Rival Modes of Truth-Telling in Antebellum American Letters

R E V I E W Rival Modes of Truth-Telling in Antebellum American Letters Mark Canada. Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America: Thoreau, Stowe, and Their Contemporaries Respond to the Rise of the Commercial Press. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 214 pp. $80.00 cloth. O ne of Edgar Allan Poe’s most imaginative works of fiction appeared, not in a literary magazine such as Graham’s or the Broadway Journal, but in a newspaper, the New York Sun. Its title comes to us as “The Balloon-Hoax,” but of course it had no such name when it was published in an “Extra” edition, just hours after a breathless “astounding news” announcement from the morning’s earlier printing on 13 April 1844. That it could be successful both as a newspaper article and as a work of literature demonstrates Poe’s mastery of the two forms, but it also reveals how very different the nineteenthcentury marketplace for the written word was from our own. As Mark Canada observes in Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America, his excellent study of the “sibling rivalry” between the two modes of writing, today the journalist who invents fictional elements for a newspaper story will likely be censured, whereas the literary author who blends fact with fiction may be lauded. As initial examples, Canada contrasts Truman Capote’s celebrated In Cold Blood or Tom Wolfe’s “new journalism” with the work of discredited journalists Steven Glass or Janet Cooke, whose Pulitzer Prize was revoked once she admitted embellishing her story with fiction. Unlike the hoaxer, these writers all engaged in telling a form of the truth, but the principles and practices of the different forms of truth-telling were still being established in the years during which American literature and journalism emerged, clashed, sometimes blended, and frequently diverged. For the sake of convenience, Canada refers to writers whose work appeared principally in newspapers as journalists and those engaged in what would be understood as “literature” as authors. Notwithstanding the early and intermittent overlapping of the two, literature and journalism grew apart as they grew during the nineteenth century [3]. A fundamental difference concerned the approach to truth, or rather, to the materials that counted for “truth.” Newspaper editors sought to convey truth by gathering and reporting everyday facts, whereas literary writers did not believe that (higher) truths could be found in mere fact: “For these authors, reporting truth requires the C  2012 Washington State University 114 P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 45, 2012 R E V I E W use of the imagination and the intellect. Facts are merely facts; the truth is something else” [77]. Newspapers, while valued in other respects, were deemed incapable of what Melville called “the great Art of Telling the Truth.” Covering a period from roughly 1833, when Benjamin Day founded the New York Sun, to 1861, the date of Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, Canada explores the ways in which journalism and literature informed one another, even as each ultimately maintained a guarded distinctiveness. In addition to an introduction and epilogue, Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America is divided into two parts, each comprising three chapters. Part 1 focuses on the encounters between the two modes throughout the mid–nineteenth century, starting with the commonalities between authors and journalists, particularly their shared concern for “the story and the truth” [11]. But the divergences were already apparent. For such literary authors as Hawthorne or Poe, the limited capacity of mere language to capture spiritual truths led to great experiments with symbolic, allusive, or ambiguous writing, whereas the journalistic imperative to keep things simple flew directly in the face of such literary language [19–20]. Likewise, the journalist’s mode of storytelling—for example, the development of an “inverted pyramid” in which “details appear roughly in the order of importance” [22]—was quite unlike the elliptical style of some literary artists, in which meanings were not supposed to be read directly from the surface of the narrative. As newspapers became more prominent, their effect on the reading public and on society at large could not be ignored. However, the critique...