The wit of Oscar Wilde is often more clever than insightful, but when he declared that “one’s first duty in life is to assume a pose”, he may have been on to something: clothes don’t just make the man; they can, if unchanging in style and sufficiently de trop, make him look ageless.
This, at least, is the impression left by Tom Wolfe as he blazes through the culinary empyrean of Café Boulud on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, trailing dash and élan among the stolidly well-heeled and sourly superannuated diners.
The writer who pioneered reporting with the intensity of literature, who gave what resulted the appearance of a movement (the “new journalism”), who chronicled the restless American spirit to the stars (The Right Stuff) and then back down into the gutter (The Bonfire of the Vanities) is, astonishingly, 77; and yet, he is still every bit the “Tom Sawyer drawn by Beardsley”, that Elaine Dundy excitedly sketched for Vogue readers in the 1960s.
Indeed, Wolfe might as well have sprung fully-formed from Richmond, Virginia, in 1930, so well have the aegis of a cream suit and its dandy-grade accoutrements (spats, bold tie, florid pocket square) rendered him an icon: Tom Wolfe! (as Tom Wolfe might exclaim).
Though Dundy told her readers that Wolfe deliberately aimed to give “offence to his viewers” through his wardrobe, the clothes do not wear him in the meretricious way that can make studied flamboyance a trap. He is gracious, strikingly modest and inquisitive to the point of turning an interviewer into an interviewee. His voice is soft, with a mild southern lilt; his comments are wry; his manner is – in the old-fashioned sense of the word – gay; he laughs softly and frequently, and it is impossible to imagine him, even at this senatorial age, pounding a lectern or as a cynic crabbing away in some dive bar.
This is not to say that Wolfe’s geniality should be taken lightly. Many a writer who is charming in person can turn vicious on the page – as the composer Leonard Bernstein discovered when Wolfe savagely mocked him in “Radical Chic”, an account of a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party that Bernstein and his wife threw at their 13-room penthouse on Park Avenue in 1966.
Late last year, in an article in the New York Times, Wolfe lambasted the city’s Landmark Preservation Commission – “a bureau of the walking dead” – for its willingness to accommodate the spread of “jumbo glass boxes” across Manhattan’s historic districts and, specifically, to admit a proposal for a 30-storey glass tower by Norman Foster that would leer over the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue. The plan was scotched.
Wolfe is, strikingly, much more at ease and much more interested in tackling the politics of anything but the political establishment: race, gender, art and architecture, finance and status – all are grist to an omnivorous intellect and rapacious reporting, but not the political parties or the politicians who lead them. It is even more striking for one who began his career in journalism in the nation’s capital. Washington is an earnest, buttoned-up place, and must have been even more so back in the late 1950s, when Wolfe joined the Washington Post; after three years writing about such timid exotica as Soviet ping-pong tours, zoning meetings and petty crime, he high-tailed it to New York, in search, as he says, of real excitement.
The rest is history. He bloomed at the New York Herald Tribune, a paper known for its cultivation of writers, and hit the literary stratosphere with his high-octane account of custom-car culture in southern California for Esquire magazine. The title of the article gave its name to Wolfe’s later collection of essays, and first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.
And yet there is a palpable sense that history – not the glacial movement of impersonal forces, but the swift and momentous events created by people – has been made on the banks of the Potomac in the reign of Bush the Younger. It seems compelling material for a writer who dissected the interaction of ideology and personality on culture so artfully in The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House.
But Wolfe claims no interest. “I have never wanted to cover politics, except in Caribbean countries,” he says. “The United States is so stable that political victories consist of minor variations. Our government is like a train on a track, and there are people on the right-hand side and on the left screaming at the train. But the train has no choice: it’s on a track! It just keeps going. And it’s really quite marvellous how stable that situation is. You can’t suddenly have parliament deciding there has to be an election.
“And when the most unbelievable things happen, there’s no backlash. For example, when Richard Nixon was forced out of office, he really had no choice. Now did a junta rise up? No. Were there any demonstrations by Republicans? No. I don’t even know of anybody throwing a brick through a saloon window – [even] a drunk Republican. Everybody, like me, sat back and watched it on TV. It was an event on television...nothing really.”
In one sense Wolfe’s view of democracy in action is reassuring: Iraq, too, will pass, though such disengagement might equally appear unnerving, as events in that country fail to pass into history quickly enough.
“Bush has, essentially, a couple of years to rectify things,” he says. “Right now there doesn’t seem to be any possible way, but who knows?
“Everything that’s said now was said about the war in Vietnam,” he continues. “It was also said that we had a very stupid president. You should have been here when Eisenhower was president; he was not very good in a press conference because he would start a sentence with a relative clause and by the time he started adding more relative clauses and appositions, he never got to the subject or the predicate. So he was called really stupid. How can this guy run the country? But, you see, all he did was win World War II! There must have been something there!
“Very few people remember the way Reagan was portrayed as an idiot,” he adds, citing a comment by Henry Kissinger that, after 20 minutes in Reagan’s company, one found oneself asking: “How on Earth can the fate of the free world be in the hands of this man?” And yet for all that, says Wolfe, Reagan kept making the right decisions.
“Bush is portrayed as a moron. I’ve only conversed with him a couple of times – not for very long – but I found he was more literate on literature than the editor of the New York Review of Books, Bob Silvers. I’ve talked to both of them, and he makes Bob Silvers look like a slug.” He laughs, possibly at the idea of New York’s literary-set frothing into their cappuccinos over the latest blow in a long but low-intensity conflict. (In the 1960s Wolfe mocked the Review as the “chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic”, after it published a cover picture showing how to make a Molotov cocktail. Three decades later Silvers published Norman Mailer’s review of A Man in Full, in which the veteran pugilist remarked that reading Wolfe’s 742-page novel of power and racial politics in Atlanta was like “making love to a 300lb woman. Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.”) “Unfortunately,” continues Wolfe, possibly sensing that making someone look like a slug is neither very presidential nor very promising, “We don’t win wars with literature.”
When it comes to literature, Wolfe avoids younger writers, except when it comes to non-fiction, where his definition of young will be welcomed by many. “Michael Lewis, in my pantheon, is the highest-ranking young writer,” he says of the author of Liar’s Poker, an account of working at Salomon Brothers. Lewis was born in 1960. “Mark Bowden, who wrote Black Hawk Down, also wrote a wonderful book, Guests of the Ayatollah, about the [1980] hostage crisis in Iran, which is so far above any novel written by a young writer today.” Bowden was born in 1951.
The continuing vitality of long-form narrative reporting has propelled Wolfe back into journalism. That and possibly the negative reaction to his last novel I am Charlotte Simmons, a story of innocence abused on the modern American university campus.
“I was surprised by the many, many negative reviews,” says Wolfe, momentarily upset. It got so dispiriting that he asked his publisher to stop sending them. This might be taken as evidence of Wolfe being out of critical step with mainstream literary culture, but Charlotte Simmons still chalked up significant sales for a novel – in the low hundred thousands for the hardback – albeit modest when compared with Wolfe’s A Man in Full, which sold over 1.2m copies in hardback. By contrast, Benjamin Kunkel’s much-praised 2005 novel Indecision sold just 15,000 hardback copies.
Wolfe is finishing off a short book, a treatise on status, speech and evolution based on the Jefferson Lecture he gave last year to the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is in research mode for a book on immigration, which as yet has no working hypothesis – “I want to know how new immigrants think and stratify themselves … I don’t know what I’ll find,” he says. From March next year Picador will begin reissuing his entire oeuvre.
And he is, as a bona-fide literary icon, in hot demand. Last month Portfolio, Condé Nast’s new business magazine , debuted with a long essay by Wolfe on the new “masters of the universe” – the mantle borne by bond traders in The Bonfire of the Vanities and now given to hedge fund managers. “Not bam bam bam bam bam bam,” it began, “but bama bampa barama bam bammity bam barampa FIRE! was the first thing she thought of because nobody ever banged on your apartment door in a building like this …” This is why people love Wolfe. He makes writing exciting and journalism fun.
“When I first came to New York to work for a newspaper, it was the great era of understatement,” he says. “Understatement was valued as something almost aristocratic; you didn’t get carried away by emotions, and you didn’t try to be an acrobat, you understated. And somehow understating things was going to make the impact of the message greater. But, in fact, understatement made the impact less, usually – because often people don’t even realise you’re making a point.”
And yet, for one who enjoys language so much, who seems to have so much fun on the page, it is perhaps a surprise to discover that Wolfe finds writing laborious. “I never trust people who say how much fun writing is,” he says. “The only thing that makes it fun is the anticipation of applause.”
A life in full
1930 Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr born in Richmond, Virginia, to agricultural scientist father and medical student mother.
1951 Graduates from Washington and Lee University. Later earns PhD in American Studies from Yale University.
1956 Reporter on Springfield Union newspaper.
1959 Latin America correspondent for The Washington Post.
1962 Reporter and magazine writer on New York Herald Tribune.
1965 Esquire magazine editor Byron Dobell deletes words “Dear Byron” at the top of a long, wild letter from Wolfe, and publishes it as “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine- Flake Streamline Baby”, effectively launching “new journalism”.
1966 Seeking material for a “non-fiction Vanity Fair about New York”, attends Leonard Bernstein’s fundraiser party for Black Panthers at Bernstein’s Park Avenue penthouse. Depicts party mercilessly in 1970 essay “Radical Chic”.
1968 Publishes The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (account of life on the road with Ken Kesey) and The Pump House Gang on the same day. Both become bestsellers.
1974 Holds one-man show of drawings in New York.
1975 Publishes The Painted Word, excoriating portrait of American art world.
1978 Marries Harper’s Magazine art director Sheila Berger. Two children: Alexandra and Thomas.
1979 The Right Stuff, paean to US test pilots and astronauts, is published.
1981 From Bauhaus to Our House, a broadside monograph on decrepitude of American architecture.
1984-5 Begins first novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (sweeping satire of Manhattan’s bond-trading “masters of the universe”) in serialised instalments for Rolling Stone magazine.
1987 One week before Wall Street crash, The Bonfire of the Vanities is published. On New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. Film rights for Bonfire sold for $5m.
1989 Writes “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast”, critical essay arguing that American novelists have lost their way.
1998 Second novel, A Man In Full, scornfully received by John Irving, Norman Mailer and John Updike.
2000 Hooking Up, collected essays, dubs Irving, Mailer and Updike the “Three Stooges”.
2004 Aged 74, publishes dissection of undergraduate sexual mores in third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons.
Robert Collins
