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… there were at least half a dozen star nonfiction writers on the staff of The New Yorker whom I admired and whose articles I clipped and filed away as examples of journalism that was both literary and historically relevant.

One article that I saved was a reprint of a piece that had totally occupied the editorial space of The New Yorker issue of August 31, 1946. It was an article by John Hersey entitled “Hiroshima,” and it described the devastation of the first atomic bomb from the viewpoint of six people in Japan who had survived the blast a year earlier. Hersey conducted hundreds of interviews with these survivors and other people in Japan and then produced a work of art that re-created for me the horror of that moment (8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945) in human terms so riveting and transcending as to soar beyond what I could imagine while viewing the film clips of the poisonous cloud mushrooming on the horizon.

The New Yorker issue featuring Hersey’s article sold out hours after reaching the newsstands, and on four successive nights the American Broadcasting Company canceled its regular radio broadcasts so that “Hiroshima” could be read to its millions of listeners.

- Gay Talese in A Writer’s Life

I read two posts about Hersey’s Hiroshima in the last several hours: the first by Susan Orlean, the second by Caille Millner, whose words made me remember Talese’s memoir and how much he revered the art of Hersey’s journalism.

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DAVID RAKOFF: It’s very easy to spin out of control and be the person on the subway who soils themselves, screams, “We’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna die” and then passes out. And then you wake up ten minutes later on the floor of the subway with soiled trousers and the subway is, of course, moving. It wasn’t going to burst into flames when it stopped in the tunnel the way you thought it was. But you never want to be that guy, and the way not to be that guy is at best - - at its most basic level - - it’s about regulating your breathing.

Try to breathe in on a count of three and not on a count of .003 which will just make you hyperventilate and pass out. There’s some comfort to be taken from this, or perhaps not. The person who drowns from anxiety and the person who claims agency from their anxiety and the person who feels no anxiety at all; they’re the same person. We’re not these warring constituencies of people who have no problems and people who are simply awash in problems; that’s just life. Life is this incredibly rich and dense and completely mutating perpetually moving mixture of things. I guess that’s sort of comforting to know. No?

JESSE THORN: It is. It’s sort of comforting.

DAVID RAKOFF: Yeah, it’s only sort of comforting.

- from a new Sound of Young America interview with author and essayist David Rakoff

I listened to this during part of my run today. A worthwhile 25-ish minutes. You might know Rakoff from “Christmas Freud” and his many other pieces on This American Life or from 1997’s enduringly clever “El Niño Has a Headache,” which I kept tacked to my cubicle at my first newspaper job. I didn’t even know it was a Gay Talese takeoff; I just knew it made me laugh:

El Niño finally arrives, trailing behind him three or four sycophants and a 35-foot wall of seawater that washes away the couple at the next table. Our server is not pleased. “Duke her,” El Niño says to one of the hangers-on, who peels off a crisp hundred-dollar bill and hands it to the waitress, busy pulling minnows from her hair.

This interview is something different. Jesse Thorn, whose eccentric charms as an interviewer I tried to explain here almost a year ago, introduced Rakoff’s latest book like this:

… a collection of essays that are meditations on the darker side of the human psyche. It comes with the warning, “No inspirational life lessons will be found in these pages.” But frankly it sort of betrays that. There are none of the traditional inspirational life lessons, but it is in part at least an argument that one can be inspired and draw life lessons from a little bit of pessimism and melancholy.”

Oh just go listen.

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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.