Review by Journalism History
by Norman Sims, University of Massachusetts
Daniel Lehman, co-editor of River Teeth and a professor of English at Ashland University, has written one of the best studies I have read of a single literary journalist. This book treats John Reed specifically as a literary journalist and uses a wealth of original source material to make convincing arguments.
Lehman used the John Reed Papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, an extraordinary collection that fills thirty-seven boxes and nearly thirteen linear feet of shelf space. The collection includes manuscripts, letters, photographs from Mexico and Russia, documents on the Russian Revolution, and his reporter's notebooks-with dirt and coffee stains embedded in the pages-that give a sense of being there.
We see Reed as a young, ambitious reporter who put himself in extraordinary places and used his growing talent to compete with Richard Harding Davis and Stephen Crane for the title of best war correspondent. Lehman shows how Reed's literary skills matured in long magazine pieces on the Mexican revolution, on the evangelist Billy Sunday (included as an appendix), and in the gruesome task of reporting from the eastem front during World War I. In the period from 1914 to 1917, Reed achieved stardom, writing for the Metropolitan, a large circulation profitable magazine, and The Masses, a small radical Joumal in Greenwich Village. The political conflict between the two magazines would eventuallv resolve in favor of revolution and end both Reed's career as a nationally known writer and his life.
Moving from the notes and manuscripts at Harvard to the published works, Lehman convincingly illustrates the elements of Reed's style in sections headed "The Construction of Character," "Reed's Lyrical Descnption" and "Reed's Narrative Voice." Lehman avoids the unreadable machinery of literary theory yet draws from his original research conclusions that can feed our theories. He follows sage advice in pursuing a cultural study of Reed's literary journalism that places Reed firmly in his time and highlights his innovative style. "By applying the fictional techniques developed early in his writing career to his nonfiction, Reed anticipated many of the formal initury later," Lehman said.
Ten Days that Shook the World, the only work that Reed wrote as a book rather than originally as a series of magazine pieces, gets resurrected. Lehman says his examination of more than 700 pages of Reed's Russian notebooks "proves that the reporter labored hard to deliver structural and dramatic power to his Ten Days manuscript. The notes provide an eyewitness historical foundation for Reed's reportirig, the theme on which Reed can work out his narrative variations of dialogue, details, and controlling metaphor." Denying decades of disparagement of the book as propaganda, Lehman shows the book was a culmination of literary strategies and styles that had been taking shape in Reed's work since he graduated from Harvard.
Reed's writing seems oddly contemporary today - Lehman draws comparisons with Michael Herr, Joan Didion, and other reporters today as Reed sought ways to expose what America was doing abroad. His personal struggle has been treated in excellent biographies. But Lehman adds a great deal to his legacy by concentrating on his style and literary journalism. Recognizing that war was brutal, ironic, and boring, Reed also . seems to be almost alone among his contemporaries to recognize the media's power to alter as well as to document the events they record," Lehman writes.
This brilliantly planned and researched book deserves a place in the library of every scholar who has a serious 'interest in the history and practice of literal journalism.
Journalism History
