DREAMING THE NEWS

By Roger Rosenblatt

In rural Illinois a man murdered his best friend and cut off his ear with a razor, a symbolic execution. The murdered man was sleeping with the killer's wife, who had left her husband and taken the children. In divorce court, where she denied her adultery, she was awarded all her husband's money, leaving him with nothing but sorrow and rage. All night he hid out near the barn, and when his best friend came to do the milking, he shot him point-blank. Then he weighted himself down, waded into the river and put a bullet in his head. The ear was never recovered.

At least that's the way the story came to me in William Maxwell's novel So Long, See You Tomorrow. It was one of several works of fiction I read on a week's vacation in a place where the newspaper arrived a day late and never before 9 a.m. I am an early riser, so the first two or three hours of my vacation mornings were spent getting the news from the likes of Maxwell, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Tobias Wolff, Frank Conroy, Alice Adams, Stewart O'Nan, Charles Baxter--short stories and novels--and from Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, a memoir so rich it might be a novel.

To begin the day with fiction instead of the news had a transforming effect on the news. When 9 o'clock came, force of habit drew me to the shop where the papers arrive, and for the time it took to read them, I would lay aside, say, Wolff's The Rich Brother, a brooding short story about two brothers joined by fear and hatred, or O'Nan's novel The Names of the Dead, about a man who cannot leave the Vietnam War behind him.

I would proceed from these crafted and layered texts of made-up events and people to the story about the mass suicide of the Rancho Santa Fe cultists who believed the Hale-Bopp comet summoned them to heaven, or the one about Martin Luther King Jr.'s son Dexter visiting James Earl Ray and saying he thought him innocent of his father's murder, or the account of George Bush parachuting out of a plane because his only other jump was during World War II, when Japanese gunners shot up his torpedo bomber and he was forced to bail out over the Pacific, getting banged up and badly cut. In his autobiography he cited that event as "maybe the most important" in his life. This time he wanted to "get it right," and the jump went perfectly. Exhilarated, he called himself "a new man."

What would happen is that I began reading the papers differently, as if the news story were an outline or sketch of a deeper (more crafted and layered) story that was being withheld from the reader and at the same time invited the reader's imagination to fill in the blanks. The stories in the news were no less interesting than the Oates story about Swimmers or Conroy's story about the curse of a mad father, but they were bare bones, hints. How could they be otherwise? If reporters had the license of artists, one would have been able to read the California cultists' last-minute thoughts as they slipped the plastic bags over their heads, and to understand their terrible bliss. One might have known if James Earl Ray (or Dexter King) was lying.

Yet the effect of fiction preceding fact was just that: I began to dream my way into the news. Ordinarily, I skitter over the papers quickly, the way an animal might take note of possible dangerous places on a journey; it is the stuff I need to know. But now I bored into language; I invented; I expected revelation. What was real became surreal, or perhaps it was that already. I read the news not as the first draft of history but as the first draft of a work of art.

Writers like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer discovered this opportunity a long time ago. But they were approaching the matter from the creative end: How do I dream my way into the wanton murder of a Kansas family, or into Gary Gilmore's frightened, deadly little mind? For the reader, the process is less demanding. I do not feel impelled to write the hidden story of Rancho Santa Fe; I simply slide into it more imaginatively. I make a different use of the news. It becomes unnecessary knowledge, a higher sort. It does not feel alien to real life, as real life often does. I like it better.

So much of living is made up of storytelling that one might conclude that it is what we were meant to do--to tell one another stories, fact or fiction, as a way of keeping afloat. Job's messenger, Coleridge's mariner, the reporter in California all grab us by the lapels to tell us their tale. We do the same; we cannot help ourselves. We have the story of others to tell, or of ourselves, or of the species--some monumentally elusive tale we are always trying to get right. Sometimes it seems that we are telling one another parts of the same immense story. Fiction and the news are joined in an endless chain. Everything is news, everything imagined.

That item about George Bush, for instance. I put down O'Nan's story about a man who cannot get the war out of his system to read another on the same subject. Bush had always seemed the least introspective of men--one of those semi-blessed creatures who are given the surface of life to float on. But here he was, age 72, jumping out of a plane at 12,500 ft. while the Secret Service paced nervously on the ground, watching the former President drift through the air in his bright white suit.

He was 20 years old again, there was blood on his shirt, his chute was ripped, and he was falling like a leaf. The ocean rose up to meet him and licked its chops.