Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
GRAPEVINE, Texas - Gay Talese has humbly and wisely disavowed the title bestowed upon him, the father of New Journalism. If this journalism was new, it was new only to post-war American newspapers and magazines. One can trace back many of its famous elements - novelistic techniques, subjective point of view - to at least William Hazlitt's essays, most notably "The Fight" from 1822.
That this would ground New Journalism in sports reporting Talese would probably find appealing. As he told the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference on Saturday during his keynote address, the author of ``Honor Thy Father'' loved sports writing as a young journalist in the '50s. The immediacy is incomparable: The reporter is a witness to the event itself.
Talese's affection for sports journalism was merely a sidetrack, an effusion during his account of his early life - from his mother's dress shop in Ocean City, N.J., to The New York Times. It was an abbreviated version of the tale he relates in his new book, ``A Writer's Life.'' Talese used his autobiography to explain his abiding curiosity, his devotion to craft and his second-generation Italian-American's sense of being a "fractional American."
Listeners encountered much the same gentlemanly narrator as in Talese's writing: alert, open, observant, sympathetic. More than any aggressive, Tom Wolfian flash or cutting, Didionesque insight, his sensibility marks Talese's New Journalism - that and his feel for stories that newspapers wouldn't normally run, "stories that were revealing of character," off-beat characters, especially.
At the end of his talk, in another effusion, Talese declared how impressed he was with the Mayborn. "I have never been a part of an institution," he confessed, "that is celebrating" what he has spent his career doing. Like Friday evening's speaker, Hampton Sides, Talese said he never liked the term "nonfiction," but he was certain that, with the Mayborn's help, it will "grow and grow as an art form."
Maybe. Or perhaps the Mayborn will become akin to a conference on court masques. If the current conference has addressed in some way the uproars over accuracy that have assailed narrative nonfiction in recent years, perhaps the next one might address the form's rapid decline as a career path. In his talk, Sides mentioned "the imbecilities of commerce" and the "dumbing down" of pop culture that have led newspapers and magazines to ditch long-form writing for chat and quips and touts - the news item as flash bulb.
But Sides still felt that a handful of magazines published the best of the form. And the best-seller lists are crowded with popular nonfiction. True, but a handful of magazines and books does not a widespread, daily profession make. Feature print journalism may well become an art form, but like many other art forms in America - stage acting, painting, set design, short fiction - not one that most practitioners actually make a living at.
No one has spoiled the weekend by bringing up any of this, but it made Talese's talk all the more poignant that the writing approach he helped revolutionize and popularize is already disappearing from newspapers - in his lifetime.
---
(c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
