Books
Commentary - A prize for the underrated genre of literary reportage
Published 13 October 2003
Despite its distinguished pedigree, literary reportage has never been publicly celebrated with a prize - until now. Isabel Hilton reflects on the problems of judging this underrated genre
In her new biography of the journalist Martha Gellhorn (Chatto & Windus, £20), Caroline Moorehead describes the young woman in Spain, wondering how to go about reporting the civil war. She was neither a novice nor an unknown writer: her book of short stories about the Depression, The Trouble I've Seen, had been widely praised. But she was in company with Ernest Hemingway who, as Moorehead writes, considered himself the foremost war correspondent in town; and Gellhorn herself felt she knew nothing of military matters. As it turned out, that may not have been such a disadvantage: she wrote about the drama lived by civilians caught up in the conflict - about the agonies of non-combatants, largely ignored by reportage - and in a way that outlasted more conventional war reporting.
Martha Gellhorn did not invent literary reportage but she certainly practised it. This month, speaking in Berlin, one of its foremost practitioners, the Polish writer and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, argued that reportage began with the historian Herodotus. If so, it sets at least one record: in more than 2,000 years, it is one of the few written forms that - until just this month - had neither been widely defined nor publicly celebrated with a prize. This has now been rectified. The winner of the first Lettre Ulysses award for creative non-fiction, awarded in Berlin on 4 October, was the Russian writer Anna Politkovskaya for her second book on the war in Chechnya (Tchetchenie: le deshonneur russe, Buchet/Castel).
I thought of Politkovskaya as I watched George W Bush in September, congratulating Vladimir Putin on dealing with the "problem" in Chechnya. As a member of the Ulysses jury, I already knew that she had won the prize. It would have made no difference to Bush - a man apparently proud of his lack of reading - but perhaps it would be of some encouragement to a writer who has shown extraordinary courage and tenacity in documenting the atrocities in Chechnya and the corruption of Russian society that has been one effect of this extremely dirty war. Perhaps, too, international recognition might offer her a measure of protection against Bush's good friend Putin, whose regime has shown itself more than capable of silencing those who challenge its propaganda.
To recognise a writer such as Politkovskaya is to do more than acknowledge her prose. Her writing on Chechnya is both more powerful and more durable than any number of news reports or television images. Good reportage is more than a recitation of events: it brings the qualities of a good novelist to bear on reality, without breaking its contract with fact.
It was swiftly borne on the jury - 11 men and women from 11 countries discussing nominated texts originally written in seven languages - that though reportage was widely practised and its best examples long remembered, its boundaries seemed elastic. What was literary reportage? What was excluded? History and memoir were ruled out. Straight travel writing was on the margins, though the frontier was porous: the best of it shared some of the qualities of reportage and many of the reportages had elements of travel writing. Some jury members even argued, unsuccessfully, for the place of historical fiction. War reporting, with its drama and sense of importance, clamoured for attention. It was one of the journalists on the jury who finally came up with a description that I adopted. Good reportage and good novels shared some characteristics, he said: both had to be truthful, but reportage also had to be factual.
Factual is not an enticing word. But the art of reportage is to respect the facts while bringing to them a novelist's skill with narrative and an imaginative understanding of reality. Think of Bartolome de Las Casas in his account of the destruction of the Indies or George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, Hans Magnus Enzensberger's reports on Europe or Ryszard Kapuscinski on the court of Emperor Haile Selassie. Nor did it need to address dramatic situations, though the jury agreed that it had to find a subject that could bear the weight of scrutiny: one of the finalists, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family (Flamingo, £17.99), is an account of life in the Puerto Rican community in the Bronx. The material was available to any reporter with the persistence and skills to gain access to it, but few had the writer's imagination to make it memorable.
Reportage may have a long pedigree but it also demands time and commitment, as well as skills that fit uneasily into the information age. It stands in opposition to a contemporary news culture of rapid images and soundbite reporting. Twenty-four-hour news gives the impression of keeping us informed but casts our understanding adrift in a sea of undigested images and rapidly changing phenomena. The external world becomes a spectacle of swiftly forgotten impressions, indistinguishable in their effects from the advertising that punctuates the news footage. The Lettre Ulysses Award is a small gesture of protest against an information culture that enables us to know more than ever, but which cannot stop to explain why it matters that we should.
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