Portrait of an (Nonfiction) Artist (continued)
Talese would reprise his high school journalism scenario at the University of Alabama--but with an important difference. He wrote only 12 articles for Alabama's student newspaper, "The Crimson-White", while establishing himself as a student during his freshman and sophomore years, but these were enough to win him the position of "Crimson-White" Sports Editor for his junior and senior years. In this role, he immediately transformed his high school "Sportopics" column into a more experimental and literary column titled "Sports Gay-zing," a conscious play on his own name and unconscious confession of his voyeur role. Tom Wolfe has written that he learned to write scenes from Talese's 1962 "Esquire" article "Joe Louis: The King as a Middle-aged Man" ("The New Journalism" 10-11), but Talese's signature subject matter and stylistic experimentations began much earlier--indeed, during his college days from l950 to l953. This is important, for Talese was trying out his scenes before Lillian Ross's "Picture" (1952) and Truman Capote's "The Muses are Heard" (1956).
Talese read Irwin Shaw's 1951 novel "The
Troubled Air" on the train carrying him to Alabama to start his junior
year. The major difference between his high school and college reporting
is that in college, Talese's journalism began to become literary. The short
stories and novels of Shaw, Carson McCullers, John O'Hara, Ernest Hemingway,
and F. Scott Fitzgerald provided the models for what Talese would seek to
do in nonfiction. He noticed that while journalism forever focused on "winners"--the
highest scorer, the big men and women on campus, the achievers--fiction
writers were writing about ordinary people and their lives, subject matter
highly congenial to Talese. His genius was to believe that he could do in
nonfiction what Shaw and company were doing in fiction, that he could write
"stories with real names." As he writes in his "Origins"
essay, he wanted to write about "the overlooked non-newsworthy population
that is everywhere, but rarely taken into account by journalists and other
chroniclers of reality". This focus, of course, would often place him
at odds with traditional news editors, and he began to see his career as
an effort to slip his kind of writing into the newspaper.
Talese was a nineteen-year-old college sophomore when he attempted his breakthrough first scene in a feature story. Like much modernist fiction, it seemed to begin "in medias res": "The smiling French professor, with a dapper tweed sports jacket, stylish pair of basket-weave shoes, and windsor-knotted tie, asked the question again" ("Crimson-White" 7 March 195l). Fully 13 of Talese's 71 college columns and articles employ scenes or mini-scenes. He often tried to evoke the atmosphere of athletes away from the glory of the playing field, as in this 7 November 1951 "Sports Gay-zing" item titled "Sunday Morning bull session":
- Rhythmic "Sixty Minute Man" emanated from the Supe Store juke box and Larry (The Maestro) Chiodetti beat against the table like mad in keeping time with the jumpy tempo. T-shirted Bobby Marlow was just leaving the Sunday morning bull session and dapper Bill Kilroy had just purchased the morning newspapers.
This could be fiction, only the actions and people were real. In his senior year, Talese would join scene with philosophical musing in an early exploration of one of his greatest subjects: "Fame and Obscurity" (1970). As he would tell "Playboy" magazine decades later: "I'm not at all concerned with the mythology of fame and success but with the real "soul" of success and the bitterness of attaining [it] and the heartbreak of not attaining it" :
- Cigar-smoking Harold D. "Red" Drew leaned comfortably back in his chair Sunday morning wearing a tan tweed suit, a Windsor-knotted reptie, and a smile which brought out all the ripples around his expressive eyes. Here sat a man who last year was on Skid Row because his team lost four out of the first five football games of the 1952 schedule. The spirited, dynamic, explosive football which the Tide displayed in the tremendous victory in Miami Friday night has gagged the second-guessers on campus, has excited the "fair weather" Bama fans to a superpitch, it has started the sportwriters who thought Bama would flop again, and the Alabama U. coaching staff now have [sic] a few assorted friends here & there around the state. Proving what? Proving that as long as you are winning, life is all beer, sunshine & palms; proving that while things go well on the gridiron the wine will always flow freely, the masses will cheer, and the football coach will be King. So Sunday morning coach H. D. Drew sat at his office desk, smoked his cigar and smiled.
Resisting the hero-worshipping stance of sportswriters like Grantland Rice, Talese began to turn his "Sports Gay-z" toward "losers" and the unnoticed. He wrote of 7-foot Eugene Jackson, an Alabama student who was not a basketball star (17 March 1953), and about old "Hooch" Collins, the African American lockerroom attendant on Alabama's then all-white campus. "It was considered good luck to touch this man's head. There was this touching between these Southerners," Talese recalls. "There he was picking up the towels, cleaning out the showers, and getting his head touched by all those hopeful athletes before a game of football against Georgia Tech or Tennessee, but for me he was a character on this white campus in this city called Tuscaloosa which was the home of the Klan."
Talese headed for New York City when he graduated from college in June l953, but the only newspaper job he could find was as a nonwriting copyboy for "The New York Times". This didn't faze him. His impeccable store manners and handstitched Italian suits impressed first the woman in personnel who hired him and then several editors who were inclined to use the stories the dapper copyboy began politely to feed them. Talese's later bestselling volumes are all foreshadowed in his earlier work; indeed his unsigned first "Times" article prefigures uncannily his first bestseller, "The Kingdom and the Power" (1969), the behind-the-scenes look at "The New York Times". Preferring as he does the unnoticed story to the "big story," Talese is particularly drawn to the kind of story that is present, yet ignored by everyone because they are following "the big story." In November l953, his curiosity led him to climb the stairs to the attic of the Times Square building to interview and write about the man behind the famous five-foot headlines that revolve glitteringly around Times Square. Only Talese thought to look behind the facade ("Times Square Anniversary" 2 November 1953). In similar fashion, in 1954 he intrigued the "Times'" staid editors with a longer feature article on the Boardwalk chairs of Atlantic City which carried nearly l0,000,000 visitors a year (21 February 1954). Here again was something present yet unremarked upon and thought unremarkable until Talese turned his gaze, his indefatiguable research, and his respectful language upon it.