The Voice shines on
The plaudit served as a long-overdue acknowledgement of one of America’s premier post-war prose stylists but was actually unnecessary. With great journalism, and particularly with the masterly Talese, the story is everything, with no need for hyperbole.
Now, as if setting proof to paper, Penguin Modern Classics have distilled 35 years of hard work and fine craft into a slender nine-essay collection, one which will easily rank among the year’s finest writing, genre be damned.
Talese’s method is to get in close to the bone, then vanish. He is the purest form of observer, cataloguing everything, every morsel of detail, but never himself encroaching on the story. Proximity is the key, to be ready and waiting when the guard finally drops, when a little truth leaks through the façade.
Read this book and steal a glimpse beneath the lid of Vogue Magazine; bounce between Castro and Muhammad Ali in Havana; meet ‘Mr Bad News’, the New York Times obituary writer who sometimes works ahead of schedule and entertains some pretty terrible thoughts and yearnings. This is absorbing and, at times, heartrending stuff.
In a world were celebrity-watching has become the new religion, Talese’s book shows how to do it right, and how to make art rather than trash of the process. The collection’s title piece, often lauded as the finest American magazine article ever written, shows off Talese’s skills to stunning effect. Over almost 50 pages we get to see Frank Sinatra from touching distance, and what we are treated to is a kind of crystalline rendition of Frank being Frank, the real thing, not just the swagger. The piece took three months to write, time spent trawling Sinatra’s wake, without permission, scrambling for morsels of detail, words dropped after the bar has shut down. We get background, we get the good and the gory, Ol‘ Blue Eyes in fullest swing, schizophrenically sweet-hearted and mean, and utterly human. The magic crackles in the things left unsaid but all the way implied: the connections, the intimidations, the lavish fondness and the fear. And what ultimately emerges is the consummate artistry of the man because what matters more than anything is the Voice. Mr Talese puts it thus: “Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint… only worse.”
Mario Puzo once proclaimed Gay Talese to be America’s finest non-fiction writer. On the evidence of this collection, arguing to the contrary would seem a waste of good breath.
