Beyond death, Bruce Chatwin still proves to be a writer worth thinking about. With only a handful of books published during his lifetime, he’s one of the most famous travel writers of the 20th century, but despite the acclaim was criticised throughout and beyond his career for supposedly fabricating many of the things that he wrote. While Chatwin’s work is lauded nowadays for its influence in travelogue writing, it’s not uncommon to find debate over whether or not he was all that up to snuff as a non-fiction writer. As Jeremy Klemin points out in his analysis of the unpublished manuscript The Nomadic Alternative, Chatwin would often knowingly include baseless claims and anecdotes into his writing, which seems to fly in the face of good journalism and what a piece of non-fiction work should be.
If a work is non-fiction, what use are completely fictional elements inserted into that work with no clear distinction? The easy explanation is to call Chatwin irresponsible. To completely fabricate these stories is a dangerous act that poisons the surrounding facts by making them so murky. That explanation, however, fails to take into consideration just how captivating and influential books like In Patagonia and The Songlines were, as well as failing to consider what Chatwin was attempting to do with those works, where In Patagonia was described as him “trying to make a cubist portrait”.
The ability to make the distinction between fiction and fact, and why sometimes blurring the two can make for some truly incredible work, is perhaps more important now than ever before as works like Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous all but decimate the line between memoir and fictional novel. Pip Finkemeyer points out the close parallels between Vuong and the novel’s protagonist; They’re practically the same person at different points in life, and while the book is considered fiction, it reads like a memoir. This blend of fiction and reality, which Finkemeyer compares to styles like metafiction and autofiction, is a captivating world of near-memoirs and would-be-biographies that extends beyond artists writing about their own lives through a third-person lens.
Maggie O’Farells acclaimed 2020 novel Hamnet, for example, is a fictional story but is based on the very real death of William Shakespeare’s very real son in 1596. Of course, neither Shakespeare nor anyone that personally knew him is alive today, yet O’Farrell uses what we know about the man, his family, and how humans function on a base level to construct a beautifully sad picture of the event.
The meshing of the real world with fiction goes beyond the world of the written word. Most commonly we see this in biographical films, and while many of these biopics are criticised for being overly serious, fully absorbing themselves in the legend and pop-cultural myths of the figures they are about, some take the approach of deconstruction, experimenting with form and structure to paint that “cubist portrait” of our cultural phenoms. Bill Pohlad’s Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy eschews the typical rags to riches Wikipedia biography approach to biographical filmmaking and instead focuses on two specific important periods of the troubled pop geniuses life, the creation of The Beach Boys groundbreaking 1966 album Pet Sounds and Wilson’s damaging conservatorship at the hands of psychologist Eugene Landy in the 1980’s. While Vulture’s David Edelstein noted significant gaps and inconsistencies in the films handling of history, what is there, events mashed together, conversations happening when in reality they happened years later or never at all, that all comes together to build up a real and impactful impression of who Brian Wilson really was.
Much of the same can be said of 2015’s Steve Jobs, a film based on Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography on the tech icon and Apple co-founder. While the book is that encyclopaedic delve into Jobs’ life and career (and was criticised by some close to Jobs as being an inaccurate portrayal of who he was as a person), the Danny Boyle-directed, Aaron Sorkin-written film makes building blocks with Jobs’ life, much like Love & Mercy did Wilson’s. While the film does follow Jobs through three real product launch events, the film jumbles up, shuffles around, and fabricates various interactions and conversations from throughout his life. Though the results have been criticised by some figures from the story, some, like Steve Wozniak, appreciated that the film’s structure helped send “the right message” about Steve Jobs and those around him.
It all comes back to Chatwin’s concept of the cubist portrait, piecing together parts of a person or place or journey into an abstract recreation of them and their many facets. It’s an impressionistic style of writing that, if pulled off correctly, can pull the reader/viewer into the real emotions of the story.
Of course, it helps no one to carelessly insert lies into real stories. Pulling off the kind of writing we see from the likes of Chatwin and Sorkin is hard enough as is and, as discussed, will still gather criticism and a negative reaction from certain places. Even when a writer is trying their best to tell a true story as close to real events as possible, they can still find themselves in trouble. After publishing Masters of Doom, a retelling of the history of legendary game development studio Id Software written by gaming journalist David Kushner, Random House Inc. was sued by business executive Mike Wilson in 2005, who felt that the book misrepresented his character. Kushner’s book was based on five years of research and interviews, but with the lightly novelised approach to writing that he takes, it is very possible that he had unintentionally dramatised aspects of Wilson’s personality in the pursuit of telling a good story.
Similarly, Truman Capote’s seminal true crime novel In Cold Blood caught flack from critics despite its success. Notably, fellow journalist Tom Wolfe (who, alongside Capote, was one of many writers that helped establish the New Journalism movement in the 60’s and 70’s) tore into the book in his essay ‘Pornoviolence’ for its highly dramatised, perhaps even glorified, depiction of the real-life 1959 Clutter family murders. He criticises the growing obsession with hyper-violence in the media at the time, comparing works like In Cold Blood to the grisly gladiatorial entertainment of the late Roman Empire. The exaggeration and heightening of real life events can absolutely aid in creating an engaging and captivating retelling of a story, but can it go too far? What are the tangible effects on a person’s view of the real world when put through the lens of Capote’s indulgence in violence or the unintentional misrepresentations of real people?
James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces was originally published in 2003 as a memoir to mixed reception for many of the same reasons that In Cold Blood was both celebrated and criticised. While some found it a harsh but important look at addiction and recovery, others found it too graphic and overindulgent in its depiction. Following an exposé in 2006, Frey would eventually admit to having fabricated portions of the book, which led to its retrospective categorisation as a semi-fictional novel. While initially this led to a large-scale backlash towards the book and Frey himself, many writers have pushed in the other direction, praising what the book represented and the story that Frey wanted to tell rather than focusing on what may or may not be real. Had Frey made clear from the jump that the story was only partly based in reality, that he wrote it like he did as a method of coping with the trauma that he had endured, perhaps the book would have been received better than it was.
These are real worries now that misinformation and disinformation are so widespread across the internet and social media. As Finkemeyer puts it: “We see for ourselves how the facts flex, bend and snap in the process of transcribing them into words and pictures, no matter how real we are trying to be”. Finkemeyer puts this inability to present facts as 100% truthful forward as a leading theory for why the halfway-memoir is becoming so appealing to modern audiences. We empathise with writers that can’t quite put their truth onto page, and as such the way they hide behind other characters is captivating to us.
To me, that is a pitfall that these impressionistic works of non-fiction can often fall into. When reality becomes so entwined with fictional elements, it can be difficult for critics to parse what should be believed as “objective truth”. This hasn’t stopped writers like Bruce Chatwin or Aaron Sorkin finding immense success with this practice of embellishing the truth. Their work has captivated audiences for decades because they understand how to map out enigmatic but real sketches of a person, place, or even themselves. A memoir may lie to you, but that lie has the potential to make a picture even clearer. It’s all about learning when to draw the line.
Words by Ash Douglas
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