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Link — Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe Talk Donald Trump – Arts Intel

“Flak Catchers” by François Busnel, based on interviews with Wolfe and Talese in 2017, published by Graydon Carter’s airmail.news. Uncredited photo accompanied airmail.news story online. Excerpts below.

Note: This was written and published before the second-term Trump experience. I disagree with Talese’s generalization about the reason for Trump’s first-term election, a narrow view from an elite New Yorker. All interesting, nonetheless. The New York Times piece looking back at Bonfire of the Vanities offers some alternative perspective but it would be fun these days to hear observations on Trump and New York from other New Yorkers, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ritchie John Torres.

From the article:

“Today’s most prominent American journalists—even if they may be skeptical of the pair’s recent literary output—recognize that these two transformed the profession like no one else. William Finnegan, who has written for The New Yorker for 30 years and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2016 with his excellent book Barbarian Days, sums up the status of Wolfe and Talese in a few simple words: “Their impact comes from their boldness. They both stretched the limits of fiction and reporting while holding up the truth as an insurmountable horizon. They are still absolute reference points and powerful landmarks.” What do these two princes of nonfiction have to tell us?”

Wolfe: “America runs on a very special fuel: the huge disparities in social status. That’s the source of ambition, greed, revolutions, and everything that upsets us today. Look at Balzac. That’s what the whole Human Comedy is about: the infinite variety of manners between rich and poor, the ambitious and the social climbers, nouveaux riches and losers. America hasn’t finished with what was at the heart of the nineteenth century in France. America is a battlefield.”

Talese: “I don’t see what’s so shocking about making money the way Trump did. Trump talks exactly like thousands of businessmen all over the world. For that matter, you yourself described these kinds of guys in your novels. The traders in Bonfire of the Vanities and the hero of A Man in Full are like Trump: crude, aggressive, willing to do whatever it takes to get a deal done. So what? New York City was built by people like him. Sure, these guys are con men. But do you think you can build such an enormous city just being swathed in virtue? New York is the result of a history where scams and self-interest dominated virtuous little saints. This city is extraordinary, and it’s men like Trump who built it. And because Americans want to have a country that’s extraordinary again, they elected one of these men, Donald Trump, as their leader. It’s very easy to understand.”

Wolfe: “We each did our thing, in the territory that interested us the most. ‘New Journalism’ is most of all about the angle and the circumstances. When I wrote my article on Muhammad Ali, he had no desire to be followed by a journalist for 24 hours, despite what he had originally led me to believe. Ali wouldn’t speak to me. He didn’t answer any of my questions. Then he decided to go for a walk through the streets of New York. So there’s the article! Circumstances: the subject you’re writing about won’t play along but suddenly wants to go for a stroll. Angle: how is the glory of a great boxer expressed on the faces of the people he passes on the street? And there you go, there’s your ‘New Journalism’–style article.”

More from Talese, from “What I’ve Learned: Gay Talese”

Writer, 91, New York City, Interview By Alex Belth And Photograph By Norman Jean Roy, PUBLISHED: OCT 11, 2023, Esquire magazine

Talese: “I didn’t want to be a five-w reporter—who, what, why, where, when. I didn’t want to be a hard-news reporter. I wanted to be a fucking writer.”