The white-clad truth teller of American culture
Mick Brown explains his lifelong admiration for Tom Wolfe, who died on Monday, and fondly recalls interviewing him in 2016
For any aspiring journalist in the Seventies, there were two writers to whom one looked above all others, as examples not only of acuity and stylistic excellence but of the possibilities that journalism seemed to offer to experience and write the world anew.
One was Gay Talese, the father of New Journalism, a literary movement that grew up in the Sixties, which eschewed the customary Olympian detachment of newspaper and magazine reporting in favour of an immersive style of writing that turned all of the devices of fiction – reported speech, scene-setting, intimate details and the use of interior monologue – to the service of factual reporting.
The other was that movement’s most vivid, colourful and inarguably successful practitioner, Tom Wolfe. It was Wolfe who took the founding principles of New Journalism, forging a singular and scintillating style that he would bring to bear in examining major cultural and social movements in America over the course of 50 years.
Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence.
In 1963, he was working on the
New York Herald Tribune when he came upon a story about a hot rod and customised car show. Realising he had stumbled upon an unreported world of car fanatics, he pitched the story to
Esquire. But with deadline looming, Wolfe experienced a block. His editor, Byron Dobell, told him to just file his notes and they’d knock it into shape.
Wolfe sat down and in a panic began typing furiously: “Dear Dobell, the first good look I had at customised cars was at an event called a ‘Teen Fair’…” As Wolfe liked to tell it, Dobell simply struck out the salutation, and ran the notes in full under the title “The Kandy-kolored Tangerine-flake Streamline Baby”.
Wolfe had found his voice, and his subject, a new American culture, energised by a booming economy – teenage scene-makers, hip social butterflies, “New York’s Beautiful People” – all of which he would capture in a hyperventilating prose as vivid and colourful as his subjects.
Wolfe took subjects that others would have regarded as beneath consideration, and celebrated and lionised them: the record producer Phil Spector – “the first tycoon of teen”; London mods dancing away their lunch hour in “The Noonday Underground”; and the New York socialite Baby Jane Holzer, “The Girl of the Year”.
Reading his zinging, exhilarating prose, with its idiosyncratic structure and exclamation-mark splattered streams of consciousness – he began one article on Las Vegas by repeating “hernia” 57 times – it could sometimes seem that Wolfe was not just in the vanguard of a new way of writing, but was inventing a whole new vocabulary in the process. Consider his marvellously inventive descriptions of casino signage: “Boomerang Modern, Palette Curvilinear, Flash Gordon Ming Alert, Mcdonald’s Hamburger Parabola, Miami Beach Kidney…”
His painterly eye for detail and colour, the anthropologist’s attention to social ritual and behaviour, his full-on engagement with his subject and his determination never to write a dull word – as a journalist one could learn from all this, but never hope to emulate it. Wolfe’s was a style that was often imitated, but never bettered.
In 1968, Wolfe published his first full-length non-fiction book, The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test, an account of a bus journey across America taken by the author Ken Kesey and a group of friends called the Merry Pranksters, fuelled by copious amounts of LSD. It would become one of key texts of the psychedelic revolution that swept across America in the late Sixties. It established Wolfe as a major cultural commentator and, along with The Right Stuff, his brilliant account of the test pilots on the first Project Mercury space programme, stands as Wolfe’s defining non-fiction work.
Wolfe’s take could be scathing. In Radical Chic, published in 1970, he satirised a party held by the composer Leonard Bernstein at his duplex apartment on Park Avenue for the Black Panthers, as an example of the pieties of “limousine liberals” attempting to salve their consciences by patronising black radicals. Interviewed by Time magazine, one Black Panther traduced Wolfe as “that dirty, blatant, lying, racist dog who wrote that fascist disgusting thing in New York magazine”.
His 1976 essay, The Me Decade, riotously lampooned the affluent middle-classes’ pursuit of meaning through the new religion of selfabsorption and narcissism. It begins with a description of a pampered businesswoman rolling around on the floor in a new age encounter group, screaming about her haemorrhoids – a symptom of what Wolfe called “the alchemical dream” of “remaking, remodelling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!)”
Wolfe’s first novel, and the work for which he will be best remembered, The Bonfire of the Vanities, published in 1987, skewered equally the avaricious, get-rich-quick culture of Wall Street and the grifters and chancers seeking to exploit political capital wherever the opportunity presented itself, embodied in the opportunist figure of the Harlem civil rights leader, Reverend Bacon.
He went on to write critically about the art world and modern architecture in The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House. His last book, The Kingdom of Speech, was a critique
of Darwin and Chomsky, arguing that it is speech, not evolution, that sets humans apart from animals. It was not received kindly, and marked a diminuendo ending to a brilliant career.
Even those unfamiliar with his work could not have failed to notice Wolfe at a hundred paces. His natty white suits, snap brim fedoras, starched collars and bespoke shoes went from being a “southern gentleman” affectation (Wolfe was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia) to a patented uniform. He was said to be distraught when Saturday Night Fever came out.
Even at the times of his immersion in the wilder shores of American culture, Wolfe was a determinedly fastidious dresser. When I interviewed him in 2016 he recalled writing about stock-car driver Junior Johnson. He figured it might be more appropriate to “dress casual” – which meant “a green tweed suit, a blue Oxford button shirt; a black knit necktie, suede buckle shoes and a Borsalino hat. I thought, that’s pretty casual.”
They say never meet your heroes, but Wolfe was as accommodating, as gracious and as amusing as one could have wished him to be. I remarked on his ability to climb into the minds of his subjects to describe the LSD experience so vividly. Wolfe had talked of taking LSD in the past, but now he admitted that he never had. “All these people were totally out of it. I felt it was really far too dangerous to take a chance.”
He seemed somewhat abashed by the confession. “But really,” he said, “you just have to tell the truth.”
Would that he could stay around a little longer to tell the truth about the times we are now living in.