The Mechanic & the Muse

"Mary Ellen's will:" Combining the Power of Investigative Narrative and Transparency

The Hollywood high-concept pitch might go like this: "Sunset Boulevard," the film classic about an aging starlet's tragic twilight, meets "Dallas," the prime time soap opera about the financial and family intrigues of the Ewing clan.

But a new, four-part Dallas Morning News series,  Mary Ellen's will: The Battle for 4949 Swiss, is journalism, a powerful example of investigative narrative that combines civic clarity and literary grace.

The series focuses on a contemporary social ill-- widespread financial exploitation of the elderly, whose loneliness and infirmities make them easy prey for strangers who swoop into their lives, shower them with attention, alienate them from family and friends, and make off with as much of their wealth as they can get away with.

Investigative reporter Lee Hancock, and the project's editor, Mark Miller, have created a gripping narrative that draws attention to such crimes by setting it against a dramatic and quintessential Texas landscape.

"The Battle for 4949 Swiss" exposes a public problem by focusing on the private tragedy of Mary Ellen Bendtsen, 88, and the fight over the decaying Dallas mansion that was her treasure.  It accomplishes this feat by transforming dogged reporting into a story brought alive by vivid characters, the unrelenting accretion of status details in a society where everything seems Super-sized, and dramatic scenes that  unfold before our eyes.

(A disclaimer: I have led writing and editing workshops for Morning News staffers for several years. In this case, Miller asked me to participate in an early brainstorming session. I also read early drafts, providing "movies of my reading," a running commentary of one reader's reaction. My enthusiasm, however, derives from having watched the series develop in complexity, as Hancock and Miller demonstrated the power of indefatigable revision, and, having now seen most of the completed version; the series' final installment appears tomorrow. A takeout Sunday explores systematic flaws that make the elderly so vulnerable to con artists.)

The paper's website provides an impressive menu of companion multimedia, including photo scrapbooks, character vignettes, and videos, including a poignant hospital scene where a frail Mrs. Bendsten signs over power of attorney to two men who, relatives and investigators believe, were intent on claiming her decaying mansion.

At a time when public distrust of the media overshadows good journalism, "Mary Ellen's will" also takes enormous pains to buttress its narrative, mirroring similar efforts to provide thorough and credible levels of sourcing transparency.

In addition to a source box, footnotes stud the narrative, pointing to documents and other records; some trigger pop-up boxes with links to news articles reaching back six decades. It's yet another example of the innovative ways that news organizations's online capabilities can provide as much information and documentation that a reader could want.

Like any good story, "Mary Ellen's will" is full of twists and turns.

But its greatest strength, and public service, reflects Hancock's relentless reporting and gifted prose, and the entire project team's attention to accuracy and detail.

Their contributions make it difficult to view the "Battle for 4949 Swiss" without thinking of our own aging relatives, and wondering whether vultures circle overhead.   

Balzac anyone?

Piqued by Tom Wolfe's descriptions of the literary devices adopted by the so-called "New Journalists" of the 1960s, I've just finished two novels by Honoré de Balzac, the French novelist identified as one of the pioneers of literary realism. Wolfe focuses on Balzac's use of status details, one of the four devices.

The first, Le Père Goriot (or Father Goriot) took a bit of patience, beginning as it does with a meticulously rendered description of a somewhat down-at-the-heels boarding house, an opening at odds with today's dictum to begin with action. But once inside Balzac's world, I've found it hard to resist. That held true for Cousin Bette, the Balzac novel I finished last night.

What I find most surprising is that there's a pile of contemporary novels by my bedside, books I've begun and cast aside. Perhaps I need to give them the same patience Balzac inititally demanded. But I can't help but wonder what it is about Balzac's storytelling qualities that make his work irresistible more than 150 years after his death.

Today I ordered used copies of three other Balzac novels: Lost Illusions, A Harlot High and Low, and Eugenie Grandet.

Got a favorite Balzac novel or story? Let me know what it is and why?

What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #3

On literary devices. Continuing from "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

"The third device was the so-called “third person point of view," (emphasis added) the technique of presenting every scene to the reader through the eyes of a particular character, giving the reader the feeling of being inside the character’s mind and experiencing the emotional reality of the scene as he experiences it.

"Journalists had often used the first-person point of view—“I was there”—just as autobiographers, memoirists and novelists had. This is very limiting for the journalist, however, since he can bring the reader inside the mind of only one character—himself—a point of view that often proves irrelevant to the story and irritating to the reader. Yet how could a journalist, writing nonfiction, accurately penetrating the thoughts of another person?

"The answer proved to be marvelously simple: interview him about his thoughts and emotions along with everyone else. This is what I had done in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, what John Sack did in M and what Gay Talese did in Honor Thy Father."

Next: Status details

What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #4

The last of the four literary devices cited by Tom Wolfe from "The New Journalism," by Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

"The fourth device has always been the least understood. This is the recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving towards children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene. Symbolic of what? Symbolic, generally, of people's status life, using that term in the broad sense of the entire pattern of behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be. The recording of such details is not mere embroidery in prose. It lies as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in literature.

"It is the very essence of the “absorbing” power of Balzac, for example. Balzac barely used point of view at all in the refined sense that Henry James used it later on. And yet the reader comes away feeling that he has been even more completely “inside” Balzac’s characters than James’s. Why? Here is the sort of thing Balzac does over and over. Before introducing you to Monsieur and Madame Marneffe personally (in “Cousin Bette”) he brings you into their drawing room and conducts a social autopsy: “The furniture covered in faded cotton velvet, the plaster statuettes masquerading as Florentine bronzes, the clumsily carved painted chandelier with its candle rings of molded glass, the carpet, a bargain whose low price was explained too late by the quantity of cotton in it, which was now visible to the naked eye—everything in the room, to the very curtains, which would have taught you that the handsome appearance of wool damask lasts for only three years)”—everything in the room begins to absorb one into the lives of a pair of down-at-the-heel social climbers, Monsieur and Madame Marneffe. Balzac piles up these details so relentlessly and at the same time so meticulously—there is scarcely a detail in the later Balzac that doesn’t illuminate some point of status—that he triggers the reader’s memories of his own status life, his own ambitions, insecurities, delights, disasters, plus the thousands and one small humiliations and the status coups of everyday life, and triggers them over and over until he creates an atmosphere as rich and involving as the Joycean use of point of view."

 

What Balzac, Dickens et all Hath Wrought #2

On literary devices. Continuing from "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

...record the dialogue in full, (emphasis added) which was device No. 2. Magazine writers, like the early novelists, learned by trial and error something that has since been demonstrated in academic studies: namely, that realistic dialogue involves the reader more completely than any other single other device. It also establishes and defines character more completely than any other single device. (Dickens has a way of fixing a character in your mind so that you have the feeling he has described every inch of his appearance—only to go back and discover that he actually took care of the physical description in two or three sentences; the rest he has accomplished with dialogue) Journalists were working on dialogue of the fullest, most completely revealing sort in the very moment when novelists were cutting back, using dialogue in more and more cryptic, fey and curiously abstract ways."

Next: Point of view

What Balzac, Dickens et al Hath Wrought #1

Dick Cheney, hunter extraordinaire, was the ostensible subject of my recent post, "Ready, Aim, Oops." But reader Harris Salat was eager to learn the source of the final paragraph when I described a tool of 19th century literary realists that Tom Wolfe and other so-called "New Journalists" relied on in their nonfiction.

I replied that it's from a long introduction by Wolfe in "The New Journalism," an anthology edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, published in 1973. There are used copies on Amazon.com

But that seemed a stingy response, and so I copied out the seven paragraphs Wolfe used to define status details and three other device the New Journalists borrowed from their literary ancestors. I'll dole them out one by one over the next four days. The source is my hardcover edition of "The New Journalism," by Tom Wolfe, edited by Wolfe and E.W. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, pp. 31-32. Wolfe writes:

"If you follow the progress of the New Journalism closely through the 1960s, you see an interesting thing happening. You see journalists learning the techniques of realism—particularly of the sort found in Fielding, Smollett, Balzac, Dickens and Gogol—from scratch. By trial and error, by “instinct” rather than theory, journalists began to discover the devices that gave the realistic novel its unique power, variously known as its “immediacy,” its concrete reality,” its emotional involvement,” “its gripping” or “absorbing quality."

"This extraordinary power was derived mainly from just four devices, they discovered. The basic one was scene-by-scene construction,(emphasis added) telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative. Hence the sometimes extraordinary feats of reporting that the new journalists undertook: so that they could actually witness the scenes in other people’s lives as they took place…"

Next: Dialogue

Stay on top of the news

with USAToday's "On Deadline"

This afternoon I got the news alert about the poor millionaire who had the foolishness to stick up his head just when Dick Cheney fired his shotgun the other day on a hunting trip. Thanks to Al Tompkins, Poynter's man on the cyberstreet, for the link.

A simple case of pockmarking of the face and neck seemed to be the first
description that emerged after it was reported -- 24 hours after the incident.

I learned  the latest--the millionaire got it even worse, a pellet from the Veep's shotgun, did more than do cosmetic surgery; it lodged in  his heart leading to what doctors called "a silent heart attack."

Cheney and the President inherited Ronald Reagan's Teflon, so I don't expect much to come from it.

What was more interesting and useful to me was the source of the alert:  USaToday's blog of breaking news and "must read stories."

What I especially like about this news alert service are the comments appended from readers, many of them with apparently authoritative takes on the news, such as the two brothers who are doctors and are confused by the diagnosis to the self-described "life long Republican" and declares:

I am embarrassed by how light heartedly everyone is taking this "accident." It was not only serious but it was irresponsible. I don't know if I can trust the judgment of a person that just turns and fires a gun. Cheney shot a person all be it by accident, and this person is suffering from it. Maybe Cheney should consider tendering his "retirement."

Another interesting take comes from from slate.com,which reports that take on the case from friends of the victim, Harry Whittington.

"If there is anything that Harry's friends at the Vaughn Building are angry about, it is not the shooting itself but the attempt by White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan to place the blame on the victim. It's the shooter's duty to know what he is shooting at and where his companions are. A shooting accident is always the fault of the shooter. Always."

Anybody know what kind of shotgun Cheney wields? As the rule established by Gene Miller, the late and great Miami Herald legend, dictates: always get the name, whether it's a dog, an ice cream or a hunter's weapon of choice. They represent what Tom Wolfe called status details, a key device the so-called "New Journalists" borrowed from the literary realists of the previous century.

It's "the recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving towards children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene. Symbolic of what? Symbolic, generally, of people's status in life, using that term in the broad sense of the entire pattern of behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be. The recording of such details is not mere embroidery in prose. It lies as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in literature."