The lady from Leamington: her true story

OVER the weekend, a San Francisco jury has been reading a celebrated New Yorker article by Janet Malcolm which was published 10 years ago and has since appeared in book form under the title In The Freud Archives. It was a brilliant piece of journalism, a profile of a controversial curator of the archives in question and an account of his theories and personality. But the subject of the article, Jeffrey M Masson, took exception and sued, claiming that remarks attributed to him had been fabricated.

Janet Malcolm denied any such slur, but was obliged to admit that she had taken and conflated conversations made several months apart, that some of the controversial remarks had been made in her flat at a time when her tape recorder was not working and that she no longer possessed the pieces of paper on which she had jotted them down. Miss Malcolm is in an embarrassing position on which the lawyers for Mr Masson hope to capitalise. According to the New York Times, they intend to characterise this story of the broken tape recorder and the missing notes as an adult version of 'the dog ate my homework'.

Leaving aside the question of who is telling the truth, and whether the article was libellous, and whether it is ethical to conflate material in this way, we come to the question the jury is not being asked in this dollars 10m suit: whether such behaviour is artistically wise. For the question of artistry does come into this type of journalism and it may be that the more the journalist considers him or herself an artist, the more tempting it is to reach for the techniques and the criteria of fiction: the technique of creating a composite out of the material of experience, and the criteria by which the truthfulness of the representation is judged.

The temptation to conflate occurs most pressingly in the craft of travel writing. The world seems full of writers who have only to get on a train and something interesting happens. They get off at the port and on to the ship; something else interesting happens. They disembark, pass through an interesting Customs shed, take another fascinating train, spend a night in a phenomenal hotel, and on and on. Their lives never stop yielding these little nuggets. They could travel from Paris to Dakar without a moment's tedium en route.

In my experience, life does not normally resemble travel writing of this kind. So, if I read a travel account that metes out the interest at brilliantly- spaced intervals, I begin to think that the material has been massaged, that the incident on the ferry really belongs on the train, while the Customs shed was perhaps not quite so striking as the stylist makes out. This does not necessarily remove all the pleasure from reading the account. The thing could be very well done, after all, and one could follow it as a bravura exercise in story-telling. But it would not qualify for the highest praise. From the moment I guessed this was a massage job, I would mistrust it.

It follows that in my own reportage I want to make absolutely certain that I do not, justifiably or by accident, inspire that kind of subliminal distrust in the reader. Most particularly, I do not want some kind of indulgent response along the lines: 'I see you're just as bad as the rest of them, but never mind - it may not be true, but it is entertaining.'

One way of insuring against this is never to conflate or transpose events. Never ever. And this is a rule which, while helping you avoid the snares of disbelief, has the further artistic merit of focusing on the individuality of experience. The woman who got on the train at Leamington is guaranteed the right to remain the woman who got on the train at Leamington. You may say: but there is no reason why she should not have got on at Doncaster, you weren't making a point about Leamington; when you described her, in fact, she fitted in better with Doncaster. The answer is that strange things happen in the life of stories, and it may turn out that her having got on at Leamington had some significance not apparent to me at the time.

Among the strange things that happen in the life of stories, there is the striking case of William Golding's trip to Egypt, which he wrote up as a short book. Golding had not had a very good time and he was somewhat caustic about the crew on his Nile trip. The book was given for review to Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian novelist, who turned out to be the sister of one of the characters in the account. This was a devastating blow to Golding's credibility, not because he had made things up, but because it had clearly never occurred to him that the feckless type he had described was an intelligent being with a sister who wrote for the London Review of Books and who would wittily present another point of view.

I will be well advised, whatever I propose to say about the woman who got on the train at Leamington, to treat her with all consideration for her reality and uniqueness in space and time, to assume that she has a sister who works for the London Review and to make sure that I can always say, however unpleasant it may be: what I wrote was true - you did indeed get on the train at Leamington, you did indeed give gin to the baby which, by the way, you did indeed throw out of the window.

If it is an artistic principle that, in my reportage, Leamington should never conveniently turn into Doncaster, how much more should it be a matter of principle that a conversation over lunch in California should not be spliced together with one that took place seven months later over breakfast in New York.

It is easy to say all this 10 years after the event, at the opening of a trial, and at a time when many have held up their hands in horror and said that the honour of the New Yorker is on trial. But it is astonishing how many people think that in the area we sometimes call 'creative non-fiction' different rules apply, and that the higher you go in the Higher Journalism the further you can depart from reality in pursuit of the Higher Truth.