TOM WOLFE (by Cary Tennis)
Morrissey Breen
He put New Journalism on the map with writing that shook as fiercely
as it shimmered.
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by CARY TENNIS
Feb. 1, 2000
http://archive.salon.com/people/bc/2000/02/01/wolfe/index.html
Tom Wolfe had been working at the New York Herald Tribune only six
months when the newspaper strike of 1963 put him temporarily out of a
job. He didn't know it then, but he was about to change the course of
American journalism. All he knew was that he needed to find some
freelance work.
As a feature writer for the Herald Tribune, he had recently visited
the Hot Rod & Custom Car show at the Coliseum, but hadn't been
completely happy with the piece he'd written.
"The thing was, I knew I had another story all the time, a bona fide
story, the real story of the Hot Rod & Custom Car show, but I didn't
know what to do with it," he wrote in the introduction to "The
Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." "It was outside the
system of ideas I was used to working with, even though I had been
through the whole Ph.D. route at Yale, in American Studies and
everything."
His sudden unemployment may have caused him to regret having turned
down Yale's offer of a teaching position in 1956. But five years as a
graduate student had given him, as he put it in the introduction to
"The New Journalism," "a fierce and unnatural craving for something
else entirely. Chicago, 1928, that was the general idea ... Drunken
reporters out on the ledge of the News peeing into the Chicago River
at dawn ... Nights down at the saloon listening to 'Back of the Yards'
being sung by a baritone who was only a lonely blind bulldyke with
lumps of milkglass for eyes ..."
So he had apprenticed as a reporter at the Springfield (Mass.) Union
and then worked as a reporter and Latin American correspondent at the
Washington Post, winning Washington Newspaper Guild awards but chafing
under the Post system. As he told a Newsweek reporter, "I didn't
subscribe to the theory that every documented sparrow that falls
within our circulation area you have to write about."
His ambitions brought him to the Herald Tribune, where he hoped to
further develop his style. But now with the strike on he needed work.
Editor Byron Dobell of Esquire agreed to send Wolfe to California to
write about the hot rod culture.
Wolfe was about to explode over America. He was about to appear in the
heavens like a clean-shaven Jehovah throwing down electrically charged
trochaic hammerlines of sheer ecstatic vision and pure hippie grace!
Soon it would be: Wake up, America! Tom Wolfe is here! Banging on the
dean's door with a dandy's cudgel in his ivory three-piece suit like a
Mercury astronaut intubated with 50 centileters of Old Granddad,
tearing through journalism's sleepy hollow of leather club chairs and
Connecticut train schedules like a Virginia frat boy channeling Alexis
de Tocqueville, yelling, "Wake up, you sleeping-beauty three-dot
phone-fed so-called journalists dreaming of a publicist's underwear!
Wake up you Rogaine revolutionaries and J. Crew flannel worshippers
from your sleep of MFA sinecures with your Lands' End picnic baskets
full to bursting with Harry and David organic fruits grown by nervous
Northern California neo-botanists with great skin who in an honester
age would have lined up outside Ye Olde Leeches and Bloodletting
Parlor for the requisite Middle Ages pageboy and signed on for the
Crusades! Wake up, everybody! Tom Wolfe is here!"
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. In this story we're telling it
was still 1963 and the not-yet-famous, out-of-work Wolfe went to
California for Esquire to check out the car scene and ran up a $750
tab at the Beverly Wilshire and came back to New York with copious
notes but no story.
American-studies Ph.D. with X-ray eyes meets nitro Neanderthals
squatting by the drag strip of our last frontier, discovers autonomous
youth culture never before possible in the history of the world except
now with unprecedented post-WWII world hegemony and unparalleled
productive capacity!
But he can't write the darn thing.
Wolfe is down! Crawling toward the enemy pillbox like a "Sgt. Rock"
G.I. with nothing left but the grit in his belly and the fire in his
heart! He calls his editor at Esquire on the walkie talkie:
"Byron ... Sarge ... Can't ... finish ... article. Take ... my ...
facts ... finish ... story."
"You can do it," Dobell says.
"Can't ... finish ... story," says Wolfe. "Here ... take ... my ...
notes."
"OK, have it your way," Dobell tells him. Just type up the notes, and
they'll have somebody else write it up. "I'll see you around Sports
Afield-freelancer 5-cents-a-word part-time Yellow Cab-driving hell,
boy!"
Wolfe starts typing a memo at 8 p.m.: "Dear Byron ..." By midnight he
has 20 pages. He turns on WABC and starts listening to rock 'n' roll
and keeps writing.
"I wrapped up the memorandum about 6:15 a.m., and by this time it was
49 pages long," he later wrote. "I took it over to Esquire as soon as
they opened up, about 9:30 a.m. About 4 p.m. I got a call from Byron
Dobell. He told me they were striking out the 'Dear Byron' at the top
of the memorandum and running the rest of it in the magazine."
"The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" became the title
piece of Wolfe's first book, a collection of 22 magazine and newspaper
pieces published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1965. In addition to
the introduction that described how Esquire came to publish a "Dear
Byron" memo as a piece of journalism, it contained such pieces as "The
New Art Gallery Society," "The Nanny Mafia," "The Girl of the Year,"
"Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't Hear You! Too Noisy) Las
Vegas!!!!" and "Why Doormen Hate Volkswagens." Taken together, the
pieces encapsulated the themes, mannerisms and obsessions that would
play out over the next 35 years, not only in his journalism but in his
novels.
He started doing crazy stuff. He started one story about the Women's
House of Detention in Greenwich Village like this: "Hai-ai-ai-ai-
i-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- i-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-
ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- i-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-
ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- ai-aireeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"
And this is how he started "Girl of the Year," about society "It" girl
Jane Holzer at a Rolling Stones concert:
Bangs mains bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter faces brush-on
lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather
blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms eclair shanks
elf boots ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them, these flaming
little buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside the
Academy of Music Theater underneath that vast old mouldering cherub
dome up there -- aren't they super-marvelous!
He was appropriating the upper-class literary tools of fiction and
poetry and using them to ornament his lower-class magazine and
newspaper journalism. It was as though he was using the good silver to
slop the hogs. In American literary culture, all hell broke loose.
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In 1965, Wolfe attacked the New Yorker magazine with two articles of
historical significance that will be anthologized for the first time
in "Hooking Up," a collection of nonfiction and fiction that Wolfe's
longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, will publish in the
fall. They are currently available only in back issues of New York
magazine, which was then the Sunday supplement of the Herald Tribune:
"Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of
the Walking Dead!" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New
Yorker-II."
Blam blam! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Wolfe single-handedly wipes out machine
gun nest of tired feature writers encamped in New Yorker magazine
bunker! No more narcoleptic pseudo-objective institutional blow-job
dispatches, no more sycophantic formulaic post-hypnotic feature
writing! No more navel-gazing pasty-faced bad-faith "novelists"
writing book-length crossword puzzles! It's time to put your boots on
your feet and your reporter's notebook in your back pocket and stride
out into the open American air and write about what the hell is really
going on in this country!
Roused from Urizenic sleep, Dwight McDonald, New Yorker staff writer
and patriarch of the literati, retaliated with "Parajournalism, or Tom
Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine," and "Parajournalism II: Wolfe
and The New Yorker"! Renata Adler and Gerald Jonas joined in, citing:
Factual errors! But Wolfe said he put them in on purpose! Attack Tom
Wolfe! Kill Tom Wolfe! Manhattan aflame with literary envy and spite.
Streets clogged with bile! Vindictiveness backs up subway! But Wolfe
won't quit!
"As the most spectacular journalist in years," gossip columnist Liz
Smith wrote, "Wolfe caused severe jealousy and outrage pangs
throughout the U.S. literary establishment when he sprang right out of
Pop Culture's forehead to become a star practically overnight. Seldom
has anyone seen such visceral envies, such backbiting bitchiness, such
voodoo malevolence directed at any writer -- especially after he took
on the New Yorker magazine."
Over the next few years, the existence of New Journalism was debated
as fervently as the existence of God. Articles such as "Is there a New
Journalism?"; "The 'Old' New Journalism"; "New Journalism Now"; "Bad
Writing and the New Journalism"; and "Want to See New Journalism in
Newspapers? Well, Don't Hold Your Breath" appeared in journals of the
trade such as Quill and the Columbia Journalism Review.
In 1973, Wolfe published "The New Journalism," a collection of
examples of the art by Terry Southern, Rex Reed, Hunter S. Thompson
and others. In its introduction he made a lucid and cogent argument
for writers to turn away from introspection and to make the
observable, reportable world the source of their art.
The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in
which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or
small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as
creativity," he wrote. "The material is merely his clay, his palette
... Even the obvious relationship between reporting and the major
novels -- one has only to think of Balzac, Dickens, Gogol, Tolstoy,
Dostoyevsky, and, in fact, Joyce -- is something that literary
historians deal with only in a biographical sense. It took the New
Journalism to bring this strange matter of reporting into the
foreground.
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Wolfe has such a way of stirring things up that one cannot help
picturing him getting his share of St. Christopher's School thumpings
as a high school kid in Richmond, Va. After all, he co-edited the
newspaper and chaired the student council. Who wouldn't want to smack
him? And just look at those supercilious, smirking, smart-ass Tory
eyes, that high, aristocratic forehead, the lock of WASPish flaxen
hair inviting those who don't know opera to play knuckle sonatas on
his porcelain chin.
The Richmond he was born in in 1931 may have been too polite for such
things, and his parents, Helen Hughes and Thomas Kinnerly Wolfe Sr. --
his dad an agronomist who taught at Virginia Polytechnic and edited a
journal called the Southern Planter -- may have been the Ward and June
Cleavers of their time. It may even be that he safely navigated the
deeply conservative, all-male Washington & Lee University in
Lexington, Va., where in his time one was still required to wear a tie
to class (the son of a student there at the time says Wolfe wore bow
ties), pitching on the baseball team, being sports editor of the
school newspaper and co-founding the literary quarterly Shenandoah
without so much as one session of boot-heel chiropractic. But his
contrarian impulse and his genius for mockery backed by uncanny
accuracy must have infuriated his peers as it later infuriated
America's literary and artistic establishments.
Be that as it may, Wolfe dismisses his own childhood as routine,
claiming, "I was lucky, I guess, in my family in that they had a very
firm idea of roles: Father, Mother, Child. Nothing was ever allowed to
bog down into those morass-like personal hang-ups. And there was no
rebellion. The main thing about childhood was to get out of it."
After a failed tryout as a pitcher with the old New York Giants at age
21, he took with him to Yale and then to Manhattan what Liz Smith,
writing in Status magazine in 1966, called "the Virginia-born
resentment of the entire Eastern Seaboard clique's old leftover FDR
liberalism and snobbism."
It was that keen awareness of class and status that he carried into
everything he wrote. Moreover, the way his youth put a stamp on his
writing provides not only a useful magazine-style transition here from
the requisite little early-life bio section, but may indeed say
something about why many believe Wolfe's talents are misused in the
novel.
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As he noted at the time with what seemed ironic distance but turned
out to eerily prefigure his own career, "The Novel seemed like one of
the last of those superstrokes, like finding gold or striking oil,
through which an American could, overnight, in a flash, utterly
transform his destiny." He says elsewhere in the same piece, "At this
late date -- partly due to the New Journalism itself -- it's hard to
explain what an American dream the idea of writing a novel was in the
1940s, the 1950s, and right into the early 1960s. The Novel was no
mere literary form. It was a psychological phenomenon. It was a
cortical fever."
At its best, Wolfe's journalism sizzles with a quality of stunned
amazement distilled into keen eloquence. At its worst, his fiction is
bloated, overbearing and boring. After he published "The Right Stuff,"
which many consider to be his best nonfiction work, Wolfe published
"In Our Time," a coffee table book; "The Painted Word," an attack on
the pretensions of modern art; "From Bauhaus to Our House," a screed
on modern architecture; and the collection of articles "The Purple
Decades: A reader," before turning to fiction and publishing, in 1987,
the blockbuster novel that became a Hollywood movie, "The Bonfire of
the Vanities." Since that time Wolfe has been apparently trying to
demonstrate, by doing it himself, that realistic fiction is the future
of American literature. In 1998 he released his second gargantuan
novel, "A Man in Full."
Norman Mailer took up five extra-large New York Review of Books pages
to agonize over "A Man in Full" and to say that it was better than
"The Bonfire of the Vanities" (which is saying what, precisely?) while
at the same time comparing it to making love with a fat lady -- "Once
she gets on top, it's over."
Mailer also offered thoughts on why Wolfe is such a fine writer of
nonfiction and such a flawed novelist:
Can one say that his strength as a journalist contributes to his
weakness as a novelist? It is likely. He was so good as a young
reporter that he was promoted to feature writer. But even in the upper
reaches of feature writing, you still move on quickly to another
subject, another set of people ... He spent his early professional
life writing too quickly and moving on ... Can we offer a final
verdict? Tom may be the hardest-working showoff the literary world has
ever owned.
When Wolfe occasionally returns to the practice of journalism, as he
did with "The Artist the World Couldn't See," a recent New York Times
magazine article, his fans still hope to see the insouciant fire and
wit that made pieces like "Radical Chic" and "The Pumphouse Gang" such
an effervescent pleasure. (For the title piece of his new "Hooking Up"
collection, his publisher reports, Wolfe immersed himself in the
subculture of American teens and reports on their sexual rites with
the clinical precision ornamented by baroque flourishes for which he
is justly famous. We are also told that according to Wolfe, today's
youths define "second base" as oral sex.)
But just as often, we are disappointed. In scolding the art world for
ignoring sculptor Frederick Hart, who died at 55 a public success and
a critical nonentity, Wolfe predictably ascribes Hart's obscurity to
that putative art-world cabal described in "The Painted Word" and
"From Bauhaus to Our House," whose high crimes include the promotion
of abstract painting and the erection of modern buildings. But, as a
letter writer responds, "The art world ignores Frederick Hart's
sculpture, not because of the formal nature of his art but because his
sculpture, remarkably skilled though it may be, seldom, if ever, rises
above the slick and sentimental."
But above all, when Wolfe hectors us about our failure to grasp the
importance of social realism and the centrality of status seeking in
American life, he doesn't entertain us. It's no fun. Maybe we're
dolts, asses and twits; maybe we're lazy and narrow and weak; maybe we
need to be educated by Mr. Wolfe. But all we want is to have some fun!
He used to entertain us and he doesn't anymore.
The value of "The Painted Word" and "From Bauhaus to Our House" is
that by example Wolfe gives us courage to question an orthodoxy that
has kept undeservedly long the mantle of the iconoclastic. If read a
certain way, those books can reinvigorate our relations to art. We
need the courage to trust our own responses, to resist the social
pressure to praise what leaves us cold and feign indifference to work
from which we secretly derive some warm, sustaining pleasure. What can
make Wolfe's bellowing about aesthetics tiresome, however, is that
while directing us to seek more authentic aesthetic experiences, he
himself lapses from art into polemic. Having given in to the urge to
be right, he has forsaken that loftier job of the writer, which is to
be intellectually beguiling in a way so complex as to awaken the
soul's delight.
And Wolfe's fiction, too, seems meant less as an expression of his own
aesthetic powers and more as Exhibits A and B in his voluminous brief
against modern novels. While "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was a
commercial success, it lacked the stylistic power and sizzle of his
journalism. Ditto with "A Man in Full," 1998's rotund tome set in
Atlanta, despite its remarkable 1.2 million initial hardback press
run. Wolfe simply does not seem to be a great novelist. He is
absolutely right about the necessity of looking at the surfaces of
American life, but in the process of telling us that, he disregards
the surfaces of his own prose. When Wolfe wrote his great stuff about
cars, when he wrote "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,"
his prose had a shimmer in the details because he was celebrating the
power of surfaces both in the world and in his writing.
What can you do? Gather below his New York apartment with megaphones
and hector: Bad Tom Wolfe! Stop Writing Fiction! Bad Tom Wolfe!
Apply tough love? "Dammit, soldier, get out there and report! Tell us
how we live today! Make us hear it, touch it, smell it, see it, taste
it! Make us feel it!"
Don't be ridiculous.
For fans who love and respect the early journalism of Tom Wolfe, the
only thing to be done, aside from looking eagerly forward to "Hooking
Up," is to recognize that Wolfe is onto something else now. Like it or
not, leave it at that. Perhaps for his forthcoming collection, he will
have occasionally dipped his pen into the ink of the gods.
Rather than petulance and stridency, the proper stance is a studied
and patient distance.
Can you do a good insouciant shrug?
Good. Let's all do one big therapeutic insouciant shrug together on
the count of three:
One.
Two.
Three.
SHRUG!
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Cary Tennis is a San Francisco writer. He works as a copy editor at
Salon.
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