"A Writer's Life": Guy Talese's
The
ANNOTICO Report
Guy
Talese, with four consecutive bestsellers under his
belt, is not only according to David Halberstam
"the most important nonfiction writer of his generation," he is
arguably the most important Italian American writer in the last half century,
since he either centers on the Italian American experience, or he weaves it
inextricably throughout his books.
Talese has just finished "A Writer's Life" (Alfred A.
Knopf), a semiautobiographical work spanning the last 60 years, and early
reviews have been generally good. But underneath his genial bravado, Talese has been a man deeply in need of reassurance. His
latest book, due in 1995, was delivered 10 years late. During the last 13
years, he grew despondent that his work had no focus, lacked a compelling
voice. Time after time, his ideas about how to write the book — or parts
of it — were shot down by editors. He worried that the publisher would
lose patience with his delays.
In
the end, Talese found the narrative thread that had
eluded him for years, offering in the bargain a revealing glimpse not only of
his own life and times but of the wrenching self-doubts a writer sometimes
endures.
As Talese has described it, "Writing is like
driving in a tunnel with the lights out. You don't really know where you're
going and it's never a straight path." Indeed, he has written a book about
a book in search of itself — and he was miserable for much of the
journey.
It
is an intriguing story about how the book evolved, and almost didn't.
But
first a Brief Reminder about Who Gay Talese is!!!!
Incidentally,
Talese — was named after his immigrant
grandfather, Gaetano Talese,
a stonemason. ( I long wondered about his first name).
Sort
of reminded me about the Shel Silverstein song,
"A Boy named Sue" made famous by Johhny
Cash!! :)
GUY
TALESE
Portrait
of an (Nonfiction) Artist
by Barbara Lounsberry
Gay Talese is known for his daring pursuit of "unreportable" stories, for his exhaustive research,
and for his formally elegant style. Talese is often
cited as one of the founders of the 1960s "New Journalism," Talese is a reaction to his own highly personal response to
the world as an Italian-American "outsider."
Talese was born
In
"Origins of a Nonfiction Writer" (1996), Talese
writes that he comes "from an island and a family that reinforced my
identity as a marginal American, an outsider, an alien in my native
nation". Talese was a minority within a
minority, for he was an Italian-American Catholic in an Irish Catholic parish
on a Protestant dominated island. Talese's rebellion are reflected in his works "Honor Thy
Father" (1971) and "Thy Neighbor's Wife" (1980).
Talese's profound identification with the unnoticed and
his celebration of "losers" throughout his writing career stems from
his own feelings of failure as a grade school and high school student, as well
as from his outsider, minority status. "I was variously looked upon as
'aloof,' 'complicated,' 'vague,' 'smug,' 'quirky,' 'in another world'--or so I
was described by former students years later at a class reunion," Talese acknowledges.
"They
also recalled that during our school days I had somehow seemed to be 'older'
than the rest of them, an impression I attribute partly to my being the only
student who came to class daily wearing a jacket and tie"
("Origins" 8). Talese remained a walking
mannequin, a mobile advertisement of his immigrant father's tailoring artistry,
to the end of his college days.
Journalism
was to provide escape and the first success for the undervalued but always
curious Talese, and it came in the most
off-hand, serendipitous fashion. Once started, however, Talese
was no ordinary high school reporter. From his first article as a
fifteen-year-old in June 1947 till his "Swan Song" column in
September l949 as he left the island to attend the
In
"Origins of a Nonfiction Writer," Talese
pays tribute to his mother for modeling the listening and interviewing skills
he came to practice as a literary journalist. Catherine DePaolo
Talese ran the "Talese
Townshop," the fashionable women's dress
boutique over which the family lived. Talese recalls
the shop as: "a kind of talk-show that flowed around the engaging manner
and well-timed questions of my mother; and as a boy not much taller than the
counters behind which I used to pause and eavesdrop, I learned [from my mother]
. . . to listen with patience and care, and never to interrupt even when people
were having great difficulty in explaining themselves, for during such halting
and imprecise moments . . . people are very revealing--what they hesitate to
talk about can tell much about them. Their pauses, their evasions, their sudden
shifts in subject matter are likely indicators of what embarrasses them, or
irritates them, or what they regard as too ! private or imprudent to be disclosed to another person at
that particular time. However, I have also over-heard many people discussing
candidly with my mother what they had earlier avoided--a reaction that I think
had less to do with her inquiring nature or sensitively posed questions than
with their gradual acceptance of her as a trustworthy individual in whom they
could confide."
By
Josh Getlin
Times Staff Writer
April 23, 2006
AS he nursed his second gin martini of the night, minutes before dinner was
served at Elaine's, Gay Talese gently grabbed a friend's
arm and began outlining his idea for a new book: It would focus on
working-class people behind the scenes, he said, the kind of people who aren't
celebrities but live fascinating lives. "Sounds great," sportswriter
Bill Madden answered. "So what's the hook?" Talese
looked offended, as if someone had stolen his drink when he wasn't looking.
"I don't need a hook," he said confidently. "I've never had to
worry much about that."
It was early in the evening, hours before the literary hangout would fill up,
and visitors had already begun straggling by Talese's
table to greet him. The dapper, gray-haired man who looks younger than his 74
years was in his element — shaking hands, trading wisecracks and flirting
gallantly with the ladies on ! his
right and left. When six large platters of grilled veal chops arrived — Talese had ordered for all of his dining companions —
the friendly banter continued. And the drinks kept on coming.
With four consecutive bestsellers under his belt, the man whom David Halberstam once called "the most important nonfiction
writer of his generation," has reason to feel cocky. He's just finished
"A Writer's Life" (Alfred A. Knopf), a semiautobiographical work
spanning the last 60 years, and early reviews have been generally good.
But underneath his genial bravado, Talese has been a
man deeply in need of reassurance. His latest book, due in 1995, was delivered
10 years late. During the last 13 years, he grew despondent that his work had
no focus, lacked a compelling voice. He fretted that he had faded from view and
would be forgotten. Time after time, his ideas about how to write the book —
or parts of it — were shot down by editors. He worried that the publisher
would lose ! patience with
his delays.
In memos to himself, Talese was unforgiving:
"Where are we going? Just completed no progress for one month!" he
said in one note. Despairing, he confessed: "I continue asking myself, as
I have before, what am I doing here? Where's the story? What's the point? Does
it matter?" Echoing a writer's worst fear in yet another memo, he asked
himself: "When are you going to get back into print???"
"Gay was depressed for much of the time during the writing of this
book," said his wife, publisher Nan Talese,
during an interview in her office at Doubleday, where she has had her own share
of problems in recent months as the publisher of James Frey's now discredited
memoir "A Million Little Pieces." "I've never seen him so
troubled, so worried that he might have lost his way," she added.
In the end, Talese found the narrative thread that
had eluded him for years, offering in the bargain a revealing glimpse not only
of his own ! life and times
but of the wrenching self-doubts a writer sometimes endures.
As Talese has described it, "Writing is like driving
in a tunnel with the lights out. You don't really know where you're going and
it's never a straight path." Indeed, he has written a book about a book in
search of itself — and he was miserable for much of the journey. There
are more visible lines of worry on his face than there were in 1992, when his
last book, "Unto the Sons," appeared. But Talese
— who was named after his immigrant grandfather, Gaetano
Talese, a stonemason — looked remarkably fit
and upbeat as he opened the door of his four-story Manhattan town house on a
recent afternoon. He was nattily attired, as usual, wearing a rust-colored
tweed sport coat and matching vest, gray slacks, white shirt, yellow tie and
handkerchief. His Italian shoes were custom-made.
Talese peppered his guest with questions about family
and work and seemed genuinely interested in the answers. The! direction of the conversation was forever shifting, just
like his book. In the first 23 pages of "A Writer's Life," the author
recalls his immigrant Italian father, he talks of his
years as a sportswriter and describes his discovery that nonfiction authors
could be as creative as any novelist. Finally, he begins what seems to be an
extended story line:
As he watched the 1999 women's World Cup soccer finale on television, a
marathon that lasted several hours, Talese was struck
by the plight of Liu Ying, the Chinese player who missed a crucial penalty
kick, thus paving the way for an American victory over her team. Who was this
obscure athlete, he wondered? And how would she handle the notoriety that would
inevitably descend on her when she returned home?
"That was the real story," he said. "I thought of myself as a
young sportswriter and how I would have run into that locker room and told the
story through her eyes."
Over the next 400 pages, Talese weav!
es four additional stories in and out of a sprawling,
often exhilarating autobiographical narrative, recounting his years as a
student at the University of Alabama; his experiences as a reporter covering
the civil rights movement; the bizarre and amusing history of a Manhattan
building that has been home to 12 consecutive failed restaurants; and the
continuing saga of Lorena Bobbitt, who sliced off her husband's penis with an
IKEA knife in a 1993 domestic dispute, claiming she was a victim of marital sex
abuse.
"Did you know Lorena Bobbitt had an agent in
Although his book periodically touches on Talese's
life and times, it is not an autobiography. Readers get scattered glimpses of
his parents, who ran an upscale women's boutique; his childhood in
He also drops hints about the tricks a writer uses when a story gets elusive.
Although Talese is still celebrated for his 1966
Esquire profile "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," many
admirers of the piece have forgotten that the singer himself would not
speak to Talese. So he produced a landmark piece of
journalism about the gaggle of long-suffering staffers, drinking pals, goons
and groupies who surrounded Sinatra.
"Ordinary life can be extraordinary," said the author, who despite
his elegant taste in fashion would rather kibitz with the doormen outside a
A legendary stickler for details and accuracy, Talese
has no patience for nonfiction writers who cut corners or make up facts. He
felt special pain during the recent Frey scandal, and although he refused to
discuss the matter in any detail, he said his wife had been "maligned and
abused" during the course of the story.
Talese said he worked hard to win the trust of those
he wrote about in "A Writer's Life." But the question that tormented
him was whether he could trust himself to pull the material together.
"Sonny Mehta [Knopf's publisher] could have pulled my contract any time he
wanted," Talese said. "And you know, when
you get older, they think, 'He's probably going to drop dead.' I worried about
not living long enough to finish the book."
*
A writer's lair
MUCH of the drama played out in the narrow, white stone town house, just
off Park A! venue, where Talese
has lived with his wife since 1958. As two Australian terriers barked wildly
upstairs, he conducted an impromptu tour, traipsing up and down the stairs.
He's especially proud of the large, enclosed patio where he and
Although Talese has an upstairs office, he writes at
a small desk in a long, narrow basement area called "the bunker." He
completes first drafts on notebook paper, then
transfers them to typewritten notes and finally a computer. To his immediate
right is a wall on which he has tacked all those memos he wrote to himself.
The room is quiet, with no telephone. Perfect, it would seem, for focused
concentration. But the bunker is also a haven for procrastination. T! alese doesn't just stuff notes
into boxes, he insists on decorating them, with black and white photos, color
maps, and other pictures. He'll waste hours tinkering with the filter for a
faulty air conditioner; he'll turn on a small TV and get lost in a baseball
game. There's a tiny alcove with a two-burner stove, teakettles and coffeepots,
where he can eat meals undisturbed. A small table on the far side of the room
holds bottles of Jack Daniel's, Dewar's, Smirnoff and Courvoisier. An entire
wall is lined with Modern Library editions.
In 1992, just after "Unto the Sons" was published, Knopf expected Talese to deliver a sequel — however he chose to
define it — within three years. At first, he believed the work would be
easy, because it focused on
But his project bogged down almost immediately. Although he knew the book would
focus on his life in some fa! shion, Talese had never
written autobiography before. Indeed, his whole technique as a nonfiction
writer was to combine meticulous reporting about other people with vivid,
literary prose. He would spend years if need be to get beneath the glossy
surface of a story. And he was a notorious perfectionist.
"Gay is not one of those writers who vomits on a page, then goes back and
rewrites," said author Ken Auletta. "He
never moves on to a next sentence until he's perfectly happy with one he's
written before. So he'll struggle with the opening paragraph of a chapter for
weeks. This is laborious, not to mention painful."
*
Overcoming discouragement
TALESE had a feeling in his gut that major episodes of his life — and
stories on which he had embarked as a reporter — belonged in the book.
But it didn't help that several editors discouraged him from pursuing the
stories, whether as magazine pieces or dry runs for the book. He pitched the
Chinese soccer idea ! to Time
Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine, but there was no interest. He wrote a
story about the Bobbitt case for the New Yorker, but editor
Tina Brown killed the story when Talese was unable to
get access to Lorena, writing instead about her husband, John.
"Dear, dear Gay," she wrote, explaining her decision. "I have
come to feel that we should really kiss off this penile saga and have you do something more rewarding."
Casting about for a new angle, Talese decided to
write about the waves of immigrants who had worked in 12 failed restaurants at
206 E. 61st St. in New York over several decades. But his longtime editor at
Knopf, John Segal, said the idea didn't sound very commercial. The publisher
expected a bigger book from him.
The recurring problem, Nan Talese said, was that
"Gay wanted to write about people who were losers, which can be quite
eloquent. He has great instincts. But others would tell him, 'No one wants to
read about losers!' "
"You don't think he could have done a Bobbitt book?" Pileggi said. "He'd have been on every talk show.
Katie Couric would be asking him deep questions. He
would have been like 99% of the other writers out there. But that's just not
who he is."
His frustrations mounted in August 1999, soon after the World Cup competition.
But Talese suddenly found his stride — and a
new approach — when he abruptly decided to fly to China several months
later. He was in Frankfurt, Germany, preparing to return home, when he hit on
the idea of chasing the soccer story once and for all.
The tale of Liu Ying, which takes up the last 55 pages of "A Writer's
Life," thrusts the reader into a foreign, inhospitable world. Talese landed in Bei! jing with no official contacts.
Even if he found his way to people in power, he wrote, who would believe that a
68-year-old American had come to China to write about a female soccer player?
"They don't have a cult of personality, of the individual, in China,"
said Nan Talese. "He was entering a culture in
which our idea of celebrity just doesn't exist."
It may have been the biggest reportorial challenge of his life. Dressed in his
cream-colored Italian suits and sporting a Panama hat, Talese
was like Truman Capote in Kansas, a New York boulevardier entering a world
suspicious of outsiders.
After months of persistent digging, he finally made contact with the soccer
player. She had little to say about the soccer defeat and its impact on her, to
his consternation. So he kept digging, until he found his way to her mother.
She, quite unexpectedly, gave Talese the human story
he wanted.
When Liu Ying missed the kick, her mother said she cried for her pai! n, and her daughter's pain.
She was embarrassed and didn't want others to know how she felt. The next
morning, a sobbing Liu Ying phoned home, saying, "It's all
my fault" over and over. Strangers came up to her sister on the
street, criticizing Ying's failure.
The family was devastated, and there was no Hollywood ending. Injuries ended
Liu Ying's career on China's soccer team, and she now lives quietly near
Beijing. She told Talese on the phone that, one day,
she hopes to be a physical education teacher.
It was the end of the story for her, but a new beginning for the author. Buoyed
by his experiences in China, he began to see how the disparate pieces of his
puzzle might fit together. They all added up to a writer's life — the
disappointments, dead ends, rejections and despair, the privileged glimpses
into the mysteries of other people's lives. With any luck, they added up to a
good book as well.
"At some point, you get to a point of total frustration as
! a writer," said Talese.
"And so you have to go out and do something, even if you don't know if
it's the correct thing to do. You just do it! Get out there! Forget whether
it's right or wrong. Just do it."
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