THE ART OF FACT A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism Edited by Ben Yagoda and Kevin Kerrane, Scribner: 558 pp., $35

To start, a clarification: What the editors of this doorstop-sized new anthology, “The Art of Fact,” call “literary journalism” is not, as I was expecting, journalism about literature. These editors aspire to compile journalism written at the highest level, literate journalism, journalism written so well, in fact, that it can hold its own against great fiction. The proposition reminded me of that zinger posed by the judge in the Jeffrey MacDonald-Joe McGinniss fraud trial: “So a novelist is the same thing as a journalist. Is that what you’re saying?”

When the journalist is at his or her best, that’s what Ben Yagoda and Kevin Kerrane, the editors of “The Art of Fact,” are saying. Kerrane alludes to Ezra Pound’s famous paradoxical definition of literature: “news that stays news.” Yagoda writes in his preface, “we will be satisfied if [this book] does one thing: makes the case that literary journalism exists, and is not an oxymoron.”

I’d certainly be satisfied. Like all feature-writing journalists, I live in a kind of contextual no-man’s-land. I work on a freelance basis, so I mostly write articles that editors have asked for. I write them at the lengths--inevitably shorter than I would like--that match the space the editors have allocated in advance. Their voices are always in my head.

These don’t feel like the best conditions under which to create art; unlike novelists or poets, I’m not certain whether I come out of any tradition. Was I born fully grown from Conde Nast’s head, or has someone always done what I did? And what of my future in an age of Web sites and ISDN lines? At times, I feel like a horse after the invention of the automobile, picturesque but unnecessary. Is literary journalism something the world still has to have?

I emerged from reading these 558 pages a bit numb: so many stories, so many people, nothing connecting piece to piece, era to era, no uniform notes on where or when the articles first appeared. But I found myself in the end convinced that great journalism has all the qualities of great literature. Unfortunately, it has fewer of them. With few exceptions, these pieces, good as many of them are, exist in a box. They feel provisional, constrained, worked at too hard. I didn’t find them more interesting for being real; I found them less interesting.

I’d always assumed that what journalists did was harder than what novelists did, because we can’t make it all up. We have notes and tapes and other people’s memories to contend with. But this turns out to be too simple. Reality can be a crutch too. Read Ernest Hemingway’s 1923 piece on an earthquake in Japan in this volume. The tone is similar to the tone of stories he was writing at about the same time. The people in the piece even sound like Hemingway characters. But the impact is diluted. “No one has the right to dig this stuff up and use it against the stuff you have written to write the best you can,” he said in 1931. It’s true; Hemingway doesn’t do his best work because he doesn’t have to. There’s a truth he can rely on, even if it’s less interesting than the one he would have invented.

I want to give Kerrane and Yagoda proper credit. They’ve chosen their writers intelligently, if conservatively. From the historical archives, they’ve chosen Daniel Defoe, Henry Mayhew, W.T. Stead, Stephen Crane, Abraham Cahan and Jack London, and they establish a pedigree for feature writing that goes back to Defoe’s wonderful 1725 profile of a London fence named Jonathan Wild, a profile that would be at home in this paper’s Sunday magazine. From the New Yorker, you get A.J. Liebling, Truman Capote, Lillian Ross, Joseph Mitchell and John McPhee, writers given enough resources and time to push fact-gathering, interpreting and composition to its limit. Among the New Journalists, Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr and Norman Mailer are here, having aged far better than I would have predicted. Who would have thought Wolfe’s 1964 hep-throwaway piece, “Girl of the Year,” about the Andy Warhol protege, Baby Jane Holzer, would still be readable?

Five entries in “The Art of Fact” make a claim to real permanence. Three of these many readers already know: excerpts from Capote’s “In Cold Blood” (whose relationship to the facts is a subject of conjecture), from Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and from Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night” (which he called a novel). The last two are a bit fresher: Mitchell’s “Lady Olga” and an excerpt from Herr’s “Dispatches.” These are the stories that confirm that as journalism as a fact-gathering enterprise becomes obsolete, journalism as a literate enterprise will endure. We are changing from a culture of information-gatherers to one of information-sifters, and the masterful sifter will be more necessary than ever.

Readers have been reintroduced to the late Mitchell’s wry, nuanced New Yorker work thanks to “Up in the Old Hotel,” a best-selling 1992 omnibus edition of his work. That’s when I first read him too. The more I read and reread Mitchell, the more in awe I stand. In “Lady Olga,” he tells the story of a bearded circus performer who treats her strange profession as if it were the most ordinary in the world. The quotes, Mitchell’s greatest gift, almost do the job alone. “If any man is fool enough to be a bearded lady,” Lady Olga says at one point, “it’s all right with me.” And later, “I’ve never been able to find out if Mamma got any money for me or just gave me away to get rid of me. She hated me, I know that. Daddy told me years later that he gave her a good beating when he got home from Baltimore and found out what had happened. He had been in Baltimore two months, and by the time he got home I and the Mohammedans were long gone. . . .” And finally: “If the truth was known, we’re all freaks together.”

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Mitchell’s talent was narrow and deep; Herr’s is wide and fitful. His work remains curiously under-appreciated, though it is perhaps as closely associated with the Vietnam War as Dickens’ work is with Victorian London. After “Dispatches,” Herr co-wrote the screenplays to both “Apocalypse Now” and “Full Metal Jacket.” Here’s a self-referential description from “Dispatches”:

“He was a moving-target-survivor subscriber, a true child of the war, because except for the rare times when you were pinned or stranded the system was geared to keep you mobile, if that was what you thought you wanted. As a technique for staying alive it seemed to make as much sense as anything, given naturally that you were there to begin with and wanted to see it close. . . . As long as we could have choppers like taxis it took real exhaustion or depression near shock or a dozen pipes of opium to keep us even apparently quiet, we’d still be running around inside our skins like something was after us. . . .”

“The Art of Fact” is light on anything much after New Journalism, which fell out of favor in the mid ‘70s. As far as I can tell--the bios are sketchy--the editors have included only one writer who got her start beyond the early 1980s: the young Irish and American journalist Rosemary Mahoney. I don’t think this is quite fair: The ‘90s have proven a tricky time for feature journalists. There is no clear national theme; magazine space is scarce and an increase in the use of public relations consultants in entertainment, business and government has made obtaining even the most routine access to the powerful difficult. You could not write “Dispatches” today: first, because there is no such national crisis and, second, because if there were, the Army wouldn’t let you on all those helicopters to see it. But significant work continues. I would have liked an excerpt from Michael Lewis’ “Liar’s Poker” or one of the profiles Philip Weiss has written of Ellen Barkin or Hollywood producer Scott Rudin in a style representative of skeptical Hollywood reporting we seldom see nowadays.

The Russian war journalist Svetlana Alexiyevich writes in “Boys in Zinc” that her articles are not meant as “documents; they are images. I was trying to present a history of feelings, not the history of the war itself.” This might serve as an epigraph to this collection as a whole. It is the book’s strength and, simultaneously, its weakness. We get Jimmy Breslin’s piece on the Arlington cemetery gravedigger who dug President Kennedy’s grave instead of a chunk of William Manchester’s far more important “Death of a President.” There’s nothing on Watergate by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (not literary enough), but there is a piece by Hunter S. Thompson: “Sometime around dawn,” he wrote in Rolling Stone in 1974, “on the Friday morning of Richard Milhous Nixon’s last breakfast in the White House I put on my swimming trunks and a red rain parka, laced my head with some gray Argentine snuff, and took an elevator down to the big pool below my window in the National Affairs Suite at the Washington Hilton.” At some point, literary journalism ceases to be journalism.

Finally, I hate to be the PC police, but where are the women? I count only seven out of 58. That’s too few. Where is Elizabeth Gilbert’s “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon” or anything by Janet Malcolm, in whose extraordinary book, “The Journalist and the Murderer,” I found the McGinniss judge’s words quoted above. And why do we have Joan Didion’s essayistic “L.A. Notebook” instead of the more journalistic “Where the Kissing Never Stops” or some of “Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” both in her collection “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” Didion is wonderful on, among other things, just how weird being a journalist actually is. “That is one last thing to remember.” she wrote in the preface to that 1986 book, “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

That’s something you’ll think about as you read these pages. Sports writer Al Stump braved Ty Cobb’s loaded handgun to gather the remarkable material with which he would draw a portrait of a pathetic drugged and drunken old man in “The Fight to Live.” Watch Hemingway push his way into the house of an earthquake victim and A.J. Liebling flatter Gov. Earl Long into an indiscretion. “When I try, I can exude sincerity as far as a llama can spit,” Liebling explains.

Take a look at the most surprising piece in this anthology: an excerpt from David Simon’s “Homicide,” about the year he spent tagging along after the Baltimore police department’s homicide unit. I’m not sure why the excerpt is here--Simon’s writing doesn’t seem particularly literary to me--but there’s a nice metaphor embedded in its tough-guy sentences:

“You are a citizen of a free nation, having lived your adult life in a land of guaranteed civil liberties, and you commit a crime of violence, whereupon you are jacked up, hauled down to a police station and deposited in a claustrophobic anteroom with three chairs, a table and no windows. There you sit for a half hour or so until a police detective--a man you have never met before, a man who can in no way be mistaken for a friend--enters the room with a thin stack of lined note paper and a ball point pen . . . your mouth opens to speak.”

There’s a reporter too, of course, with the thin stack of lined note paper and a ballpoint pen, taking it all down.