The good news is that Gay Talese is still active. At 92 years old, this leader in literary journalism has just published Bartleby and I in Spain, which appeared in the US last year and was translated by Antonio Lozano. Talese was not included by Tom Wolfe in his 1973 canonical anthology The New Journalism, but was recognized in the prologue as a precursor, particularly for his use of “the tone and mood of a short story” in his 1962 profile of boxer Joe Louis. , which already marked a strong distance from the neutral and distant informative approach then in vogue, against which Wolfe attacked.
I had the honor of presenting Gay Talese with Toni Iturbe in a talk at the Col legi de Periodistes, during his visit to Barcelona in 2011. With his careful – and rather ornate – clothing, similar to Wolfe’s, he was brilliant chaining together anecdotes from his long career without leaving much room for counter-questions. He then presented his recapitulatory book Portraits and Encounters, published by Alfaguara, a publisher that has recovered several of his best works and brings us Bartleby and I, a Vilamatian title with reference to the author’s interest in people apparently with no, or very little, history.
There are several things to praise in this volume, and some debatable. The Spanish subtitle, “Portraits of New York,” does not seem very appropriate, as it is not that of the original version, adjusted to the content: “Reflections of an old scribe.” Without a doubt, the city on the Hudson has a circulation, but it turns out that of the three parts that make up the book, the central one, precisely the longest, takes place in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
That part, “In the Shadow of Sinatra,” has left this reader perplexed. This is an extensive “making of” of 125 pages – from pages 91 to 216 – of Talese’s most famous journalistic profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”, published in Esquire in 1966 and celebrated, among other details, for how the The journalist constructed his text despite, or precisely because of, the singer’s refusal to grant him an interview that had already been agreed upon and that had involved traveling from coast to coast.
In the version included in Portraits and Encounters, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” – a delight – occupies 48 pages – from 29 to 77 -. The making of this text that Talese provides is now more than twice as long as the glossed piece. One understands that the teacher had a few folders of notes left that were discarded in 1966, but the current recovery, tremendously extensive in data and biographies of secondary school students in the Californian environment of La Voz, from friends and managers of different stripes to film technicians, waiters at bar or his own daughter Nancy, does not live up to his prestige. I didn’t finish it.
On the other hand, the first part of the book, “A History of Wall Street”, is fine and entertaining, with appearances such as that of the silent film star Nita Naldi, whom Talese located after a telephone search in 80 hotels in the city , and especially that of Alden Whitman, editor of the New York Times, a pioneer in interviewing notable people to prepare in advance the obituaries that the newspaper would dedicate to them, a former communist persecuted in the Witch Hunt, married three times, whom the author converted in mythical figure.
The third part is titled “Doctor Bartha’s Brownstone.” This Bartha, a doctor born in Romania who was financially successful, bought one of those classic houses with a brownstone facade in 1980, and when in 2007 he was threatened with eviction after an expensive divorce process, he blew it up. with himself inside -sic- after opening the gas conduits.
The history of 34 East 62nd Street allows Talese to make a long excursion into the urban past to the era of the Whitneys and the Vanderbilts; in Bartha’s complicated family history; in the lives of the neighbors, with appearances such as that of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a customer of the nearby Serafina restaurant. And in the subsequent development of the site, which he briefly fell in love with the wife of a Russian magnate, until the construction of the current building. This extensive report by the veteran Talese constitutes a magnificent urban non-fiction novel, a small masterpiece that possibly would have looked better in an edition not shared with other pieces.
