eventual liberation. Two turn collaborators, Toon Mussert one of the leaders of the Dutch Nazi movement. One, a woman, helps organize and run a supply network for the resistance. A classmate who becomes a Catholic priest dies nailed to a cross by the Japanese in Indonesia. And one, a doctor, is rounded up with the other 130 Jews in the town, housed for weeks within the local synagogue, and eventually transported to extermination camps in Poland. He survives until his camp is liberated by the Russians, but later dies when he and a few Polish partisans blow up their hideout to kill themselves along with a squad of Wehrmacht troops coming in from the street.
The New Yorker’s reviewer had little appetite for van Paassen’s approach. While conceding that the book “has merit in its mood, atmosphere, and evocation of the past,” he attacked the author’s “suspiciously complete recall of conversations and trivial events that took place thirty-odd years ago” and “a slipshod attitude toward facts,” calling him “probably the most creative nonfiction writer at work today.” The recollection of detailed conversations from the past is easily the single most common way in which biographers and autobiographers have long engaged in creative nonfiction. Even the great Boswell reconstructed rather than recorded the talks of Samuel Johnson that fill his biography. Several reviewers described van Paassen’s work in Earth Could Be Fair as novelistic, but none argued that it was a work of fiction. I suspect one could easily, if not quickly, go page by page through the book and flag passages as either taken from factual documentation, reconstructed — assembled from old fragmentary evidence and new cement — or clearly invented anew based on impressions and assumptions.
The same could be done for almost all works of nonfiction that are not strictly academic in purpose. And that brings to mind one of the first uses of the term “creative nonfiction. In 1937, while serving as Governor General of Canada, novelist John Buchan — then Lord Tweedsmuir — established an annual award for the best works of Canadian literature. A few years later, the categories were revised, and nonfiction was divided into two: academic nonfiction and creative nonfiction. Academic nonfiction conformed to broadly accepted conventions such as citing sources in notes and bibliographies and use of an objective third person narrative voice. Creative nonfiction, on the other hand, included histories, personal memoirs, philosophy, and travel. The key characteristic was that the works nominated had to be accessible by a broad audience of readers. Nothing in Pierre van Paassen’s Earth Could Be Fair — aside from its non-Canadianness (is this a word?) — would have disqualified it as creative nonfiction.
- • The Experience of War: The United States in World War II, by Kenneth S. Davis (1965)The Experience of War: The United States in World War II
- The Experience of War is one of the most exciting works of history I’ve ever written. Davis structures his account as a sequence of set-pieces such as General Jonathan Wainwright waiting for the end in a tunnel on Corregidor and Navy pilots spotting and attacking the Japanese carrier Kaga just as they reach the very limit of their range, opening the battle of Midway. Davis caveats at the start of his book that “It is not designed to be a formal academic history, though every effort has been made to assure its factual accuracy. Rather, its essential purpose is literary in that it attempts to rescue from the erosions and abstractions of Time something of what Webster’s Dictionary, in the definition of ‘experience,’ calls the “actual living through an event or events; actual enjoyment or suffering.”
To this end, Davis adds at least one fictional character to his narrative. In chapter 10, we follow George, a Marine recruit, through his basic training, his transport to Hawaii, his passage to an island in the Southwest Pacific, and through his part in the island’s assault and bitter conquest. This led to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fisher to remark, several decades later, that the book “promiscuously mixes fiction and fact” and was not serious history. When I looked at Davis’s work, including his long and ultimately unfinished biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, back in 2008, however, I concluded that his greatest shortcoming was not his use of fictional characters but his weakness for bursts of prose of 19th century floridity.
And it was the fiction that brought out the worst of it. Here, for example, is just a bit of George’s thoughts as he looks out on Guadalcanal from the deck of his ship:
Certainly beauty was there for the seeing — in the jagged, lofty, blue-green mountains of the interior; in the dark green jungles opened here and there by wide, pale sweeps of grassland, shoulder-high grasses flowing there in the wind like sea waves; in the tall, swaying cocoanut palms spread in mile after mile of groves along the northern shore; in the dazzlingly white beaches or coral sand with surf breaking gently upon them, rhythmic as a porch swing’s stroke across summer night in a now lost and ancient past.
Edmund Morris introduces fictional characters on an even grander scale in Dutch, his book on Ronald Reagan, discussed below, but succeeds where Davis fails because his skill as a writer works on a structural level not only at the top level — the content and sequence of his chapters — but also at the level of well-crafted sentences and paragraphs — unlike that sodden mass above.
(As an aside, the problems with Kenneth S. Davis’s prose at the sentence/paragraph level supports a theory I have that in the past, many books were just as sloppily edited as seems to be today’s average. For every Robert Gottlieb-Robert Caro collaboration in which great pains are taken to every aspect of a book, there are plenty of examples, past and present, that suggest that a fair number of books were slapped together without the kind of ruthless blue-penciling that could have turned a good book into a great book. The Experience of War seems like a book that could have been significantly improved through some hard-nosed developmental editing.)
- • Apalache, by Paul Metcalf (1976)
- Apalache is an epic tragedy of the loss of the Eden that North America represented when Europeans began to explore and colonize. Metcalf weaves together hundreds of excerpts from numerous sources ranging from Native American myths to the journals of early European explorers to scientific texts and newspaper articles, ranging over a period of nearly 400 years. Allan Kornblum wrote that Metcalf had “a scope of historical vision and a depth of compassion that I found breathtaking.” I find that last phrase key to appreciating Metcalf’s work. Yes, it is densely historical, and as he said himself, full of “the incontrovertible force of facts.”
When I wrote about Apalache in 2021, I referred to it as, “in its unique way, the Great American Novel — if you accept that the Great American story is that of the destruction of Eden and its inhabitants and their replacement by a spirit of exploitation enforced through violence.” But is it a novel? There is really nothing fictional in it. I took the time to track down several dozen of the texts that Metcalf drew from — and cites — and I could find no evidence that he had altered or invented anything. His creation is the collage that is Apalache: the selection and trimming and fitting of fragments to form an overall work, not the invention of those fragments. So, perhaps novel isn’t the right way to describe it. Apalache is a creative work built out of facts and factual sources: in other words, creative nonfiction. So, why isn’t Paul Metcalf celebrated in the same way that, say, W. G. Sebald is?
- • Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan — A Mosaic, by Ruth Limmer (1980)
- Louise Bogan didn’t write her autobiography. Or rather, she didn’t write this book. Always an intensely private person, she rarely risked putting details about her life in print, preferring to confide in her own diaries and journals and, occasionally, in letters to a few friends. “The poet represses the outright narrative of his life. He absorbs it, along with life itself,” she once wrote. “Actually, I have written down my experience in the closest detail. But the rough and vulgar facts are not there.”
Journey Around My Room was assembled some years after Bogan’s death in 1970 by her literary executor, Ruth Limmer, a professor of English at Goucher College, after the idea was suggested by Amanda Vaill, then an editor at Viking. Limmer framed the work in rough chronological order, using text from a story Bogan published in The New Yorker in 1933 titled “Journey Around My Room” as introduction, close, and chapter prefaces. She also used the lines from one of Bogan’s poems, “Train Tune” (“Back through clouds/Back through clearing/Back through distance/Back through silence…”) as chapter titles. Finally, she pulled from the mass of papers Bogan left: extracts from journals, notebooks, poems, letters, short stories, scraps of paper, essays, even recorded conversations hundreds of fragments — the tesserae from which she assembled this mosaic.
I think it’s one of the great American autobiographies. It’s moving and beautiful and nuanced and brilliantly structured. I would love to see it reissued as recognized as the classic it is. Unfortunately, in the view of Bogan’s executor, Journey Around My Room is merely “an unauthorized butchering” of her work, and so the book is unlikely ever to be republished. Which doesn’t diminish its merit but does guarantee its continued obscurity, unless a samizadat network of underground champions like me develops.
- • Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, by Edmund Morris (1999)
- I am among the small number of readers who not only bought a copy of Dutch but kept reading after realizing that Morris had invented a character, a fictious lifelong friend of Ronald Reagan who narrated the book as personal recollections rather than traditional, factual biography. It may have been a tactic Morris adopted as the only way to get through a book he’d promised Reagan to write, and among those who like their presidential biographies more like … well, like Morris’s biographies of Theodore Roosevelt.
The backlash against Morris when the book first came out has overshadowed the man’s sheer experimental audacity in trying something considered almost a mortal sin in a formal presidential biography. But folks, remember what Morris called the book? Dutch was Reagan’s nickname among friends from his youth, which Morris’s fictional character was. So, to that extent, it was a case of truth in packaging. Had he called the book Ronald Reagan: A Presidential Life or something like that, then the anger and disappointment would have been more understandable. For me, I consider Dutch a bold, if perhaps not entirely successful, work of creative nonfiction, and one that makes sense if we understand it as an attempt to tell Reagan’s story using the same tools of superficial appearances and masks the man himself employed as actor, corporate spokesman, and politician.
