It isn’t often remembered that one of the leading entries in Norm Sims’ field-opening collection Literary Journalism in the 20th Century (2007) was a pairing of two essays by Mary McCarthy, “Artists in Uniform” and “Settling the Colonel’s Hash,” both from the 1950s. (The latter sometimes appears as “Unsettling…”). Sims no doubt included these essays as wonderful examples of the edgy boundary confusion that resulted when McCarthy’s readers of the first essay mistakenly thought she had created a work of fiction. (For example, an English teacher wrote in to ask about the “symbolic” significance of what the character “McCarthy” was wearing; McCarthy tells us that the narrator was her, and green was what her “character” was wearing.) It reminds us that reading narrative journalism–the contract we form with it–is very much part of the status and authority that we grant it.

I thought of these essays recently, however, when reading the wonderful work on McCarthy in Deborah’ Nelson’s Tough Enough:  Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil  (U of Chicago Press: 2017). I came away feeling that Nelson’s book should be required reading for anyone taking up the study of literary or narrative journalism, for at least two reasons. First, most obviously, for how Nelson usefully complicates the category of gender in and around the paired subjects of “empathy” and the witnessing of suffering. As she explains, Nelson’s aim was in part to ask about the cultural and historical forces behind emotions at “the extremes of the emotional scale” (7) that were challenged and re-shaped by her cast of women thinkers, artists and writers. It’s a bracing story of women who “neither sacralized pain nor remained indifferent to it” and by so doing constituted a “countertradition” that certainly intersected with mid-20th century journalism. And still does (take, for example, Masha Gessen).

Secondly, Nelson’s treatment of McCarthy (and of course Didion) also reminds us that, for MM, the disposition towards facticity could be embraced as something of a personal ethic or code–a matter of moral striving and character that sometimes meant risking rudeness or seeming indifference. For me, one of the interesting aspects of Nelson’s description of this code is how un-institutional it is. That is, when we customarily talk about the cult or privileging of “objectivity,” usually we approach it through institutional norms and practices, mid-century notions of “balance,” and–not unimportantly, in some instances–a post-Lippman identification with the national security state (something that became clear in US reporting on Vietnam, at first). McCarthy’s personal forging of this code was not without flaws or limitations–of course, it could neither exempt her from criticism nor inoculate her from the ideologies of her moment. (Arendt’s influence is everywhere, of course.)  But Nelson reminds us that there are an awful lot of narrative journalists who neither apprentice nor prosper with institutional habitats, and yet who carry certain “mainstream” norms within their own practice–sometimes, even, to non-mainstream ends.