I didn’t know this, and I really don’t know how anyone would, until I read a remarkable pair of “Annotation Tuesday!’’ articles by Elon Green at the Nieman Foundation’s NiemanStoryboard website. The first featured Gay Talese about his famous Esquire article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,’’ that originally appeared in 2013. The second dealt with Tom Wolfe and “Radical Chic’’ in 2014. Both are done in the same format. Green interviews the writers and then they go through the articles and add annotations from his questions.
It’s a very effective and revealing format, and in its way, reading the Talese/Green annotation is also like watching a boxing match.
In the Talese annotation, pretty early in the going, Talese says that what’s important is “how you use this stuff,’’ that is, all the material you collect in your reporting. He says, “For example, the famous quote in the Joe DiMaggio piece. Marilyn Monroe, who just performed for troops in Korea, told DiMaggio, `You never heard such cheering.’ `Yes, I have,’ he said. People say, `Oh, Gay, how did you get that? What a great idea.’ I didn’t get that. That quote was published. I lifted it out of a magazine article about Marilyn Monroe that was written by Maurice Zolotow. I just clipped it. I took it out and I stuck it in there, and it took on a meaningfulness, a dimension.’’
I didn’t get that. (Italics mine).
Talese goes on in that tone for a bit. Finally Green says, you didn’t attribute it. And Talese answers, “No, I don’t. I didn’t attribute it because you couldn’t. If I did, the mood would be lost.’’
Much later, Green observes that editors today hold reporters to a different standard, and demand attribution of material that’s not original.
Talese replies, “if I had said, `Oh, Joe, you never heard such cheering,’ Marilyn said, according to Maurice Zolotow in Glamour magazine, it would kill it.’’
And you can tell that Green isn’t quite buying it. He’s uncovered something here, but he isn’t exactly going to get into a fight with a revered guest in that guest’s own home. Still, he, Green, keeps pushing, and Talese pushes back, eventually saying it’s a matter of form, the uninterrupted voice of the writer. “When you choose not to attribute Zolotow, or these quotes, it is a literary device which predicates the most important thing is form. It’s not as important as fact, but form and fact break the barrier between nonfiction and fiction as a method of communication.’’ He continues, “Writers, whether Philip Roth in fiction or Tom Wolfe or Halberstam or Breslin or John McPhee or me or whoever in nonfiction, the voice is very important. And there are times when you cannot interrupt the voice if you have it. It carries an atmosphere.’’
I guess as a journalist I’d never heard that, that once something’s been published, it’s open season and you can use it as your own, without attribution. Okay, maybe I might think about sneaking in a fact that’s generally known, such as maybe that the signing of the Declaration of Independence occurred on July 4 of 1776, but once it gets to a tasty little morsel that’s been published but perhaps not fully appreciated at the time, as one of the drones of business journalism, I would find it impossible to just lift it without acknowledging somehow that someone else found it or wrote it first, and I would say this professional point of view has won out in the intervening years since Esquire published “The Silent Season of a Hero,’’ in 1966. I understand and appreciate the importance of tone, of form. But still.
Which leads us back to the Lehmann-Haupt review and to his question about Leonard Bernstein’s innermost fantasies. This concerns how Tom both opens and closes “Radical Chic,’’ and a recurring weird little nightmare or vision or thought that Bernstein keeps having at 3 or 4 in the morning. And Tom, in the very first annotation, admits that the entire anecdote is from a book on Bernstein by John Gruen that was published in 1968. And no, Tom doesn’t feel the need to attribute, either.
