The Statustician!

To go along with gaudy threads, the young Tom Wolfe devised an even gaudier prose style, which went well beyond the legal limit for ellipses, capital letters, exclamation marks, and ornate vocabulary. Nearly every sentence he wrote seemed a verbal extravaganza. One of Wolfe’s first successes was a 1963 article for Esquire written in garishly Technicolor prose—“shotgun baroque edging over into machine-gun rococo” is how I described it in the New Republic as long ago as 1965. The legend behind this article, titled “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm) . . . . . .,” is that Wolfe had scribbled 49 pages of notes that he couldn’t pull together into a coherent article. With deadline pressing, Byron Dobell, Esquire’s managing editor, told him to bring in the notes, which Dobell then published without change. The story is one of the foundational myths of what came to be called the New Journalism.

Perhaps the quickest way for a school of thought, political program, or other phenomenon to reach obsolescence is to term itself New. Hence the New Deal, the New Criticism, the New Frontier, and, inevitably, the New Journalism. In its heyday, the New Journalism, whose home fields were Esquire and New York under the editorships, respectively, of Harold T. P. Hayes and Clay Felker, featured nonfiction using the techniques and devices of fiction: shifting point of view, present-tense description, foreshadowing, stream of consciousness. It also permitted its practitioners to insert themselves into their work, which in an earlier time would have outraged traditional journalism’s goal of objectivity. Under this reign of subjectivity, the author himself or herself—Joan Didion comes prominently to mind here—was not infrequently the subject.

Tom Wolfe was one of the leading lights of the New Journalism, along with Didion, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Nora Ephron, and David Halberstam. Two famous novelists, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, soon stepped out onto the New Journalism dance floor: Capote with In Cold Blood (1966), Mailer with Armies of the Night (1968), both of which works their authors termed “nonfiction novels.” How much of the New Journalism remains readable in our day cannot of course be known, but high estimates would doubtless be a mistake.

What Wolfe had was a dead eye for the telling detail, especially where it touched on the status life. He would become statustician in chief of American life. In “The Secret Vice” (1966), an essay on custom haberdashery, Wolfe wrote of a New York lawyer who divides the world between men “with suits whose buttons are just sewn onto the sleeve, just some kind of cheapie decoration, or—yes!—men who can unbutton the sleeve at the wrist because they have real buttonholes and the sleeve really buttons up.” In “Putting Daddy On” (1964), he described an advertising executive who calls his hat, a “sort of homburg with a flanged brim,” a “Madison Avenue crash helmet and then wears one.”

At the beginning of his career Wolfe wrote about the American sideshow: racecar drivers, Ken Kesey and his acid-dropping (not very) Merry Pranksters, Las Vegas, rich divorcées in Manhattan, the Rolling Stones, whom he designated like the Beatles, “only more lower-class deformed.” Good copy all, but still very much in the realm of journalism, however New the presentation. Wolfe’s subjects were people who had, in the cant phrase of the day, lifestyles, but not really lives, in the sense that they didn’t seem to live very deep down. He caught the sheen of their surface with great skill.

An admirer of Max Weber and of Thorstein Veblen, Wolfe established himself as a sociologist without license, a social scientist who took no surveys but operated out of pure instinct and subtle observation. He could tell you that the current teenage word for French kissing was “tonsil hockey” or that the CEOs of Silicon Valley corporations do not carry smartphones (they have vice-presidents to carry their phones around for them) and other petits faits vrais. Recounting a moment from a session at Esalen, in his 1976 essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” Wolfe, homing in on the feast of self-regard of 1970s psychology, wrote:

For all the dazzle, Wolfe often seemed just another interesting journalist, a fellow who had developed a wow and whoopee style, little more. Then, in 1970, he wrote his breakout piece, the work that made him a writer to be reckoned with. “Radical Chic” was an account of the most famous case of reverse slumming of its time: the party that Leonard and Felicia Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers. The phrase “radical chic” was a perfect description of the behavior of an upper class with nothing at risk cultivating fashionable progressive opinions to reinforce its own self-esteem and at the same time seeming to demonstrate its large-hearted sensitivity to the condition of the underclass. The point about the phenomenon was that it was risk-free. As Wolfe later noted: “A Radical Chic protester got himself arrested in the late morning or early afternoon, in mild weather. He was booked and released in time to make it to the Electric Circus, that year’s New York nightspot of the century, and tell war stories.”

The roster of guests gathered at the Bernsteins’ Park Avenue penthouse duplex for an evening of fundraising for the Black Panthers was a splendid combination of the well-known and the well-to-do. Included were Jason Robards and Schuyler Chapin, Goddard Lieberson and Mike Nichols, Lillian Hellman and Larry Rivers, Aaron Copland and Richard Avedon, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins, Adolph and Phyllis Green and Betty Comden. A party for the Panthers had its complications: Black servants had to be replaced by Hispanic ones, for a start. Then there was the question of the Black Panthers’ taste in hors d’oeuvres and so much more with which the thoughtful hosts had to contend. The Bernsteins’ mistake, of course, was letting Tom Wolfe in the door.

What he set indelibly on display in “Radical Chic” was that people who can afford them can wear their opinions as if they were designer clothes. Some opinions, like some clothes, were more comme il faut than others. Expressing support for the Black Panthers, a group that should its members’ dreams come true would have everyone in the Bernstein apartment that evening on a tumbril on the way to the guillotine, was the political equivalent of Dior, Hermès, or Givenchy.

Just behind the Panthers in progressive social prestige in those days came Cesar Chavez and his National Farm Workers Association. In the same essay, Wolfe gave a brief account of a fundraiser arranged for them by Andrew Stein in Southampton. “From the beginning,” Wolfe writes of Stein’s fête, “the afternoon was full of the delicious status contradictions that provide much of the electricity for Radical Chic.”

The men in their Dunhill blazers and Turnbull & Asser neckerchiefs, the women in their Pucci dresses, Gucci shoes, and Capucci scarves listened to heartrending accounts of grape pickers and their children rising at 3 a.m. for 12-hour days in the blistering hot fields with nothing to eat but a baloney sandwich. How sad, how gripping, how unjust it all was, until, Wolfe interjected, “the wind had come up off the ocean and it was wrecking everybody’s hair.” Perfecto!

Perfecto, that is, if one wishes to show how feeble, thin, and ultimately fraudulent was the sympathy of the rich and famous for the poor and downtrodden. “Radical Chic” put a serious dent in the radical movement that was then sweeping America and that today chiefly finds a home in the much shabbier surroundings of university humanities and social-science departments. Many thought the essay the work of a right-winger, but they were wrong. The essay was the work of a man who enjoyed the comedy of rich contradictions played out by people prepared to desert their common sense in the hope of boosting their status. And Wolfe didn’t in the least flinch when naming names: Jean vanden Heuvel, Jules Feiffer, Carter and Amanda Burden, Sidney and Gail Lumet, and other glittering names all hosted events like that of the Bernsteins. “Who do you call to give a party?,” Wolfe quoted the then-high-profile New York art dealer Richard Feigen asking.

Wolfe never minded making enemies. Early in his career he took on William Shawn and the New Yorker in an essay called “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!,” guaranteeing that he would never appear in that magazine’s pages. Later, he wrote of Robert Silvers, the Anglomaniacal editor of the New York Review of Books, that “his accent arrived mysteriously one day in a box from London. Intrigued, he slapped it into his mouth like a set of teeth.” In those two strokes, he made himself permanently non grata with two of the most powerful editors in the land. He was no more tender about the leading intellectual figures of the day. He described Susan Sontag as “just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review.”

Along with conferring greater fame on him than he had hitherto known, “Radical Chic” gave Wolfe a strong taste for provocation. Literary and intellectual provocateur was a role he felt comfortable playing. He seemed greatly to enjoy a ruckus of his own devising. After “Radical Chic” came his book The Painted Word, a dazzling takedown of the pretensions of the contemporary art world and its star critics, which was excerpted in 1975 in Harper’s. (Six years later, in From Bauhaus to Our House, he would perpetrate a similar massacre of modern architecture.)

Wolfe was a brilliant titlist, and “The Painted Word” conveys the chief idea in the work—namely, that no contemporary painting could have any serious standing without a critical theory certifying and explaining it. Twenty-five years from the time of his essay, he prophesied, there would appear on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art “huge copy blocks, eight and a half by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages. . .. Beside them will be small reproductions of the work of leading illustrators of the Word from that period such as Johns, Louis, Noland, Stella, and Olitski.” The essay is a reminder that in Joseph Roth’s novel Left and Right, the criterion a wealthy character sets for buying art is “that a picture should repel his sense and intelligence. Only then could he be sure of having bought a valuable modern work.”

Wolfe grasped what difficult abstract and minimalist art did for its collectors:

I have an acquaintance in Chicago, a lawyer, an unembarrassed right-winger in his politics, who has an apparently valuable collection of social protest art from the 1930s, a collection that he obviously feels sets him apart from his confreres. That art collection, in his mind, is the white ass upon which he intends to ride into Jerusalem.

Hilton Kramer, in a powerful essay called “Revenge of the Philistines,” praised Wolfe’s account of the sociology of the visual art of the time. On the comedy inherent in the subject, he noted, Wolfe “is illuminating and often hilarious.” Yet, when it came to the analysis of ideas, Kramer felt, “when it comes down to actual works of art and the thinking they both embody and inspire, Wolfe is hopelessly out of his depth . . . and, no doubt, beyond his true interests.” He faulted Wolfe for his inability to understand the historical context of the contemporary situation in art or how we have come to where we are in a way that carries us well beyond “the drawing-room comedy of The Painted Word.” Kramer concluded: “It is this fundamental incomprehension of the role of criticism in the life of art—this enmity to the function of theory in the creation of culture—that identifies The Painted Word, despite its knowingness and its fun, as a philistine utterance, an act of revenge against a quality of mind it cannot begin to encompass and must therefore treat as a preposterous joke.”

Tom Wolfe’s style, cast of mind, and literary mission were essentially satirical. The satirist is chiefly interested in exposé—in exposing the pretensions, hypocrisies, fraudulence, and even the hidden anxieties of others. In his work, the satirist is allowed—actually, requires—simplification, caricature, and hyperbole. Interested though he is in the truth, he doesn’t wish to be derailed, or slowed down even, by the whole truth. So when Hilton Kramer, in reviewing The Painted Word, pointed out Wolfe’s ignorance of, and indeed probable uninterest in, the history of the work he is mocking, he was correct. But unless that history were inherently comical, to recount it would only have obscured the sharpness of Wolfe’s attack, which was worth making and best made without stopping to deal with messy complication. When, in The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe’s 2016 book about language and evolution, he remarked that upon learning that Alfred Russel Wallace had arrived at the basic notion of evolution before he, Charles Darwin “freaked” and that through the remainder of his life Darwin, because he was able subtly to edge Wallace out of his position of deserved primacy as the discoverer of the theory of evolution, “over and over, until the day he died, . . . sent up flares signaling his guilt,” one knows that, far from the way things happened, this is the comic artist, the satirist, at work.

Apart from Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms, who aren’t quite human, there are not many heroes for satirists. Nor are there, in the works, nonfictional and fictional, of Tom Wolfe. Wolfe approvingly quoted Nietzsche and Marshall McLuhan in various of his works and wrote admiringly about Robert Noyce, the physicist and founder of Intel, and about the test pilots turned astronauts and their wives in his book The Right Stuff (1979). But the charivari of comic misbehavior in his time was too loud to leave much room for heroes.

In the early 1980s, Tom Wolfe turned to writing fiction, and in 1987 brought out The Bonfire of the Vanities, about the high-priced status life in Manhattan. “There it was,” the novel’s protagonist notes, driving in from the Bronx, “the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening—.” The book was a great success, commercially and critically, and made the kind of stir its author most enjoyed. The Bonfire of the Vanities tells of the life of Sherman McCoy, a player in the bond market, one of the self-acclaimed “Masters of the Universe,” earning $980,000 a year and, owing to his headlong plunge into the New York status life, not making his nut. McCoy’s life goes bust when his 26-year-old mistress, driving his Mercedes, runs over a thuggish young black man late one night, and they flee the scene. The full nightmare of modern life—a pestiferous media, glory-seeking politicians, corrupt prosecutors, race-activist charlatans looking for a cause to stir up trouble—comes down upon him with full force. The vanities of the novel’s various characters compete in a combined effort to promote themselves at the expense of Sherman McCoy.

Yet his plight is not what is most memorable about The Bonfire of the Vanities. What is memorable is the relentless detail in which Wolfe demonstrates how far from the real McCoy is the life of his novel’s hero. Doing the math, setting out the numbers, he shows how a man earning a yearly salary only $20,000 short of a million can fall into debt. He recounts how a night out on the town in little ole Manhattan—what with renting a limo, babysitting fees, hairstylists, and the rest—can run a man $2,000.

The scope of the novel is impressive, even for its 659 pages. Wolfe’s characters range from gay lawyers and Jewish cops to alcoholic journalists and lower-middle-class Greek bimbos—the dialogue of this gallimaufry never striking a false note—his scenes from grand Park Avenue apartments to haute-cuisine French restaurants to police lockups. Wolfe was more than merely attentive to all his characters’ clothes and accessories. No surprise there. A character in the novel carries his shoes to work in a shopping bag and we learn that they are “not very elegant” Johnston & Murphy shoes. Another wears an English riding mac that was “bought at Knoud on Madison Avenue.” Henry James, as far as possible from Tom Wolfe’s model in the realm of writing fiction—Wolfe claimed Thackeray and Dickens as his literary forebears—notes of his character Gilbert Osmond, in The Portrait of a Lady, that “he was dressed as a man dresses who takes little other trouble about it than to have no vulgar things.” How much more economical, and effective, to leave such matters to the imagination of readers.

In 1987, political correctness hadn’t fully kicked in, and so Wolfe could produce despicable lawyers who are clearly Jewish (quite as despicable as not a few Jewish lawyers I have known)—though one of the few admirable characters in the novel, a figure of courage and competence, is the obviously Jewish judge Myron Kovitsky. The character Reverend Bacon, who attempts to make great hay over Sherman McCoy’s running over a black kid, is a portrait for which our own Reverends Jackson and Sharpton might have sat. McCoy’s wife Judy refers to three “V. I. F.’s,” which, as she explains to her husband, stands for “Very Important Fags.” I mention all this not to indict Wolfe for political incorrectness—the last thing I should want to do—but to show his social accuracy and fearlessness. Wolfe, like every sensible person, judged all groups not by their ethnicity or social status but one man or woman at a time.

Yet rich as it is, something is missing at the heart of The Bonfire of the Vanities—as it would be in the three further novels Wolfe went on to write. And this was due to his greater interest in social scene than in character. In his fiction, Wolfe set out to show, to borrow the title of a Trollope novel, the way we live now—or rather, lived then. But the central task of the novel at its finest, recording the twists and turns of the human heart, eluded Tom Wolfe.

What one remembers from his novels are not specific characters, but the details of social scenes and situations. This is owing, I strongly suspect, to Wolfe’s view that the motor force of modern life is the struggle to achieve high status, whatever one’s line of work or station in life. Wolfe was dedicated, as he put it in his 1989 essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” to a fiction that “would portray the individual in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him.” Somehow Wolfe, like the good journalist he was, so artfully created the society that the individual got lost.

When Tom Wolfe’s second novel, A Man in Full (1998), a book 11 years in the making, was attacked by John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving, Wolfe fired back in an essay called “My Three Stooges.” He had already set out his novelistic credo in “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” which rightly contemned those academic novelists of the day—John Gardner, John Hawkes, Robert Coover, John Barth—for the aridity of the enclosed worlds of their work and called for a return to realism in fiction. He argued that there is a wealth of material available to the novelist, but to acquire it he needs the reportorial skill of a Zola, a Dreiser, a Dos Passos, a Sinclair Lewis. “Literary genius, in prose,” he wrote, “consists of proportions more on the order of 65 percent material and 35 percent talent in the sacred crucible.” Wolfe’s argument, in short, was that novelists needed to do what journalists do—the necessary legwork to get the story or, better, the story behind the story.

In “My Three Stooges”—Updike, Mailer, Irving being the stooges in question—he took things further and argued that the school of realism is the primary, the best, and really only worthwhile school of fiction. George Costanza-like, he then went too far. If a novel doesn’t sell well, Wolfe concluded, it is probably not very good. By falling back on the success of certain novels constructed out of the principles of realism, he suggests that the ultimate judge of great art is neither enlightened criticism nor time but popularity, citing the commercial success of his own second novel, A Man in Full (first printing 1.2 million copies with further printings to follow).

“It was not until after the First World War,” Wolfe wrote, “that there came into being that sweaty colonial, the American ‘intellectual,’ who would value a James above a Dreiser, a Dos Passos, or a Sinclair Lewis.” Proust, Joyce, and James were figures of contempt for Wolfe, treated as if no one but an intellectual, a person dead to life, could value their work above the pulsing-with-life novels of Zola. Elsewhere Wolfe compared the tedium of graduate school with reading Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Saul Bellow’s least solipsistic novel. When Wolfe named contemporary novelists working in the realist mode that he admired—James Webb, Richard Price, Pat Conroy, Jimmy Breslin, Terry McMillan, Joseph Wambaugh, Po Bronson—the list was disappointing.

Wolfe was opposed to the cerebral in fiction. In his ardor to capture the larger story of the battle for status, the journalist in him set society in the foreground, leaving the individual well in the background. In doing so, he mistook the true mission of the novel, which has always been to study human nature in moral conflict, and the home truth that the greatest novelists—Tolstoy, George Eliot, Henry James, Proust, Thomas Mann, Willa Cather—have been those with the most powerful moral imaginations. Tom Wolfe, percipient about so much, missed this.

Abundant and on the whole admiring though most of the obituaries of Wolfe have been, none attempted to find a pattern in his long career. Some, mistakenly, used the occasion of his death to score off what they took to be his politics. But he never wrote directly about politics or politicians. Here he doubtless reserved the right to attack figures on both the left and the right. When Michael Jordan was asked why a man of his renown didn’t speak out more about politics, he answered, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

If Wolfe was ultimately conservative, as satirists tend to be, his was a cultural conservatism. And this conservatism extended beyond what we normally think of as culture. Behind his preoccupation with status, and apart from the comedy with which he portrayed it, was an abiding sadness at what fools people were to devote, and thus lose, their lives to the pathetic snobbery that lies behind all such systems. As a cultural conservative, he viewed most contemporary social revolutions as bringing out the worst in people. He thought the so-called sexual revolution, for example, “rather a prim term for the lurid carnival that actually took place.”

Wolfe could be death on pretension, and on none more than intellectual pretension. He mocked those intellectuals who always sought out the worst in America and found the country on the edge of incipient fascism. He loved America and knew what tremendous advantages it had provided for all who lived here. In an essay attacking American intellectuals, “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists” (2000), he wrote:

In The Kingdom of Speech, his last book, Wolfe expressed his disdain for cosmogonists, those thinkers who devise theories that Explain Everything (his capital letters). In this case the chief such thinker he had in mind was Charles Darwin. But the real point of attack in the book is Noam Chomsky, who, with his theory that owing to evolution humans are born with a universal grammar and his organized arrogance in defending it, represents all that Wolfe disdained. In a single sentence, he tied together Chomsky’s politics and, as several devastating pages show, his illegitimate authority as a linguist:

Although he mentions him only once in his writings, and that far from favorably, Tom Wolfe is a writer in the line of H. L. Mencken. Both devised original, altogether inimitable prose styles. Both were in hot pursuit of the quacks of their time: Mencken of healing and holy-rolling preachers, fatuous professors, and others, Wolfe of many of the sad social climbers and savant-idiots who went under the name of intellectuals. Each man in his work brought a literary sensibility to keen sociological instincts. Each exhibited his greatest energy on the attack: Mencken on such figures as William Jennings Bryan and Warren Harding, Wolfe on Leonard Bernstein and Noam Chomsky. Like Mencken, Tom Wolfe deserves a place in American literature for doing so much to pull the wool off the eyes of his countrymen. May the line of Mencken and Wolfe never run out.