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Notes from 21 South Street: Origins of a Nonfiction Writer Every morning at 8 am, Gay Talese walks down the staircase of his Manhattan townhouse to the sidewalk, turns left, and opens the wrought iron gate leading to his office. He unlocks the door and descends the broad wooden steps to a rectangular room with vaulted arches left over from its days as a wine cellar. The kitchenette where he makes his morning coffee is up to the right, past the arches, directly opposite a desk where he sits facing a bulletin board covered with memos he has written to himself. The pieces of paper, arranged chronologically from upper left to lower right, chart his progress on his latest project in an ongoing internal dialogue: typed up in different sizes and fonts, they ask Gay why he is such a slow writer, where a topic is leading him, when he plans to publish. To the left of his desk are shelves of cardboard filing boxes that contain all the research for his books, each one illustrated with clippings that immediately identify their contents. A box labeled “China” has a photograph of Talese standing in front of Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square; another, labeled “Restaurants,” has a picture of an old warehouse on 63rd Street whose ground floor hosts a new restaurant every few years. He spends four hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon working in his office, with no phone, email, or doorbell to distract him. Now in his seventies, Talese has written books on topics ranging from The New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power) to the Mafia (Honor Thy Father), as well as magazine pieces profiling figures like Peter O’Toole and Muhammad Ali. He writes nonfiction like a novelist, using the techniques of fiction to describe real people and real events; in 1975, Tom Wolfe hailed him as an early practitioner of New Journalism. Talese avoids quoting his subjects verbatim, preferring whenever possible to use his own voice to frame the psychology of their character. When writing one of his best-known magazine pieces, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” he never interviewed Sinatra. “I didn’t go up to Frank Sinatra and start asking questions,” he says, leaning forward slightly on the brown couch in his living room. “The last thing you want is a question and answer session.” Instead, he observed Sinatra in his environment, letting atmospheric details set the stage. “It’s Beverly Hills, it’s 1965, it’s 8:00 pm, and it’s just Frank Sinatra at the bar. I don’t go up to him and say, ‘Hi.’ I watch him with two blondes. His music is on, people are dancing: I see a scene.” Talese laid out the story on cardboard as a film director would, noting every character, plot turn, and scene change. As with much of his work, the most vivid portraits are those of the people at the periphery, from the blondes at the bar to Sinatra’s anxious press agent agonizing over his client’s perpetual bad behavior; they orbit the aging singer like satellites, briefly illuminated in passing proximity to their star. In Talese’s piece, Sinatra is less the protagonist than the axis of this rotation, a man whose magnetism permanently realigns the lives of the people around him. “If Frank Sinatra doesn’t want to talk to you,” Talese adds, “you don’t need Frank Sinatra.” Talese began his career as a sports writer: first in high school, where he reported on sports for the student paper, and then at the University of Alabama, where he majored in journalism and became the sports editor for the college weekly. His freedom in those years to observe events firsthand and to talk with the individuals involved, no matter how marginal, would be decisive for his later writing. His other major influence as a young journalist was fiction, particularly the short stories of John O’Hara and Irwin Shaw. Their talent for producing vividly lifelike scenes in the mind of the reader impressed Talese, who sought to achieve the same effect when chronicling his school’s football matches—particularly when they lost, which was often. After graduating from the University of Alabama in 1953, and spending two years in the Army, Talese became a reporter at The New York Times. Although his experience at the Times provided him with valuable background as a researching writer, the disposability of daily journalism bothered him. He labored endlessly over his prose, producing articles he hoped would outlive their dateline. One day in 1962 while Talese sat in the newsroom working on a story, an older reporter ridiculed him for spending so much time on an article. “You’re not writing for posterity!” the man said. Talese remembers the incident as if it were yesterday, and it angered him in a way that can still bring heat to his voice. Who the fuck is this guy telling me this? He wanted his articles to be read as serious literature, on the same level as fiction by writers like O’Hara and Shaw. “I always felt journalism was being put down by the people who sat in judgment of the written word,” Talese explains. He eventually left the Times in 1965 to freelance and write books full time, including a history of the newspaper, The Kingdom and the Power, in 1969. His latest book, A Writer’s Life, is another exercise in writing for posterity. “A Writer’s Life is all about trying to find a subject worthy of your energy and exhaustion,” Talese says. “It is a worthy quest to write prose that will endure.” Unlike his more focused studies of institutions like the Times or the Mafia, A Writer’s Life covers a wide range of topics, spending anywhere from a few pages to a few chapters on a subject before moving on, and often returning to pick up the thread later in the book. “It’s a portrait of an average day in the life of a writer, of having a devil of a time trying to figure out what I’m writing about.” The book opens in the summer of 1999, when Talese, seven years into his book contract, faces a number of unfinished projects. He has notes he has been accumulating since the 1970’s on the capricious New York restaurant world, fragments of a book on a turn-of-the-century building at 206 East 63rd Street that he first became interested in during the late 1950’s, and sketches for a piece for The New Yorker on Lorena Bobbitt, the woman from Manassas, Virginia who cut off her husband’s penis in 1993. With all these on the table and his editor at Knopf eager for a manuscript, Talese turns on the TV and watches a Chinese soccer player named Liu Ying miss a penalty kick against the United States in the Women’s World Cup, costing her team the championship. Imagining her reception back in China, he begins to reflect on the role of young women in a society transformed by two decades of market liberalization and half a century of Maoist ideology. He ends up spending five months in China, and the next few years following the story, meeting with Liu Ying in Beijing and attending her team’s games around the world. Talese works on pieces in parallel, slowly expanding each story in new directions, and exploring new digressions, until his frustrations force him to put one project aside and resume another. Kurt Andersen, in a highly critical review of A Writer’s Life published in The New York Times Book Review, attacked Talese for focusing on unfinished projects instead of writing a more traditional memoir, calling the book “a saga of serial professional failures that is itself a failure.” The litany of obstacles, missed connections, and dead ends that form the thematic core of A Writer’s Life can be off-putting, particularly from a writer who has built his reputation on a prose style that masks the literary labor behind it. But his difficulties are also what make the book interesting, and rather than ruining the memoir, they provide the most authentically autobiographical moments in A Writer’s Life. By peeling back the polish, Talese reveals the clumsy choreography of his creative process—an intuitive, messy affair always on the verge of coming apart. “Writing is like driving a truck in a tunnel with the lights out—” he says, “you have to feel it out.” You might skid into a wall, crash into an oncoming car, or make it through to the other side, but whatever happens, no amount of planning beforehand will guarantee the outcome. Some lines of research never yield a single page, while others generate whole boxes of interviews that end up in the trash. Each project in the book presents its own challenges. Setting emotional tone in a scene is particularly hard in China, since it requires correctly interpreting mannerisms and facial expressions in a culture with different rules for how people interact. When discussing the Cultural Revolution with a Chinese woman, for instance, Talese can’t tell whether her composure means that she supported Mao or whether she is hiding her true feelings out of politeness. He also has trouble finding the right lead characters for his pieces, people whose personal dramas perfectly match the idiosyncrasies of his subject. His unfinished book about a building at 206 East 63rd Street moves through a number of possible heroes—a procession of colorful restaurant entrepreneurs, a real estate developer and his take-no-prisoners Hong Kong wife—but no one seems right for the star role. In his piece on the Bobbitts, the personalities have already been provided for him, which relaxes his anxieties as a storyteller somewhat and lets him focus on filling out the cultural context. Lorena, born in Ecuador and educated in Venezuela, castrated John, a former Marine, at a time when post-Cold War demilitarization was putting lower-class whites like him out of a job, the Latino immigrant experience was becoming a high currency concern, and sexual harassment suits were starting to receive a lot of press coverage. One summer night with a kitchen knife was all it took for the Bobbitts to become media shorthand for a range of issues they didn’t fully understand, as pundits tried to make their bloody, but essentially banal, marital conflict into ammunition for national debates. Talese deftly captures the episode’s outrageousness, sketching a circus almost as grotesque as its gory opening act: a Quito-based feminist organization threatens to castrate one hundred Americans if Lorena is convicted, vendors outside the courtroom during her trial sell penis-shaped chocolates, and John Bobbitt has a brief stint as a stand-up comic (“The last thing I told her was that I wanted a separation, and she took it literally”) and later, somehow, as a porn star. The story owes its force to Talese’s skill for building scenes from memorable snapshots, taken individually and then sequenced like a flipbook, until the motion of his prose gives the characters such life that they seem to walk across the page. He lets his visual impressions guide him to the heart of his theme, a technique that dates back to his days as a young reporter at the Times. “I didn’t want to do hard news because I didn’t think it was hard,” Talese says of his early years as a journalist. “I wanted to be in the middle of the back of the page.” Although the positions for political correspondents in Washington or Paris were the most prestigious assignments, they didn’t appeal to him. “I never wanted to be a premier journalist with four-star credentials, because they would box them in and make them dependent on their sources. Journalists outsource themselves, becoming captive to press secretaries. I wanted to see the news, see the subject of interest, and you can’t see it with the big news.” Journalists today should try to authenticate the stories they report, says Talese, even if it means criticizing the government officials they rely on for information. What happens when their sources stop talking? “Move all the journalists out of D.C. and put them in the fifty states,” he answers. “We’d get a better sense of the United States by distributing the press throughout—Washington is overcovered. You could decentralize coverage. Then you have an evolving American story, not just a center of fiction and falsification.” For all his unorthodoxy, Talese belongs to the old school of journalism, an era when reporters chased the story down with a pad and pencil, returned to a newsroom thick with cigarette smoke, and pounded out a thousand words on the typewriter until the copy boy came by for the late edition. Although he has been critical of journalists over the years, he still passionately believes in their role as chroniclers of our culture, as the craftsmen who spin necessary narratives out of a disorderly mass of material. In a world oversaturated with information, bare facts are the unprocessed ingredients of news, only made digestible through the efforts of a writer like Talese. His nonfiction over the past fifty years has put the short-order cooks of all newspapers to shame.
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