Untold Tales

Published in the Washington Post's BookWorld
May 7, 2006

A WRITER'S LIFE
by Gay Talese

His eagerly anticipated midday tennis match had been cancelled; his beloved Yankees were trailing the Mets and heading for defeat; and with "no more passion for women's soccer than tiddlywinks," Gay Talese turned for some distraction to the Rose Bowl in California, where the United States was battling China in the final of the Women's World Cup.

Watching television in his Upper East Side house, Talese wondered "what it was that I was not seeing that was prompting the crowd's constant roars of approval and sighs of regret." But as the stalemated match descended into a penalty shoot-out, he began to see that one person on the field faced a "momentous and heartrending" fate. She would take her shot at the goal, and either miss, or see it miraculously deflected by the goalkeeper, and she alone would be remembered as the player who lost the game. On July 10, 1999, that player was Liu Ying.

Talese imagined her "sitting tearfully in the locker room. Nothing in the life of this young woman of twenty-five could have prepared her for what she must have been feeling, for never in the history of China had a single person so suddenly been embarrassed in front of so many people -- including 100 million from her home country."

For a writer whose Odyssean curiosity and reporting had produced such bestsellers as Thy Neighbor's Wife , Honor Thy Father and Unto the Sons (nine, six and 10 years, respectively, to research and write), imagination was a drug; he would have to find out what really happened to Liu Ying.

It speaks much for his power as a storyteller that I, a reader who does not care for sports,* was almost cheering him on to Beijing; for in an earlier profile of the great heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, Talese had ennobled the return from defeat with a glory that seemed to eclipse brute victory: He had taken the journalistic profile and given it the permanence of literature. Perhaps he would redeem Liu Ying in a similar fashion.

But if the relentless pursuit of this kind of story constitutes Talese's life as a writer, it makes for an unconventional and oblique memoir. Talese is not really interested in recounting his journalistic victories; as with Patterson, and ultimately with Liu Ying, that pursuit is about Talese refusing to quit on the stories that signaled, to him, his failure as a writer -- the reporting and ideas that went nowhere or were explicitly rejected by editors.

As a result, autobiography and reflections on the craft of journalism form and fade through an array of characters and subjects, from Elaine Kaufman's legendary restaurant on Manhattan's Upper East Side to a complex account of Selma, Ala., during and after the civil rights movement. This is a book told as if Homer had stood you to a martini at a comfortable bar, saying "Let me tell you about my life, but first let's start with the great Achilles."

The virtue of this approach is, at least in my view, a cracking good read: The author is freed from the burden of finding himself entertaining, and he is, instead, free to revert to his preferred form, that of a nonfiction short story writer. (In terms of this literary debt, he really deserves the late Frank O'Connor as a critic.)

The vice, however, is shyness. Take the gruesome case of John Bobbitt, which consumed Talese just after Tina Brown signed him on to the staff of the New Yorker. Bobbitt was a character worthy of Gogol: As with the clerk who loses the only thing of value he possesses (his overcoat), John Bobbitt's temporary loss of manhood becomes a "contemporary symbol" for an entire class -- the aimless white brawn, shorn of the dignity of a blue collar and without the means to till the new frontier of technology or tarry in the culture of college-conceived America.

But Talese's 10,000-word draft failed to excite the queen of buzz, as Brown was then known. "We should really kiss off this penile saga and have you do something more rewarding," she responded.

What did Talese make of his abrupt literary castration? Not much. "I thought that I would reread it someday soon, reminding myself that Tina Brown had said it might be worthy of a short book," he writes. "Years passed, however, and I never got around to doing it."

Perhaps a studied critical silence, a muting of self-reflection, is the price paid for sustaining months and years of devotion to his subjects. But it turns A Writer's Life into a life largely composed of other people's lives. It is as if behind Talese's dapper, tailored suits there lies a heart of ravenous sponge, soaking up the world -- and squeezing it back out, slowly, reluctantly, across the years. We are, of course, richer for that -- as, indeed, a critical biographer may be richer some day for all that has gone unsaid.

At the age of 74, and 14 years after his last major book, A Writer's Life may seem a coda, an attempt to recover the time bound up in all the manila folders sitting in his office before they are buried in some university archive. But these wonderful stories, borne on gossamer threads of inspiration and serendipity, are less a summing up than an introduction to a body of nonfiction that is a signal triumph of American literature. And as we are consumed by the effortlessness of blogging, the false plenitude of the Internet and the vaporous sublime of a democratized media, A Writer's Life is a timely reminder of literary craft, and what it really takes to produce writing worth reading. ·

Trevor Butterworth is a regular contributor to the Financial Times Magazine.

* I originally wrote that I was "a deeply sportophobic reader," which permits the understanding that I merely dislike reading about sports as opposed to the blanket dislike circumscribed by the ungainly "who does not care for sports." Unfortunately, this change was made without my approval. It is, I hasten to add, untrue.