Lillian Ross's Collection Of Talk Stories Sparkles

Lillian Ross is a girl-about-town. She frequents the Village, Central Park, the hairdresser's and other people's apartments. Her tastes in celebrities range from the late Dag Hammarskjold to Zero Mostel to Miss Teen-Age America to Lassie (her favorite television star). What makes Miss Ross different from thousands of other girls-about-town is that she writes about it. With deftness, lucidity, and wit. In Talk Stories, a collection of sixty "Talk of the Town" pieces from the New Yorker. Miss Ross has further established her reputation as a reporter sans rival and shows another side of the talent which produced Reporting and the now famous profiles of Hemingway and Stevenson.

Skill Over Form

Talk Stories is a triumph of skill over form. Few of the stories run four pages, and saddled with the first-person plural narrative gambit, Miss Ross has to tell her story fast and well. Details must be spared in the right places, interview conversations compressed into monologues, and revealing quotes made ironic rather than cute. It is, admittedly, a difficult genre, but Miss Ross has mastered it and added a dimension of her own. She says a great deal by telescoping events and people with minute details. Security Council delegates, for example, are surveyed characteristically by a running description of their ashtrays, water glasses, and pencils. On another visit to the U.N. (one of her favorite haunts) she examines the employee bulletin board and discovers such gems as "meeting of the U.N. Folk Dance Club on folk dances of France, with Mme. Olga Tarassova," then retires to the cafeteria, where she meets a young Indian eating prune yoghurt and listening to a baseball game via transistor radio. "Two to one, Kansas City," he says gloomily.

The world of Talk Stories is as Kaleidoscopic as New York itself. Miss Ross attends a cocktail party for Beat writers (during which a Harvard man says, "You've got hope here. That's more than we've got at Harvard."), examines the go-go phenomenon, pedals fourteen laps around Central Park, and has 'the works' at Mr. Kenneth's in those New Frontier days when he did Jackie, Rose, Pat, and Eunice. She is at her best, perhaps, when dealing with Personalities. Truffaut, Albee, Stevenson, Noel Coward, and Simon McQueen (the weather girl) all make their appearances. "Campaigning I" and "Campaigning II," in which she deals with Robert Kennedy and Kenneth Keating during their Senatorial fight, are classic. Who could ever forget that breakfast in Scarsdale when "a couple of hundred women, all wearing suits, all with fresh hairdos, sang 'We've got a wonderful feeling / Keating is is going to stay'" and then dived into toasted bagels covered with cream cheese and Nova Scotia salmon?

The old adage about too much of a good thing can be applied to Talk Stories. It is best to read them separately, savoring their gem-like quality. Read all at once, they smother the reader in "we's" and miles of details. But since they appeared over the last five years, the individual stories paint entertaining and vivid sketches of urban life in the '60's with Miss Ross setting the mood.

Nostalgin

Talk Stories will probably never be sociologically significant. But for those who lived during this period, they provide a delightful and nostalgic look back, not only into the trivial. When covering President Kennedy's

The letters to Faulkner's hometown newspaper, The Oxford Eagle, are set in the style of his later novels and make pleasurable reading. A letter about his dog, Pete, killed by a reckless driver, contains the kind of compassion we have come to expect from Faulkner:

But Pete has forgiven him. In his year and a quarter of life he never had anything but kindness from human beings; he would gladly give the other six or eight or ten of it rather than make one late for supper.

The same gentle humor can be found in a broadside which Faulkner distributed to campaign against prohibition in Mississippi.

Unfortunately, as his fame grew, Faulkner began writing to Time, Life, and The New York Times about political matters. "What this country needs right now is not a golf player but a poker player," he said of Eisenhower after the Suez crisis of 1956. His other letters to the Times, including one on an airplane crash at Idlewild Airport and another about U-2 pilot Gary Powers, closely resemble the work of Moses E. Herzog.

In short, poor Faulkner. The quiet man who rarely ventured from his estate in Oxford, Mississippi never considered that these lesser works might one day appear within one volume. If this book is ever reissued, hopefully it will be in hideable proportions