Speaker: Gay Talese
Session: A New Journalist's Suggestions for Daily Journalists
Dec. 1, 2001, 9:45 - 11:00 a.m.

The Art of Hanging Around
ABSORBING A SUBJECT'S HABITS AND WAYS OF THINKING

By Victor Greto
vgreto@sun-sentinel.com

Dear Colleagues:

He stuck out like a well-groomed thumb.

Gay Talese, 69, one of the co-creators of the "New Journalism" and the best-selling author of many non-fiction books that helped break the ground for narrative journalism, entered the JFK auditorium at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Cambridge in a suit that put his colleagues attending the Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference to shame.

While journalists in the audience dressed casually, Talese entered the room in a blue, pin-striped suit, solid pale blue shirt, white collar and yellow tie.

The son of an immigrant Italian tailor who grew up in Ocean City, N.J., Talese told an audience bits and pieces of his life story, how he apprenticed for 10 years at the New York Times, before jumping to Esquire and then through decades of writing best-selling non-fiction books.

Like his style of dress, he said, journalists and non-fiction writers are tailors, shapers of stories that respect their subjects.

Being the son of an immigrant, Talese said, helped him to become the writer he became.

"As people of the underclass," he said, "we move out into the world from narrow circumstances to reveal the larger world."

Attention to detail, he said, is what the art of narrative non-fiction is all about. But to get to the detail, he said, non-fiction writers must have an innate curiosity.

"I have one quality - if I may say so - that I still have from when I was 22," he said, the age he began writing for the New York Times. "That's the quality of curiosity."

Talese said the best writing of his youth had been the great American novelists of his time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara and Irwin Shaw, who brought out the little details that made a story more compelling.

That's what he searched for in his writing, he said.

"I write with respect for the subject," he said, "and take care with the language. I wanted to bring reality and story sense to non-fiction."

Talese recommended the "art of hanging around" people whom you're writing about, absorbing their habits and ways of thinking. No tape recorders, he said. Just observation and note-taking.

In "The Silent Season of a Hero," Talese paints a portrait of baseball great Joe DiMaggio long after he's retired. In one scene, DiMaggio's in the batting cage, using the bat his successor Mickey Mantle had used. After a few cuts, he sits down, and says, "There was a time when you couldn't get me out of there."

Unlike the older DiMaggio, Talese, dressed to the nines, is still swinging.

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