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| Tom Wolfe, 1930-2018. Nattily dressed, as always, but this time not in all white. |
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| The collected works of Tom Wolfe. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor) |
Tom Wolfe! One of the major writers of our time! The man who
introduced phrases like “pushing the envelope,” “the me generation,” “radical
chic,” and “masters of the universe” into our language! And yet, for some
reason, Wolfe was never fully accepted by the East Coast critical establishment.
For example, compare
Wolfe’s obituary in The New York Times to
Philip Roth’s. Those two writers passed away just eight days apart in 2018. But while
Roth’s obituary includes a video the
Times taped with Roth
specifically
for his obituary, Wolfe’s obit includes nothing of the sort. I’m not trying
to suggest that either Wolfe or Roth was a “better” writer than the other, I’m
merely pointing out that Roth was clearly anointed by
The New York Times
as a “Great and Important Writer” and Wolfe wasn’t.
The New York Times even
got the date of Wolfe’s first book wrong: it was published in 1965, not 1968.
I think part of Wolfe’s lack of serious acclaim is due to
him starting his career as a journalist, which is traditionally regarded as
somehow inferior to being a novelist. In order to impress the literary establishment,
you really must write serious fiction. The major literary prizes never went to
Wolfe. Thomas Mallon recalls John Updike “flashing me a relieved smile” when A
Man in Full lost the National Book Award for Fiction in 1998.
There aren’t very many books about Tom Wolfe or his writing.
One of the few is Modern Critical Views: Tom Wolfe, published by Chelsea
House Publishers in 2001. The volume was edited by literary critic Harold
Bloom, and it presents essays about Wolfe’s work that were published from 1974
to 1999.
Bloom’s introduction damns Wolfe with faint praise. “Wolfe
is a grand entertainer, a true moralist, and a very intelligent and perceptive
journalist. That is not Balzac, but is still very impressive indeed.” (p.1) This
is typical of the East Coast critical establishment view of Wolfe. John Updike
dismissed Wolfe’s 1998 novel
A Man in Full as falling short of
literature, even “literature in a modest aspirant form.” Norman Mailer’s review
of the same book took a similar tack, as it was full of belittling questions
like
: “Is one encountering a major
novel or a major best seller?” Yes, we can praise Wolfe a little bit, he does
write well, but he crams all those status details into his writing, that can’t
actually be literature! He’s too focused on what brand of shoes those are, and
what store the end table came from! And so, Tom Wolfe, for all his astounding
success, remained something of a literary outsider. I suspect that was probably
just fine with Wolfe.
Ronald Weber’s 1974 essay, “Tom Wolfe’s Happiness
Explosion,” is a very good essay on Wolfe’s early journalism. In the
introduction to Wolfe’s 1968 book
The Pump House Gang, he described taking part in a symposium on “The Style of
the Sixties.” The other panelists all seemed quite depressed about the state of
the world, and they were open in their fears of incipient fascism, always the
greatest fear of liberals. When it was Wolfe’s turn to speak, he said “What are
you talking about? We’re in the middle of a…Happiness Explosion!” (
The Pump
House Gang, p.9) The other panelists didn’t have the foggiest notion what
Wolfe was talking about, but he was right. Sure, there were
lots of
problems in America in the late 1960’s, but Wolfe’s point was that the booming
post-war economy had allowed many people the time and money to indulge in their
chosen leisure activities. From the very beginning of his career, Wolfe was
pushing against the literary mainstream. Where others looked around and saw
creeping fascism, Wolfe looked around and saw all the fantastic personal
indulgences.
Much of Wolfe’s early journalism was preoccupied with these
new “statuspheres” as he called them—the custom-car scene in Southern
California, teenagers living the surfing lifestyle, Hugh Hefner, Ken Kesey and
his Merry Pranksters. Weber’s essay is an excellent look at Wolfe’s early
journalism, and the ways in which it broke from the conventional mold.
Mas’ud Zavarzadeh is next with the longest essay in the
book, a 35-page slog about non-fiction novels. The two books he discusses are
Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Norman Mailer’s The
Armies of the Night, both classics of “New Journalism,” and both published
in 1968. If you’re not deeply familiar with both books, I’d say just skip the
essay.
Zavarzadeh’s essay is written in the nearly incomprehensible
academic-speak that is unfortunately all too prevalent in academic writing.
Here’s a sample sentence:
“It does not proclaim the inability of totalizing models to
decode current fictuality, but it enacts such inability on a split screen on
which we see simultaneously the Old Quest and the New Actuality.” (p.47-8)
My God, the things’ practically impenetrable! You’d need a
Ph.D. to figure out what it means! It’s good old academic psychobabble of the
highest style! Wolfe had a Ph.D. of his own, from Yale, in American Studies,
but he never wrote like this!
A. Carl Bredahl has a more traditional take on
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It’s a very good essay that is much easier to
read. Bredahl writes of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ attempts to start a
new social order: “What was to have stimulated the individual to discover
himself has become a social enterprise where the group is dependent on a
leader.” (p.63-4) Bredahl understands the key fault of this enterprise, and why
it ultimately ends up being doomed. It’s yet another search for a leader, a
messiah who will lead you through the wilderness. It’s probably inevitable that
any kind of new religion or way of thinking will start with a charismatic
individual that is able to draw people to them, but ultimately, the new ideas
will have to survive without the charismatic founder. It’s clear by the end of
The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that the Merry Pranksters are floundering
without Kesey’s guidance, and they will be unable to make the leap to
self-discovery.
In his essay, Bredahl sees the Pranksters’ unfinished movie
of their cross-country bus trip as a key distinction separating Wolfe from the
Pranksters: “Ultimately, the difference between Wolfe and the Pranksters is
evidenced in Wolfe’s ability to keep his narrative eye focused on the physical
world of the Pranksters and to unify The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in contrast to the talk and endless feet of
film and electrical wires that the Pranksters can never manage to bring
together.” (p.68)
And that’s perhaps the difference between being “on the bus”
and “off the bus.” To briefly explain the difference, those who are “on the
bus” are a part of the psychedelic experience and have devoted themselves to
Kesey’s ideas about a new society. Everyone else in society is “off the bus.” Those
people who were “on the bus” were too close to the experience (and maybe too
strung-out) to really make sense of it. Thus, it was left to Wolfe, who was
definitely “off the bus,” to write the masterpiece of the psychedelic era,
despite not being a Hippie himself.
Richard A. Kallan offers a rhetorical analysis of Wolfe’s
writing. Kallan makes note of Wolfe’s many unusual writing habits, including
idiosyncratic punctuation marks like the multiple colon, and multiple
exclamation marks. Kallan’s thesis is that Wolfe was writing in an electronic
style for the electronic age. Kallan’s essay was published in March of 1979, just
a few months before Wolfe’s book
The Right Stuff came out.
The Right
Stuff chronicled the Mercury 7 astronauts and
was radically
different in style from Wolfe’s other books. I suspect Wolfe knew that he
needed to use a different style
—after all, he was examining a world
that could not have been further from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The
hyper-excited style of
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test wouldn’t have
worked for the conservative world of the Mercury 7 astronauts. I’d be
interested to know how Kallan would define Wolfe’s shift in style for
The
Right Stuff.
Wolfe’s writing style is unusual, even off-putting at the
beginning. But he’s able to conjure up these visions that take you closer to
the experience than a typical journalist would be able to. Kallan examines the
beginning of “The Girl of the Year,” Wolfe’s 1964 article about Baby Jane
Holzer, a socialite who was that season’s “It Girl,” and who palled around with
the Rolling Stones and Andy Warhol. Wolfe begins the article with a long list
of unpunctuated details as he observes the crowd at a Rolling Stones concert.
You’re 34 words in before you even get a comma to catch your breath! Wolfe’s
list of visual details throws you into the scene, whereas a more traditional
writing style wouldn’t be as visceral or immediate. Wolfe was taking a bold gamble
with his style, trying all sorts of different techniques “anything to avoid
coming on like the usual non-fiction narrator, with a hush in my voice, like a
radio announcer at a tennis match.” (The
New Journalism, by Tom Wolfe, p.17) Wolfe’s style was brash—you’re
either going to go with him on this journey, or you’re going to throw the
magazine across the room and say “what in the hell is this guy talking about?”
There’s no in between.
In his essay, “Tom Wolfe on the 1960’s,” Thomas L.
Hartshorne makes the excellent point that Wolfe wasn’t necessarily a part of
the 1960’s madness that he was chronicling. As Hartshorne writes, critics “took
him as a representative of the switched-on, rebellious, anti-traditional
culture of the 1960’s.” (p.85) Wolfe was really a traditionalist wearing
outlandish clothes and writing in an outlandish style.
Hartshorne makes the point that it’s difficult to determine
Wolfe’s true feelings about his subjects: “they must be deduced or inferred.”
(p.87) Hartshorne puts forth the theory that NASCAR driver Junior Johnson is
one of Wolfe’s subjects that he most admires, and I agree with that. There is
no pretense about Johnson—he’s not trying to fool you into thinking he’s anything
more than a “good old boy” who just happens to be a very skilled race car
driver. Wolfe was always able to skewer anyone who was putting on airs, but
Junior Johnson, like Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, embodied a confident,
straight-forward masculinity that Wolfe found honorable.
Barbara Lounsberry contributes a nice essay on The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. My favorite quote from her essay is: “The bus
is thus carefully elevated through Wolfe’s diction from a literal 1939
International Harvester bus to the major metaphor and symbol for the whole
psychedelic odyssey.” (p.107) As Ken Kesey said, “You’re either on the bus…or
off the bus.”
Ed Cohen’s subject is the two articles that Wolfe wrote
about
The New Yorker magazine in 1965, as the magazine was celebrating
its’ 40
th anniversary. These articles, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story
of the Ruler of 43
rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” and “Lost
in the Whichy Thickets,” were published in
New York magazine, then the
Sunday supplement of the
Herald Tribune newspaper. They caused an
enormous stir when they were first published, and they weren’t collected in one
of Wolfe’s books until 2000, when they appeared in
Hooking Up, his final
essay collection.
Wolfe was stinging in his critique of New Yorker editor William Shawn, who helmed the magazine from 1952
until 1987. Wolfe writes: “William Shawn has not lapsed for a moment from the
labor to which he dedicated himself upon the death of Harold Ross. To preserve The New Yorker just as Ross left it,
exactly, in…perpetuity.” (Hooking Up, p.270)
In “Lost in the Whichy Thickets,” Wolfe attacks the very
style of The New Yorker itself! Wolfe hits the nail on the head when he
writes about the “fact-gorged sentence,” a stylistic affectation that, in my
opinion, still plagues The New Yorker. “All
those clauses, appositions, amplifications, qualifications, asides, God knows
what else, hanging inside the poor old skeleton of one sentence like some kind
of Spanish moss.” (p.273)
After Wolfe’s articles on The New Yorker appeared,
numerous national figures, ranging from J.D. Salinger to columnist Walter
Lippmann, denounced him in print. Cultural critic and longtime New Yorker staffer
Dwight Macdonald compared Wolfe to Hitler and Joe McCarthy. You know, because a
newspaper reporter who also wrote for Esquire in his spare time was equivalent
to a murderous dictator and a demagogic U.S. Senator. I’m sure Wolfe didn’t
care much about what Macdonald thought of him, as Macdonald was another one of
those elitist, arteriosclerotic old men taking up space at The New Yorker, preserving
the august history of this important magazine forever in amber! Once again, we
see how Wolfe annoyed the literary elite of the establishment.
James Stull writes about Wolfe’s privilege, which is very
fitting with the cultural moment we now find ourselves in. And it’s certainly
true that Wolfe’s life was very privileged. Tom Wolfe sold a lot of books and
lived in a very nice brownstone in New York City. But isn’t every successful
writer privileged, simply because they’re successful?
Stull writes that “Wolfe is more interested in portraying a
static idea—a
status distinction, conflict, or incongruity—than with dramatizing diverse
interactions of psychologically individuated selves.” (p.130) My question to
Stull would be: what is the alternative to this? I would agree that sometimes
Wolfe’s characters in his fiction are more archetypes than fully drawn people,
but I’d like to know what authors succeed at “dramatizing diverse interactions”?
James F. Smith compares Wolfe’s debut 1987 novel
The Bonfire of the Vanities to Theodore Dreiser’s
Sister Carrie, a
comparison that Wolfe, a devoted fan of Dreiser’s social realism, would no
doubt be pleased with.
And then, after 150 pages of reading other people’s writing about
The Man in White, there he is! TW himself! He tells us all about “Stalking the
Billion-Footed Beast”! The subtitle proclaims it to be “A Literary Manifesto
for the New Social Novel.” A social novel? What is he talking about? Doesn’t he
know that social realism went out with John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell? First
published in Harper’s magazine in November of 1989, “Stalking the
Billion-Footed Beast” spawned much criticism and controversy.
In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Wolfe essentially
argued that American novelists should be, well, more like Tom Wolfe. There’s
nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument. I suspect that most major
novelists, if pressed on the point, would probably like most other novelists to
be more like themselves. Wolfe made it clear in the essay that he had issues
with the major literary styles of the past thirty years. The essay buttressed
Wolfe’s reputation as an iconoclast, and again demonstrated how he didn’t fit
in with the literary establishment.
Wolfe thought that American writers should tell us something
about what it’s like to be alive in America right now. And he thought that the
way to write such novels was to go out there and do some reporting. Ask
questions! Interview people! For God’s sake, get out of your cloistered little
study and TALK TO SOME PEOPLE, FER CRYING OUT LOUD!!! Of course, Wolfe had the
journalistic background to easily do this, and each of Wolfe’s four novels grew
out of his own reporting.
Wolfe didn’t understand why no one was writing about “this
phenomenon that had played such a major part in American life in the late
1960’s and early 1970’s: racial strife in the cities.” (p.153) Wolfe continues:
“The strange fact of the matter was that young people with serious literary
ambitions were no longer interested in the metropolis or any other big, rich
slices of contemporary life.” (p.154) The novelists were turning inwards, to
novels that illuminated the inner lives of their characters, but that did not
engage with the social milieu surrounding them. Wolfe wrote of the Neo-Fabulist
school of fiction: “The characters had no backgrounds. They came from nowhere.
They didn’t use realistic speech. Nothing they said, did, or possessed
indicated any class or ethnic origin.” (p.157) All of this was anathema to
Wolfe. When he finally embarked on his long-awaited debut novel in the early
1980’s, he put his money where his mouth was and ventured out into the messy
world of New York City to see what was happening for himself.
And the book that Wolfe came up with, The Bonfire of the
Vanities, was a hulking great hardcover, weighing in at nearly 700 pages.
And between those covers was a portrait of New York City, dense and vibrant and
complicated. Wolfe took the reader from the Park Avenue apartments of Manhattan
to the Bronx County Courthouse, where the lawyers were scared to venture out
after dark. The Bonfire of the Vanities became a huge best-seller, thus
proving to Wolfe that a good, old-fashioned social realist novel could still be
successful.
Wolfe makes an excellent point in his essay about New
Journalism outstripping the fiction of the time. If you examine the period from
1965 to 1975, what are some of the classic American books of those years? Some
of them would surely be
In Cold Blood, the Armies of the Night, The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In short, New
Journalism 101. Fifty years later, the ultimate book about the American Hippies
isn’t a novel that someone involved with the movement wrote: it’s Wolfe’s non-fiction
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
I’d be curious to know what Wolfe thought of historical
fiction. I’ve never read his opinion on it. Did he think it was worthwhile to
try and depict the past, or was it a waste of time because you were ignoring
the present? I wonder too, what Wolfe
would make of the state of American fiction now, thirty years after the
publication of “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”?
Rand Richards Cooper examines Wolfe’s second novel, 1998’s A
Man in Full. His critique is that Wolfe essentially writes each character
in a similar voice, as he offers seven similar descriptive passages from A
Man in Full that physically describe seven different characters, one of
whom is a horse. These seven passages are all about Wolfe’s fixation on male
strutting, how men show off their muscle in subtle, or not-so-subtle, ways. I
suspect that Wolfe’s reply to Cooper would be something along the lines of,
“Yes, those passages are similar because that’s what all men do! They’re all
showing off, all the time!”
I think some of Cooper’s criticism is justified, that
sometimes Wolfe wrote types instead of fully fleshed out characters. However,
where Cooper argues that having Charlie Croker intersperse his interior
monologue with the occasional French phrase is a sign of Wolfe’s authorial
voice peeking through, I’d argue that it might be a sign that Croker is more
intelligent than Cooper thinks he is.
I must quibble with Cooper’s assertion in his opening
sentence that Tom Wolfe first “splashed into the national consciousness in the
summer of 1970 with ‘Radical Chic.’” (p.169) I’d assert that it happened two
years earlier, in the summer of 1968, as
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test became
a best-seller. One could even argue that Wolfe’s first splashdown occurred with
his very first book of articles,
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, which became an unlikely best-seller in 1965.
In the book’s final essay, Joshua J. Masters takes Wolfe to
task for the racism he sees in The Bonfire of the Vanities. This was
much commented on at the time of the book’s publication in 1987. A theme of the
novel is the waning of white authority in the urban metropolis, and how
minority groups are starting to flex their own power.
In one example, Masters seizes upon Wolfe’s description of
African American youths observing white people going to a trendy nightclub.
Wolfe writes of the youths “eyeing the drunks and heads going in and out of the
door.” Masters takes this to mean that Wolfe is “transforming them into
monstrous gargoyles awaiting the opportunity to victimize (and perhaps
cannibalize) what they can only see as disembodied ‘heads.’” (p.186-7) Masters
takes “heads” to mean a literal head, but what he doesn’t seem to know is that
“head” is good old-fashioned 1960’s slang for someone on drugs. That seems to
me the sense in which Wolfe is using the word in this example.
I’d argue that Wolfe’s racial vision of New York City in Bonfire
is not necessarily how he himself sees things, but how his characters see
things. The Bronx being characterized as a “jungle” might not be Tom Wolfe
talking, but rather Sherman McCoy’s interpretation of the Bronx. It’s quite
clear that Sherman has no knowledge of the Bronx, thus his imagination runs
rampant.
Masters writes of Wolfe’s symbolic language describing the
judicial system as consuming “meat.” Wolfe is blunt in his point that the
judicial system is meant to devour the meat of whoever is in front of it. Yes,
most of the time it’s the minorities who are being shoved into the meat-grinder,
but now that Sherman is in the judicial system, it will greedily devour him
too, despite the advantages of his race and privilege. Sherman becomes a cause
celebre, and because of the rarity and novelty of someone like Sherman being
processed through the judicial system, many people are crying out for him to be
painfully wrung through the meat-grinder. For the District Attorney, Sherman
becomes the “Great White Defendant” that he longs to take down.
Race was a theme in many of Wolfe’s writings, from
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers through all four of his novels. In a
1989 interview with Bonnie Angelo in
Time magazine, Wolfe replied to
those critics who found
Bonfire to be racist:
“What they are really saying is that I have violated a
certain etiquette in literary circles that says you shouldn’t be altogether
frank about these matters of ethnic and racial hostility. But if you raise the
issue, a certain formula is to be followed: you must introduce a character,
preferably from the streets, who is enlightened and shows everyone the error of
his ways, so that by the time the story is over, everyone’s heading off wiser.
There has to be a moral resolution. Unfortunately, life isn’t like that.” (
Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.286)
Wolfe’s quote is exactly why I think he was such an excellent
writer on race in America. Wolfe didn’t just mouth the usual liberal pieties
about the subject, he tried to straightforwardly expose the important role race
still plays in American society. And it took guts for a white Southerner from
Virginia, who walked around in a WHITE SUIT, for crying out loud, to write
about race in an honest way.
Modern Critical Views: Tom Wolfe features many
interesting essays and viewpoints about the writing of Tom Wolfe. The book will
inevitably bring you to reexamine the marvelous, stimulating, incandescent,
phosphorescent, vibrant, bold, and colorful prose of Tom Wolfe.
