The 1936 Berlin Olympics is recalled as the effort by Adolf Hitler to showcase Germany as a prosperous modern state that showed the superiority of the Aryan race. This effort was dented by Jesse Owens, the Black American athlete who won four gold medals in the 100m, 200m, long jump, and 4x100m relay. But there was another event, rowing, in which the American team edged out the Italian team to second and the German team to third place. The nine-member American team was all white so this result had no racial implications but it still stung for the Germans who had hoped to get the gold. Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Goering all were present for this event and were seemingly excited when it seemed like the German team would win, only to be deflated at the last minute.

The book The Boys on the Boat by Daniel James Brown tells this story. Rowing had long been dominated n the US by the east coast Ivy League schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and by Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, but this American team was made up of mostly people with working class backgrounds at the University of Washington.

The book consists of two interleaving threads. One is the story about how the University of Washington came to be a rowing power and the backgrounds of the rowers who made up the team. The other is about the German preparations for the Olympics so that it could serve as a major propaganda coup. The preparations included building massive facilities, cleaning up Berlin so that it looked spotless, and removing all the signs of antisemitism that had been ubiquitous, as well as rounding up the Romani people.

The book also discusses the role that filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl played in it. Her film of the event Olympia is considered on a par with her more well-known Triumph of the Will about Hitler’s Nuremberg rally as showing her superior filmmaking skills, even as it served an ignoble propaganda cause.

I am not that interested in rowing and so skimmed past much of the rowing story but the story of what was happening on the German side contained many interesting details that I had not been aware of.

But that is not the main point of this post, which is about the nature of non-fiction writing. The first chapter of the book has the following passages:

Monday, October 9, 1933, began as a gray day in Seattle. A gray day in a gray time.

Along the waterfront, seaplanes from the Gorst Air Transport company rose slowly from the surface of Puget Sound and droned westward, flying low under the cloud cover, beginning their short hops over to the naval shipyard at Bremerton. Ferries crawled away from Colman Dock on water as flat and dull as old pewter. Downtown, the Smith Tower pointed, like an upraised finger, toward somber skies. On the streets below the tower, men in fraying suit coats, worn-out shoes, and battered felt fedoras wheeled wooden carts toward the street corners where they would spend the day selling apples and oranges and packages of gum for a few pennies apiece. Around the corner, on the steep incline of Yesler Way, Seattle’s old, original Skid Road, more men stood in long lines, heads bent, regarding the wet sidewalks and talking softly among themselves as they waited for the soup kitchens to open. Trucks from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer rattled along cobblestone streets, dropping off bundles of newspapers. Newsboys in woolen caps lugged the bundles to busy intersections, to trolley stops, and to hotel entrances, where they held the papers aloft, hawking them for two cents a copy, shouting out the day’s headline: “15,000,000 to Get U.S. Relief.” (p.7)
…

But the overcast didn’t last, nor did the gloom, in Seattle that day. By late morning, seams began to open in the cloud cover. The still waters of Lake Washington, stretched out at the city’s back, slowly shifted from gray to green to blue. On the campus of the University of Washington, perched on a bluff overlooking the lake, slanting rays of sunlight began to warm the shoulders of students lounging on a wide quadrangle of grass in front of the university’s massive new stone library, eating their lunches, poring over books, chatting idly. Sleek black crows strutted among the students, hoping for a morsel of bologna or cheese left unguarded. High above the library’s stained-glass windows and soaring neo-Gothic spires, screeching seagulls whirled in white loops against the slowly bluing sky.

For the most part, the young men and women sat in separate groups. The men wore pressed slacks and freshly shined oxfords and cardigan sweaters.
…

The young women, sitting in their own clusters on the lawn, wore short-heeled pumps and rayon hose, calf-length skirts, and loose-fitting blouses with ruffles and flounces on the sleeves and at the necklines. Their hair was sculpted into a wide variety of shapes and styles. Like the young men, the women talked about classes and sometimes about baseball too. (p. 10,11)

What struck me on reading this is that the book was written in 2013, 80 years after the events described. The author was not there. And yet he describes the scene vividly in great detail. Was he using his imagination to make up stuff? And if so, can this still be classified as nonfiction? This is not the first time that I have read purportedly historical accounts of long ago events where the author describes scenes and conversations that they could not possibly have seen or known about.

In the end notes, Brown says that his descriptions of the weather conditions were obtained from daily meteorological records taken by various observers in the Seattle area and reported to the US Weather Bureau. Descriptions of the students appearance and dress were obtained from photographs taken on the university campus that fall. So his descriptions had some basis in fact although he clearly added flourishes to give the writing more energy and color. But does doing so remove the book from the nonfiction category and into something else? That seems like too harsh a verdict. So is there another category that is appropriate?

Nonfiction is often conflated with true or real while fiction is seen as false and unreal but Hannah H. Kim argues that that distinction is too simplistic.

This raises a fascinating and surprisingly thorny philosophical question: what distinguishes fiction from nonfiction? What is fiction in the first place? Despite common usage, philosophers agree that we can’t equate ‘fiction’ with ‘false content’. On the one hand, the inclusion of falsity isn’t enough to render a work fiction. Books with false statements – old science textbooks with disproven theories, history books with mistakes, memoirs with contradictory events – don’t change their status from nonfiction to fiction when false content is identified. Instead, we judge them to be bad nonfiction. On the other hand, not all fictions include false content since there are fictions that include only actual events, such as Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (2008), a factual account of the author’s experience of nursing a dying friend. And the fact that historical fiction exists – that a fictional work can be consistent with all known facts, yet still be considered fiction – shows that fiction doesn’t need to include (known) falsity.

What matters for nonfiction is that its content is believed to be true. A creative writing friend of mine told me that writing what one sincerely believes to be true after due diligence in research and introspection is enough to render some content ‘nonfiction’. This means that, strictly speaking, nonfiction can be false but remain ‘nonfiction’ as long as we think it’s true.
…

What grounds the nonfiction/fiction distinction is not that the former is based on truth or facticity per se, but that the former contributes to how we see the world insofar as it organises the kinds of truths that we care enough about to read and write about.

It is an interesting argument. I am a writer of nonfiction but try to stick to factual descriptions as much as possible. If I have to speculate about things in order to fill in the inevitable gaps, I tend to use qualifiers like ‘probably’ or ‘perhaps’ or ‘likely’ to signal that I do not really know whether what I am saying is true. That is why my writing is not as vivid as Brown’s and so many other authors of historical events. It did not strike me that ‘sincerely believing’ that what I am writing is true was sufficient license to drop the qualifiers and write with more certainty. It seems a bit of a slippery slope.