“New York is the city of the unnoticed,” begins the opening essay in Gay Talese's new collection of New York writing, A City Without Time. Talese then uses deceptive economics to list things he notices, including chestnut sellers, pigeons, doormen, copyboys, and ants.
For more than 60 years, Talese has tried to make sure you don't miss out on a lot. Whether his subjects are idols (“Frank Sinatra had a cold”), monuments (his cinematic account of the construction of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge), or tragedies, he is known for his feline animals. Well, he's always observed with the same novelistic élan and gimlet. eye. And of course he paid attention to what everyone was wearing.
“When I describe people, I describe what they look like,” Talese said. “Clothing is important, especially as you get older.”
In fact, walking through a crowded room with Talese, 92, is no different than being approached by men who want to talk about suits. At a recent holiday party for writers, politicians, and fashionistas, Talese, dressed in a gray wool three-piece suit and yellow silk tie with a blue stripe, was among the bold-faced names (and At least one journalist) stopped me every few steps. The real thrill of men's tailoring. A young novelist asked in 1980 how much a custom pattern would cost.
“We have 3,000 suits,” Talese said, adding that most of the “50 to 60” handmade suits in his collection date from the 1950s.
For many years, suits have served as a type of armor. “I was hiding behind my clothes,” Talese said. They were also advertisements. From the age of 11, when his father, the “James Salter of tailors”, dressed him up as “a little poster boy”, wearing suits “made me feel isolated”.
A sense of being hidden in plain sight, of managing a kind of ostentatious anonymity, pervades The City Without Time. It's tempting to see Tully's as a sepia-toned incarnation of a vanished city. In fact, he's always been proud of his anachronisms, a fedora-wearing copyboy who says he never owned a pair of jeans, even into the gonzo era of the 1960s and 1970s.
He stands by his decision. Today, he and his wife, former publisher Nan Talese, live next door to a 16-story medical building. He said he saw cars pull up and people coming out to see doctors, but they were dressed in “horrible outfits: blue jeans, sneakers and windbreakers.” He is convinced that he would feel better if he wore better clothes. “Look in the mirror. You'll feel better,” he said. “You won't have to spend as much time in the doctor's office.”
Although he now walks with the aid of an elegant Italian cane and lives six days a week in the city's hot spots, mostly in the midtown brownstone he has lived in since 1957, Mr. Talese's New York feels more vibrant than ever.
As the title of your book suggests, you're not memorializing the New York of old. Is there something I'm missing?
Elaine's. I miss that place. Because today the city is asleep. PJ Clarke's is open late, but you don't always want a burger. Of course it's the people. I miss George Plimpton.
However, in reality, not much has changed in this area. I know people at drug stores and tailors in this neighborhood. I know a hardware store. There is no supermarket or doorman, so a supermarket in a nearby building will help you. It's a really small town, at least in this area.
It's interesting to talk about it in terms of additions rather than losses. Do you consider yourself an optimist?
To be able to publish a book at the age of 92, and to be able to publish a book that requires so much effort…I am so grateful that I have retained my body and mind.
Nothing has changed. I show up and talk to people and see their faces. What an enlightening life!
Do you have a favorite New York story?
I have never won a Pulitzer Prize or anything like that. But one thing I'm proud of is my work on Verrazzano. When I'm long dead, someone 35 years from now will want to know something about that bridge. I was the recorder, not just anyone who installed wrenches and screws. For me, that was a huge accomplishment.
We were driving across the bridge with the top down. That was “Papa's Bridge.” My daughters Katherine and Pamela thought I owned that bridge. I didn't tell them I wasn't doing that for a long time.
You're a newspaper reporter by training, and your early New York Times articles are published here, and you say your main inspiration as a writer comes from fiction. .
What I wanted to do was take the form of a short story, which I had envisioned since high school. Robert Penn Warren, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Joseph Conrad, Seymour Krimm, and others. Mary McCarthy was one of my favorites. I wanted to be a nonfiction writer who wrote short stories. I've been writing for 67 years, and I haven't changed the way I work or research. I'm the recorder.
And famously, we have a complete archive.
yes. Record everything. And of course, my letters, letters are not to be believed. What I wrote in those letters is not necessarily true.
I wrote terrible things about my marriage. It cannot be taken back. I'll keep it there. But that's not true.
I'm almost 93 years old. My wife is 92 years old. I don't want to leave her alone now, but there was a time 10 years ago when I didn't want to be with her. How can I be honest? What is honesty?
The motif of New York's work is baseball.
In 1944, when I was a kid in Ocean City, New Jersey, the New York Yankees came to Atlantic City for spring training. During the war, it was not possible to travel far using gasoline.
And then along came the sportswriters. There were seven newspaper companies at that time. There was a deaf man at the New York Times named John Drebinger. He had big earphones on and couldn't hear anything, but he knew who Babe Ruth was. I really admired the big screenwriters who travel with their teams. God, what a job, what a job.
New York has come to Atlantic City. I looked at New York as a team figure and became a sportswriter. That was my first job.
Your first job in New York was as a copy boy?
yes. And when I was appearing at the New York Times as a copy boy in 1953, men were still wearing suits and jackets and ties, and sometimes fedoras. This was especially the case for many in the final years of their World War II correspondents' careers. The bureau chiefs in Paris, Rome, and London had foreign tailors and were very well-dressed.
Well, that has changed!
Men don't dress up anymore in New York. Women look great when you go to a good restaurant. The men are badly dressed.
Will you ever move?
I can't remember my unfortunate day in New York City. I can't imagine leaving.
