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“New York is a city of things unnoticed,” begins the essay that opens “A Town Without Time,” a new collection of Gay Talese’s New York writings. Talese then proceeds to list, with deceptive economy, the things he has noticed: chestnut vendors, pigeons, doormen, copy boys, ants.
Over more than six decades, Talese has made it his business not to miss much. Whether his subject is an icon (“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,”) a monument (his cinematic account of the building of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge), the tragic or the feline, he has always observed with the same novelistic élan and gimlet eye. And, of course, he’s taken note of what everyone wore.
“When I describe people, I describe the way they look,” said Talese. “Clothes matter — especially when you get old.”
Indeed, to walk through a crowded room with Talese, 92, is to be accosted by men wanting to talk about suits. At a recent holiday party replete with writers, politicians and tastemakers, Talese, wearing a three-piece gray wool suit with a yellow silk tie with blue stripes, was stopped every few steps by boldface names (and at least one journalist) eager to discuss the finer points of men’s tailoring. One young novelist asked how much a bespoke pattern would have cost in 1980.
“Three thousand,” said Talese, although most of the “50 or 60” handmade suits in his collection date to the 1950s.
Over the years, the suits have served as a kind of armor: “I hid behind the clothes,” Talese said. They have been an advertisement too. From the age of 11, when his father — “the James Salter of tailors” — dressed him as “kind of a little billboard,” wearing a suit “gave me a sense of separateness.”
This sense of hiding in plain sight — of curating a sort of flamboyant anonymity — pervades “A Town Without Time.” It’s tempting to view Talese as an avatar of a vanished, sepia-hued city. In fact, he has always been a proud anachronism, a fedora-wearing copy boy and, even into the Gonzo years of the 1960s and 1970s, someone who, he said, never owned a pair of jeans.
He stands by his decision. Today he and his wife, the retired publisher Nan Talese, live next door to a 16-story medical building. He sees cars pull up and people get out to see a doctor, and they’re dressed “dreadfully, in blue jeans, sneakers, wind breakers,” he said. If they’d only dress better, they’d feel better, he’s convinced. “Look in the mirror, you’d feel better,” he said. “You wouldn’t have to spend so much time in doctors’ offices.”
Although he now walks with the aid of an elegant Italian cane and has traded six evenings a week at the city’s hot spots for life primarily in the Midtown brownstone where he’s lived since 1957, Talese feels his New York is as vibrant as ever.
As the title of your book suggests, you are not in mourning for a New York of old. Is there anything you miss?
Elaine’s. I miss that place. Because today, the city does sleep. P.J. Clarke’s is open late, but I don’t always want a hamburger. People, of course; I miss George Plimpton.
But really, this neighborhood hasn’t changed so much. I know people in this neighborhood, the drugstore, the tailor. I know the hardware store. Because I don’t have a super or doorman, some of the supers at the neighboring buildings help me out. It really is a small town, at least in this area.
It’s interesting to speak in terms of additions, rather than losses. Would you say you’re an optimist?
At 92, to have a book come out, and one involving so much legwork … I’m a very grateful person that my body and mind have held up.
Nothing’s changed. I show up, talk to people, see their faces. What an edifying life.
Do you have a favorite of your New York stories?
I never won any prizes like the Pulitzer, or anything like that. But one thing I am proud of is my piece on the Verrazzano. When I’m long dead, somebody 35 years from now is going to want to know something about that bridge. I was a chronicler of the nobodies who put the wrenches and the screws. To me that was a major achievement.
We used to drive over the bridge, with the top down, and that was “Daddy’s bridge.” My daughters Catherine and Pamela thought I owned that bridge. I didn’t tell them I didn’t for a long time.
You are a newspaperman by training — a piece about your early days at The New York Times is included here — but you say you take your main inspiration as a writer from fiction.
What I wanted to do was take the short-story form that I had in mind from the time I was in high school: Robert Penn Warren, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Joseph Conrad, Seymour Krim. Mary McCarthy was one of my favorites. I wanted to be a nonfiction writer of short stories. I haven’t changed my way of working or researching in 67 years of published writing. I’m a record keeper.
And you have a famously complete archive.
Yes. I record everything. And of course, my letters — but letters are not to be believed. What I wrote in those letters is not always true.
I wrote terribly about my marriage. I can’t take it back. I’m going to keep it there. But it’s not true.
I’m almost 93. My wife is 92. I don’t want to leave her alone now, but there were times 10 years ago I didn’t want to be with her. How can you be honest? What’s honesty?
A motif in your New York writing is baseball.
When I was a kid in Ocean City, N.J., in 1944, the New York Yankees came to Atlantic City for spring training because during the war, you couldn’t use the gas to travel farther.
And then sportswriters came. You know, there were seven newspapers then. The New York Times had a deaf guy named John Drebinger, he had big earpieces, couldn’t hear anything, but he knew Babe Ruth. I was so enamored of big-time scribes that traveled with a team. God, what a job, what a job.
New York came to Atlantic City. I saw New York in the personage of the team, and I became a sportswriter. It was my first job.
And your first job in New York was as a copy boy?
Yes. And when I was on The New York Times in 1953 as a copy boy, men still wore suits and jackets and ties and sometimes fedoras. Especially a lot of the correspondents from World War II in the final years of their career. Those guys who had been bureau chiefs in Paris or Rome or London were very, very well dressed, with foreign tailors.
Well, that’s changed!
Men don’t dress up in New York anymore. You go to a good restaurant and the women look great. The men dress terribly.
Would you ever move?
I can’t remember an unhappy day in New York City. I can’t imagine leaving.
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