INTERVIEWER
Do you feel competitive with novelists?
TALESE
Yes, I do. Journalism is not given much respect. Journalists themselves, particularly in my generation, didn’t take their jobs very seriously. I take it very seriously. This is a craft. This is an art form. I’m writing stories, just like fiction writers, only I use real names. If you chopped my books into single chapters, each one could be a stand-alone short story. You could take the chapter about McCandlish Phillips in The Kingdom and the Power, Garibaldi in Unto the Sons, and Harold Rubin in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and they would work together as a short-story collection.
Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can’t quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
- from “The Art of Nonfiction No. 2,” an interview with Gay Talese in last summer’s issue of The Paris Review
Thanks to my massive, short-lived, amicable dispute with Doreen Marchionni about creative nonfiction and New Journalism, I picked up Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties, a book which, at this moment on Amazon, can be purchased new in hardcover for $262.91 or used in hardcover for 86 cents. My copy is from the library.
It’s huge and I’ve read little of it. The first few pieces I started didn’t hook me. Then I noticed something by Gay Talese called “Looking For Hemingway.” These days I will taste at least a spoonful of any substance whose ingredients include the name Hemingway. So I started the Talese piece, which turns out to be about the earliest days of The Paris Review. I could just say that it’s great, but maybe it’s more useful to say that the piece left me primed to taste at least a spoonful of any substance whose ingredients include the name Talese. That’s how I got to the interview I quoted at the top of this post.
Meanwhile, someone at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, who may or may not have permission, posted Talese’s “Looking For Hemingway” here. Whether via that link, your local library, an 86-cent book, or a $262.91 book you should find a way read it.
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UPDATE: I kept looking and found a way for anyone who’s interested to get “Looking For Hemingway” while putting some money in Mr. Talese’s pocket: 2009’s The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits & Encounters.
