The Case for (tasteful) Sensationalism and Lies
What Victorian penny papers and lying travel writers got right about evoking timelessness and wonder.
Le Petit Journal cared little for sane reporting on grave political matters. It had no incentive to do so. Back then France taxed political newspapers ten centimes; by writing about crime, gore, scandal and adventure instead, millions could buy the Journal for just five. Space for serial novels helped immensely: people always bought the latest edition to keep up with the fate of their beloved characters. At its peak in the 1890s, Le Petit Journal (‘The Little Diary’) boasted a circulation of a million copies per day.
Hailed as one of the pioneers of the tabloid genre, the Journal was very much the nasty sensationalist paper tabloids are today. Its artists had that annoying quality of modern paparazzi, painting and etching gore to depict crime scenes for the front page of its weekly illustrated supplement. Crime drove up circulations; Le Petit Journal and the like were always on the lookout, even if they had to get their fix from across the strait: the French penny-papers took a keen, lurid interest in Jack the Ripper’s doings in London. They fattened themselves feeding on the basest instincts of men; facts mattered little. In 1870, the Third Republic came to be and the tax on political papers was removed. Free to talk politics, the Journal sided with the public’s inflamed sentiments during the Dreyfus Affair and launched an antisemitic tirade against Captain Alfred Dreyfus—a soldier wrongfully accused of selling military secrets to Germany—taking out full-page artworks portraying Dreyfus’ disgrace.
These paintings and engravings showed ‘Le Traitre’ Dreyfus’ sword being snapped into two; his court martial; him languishing in jail on Devil’s Island; the police outside Rennes prison, where he was held for his retrial, and the writer Emile Zola arriving at the Palais de Justice, summoned on the charge of defamation for alleging that the government had forged evidence to convict Dreyfus.
Dreyfus was eventually found innocent. The man who had framed him slit his own throat in prison.
These colorful spreads of suspended drama were not just limited to spicing up domestic affairs: they also captured the horror and awe of a swiftly changing world. The modern era was beaking out of the medieval: while one issue depicts an Afghan man tied to a cannon, about to be blown to bits for conspiring against the Emir, a French crowd in another looks up in wonder as a huge contraption of timber and fabric, Santos-Dumont’s flying machine, takes to the sky in its first public flight.
Paintings of faraway wars in faraway places were popular too: in the late 1890s and early 1900s, the Journal came out with many illustrated editions on the Boer War. Jubilation, misery, compassion, death, defeat, capture, scenes and emotions of every shade made it to its front pages. The frozen-action style unique to these penny papers rivaled Tintin comics in serving up adventure and fantasy to millions that would never get to step out of their country.
This was, dare I say, their only achievement, but it was a significant one.
What was tragic for journalism was heartening for storytelling. Choosing paintings and engravings over photographs made historical events timeless and mythical: those coups and wars and scandals and assassinations could be happening then or centuries before. Events could be choreographed at will; man, spirit, landscape and destiny arranged to please the eye. Angels could swoop down and revive a fatigued army on its last legs, or phantoms silently watch doomed men march to their death. Large pennants could flutter perfectly on enemy lands, inspiring men to quit their trenches and forge on ahead, or ominous skeletons quietly stand by the bedside of dying regents. Somewhere in the mess of reality, exaggeration, symbolism and mythmaking, possibilities of a breathtaking epic emerged. Napoleon, revered often as Caesar and Alexander are, died half a decade before the first surviving photographs. Would he appear as wrapped in mystique and splendor were he photographed in albumin print, exposed as a mortal?
But photographs are necessary, journalism is necessary. For every battalion-worth of adventure-hungry lads signing up to die for their king, moved by the papers’ storytelling and mythmaking, a sobering shot of butchered men could snap a young man out of his fantastical reverie, save him from the horrors of war. Photographs came, and then moving pictures, and people found out that they could be crafted to awe and deceive too, but never could they evoke the drama and scale of the human imagination as vigorously as those engravings did.
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What journalism lost, endured in travel writing. There were no dog-headed people in modern travelogues; the world had become smaller, too familiar, but a dose of good yarn helped keep landscapes and people wrapped in mystique, dyed them again in legend and myth, crafted narratives of immense beauty and awe.
Bruce Chatwin wove such yarns. He turned his childhood memories into quests spanning continents; people, history, landscapes, myths and prehistoric creatures all converged as he plodded through remote terrains for his answers. His passages were hypnotic, ‘voyages of the mind’, as his friend Werner Herzog put it, and his prose was a rare marriage of brevity and warmth: incisive but seldom clinical. He’d paint entire vistas in a brief paragraph, sum up a man’s appearance and soul in a few lines.1 Bruce opens The Songlines by describing a Russian man he met in Alice Springs:
Nothing in Arkady’s temperament predisposed him to live in the hugger-mugger of Anglo-Saxon suburbia or take a conventional job. He had a flattish face and a gentle smile, and he moved through the bright Australian spaces with the ease of his footloose forebears...only when you came up close did you realize how big his bones were.
Arkady is a major presence in the book. He accompanies Chatwin in his pursuit of the Aboriginal songlines, is a second protagonist almost, the youngest son of an immigrant Russian father who escaped Nazi custody by jumping off a cattle-car bound for a German factory:
One night, somewhere in the Ukraine, he jumped from the cattle-car into a field of sunflowers. Soldiers in grey uniforms hunted him up and down the long lines of sunflowers, but he gave them the slip. Somewhere else, lost between murdering armies, he met a girl from Kiev and married her. Together they drifted to a forgetful Adelaide suburb, where he rigged up a vodka still and fathered three sturdy sons.
But this sturdy Russian explorer, Chatwin’s guide to the Outback, never existed. He wasn’t an outright concoction either. Arkady was modeled after Toly Sawenko, child of an immigrant Pole, who’d been mapping Aboriginal sacred sites when Chatwin first met him. His father did escape the Nazis, only the circumstances were less graceful. There was no train he jumped off of, no field of sunflowers he vanished into. His commander had deserted his troops, and the Nazis captured him and others as they attempted to flee the German tanks. “Allowed into a cornfield to shit, he and two others escaped”, writes Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwin’s biographer. “At midnight, his companions judged it safe to stand up and were shot: all day the Germans had been waiting. He waited in the corn until they had left and with a bribe of honey vodka bought himself new papers.”
The truth here is as intriguing as the lie. But by making the prisoner jump off a doom-bound train and find salvation in a field of sunflowers, by letting him fall in love while he roamed “lost between murdering armies”, Chatwin elevated the event to poetry. The knowledge that one’s reading fiction numbs one to its wonders. The tiny voice within refuses to be tricked; the immersion is never complete. To achieve total immersion one has to confuse the mind, muddy the line between reality and fiction. Whether or not the immersion will break depends on how subtle a yarn the writer can sneak into reality, and how far he can push it. Chatwin was a master of such yarns.
There were other improvisations too which were not well received by the people Bruce documented. His cousins in Patagonia were miffed at his portraits of their parents:
One of the things that drove me out of my mind was that he called my father ‘Charley’. He was never called that. He was ‘Charles’ or ‘Captain Milward’. He described my father as tall, having startling blue eyes and black mutton chops, with sailor’s hat at a rakish angle. He was short and red-headed and bald by the time he was 30, and always wore a black tie. And he was not this sickly old man. He died very suddenly of a heart attack.2
Chatwin’s embellishments and lies weren’t confined to his books either. In his final years, he hid news of his Aids diagnosis by giving his ill-health fantastical origins: depending on who you’d ask, they’d tell you that he got his disease by eating either the raw meat of a Cantonese whale or a thousand year-old rotten Chinese egg. For Chatwin, even his death needed to be kindled by some obscure, curious, wondrous event, like the explorers of yore.
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For all the criticisms Chatwin attracted for his embellishments, he was clear about his motives from the beginning. That his book was being called a ‘travel book’ when it first came out didn’t sit right with him. Here’s what he writes after reading the first reviews of In Patagonia:
the FORM of the book seems to have puzzled them (as I suspect it did the publisher). There’s a lot of talk of ‘unclassifiable prose’, ‘a mosaic’, ‘a tapestry’, ‘a jigsaw’, a ‘collage’ etc. but no one has seen that it is a modern WONDER VOYAGE…
‘Wonder Voyage’ sums it aptly. It echoes the timeless spirit of those penny paper illustrations showcasing faraway lands. There’s great (?) journalism out there, from op-eds and features to minute-by-minute bulletins keeping us abreast of the truth. I would argue we have space for some wonder voyages too: shorn of their nasty origins, aspiring to literature, now dedicated solely to satisfy mankind’s sense of adventure and awe.
One I like: “But the town’s most distinguished citizen was the Lithuanian, Casimir Slapelic. Fifty years ago he found the dinosaur in the barranca. Now, toothless, hairless and in his middle eighties, he was one of the oldest flying pilots in the world…”
Quote from Nicholas Shakespeare’s Bruce Chatwin. To be fair to Chatwin though, the tall, intimidating ‘Charley’ he had written about was one of his imagination: “The Charley Milward of my imagination was a god among men—tall, silent and strong, with black mutton-chop whiskers and fierce blue eyes. He wore his sailor’s cap at an angle and the tops of his sea-boots turned down.” (From In Patagonia)
“Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
I really liked this piece. I wonder what the fine line is between a cheapened truth and a relatable history when it comes to honest writing. I guess, it depends on what you call "honest": it makes me think of this little thing someone said, "I don't believe in ghosts, but I believe someone who says that they saw one".
Great post, interesting about the French journal, but then a sudden detour into the strange world of Bruce Chatwin, one of my favorite writers!