story of the leading journalistic observer and describer of American life, in a time of radical cultural transformation, and of the sensational explosion in American literary journalism that occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s—on which the ashes and the dust are just now settling.
...Back in November 2013 the New York Public Library announced that it would pay $2.15 million to acquire Wolfe’s papers. It wasn’t until earlier this year that they became available for inspection. It’s not hard to see why it took them so long. Wolfe saved what he touched—report cards, tailors’ bills, to-do lists, reader letters, lecture notes, book blurbs, requests for book blurbs, drawings, ideas for drawings never executed (“Nude Skydiver Devoured in Midair by Ravenous Owls”), and dozens of sexually explicit and totally insane letters from a female stalker, including one consisting chiefly of 17 pages of red lip prints. He just tossed all this stuff in steamer trunks and hauled the trunks up to the attic, where some of them had sat undisturbed for 50 years. He kept postcards from friends with hardly anything written on them; he kept all the Christmas cards; he kept morning-after notes from New York society ladies.
Lewis immerses himself in those papers, and then sets out to meet Wolfe and ask Wolfe questions about his life.
...Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was born on March 2, 1930, and grew up in Richmond, Virginia, the son of a conservative, God-respectful southern editor of an agricultural trade magazine. Home was never something he was looking to get away from; it was never even something he was looking to pretend he was looking to get away from. He was accepted at Princeton but chose to attend Washington and Lee, to remain close to home. Every now and then one of his teachers would note that he had a way with words, and some artistic talent, but artistic ambition, for a conservative southern male in the 1950s or really any other time, was too vague and impractical to indulge. After college, he took the advice of his professor and went to Yale, for a doctorate in American studies—and right up to this point in his life there isn’t a trace of institutional rebellion in him. He pitches for the baseball team, pleases his teachers, has an ordinary, not artistic, group of pals, and is devoted to his mother and father.
In the late 1960s a bunch of writers leapt into the void: George Plimpton, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and the rest. Wolfe shepherded them into an uneasy group and labeled them the New Journalists. The New Journalists—with Wolfe in the lead—changed the balance of power between writers of fiction and writers of nonfiction, and they did it chiefly because of their willingness to submerge themselves in their subjects, and to steal from the novelist’s bag of tricks: scene-by-scene construction, use of dramatic dialogue, vivid characterization, shifting points of view, and so on.
I doubt I was ever alone in failing to find the whole New Journalism story entirely satisfying. (Hunter Thompson, for instance, wrote Wolfe, “You thieving pile of albino warts…. I’ll have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters if you ever mention my name again in connexion [sic] with that horrible ‘new journalism’ shuck you’re promoting.”) For a start, there wasn’t anything new about the techniques. Mark Twain used them to dramatize his experiences as a riverboat pilot and a gold miner. George Orwell set himself up as a destitute tramp and wrote up the experience as nonfiction. Virtually every British travel writer who has ever left an unpaid bill might be counted a New Journalist. When you look at that list of New Journalists, what pops to mind is not their common technique. It’s their uncommon voices. They leapt off the page. They didn’t sound like anyone else’s.
found, on the East Coast, the perpetual revolt of High Culture against God, Country, and Tradition. He happens to have landed in a time and place in which art—like the economy that supports it—is essentially patricidal. It’s all about tearing up and replacing what came before. The young Tom Wolfe is intellectually equipped to join some fashionable creative movement and set himself in opposition to God, Country, and Tradition; emotionally, not so much. He doesn’t use his new experience of East Coast sophisticates to distance himself from his southern conservative upbringing; instead he uses his upbringing to distance himself from the new experience. He picks for his Ph.D. dissertation topic the Communist influences on American writers, 1928–1942.
To this comes appended the genuinely shocked reviews of three Yale professors. It’s as if they can’t quite believe this seemingly sweet-natured and well-mannered southern boy has gone off half cocked and ridiculed some of the biggest names in American literature. The Yale grad student had treated the deeply held political conviction of these great American artists as—well, as a ploy in a game of status seeking. This student seemed to have gone out of his way to turn these serious American intellectuals into figures of fun.
Which is to say that, as a 26-year-old graduate student, just as a 12-year-old letter writer, Tom Wolfe was already recognizably himself. He’d also found a lens through which he might view, freshly, all human behavior. He’d gone to Yale with the thought he would study his country by reading its literature and history and economics. He wound up discovering sociology—and especially Max Weber’s writings about the power of status seeking. The lust for status, it seemed to him, explained why otherwise intelligent American writers lost their minds and competed with one another to see just how devoted to the Communist cause they could be.
Wolfe takes a job writing for the Washington Post.
But in Washington, when he’s in his early 30s, come the first signs that he isn’t entirely satisfied with the path he’s on. He writes to his parents to complain of the Post’s “chronic mania for bleeding heart stories on the poor and downtrodden.” He writes a 10-page single-spaced letter to interest the editor of The Saturday Evening Post in a piece for which there is no place in The Washington Post, on “status-seeking in Washington D.C.” “I don’t believe there is any subject, with the possible exception of the neighbors’ finances, which people enjoy having lugged out into the open more,” he writes. In his notebooks he catalogues his careful observations of the locals, in their hand-over-hand status climbs:
...The man who would become the foremost chronicler of American life for a generation would decide, from his position inside The Washington Post, that Washington wasn’t all that important. Decades later he writes a letter to a young friend in which he explains, in an aside, why:
“The Republican Party as now constituted is obviously too stupid to survive…. What is to be done? Of course, that was Lenin’s line and the only lucid one he ever wrote. The answer is nothing. America’s position is unassailable. We are the imperial Rome of the 3rd Millennium. Our government is a CSX train on a track. People on one side (the left) yell at it, and people on the other side (the right) yell at it, but the train’s only going to go down the track. Thank God for that. That’s why I find American politics too boring to write about. Nixon is forced from office. Does a military junta rise up? Do the tanks roll? Give me a break.” [February 28, 2000.]
...So long as he was a newspaper reporter, there was not much risk his private thoughts would get him into trouble. There are limits to what a reporter can say about people in a daily newspaper; there is the need to at least seem objective. And so Tom Wolfe, as he enters mid-career, finds himself wearing handcuffs: he’s just good enough at writing for newspapers that he doesn’t need to do anything else. And he doesn’t have the money to stop writing for newspapers, even if the job keeps his inner dog on a leash.
What interested Wolfe intensely was to write about
the sincere soul of American life.
...his ability to see what others have missed, or found unworthy of attention, is sensational.
...Anyway, it resonated with Wolfe, to incredible effect. Never mind journalism, new or old. The Right Stuff, in my view, is a great work of American literature. It’s also the last nonfiction story Wolfe ever tells. The book sells well enough that it provides him with the financial cushion to avoid jobs as difficult as this one. He’ll use the cushion to prove a point he has always wanted to make, to High Culture but also to himself, that he can report a novel. That novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, will sell nearly three-quarters of a million copies in hardcover and another two million in paper. The marketplace will encourage Wolfe to write nothing but novels. And a funny thing happens. The moment he abandons it, the movement he shaped will lose its head of steam. The New Journalism: Born 1963, Died 1979. R.I.P. What was that all about? It was mainly about Tom Wolfe, I think.
travels to the Hamptons to interview Wolfe. Wolfe tells him,
I honestly think that everyone—unless they are in danger of losing their lives — makes their decisions on status.”Read more here.
h/t Bird Dog
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