other people's stories

Other People's StoriesAuthor(s): John HildebrandSource: Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 174-176Published by: Michigan State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41938619 .

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174 Fourth Genre

embodiment - and not just a prompter or tag- along. I felt, for instance, that his motives were important for the reader to understand and judge. Why was he interested in these boys? (Certainly it was a question that all the boys asked.)

We live in an age of confessional reading, where even the narrators in fiction are often regarded as indivisible from the authors who created them. Like the notion of character types, this belief also has a long history. I think ofThoreau's assertion, for instance, that all books are really first-person books. Here, I'd like to assert something of the opposite: There are first-person nonfiction books that are really third-person books in disguise. They don't pretend to that god-like third-person point of view, but they are not preoccupied with the drama of unreliability that usually surrounds a first- person narrator - especially the narrator in memoir, where the authors struggle against his own unreliability is a crux of the story.

In these reluctant first-person nonfiction narratives, the author stands back from the narrator differently than does a memoirist from his "I." To some degree, the narrator acts within the story he relates and, of course, inevitably affects the course of events. But thats not his desire, or preoccu- pation or purpose. He's there as a guide with a face and motives but not a character to be worked out.

Other People's Stories

The clearest distinction I can make between memoir and reportage is that the latter doesn't call for much in the way of introspection. The memoirist necessarily looks backward to examine his own past, a subject on which he is automatically an expert. The consummate insider, he knows so much about this one subject that his chief problem is determining what to leave out. The journalist, on the other hand, frequently knows nothing about the

subject, which may also be its chief appeal, a topic that is terra incognita. The

journalist is the outsider, a mere spectator, a hanger-on at events that are central to people other than himself, even as those events play out in the on-

going present. So where does character fit into this kind of nonfiction or literary jour-

nalism? At the beginning, it doesn't figure at all. You don't query an editor

by saying, "I'm going to write about the most unforgetable character" unless that



Roundtable: Character in Nonfiction 175

editor works for Reader's Digest. Apart from the profile, a proposal is invari- ably about things, not people. You promise, as I have, to write about a river or a farm or timber wolves or whatever rings the editor's bell. But you know, and the editor knows, that if there are no people in your work, no characters, then there isn't going to be much of a story.

I assume from talking with novelists that they begin with character and move on from there. Or, as Flannery O'Connor once wrote, "a story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality." That's true of nonfiction narrative as well, with one important difference: Before the journalist gets started, he has to find the character. A case in point. In 1936, George Orwell was commissioned by the New Left Book Club to write a book on unemployment in the north of England. Orwell was given letters of intro- duction to union officials in Wigan who put him up and showed him around town. Much to the surprise (and annoyance) of his contacts, Orwell soon abandoned his clean lodgings and moved into the most odious board- ing house he could find, there to meet the Bookers, the grossest landlords in all of English literature - exactly what Orwell was looking for.

A half-century later, Tracy Kidder interviewed scores of elementary teachers in the Boston public schools in preparation for writing Among Schoolchildren. He wasn't looking for the best teacher. He was looking for the best character.

To state the obvious, a character in the literary sense is a writer's idea of a person. Not flesh and blood but a representation of a person made out of words. The most important words that go into fashioning a character are those that come out of the person's own mouth. In nonfiction, you often choose characters for the ability to write their own dialogue.

Some of that dialogue is likely to be (or should be) language specialized to the field you're writing about, a field to which your character is both guide and translator. Before writing a book about a family farm, I had no idea that a bred heifer was referred to as a "heiferette" or that a horse with a milky eye is said to be "moon-blind" or that the field to which cows are released from the barn after the evening milking is called "the night pasture." Such terminology is both poetic and literally precise. Through such language we provide the reader not only with a window into our character but also into the particular world he inhabits.

Journalists, I think, are more conscious of using people than other types of writers who don't have to spend long hours with the people they make into characters. In the process, you appropriate those people's stories. Of course, you have the best of intentions - to tell a story that will otherwise



176 Fourth Genre

not get told, which is why people open up to you in the first place. But make no mistake. The story ultimately becomes your own because you are the one making the decisions how to tell it and what is to be included and what is to be omitted. A writer who avoids the responsibility of making those decisions in order to please his subject is on the road to hackdom.

When I wrote about Hmong immigrants living in Wisconsin, I initially had trouble coming up with a central character. My first candidate was a middle-aged man who'd gotten lost in a swamp on the opening day of deer season and survived a blizzard. His story interested me because it seemed a parable of the immigrant experience. But when I tracked him down, I learned he spoke litde English and I had to interview him through an inter- preter who seemed to condense everything he said by omitting every other word. Language, in this case, had blocked the door. Eventually, the article focused upon Joe Bee Xiong, who not only spoke fluent English, but had shared the defining experiences of at least two generations of Hmong immigrants in that he was old enough to have fought the Pathet Lao and young enough to have graduated from an American high school. (It's difficult to judge which was the more trying experience for him.) Joe Bee is someone who appears thoroughly assimilated. He drives a Miyata, votes Republican, and wears an American flag pin in the lapel of his suit - all of which I allude to in the article. On the other hand, I also mentioned that we shared a pot of squirrel stew on a hunting trip and as we got down to the bottom of the

pot, Joe Bee helped me and then himself to what was left, in this case the blanched, sorry-looking heads of the squirrels themselves. It was a detail I chose to include in the article because food is such a cultural divide, and the divide was one of my subjects. I doubt it would have been a detail Joe Bee would have included, though he's been kind enough not to mention it since the article came out in Harper's. Recendy, we went out to a Hmong restau- rant for lunch, and Joe Bee introduced me to a friend as the writer of the article. As I perused the menu, the friend said, "Oh yes. The squirrel head

soup." You write in the service of your story, not to flatter your characters. I try

.not to be at cross-purposes with the people I write about, because otherwise there is a slippery slope of ethical problems. Usually, I write about people that I like, people whom I admire for one reason or another, and I can

only hope that my version of events will strike them as, if not always fair, then at least true.



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