Writing vs Journalism: Which Tells the Better Truth?

Michael Wolff on how he wants to be judged

On Epstein’s private jet (Archives AFP Photo / US District Court for the Southern District of New York)

Once out of Harvard, Stevens decided to work as a journalist. He published regularly, but found the work dull and inconsequential.
—Biography of the poet Wallace Stevens at Poetry Foundation

I am drawn to…monsters. Not really to the news they make, but the person they are.
—Michael Wolff

This is a follow-up to this recent piece on Michael Wolff and Trump:

In it I made a number of, I thought, interesting assertions about the relationship between “the truth” as expressed in journalism vs. “the truth” as captured in fiction, and said that Wolff’s work lies somewhere between the two.

That is, can Wolff be criticized for not revealing all of his sources? From the journalism/newsreader standpoint, sometimes, probably. But is that what he’s trying to do? Probably not, not always. I expressed the point this way:

Wolff has often been accused, sometimes plausibly, of getting facts wrong in his own work and writing fictional scenes. Consider this review of Wolff’s book Burn Rate, for example, from 1998, in which many of the book’s claims are disputed. (Wolff defended this work as accurate.)

You get the idea. Does Wolff stretch? Perhaps he does. Maybe it’s likely he does.

Yet to my novelist’s eye, he gets at the truth. There’s something right in his claims — however he comes to them — that makes me say, Yeah, I get it. This now makes sense.

Yet to my novelist’s eye, he gets at the truth.

Thus despite claims, for example, that he fictionalizes conversations (which he denies), there’s something basically right about what he presents, that Trump is this kind of person, and Epstein’s like that.

This rigidity about, and perceived tension between, the truth in non-fiction work and the truth in what we once called “poetry” has been one of the essential discussions in the Western mind since the Reformation and the flowering of science during the so-called Age of Discovery. Poetry was lies, thought Newton. No, poems are the truth of the heart, said the Romantics. This dichotomy, this conflict, has bedeviled our thinking since. Shakespeare was good at business, and no one in his time saw a contradiction. But can a great modern poet also be an insurance executive? (Uh yes, he can.)

Michael Wolff on Michael Wolff’s Work

This false dichotomy bedevils thinking about Wolff as well, so much so that he recently wrote his own answer to it. The piece, “On Being a Writer” (as opposed to being a journalist), is a paid subscriber entry at his Substack site. I want to excerpt some of it since he stands behind his assertion that what he writes is “the truth,” properly considered. I completely agree.

What Is a Journalist?

Wolff starts by considering the role of the modern “journalist” [emphasis in the original]:

I often try to make the distinction between journalism and writing, which my wife, with quite some impatience, says no one understands. I am not, after all, a novelist. I write about real things. I don’t make them up (though I’ve certainly been accused of that). The real things I write about often become the subjects in the news that other journalists are writing and talking about. And, more confusing, I often call myself a journalist, basically because other people call me that.

But what I do is different from what journalists who work for news organizations do—as different as, I hope…military music is to music.

He’s not a novelist, he says. But he’s not a journalist either, not like those who work for “news” organizations. Wolff’s subject isn’t “the news.”

News organizations, on the most basic level, employ people who are called journalists to summarize the news. They take the basic facts from a press release or from a news wire and, with or without some added fact checking, rewrite the source material.

Wolff wryly adds (in agreement with Wallace Stevens), “I can’t figure out the satisfactions of this job.” His goal, then, isn’t to summarize or regurgitate. Yet it’s on this basis — that he’s a “journalist” and journalism has rules — that he’s often attacked. (See the piece for more on the “rules” of the journalist profession.)

Wolff as Writer

Not a journalist, Wolff calls himself as a “writer.” What does that mean?

Writers [are] people fundamentally interested in the quality of expression rather than, per se, the news itself. …

Broadly speaking, writers are interested in the construction of a story: beginning, middle, and end. News people are most interested in what’s up top. The writer’s job is a further view of characters, motivations, and, dare I say, how we live in the time we live in.

For Wolff, “[t]he primary tools here are an up-close relationship with the people or events at the heart of the story, and the language with which to express it.” This is how he defends his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein as revealed in the Epstein releases that have just come out.

He compares his non-fiction work to magazine writing of a now-long dead time, the era of Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, and the so-called “New Journalists” of the headier hippie days:

[N]onfiction writing … at its best took the reader into a world as real as a novel might make it (almost every journalist, at one time, aspired to this kind of writing). Such a style, popular with readers, bled over into news coverage—every news story suddenly began with a you-are-there lead—but it did not necessarily come with the freedom that [that era’s] magazines offered. [emphasis mine]

Note again the mention of novels as “real,” as telling the truth. He wants to be judged as a writer who, when you are done, you now understand. That’s the standard to judge him by. The rest is just window dressing from another profession.

Wolff and Epstein and Trump (oh my)

By the way, for those who may think Wolff is an Epstein fan, consider this from the same article:

I am drawn to…monsters. But not really to the news they make, but the person they are. The story is human nature and folly.

I came to be in Jeffrey Epstein’s house many times because, with years of experience, I know my way around New York, and the particular precincts where you find people like Epstein (although there may not be anyone quite like him). Epstein and his house seemed to represent an obvious window into understanding both the reaches and limitations of power. He was, I often thought, Gatsby but without the romance. Or Gatsby as he would have been if Fitzgerald had been a non-fiction writer. That is, Gatsby, in real life, would have been quite a sleazebucket.

No wonder he’s drawn to Trump. Which brings us full circle, to the point I made in my first Michael Wolff piece, that his picture of Trump, whatever the source might be, is essentially right: Trump is a man who wakes up and needs to be fed, told what to think.

Is this characterization less true than a pile of quotes? Or is it more to the point?