Tom Wolfe put the whole operation into one telephone call, and he did it forty years ago.
In The Bonfire of the Vanities,, Peter Fallow of the City Light needs a fact about a boy in a coma. He rings the boy’s English teacher at a high school in the Bronx on a Saturday afternoon. Zane Rifkind is in his driveway drinking beer and making a for-sale sign for his Thunderbird, and he does not want to talk, and he answers every question honestly anyway.
Fallow asks whether Henry Lamb is an outstanding student. Rifkind says outstanding is not a word they use at that school. Fallow asks whether he is a good student. Rifkind says good does not work either, the question is whether a boy attends class. Fallow asks about written work. Rifkind laughs and says there has been no written work at the school in fifteen years, maybe twenty, only multiple-choice reading comprehension, because that is what the Board of Education counts. Fallow asks about reading comprehension. Rifkind says he would have to look it up.
Then Fallow does the thing.
He asks Rifkind to define the standard. Rifkind obliges. At his school, he says, an honor student is a boy who attends class, does not disrupt it, tries, and manages reading and arithmetic. Fallow immediately says: by that standard, is Henry Lamb an honor student?
By that standard, yes.
The next morning the paper says honor student.
Nobody lied. Rifkind said something true. Fallow printed something true. The conditional that made it true was present in the conversation, was stated aloud by the teacher, was assented to by both men, and did not survive the trip to the composing room.
I have been writing about claims that inflate as they pass through institutions, and about how the qualification is always the first thing to go. Wolfe had the finding in 1987 and put it in a scene instead of a framework, which is why it has stayed readable and the frameworks have not.
Watch the two moves separately, because they are different crimes.
The first is the stripped conditional. This is the ordinary one, the one that requires nobody’s dishonesty. A speaker qualifies a claim. The qualification is a burden on him and a nuisance to whoever repeats it. The repeater is the one holding the pencil. So the qualification goes, and what remains is shorter, more usable, and no longer testable, because the conditional was the testable part. Fallow does not need to deceive Rifkind. He needs only to let Rifkind supply a definition and then decline to print it.
The second is worse and Wolfe buries it where a fast reader will miss it. The quotation the paper attributes to Rifkind is invented. In print he says the situation is tragic, that Henry belongs to that remarkable fraction of students who overcome the obstacles of life in the South Bronx and concentrate on their studies and their futures, that one can only wonder what he might have achieved in college. He said none of that. He said the range at his school runs from cooperative to life-threatening and asked twice not to be quoted.
So the reader gets a manufactured sentiment in quotation marks and a technically defensible word outside them, and the manufactured one is the one that carries the piece. Wolfe understood that the fabricated quote does the emotional work while the laundered word does the factual work, and that a paper which would never invent a fact will invent a feeling.
Notice who in that chapter knows the most and who is most exposed by knowing it.
Rifkind knows the school has assigned no written work in fifteen years. He knows what the enrollment figures mean, sixty-five at the start of the year, forty by midwinter, thirty at the end. He knows the boys are boys and that he is not supposed to say so. He states his central finding in Latin, that nothing comes from nothing, to a man who lets it pass without comment. And twice he asks not to be quoted, because he understands that in his position accurate knowledge is a liability and the only safe form of it is the unattributed kind.
The honest man in the room is the one trying to get off the phone.
That is not a comment on his character. It is a description of his incentives, and the incentives are the same everywhere the claim travels. Rifkind gains nothing by being right about Ruppert and loses his job if he is quoted being right about it. Fallow gains a front page. The paper gains a circulation war. Reverend Bacon and Albert Vogel gain a demonstration. The only person in the chain with a reason to keep the conditional attached is the man who will be punished for stating it.
Wolfe also has the carrier group, seventeen years before the sociology of cultural trauma named it. Vogel rings Fallow to feed him the tip about the Motor Vehicle Bureau. Bacon is holding the story for him, exclusive, and Vogel tells him to run with it. The mother is credible, the flat is orderly, there are pictures on the walls. Fallow has visited that apartment exactly once, with Vogel and one of Bacon’s men, and never returned, and by the following week his standing at the paper as an intrepid explorer of the lower depths is high enough that he does not care to correct the impression.
The reporter’s biography inflates alongside the subject’s, out of the same material, at the same rate. That is a detail I have never seen in the academic literature and it is the sort of thing only a novelist reporting from inside a newsroom would think to include.
And there is Sherman McCoy shouting about the car. They keep calling it a luxury car, he says, and it is only a Mercedes. He is right and it does not help him. The paper needs an adjective that carries a charge, and the accurate noun carries none. Every one of these stories runs on a descriptor chosen for its symbolic voltage rather than its precision. Luxury sedan. Poster boy. Youngest ever. The word is doing work the fact cannot do, and arguing about the fact does not touch the word.
Now the disanalogy, because the resonance breaks in one place and the break is the point.
Henry Lamb is unconscious. He makes no claim about himself, has no memoir coming, gives no keynote. Everything built on him is built without him. His mother believes what she says. Rifkind says nothing false. The reporter commits one fabrication and one omission. And the machine still produces a saint out of a boy nobody in the chain has any reason to sanctify.
That is Wolfe’s harder claim, and it is easy to miss because the novel is usually read as satire on race and money. The apparatus does not require the subject’s participation. It required no dishonesty from Rifkind, no calculation from Annie Lamb, and no consciousness at all from Henry. Give it a usable case and it will produce the figure it needs, and it will produce him out of true statements if true statements are what it has.
Which is the uncomfortable implication for any case where the subject did participate. The instinct is to run the whole explanation through him. He inflated, he embellished, he supplied the story, and everyone else was deceived. Wolfe’s scene says the chain would have generated most of it anyway. Rifkind’s honesty was no obstacle. The conditional was stated and printed away. The subject’s cooperation makes the process faster and is not the reason it works.
There is one more thing in that phone call and it is the best line in it.
Fallow, running out of angles, asks whether Rifkind can tell him anything at all about Henry Lamb’s performance or aptitude, anything at all. Rifkind answers by describing the class. Sixty-five students at the start of the year because the administration knows it will be forty by midwinter. Thirty by June, and thirty is still too many. He is not being evasive. He is telling the reporter that the question has no answer, that the school does not produce the kind of information the question assumes, and that any number he supplied would be an artifact of the asking.
The reporter hears a man failing to give him a quote.
Most of the time, when a source cannot answer a question, he is not withholding. He is reporting that the world does not contain the fact. There is no way to print that, so it does not get printed, and the story runs with a word that was true in the room and false on the page.
By that standard, yes.
