“New York is a city of things unnoticed,” declares Gay Talese at the beginning of A Town Without Time, the new collection of his journalistic work centered on New York. New Jersey-born Gay Talese made a brand-new start of it in New York in the early 1950s. After a stint as a copy boy for the New York Times, he cut his teeth on the paper’s sports desk. The following decade, he was widening his scope and making his mark with a variety of pieces that took the pulse of the metropolis and examined its working parts and some of its dysfunctional components. Leading the way with his fact-filled, image-rich, more literary style of reporting — what Tom Wolfe called New Journalism — and keeping New York front and center, Talese went on to carve a long and illustrious career as a master chronicler.
A Town Without Time comprises 15 previously published pieces that put the city in the spotlight, covering a range of topics and showcasing a singular talent. The oldest stems from 1957, the most recent appeared in 2023. Some of the writing takes the form of in-depth reportage; other articles are fleshed-out character profiles and snapshot sketches and squibs. The Big Apple might be too large and too hectic for most people to stop and take stock of its finer and more peculiar details, but for Talese, the opposite has always been the case. The book’s opening section sees him documenting the overlooked and the underappreciated.
In that first colorful essay from 1961, “New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed,” he trawls the streets, his dragnet-gaze capturing all sorts at all hours. We meet a Park Avenue doorman with three bullets in his head; a nattily dressed gent who forages in Sixth Avenue trash cans; a boxer-turned-masseur who has moved on from knocking out men to “rubbing women the right way”; a medium who claims to be “clairvoyant, clairaudient, and clairsensuous”; and a small lady with a big voice who screams at Broadway sinners until her chauffeur picks her up in her Rolls-Royce at 3 a.m. and drives her home. Five hours later, those who have worked or drunk through the night and either can’t sleep or can’t go home take refuge in dark and smoky Times Square movie theaters.
The other piece in this section is not an essay but rather Talese’s 1964 book The Bridge in its entirety. When construction began on the Verrazano-Narrows to connect Brooklyn and Staten Island, Talese often donned a hard hat and watched its builders way up high. Knowing these hardworking, risk-taking bridgemen would be unsung heroes, he decided to tell their stories. At one point, the superintendent of the project outlines to him the challenges ahead: “all the mistakes, all the cursing, all the goddamned sweat and the death we gotta go through to finish this thing.” Talese conveys the toil and the sacrifice and brings both the apprentices (“punks”) and the foremen (“pushers”) vividly to life.
The second section of the book takes us from bridgemen to newsmen. In the first of three solid pieces that Talese wrote for Esquire in the 1960s, “The Kingdoms, the Powers, and the Glories of the New York Times,” he serves up potted biographies of notable “Timesmen” such as managing editor Clifton Daniel. Along the way, Talese scrapes beneath the institution’s veneer of solvency, certainty, and reliability and reveals a harsh, frenetic dog-eat-dog world — “a fact factory where the workers realize the too-apparent truth: they are replaceable.” Later, in “Vogueland,” Talese takes us behind the glossy covers and into the plush, fragrant offices of the editors and other “tastemakers” who produce the fashion bible.
In “Looking for Hemingway,” Talese turns his attention to the founders and early contributors of the Paris Review. This particular story is winningly stuffed with anecdotes. We hear how George Plimpton played the perfect host at parties in his New York bachelor apartment. (“George first introduced Mrs. Kennedy to Ved Mehta, the Indian writer, and then slipped her skillfully past Norman Mailer toward William Styron.”) We also learn that Plimpton’s colleague Harold L. Humes was not a man to be trifled with. On discovering that he would not be credited as a co-founder of the magazine, Humes intercepted the arrival of thousands of copies of the first Paris Review at the Hudson River pier. After ripping open the cartons, he spent several hours, and considerable effort, stamping his name in large red lettering over the masthead of every issue.
Elsewhere, two extended multilayered essays stand out. “The Kidnapping of Joe Bonanno” from 1971 starts with the abduction of a Mafia boss one rainy night (in full view of a doorman who, like many in the city with their “extraordinary sense of selective vision,” played safe and claimed he didn’t see a thing). It then opens out to chart the progress of the gangster’s son and the feudal war between rival mobs. The book’s second-longest piece, “Dr. Martha’s Brownstone,” recounts the case of a doctor who chose to blow up his Manhattan townhouse (and himself in the process) rather than sell it to pay a court-ordered sum to his ex-wife. Talese goes on to describe the bizarre bullying campaign the doctor subjected his spouse to, before traveling back through the centuries to trace the building plot’s previous owners — the earliest being an Irish-born printer, publisher, and, it transpired, traitor, who drew opprobrium for changing sides during the Revolutionary War.
“Dr. Martha’s Brownstone” was originally published in Talese’s 2023 collection, Bartleby and Me. Those who purchased that volume may be disappointed to find the tale reproduced here only two years later. Talese’s celebrated profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (1966) also appears in two consecutive books, leading us to wonder if Talese’s publisher is giving us too much of a good thing. Perhaps a bigger problem is that the Sinatra piece is out of place: With the exception of a short detour to Jilly’s saloon in New York, Talese predominantly shadows an ill and increasingly ill-at-ease Ol’ Blue Eyes in a private club in Beverly Hills and playgrounds in Las Vegas.
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Still, if we can criticize how Talese’s writing has been curated, it’s hard to find fault with the writing itself. Whether focusing on public figures, “offbeat wonders” (like a woman with two homes who chooses to live on the street), or “roving, independent, self-laundering cats,” Talese’s prose is subtle, polished, sprightly, and consistently engaging. He transmutes his keen-eyed observations into colorful detail, riveting exchanges, and nuanced character studies. Depending on his topic, New York emerges in different guises: It is an “overreaching city,” a “city of movement,” “a town of tall shadows, sharp angles, and crooked people,” and, above all, a town without time.
Some of Talese’s older stories now read like quaint period pieces. However, this self-styled old scrivener’s craftsmanship — his way with words, his narrative dexterity — remains a vibrant, potent force throughout.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
