Friday May 19, 2006

The Invisible Man

I went to Gay Talese’s book signing last night at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. The crowd did not quite fill the two hundred or so chairs laid out—perhaps because of the rain or fading memory or poor reviews of Talese’s latest book, A Writer’s Life. The majority of the audience was closer to the author’s age than to my own, which I thought was a shame. Along with the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsy and the filmmaker Errol Morris, Talese is someone who doesn’t write fiction but who has nonetheless shaped my ideas about writing and story. I’ve often thought that magazine writing would have gone in a much different (and better) direction if my generation had learned the lessons of Talese, rather than those of Thompson and Wolfe.

If you ask most people what “New Journalism” is all about, they will say that it is about the author putting himself or herself into the story. While this is one technique—and unquestionably the most popular, for obvious reasons—employed by so-called New Journalists, it is not a requirement, even by Wolfe’s definition. Rather, New Journalism is simply the use of novelistic techniques to tell true stories, and not all novels are written in the first person. As Talese wrote in the introduction to his 1970 collection of magazine writing Fame and Obscurity, “The new journalism allows, demands in fact, a more imaginative approach to reporting, and it permits the writer to inject himself into the narrative if he wishes, as many writers do, or to assume the role of detached observer, as other writers do, including myself.”

In hindsight—or by picking up almost any magazine—we can see, however, that the self-injectors have won. Even Wolfe, who often plays the detached observer, produces prose that drips with his persona and has been instrumental, along with Hunter S. Thompson, in creating the impression that literary journalism is all about self-absorbed bursts of expression. (See for example, Wolfe’s creation myth.)

This makes it all the more breathtaking to read Talese’s magazine writing and observe the lengths to which he goes to stay out of his stories. “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” gets all the glory, but I think “The Loser”—Talese’s profile of the just recently departed boxer Floyd Patterson—is a better piece. Talese cites it early in A Writer’s Life, quoting in full a passage where Patterson describes the momentary bliss of being knocked out. Talese never appears in the piece, and he resorts to the passive voice to remain invisible. He does not ask; Patterson “was asked.” The technique reflects restraint and humility almost unthinkable in our Age of Memoir.

That said, Talese is not at his best when talking about himself—are any of us?—in print or in person. Last night’s talk seemed to be addressed to an unseen interlocutor (Kurt Andersen, perhaps?), as Talese attempted to reveal the continuous thread that runs through all of his books, including A Writer’s Life. According to him, that thread is the telling of untold stories, although what I’ve read of the latest book so far has been mostly about him. I am inclined to agree with Andersen that it doesn’t really work. Robert Boynton offers a more charitable spin, suggesting that what makes Talese such a keen observer—and self-effacing writer—is what makes him such a bad memoirist. (Boynton writes: “The thing that most puzzles me about the book, I confess, is how someone so devoid of introspection would write a memoir in the first place.”)

Which is why it’s a shame that more young people didn’t show up last night and that Fame and Obscurity, which was long out of print, isn’t as widely read as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A writer whose most spontaneous gesture isn’t memoir? Impossible! But that’s what Talese is, and he’s created some timeless writing as a result. My favorite piece in Fame and Obscurity—and one of my favorite pieces of writing by anyone—is an unassuming profile of Alden Whitman, an obituary writer for the New York Times, called “Mr. Bad News.” Its tempo and arc is as perfect as any short story, and this how it ends:

“But what will happen to you then, after you die, Mr. Whitman?”

“I have no soul that is going anywhere,” he said. “It is simply a matter of bodily extinction.”

“If you had died during your heart attack, what, in your opinion, would have been the first thing your wife would have done?”

“She would first have seen to it that my body was disposed of in the way that I wanted,” he said. “To be cremated without fuss or fanfare.”

“And then what?”

“Then, after she’d gotten to that, she would have turned her attention to the children.”

“And then?”

“Then, I guess, she would have broken down and had a good cry.”

“Are you sure?”

Whitman paused.

“Yes, I would assume so,” he said finally, puffing his pipe. “This is the formal outlet for grief under such circumstances.”

Posted by jim at 10:28 AM ||