I was very sad to see that Tom Wolfe had passed away last week, but he certainly lived "A Life In Full," to steal the title of one of his novels.
And novel-writing was what he turned to later in his life. Not many people can lay claim to inventing a whole new form of writing, but Wolfe was right there in the early 1960s when what came to be called New Journalism was born.
And it wasn't like New Coke or the New Math, both of which came to be disliked just minutes after they were opened. In the old days of journalism, a reporter went to cover an event - a fire, say, or a gangland slaying - and came back to the Daily Globe to pound out a couple hundred words about the Who, the What, the When, the How and the Why. ("A warehouse belonging to Tuxedoville, a men's formalwear chain operating in the local area, caught fire yesterday evening in the 5400 Block of Swallowtail Av. Fire Department spokesman Hugh Burnham reported the building, and its contents - approximately 350 heavily-used, out of style dress outfits for men - were completely destroyed. All of the firm's newer tuxedos and rental haberdashery, by good fortune, had been moved to an another warehouse just last week. The arson squad is investigating the apparent presence of a liquid accelerant and some partially used matchbooks found at the scene.")
Old and stodgy. Wolfe, a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, had come to realize that he could get at the part of a story that people were really interested in by going to the story himself and finding out what happened - and then writing it in his own inimitable fashion:
This is how he described the masses of stock car racing fans heading to a race, in his article "The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!" from Esquire magazine in 1965:
Ten o’clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua aqua, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry. Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock-car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields. Mother dog!
Doesn't take much to see how that turned the literary world on its ears 50+ years ago, and, along with Truman Capote's great idea of writing the story of the murder of a Kansas farm family as if it were a novel called "In Cold Blood," things have not been so stodgy since.
Tom Wolfe became an acclaimed observer because he seemed to go everywhere, see everything, and write it up for those of us who couldn't join him. He wrote about the space program ("The Right Stuff"), late 60s hippie culture (“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”), well-off sympathizers of liberal causes (“Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers”), the art world (“The Painted Word”) and architecture ("From Bauhaus to Our House").
All the while, he carried on lively rivalries with novelists such as Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving. Those three, and others, dared to criticize Wolfe's writing and soon were on the receiving end of his barbs, saying that Updike and Mailer were "two old piles of bones, " and that "Irving is a great admirer of Dickens. But what writer does he see now constantly compared to Dickens. Not John Irving, but Tom Wolfe . . . it must gnaw at him terribly."
Wolfe's chief complaint against those writers was that they sat in tony Manhattan homes writing about "real people" elsewhere in America, so he went to do his research when he shifted to writing novels. For example, he immersed himself in relationships with bond traders and other free-wheeling billionaire types before writing "The Bonfire Of The Vanities," and in a group of insecure college freshmen and women for "I Am Charlotte Simmons."
If it sounds like I can go and on about Tom Wolfe, it's because of my admiring his every word for over half a century, and I will close this with my favorite story about him.
Esquire magazine sent him to California in 1963 to write about a custom car show, at the time when hot rods and custom machines and Beach Boys surf music was just being noticed in the national cultural pulse. He spent a weekend with the car-crazy folks, but was not able to find the handle on the article Esquire wanted. He didn't know how to approach a topic that was so foreign to East Coasters. Finally, in desperation, he called his managing editor, Byron Dobell, who told him to just write up his notes in memo form, and the magazine would shape them into some kind of story.
Wolfe began typing at 8 p.m. “I wrapped up the memorandum about 6:15 a.m.,” he later wrote, “and by this time it was 49 pages long. I took it over to Esquire as soon as they opened up, about 9:30 a.m. About 4 p.m. I got a call from Byron Dobell. He told me they were striking out the ‘Dear Byron’ at the top of the memorandum and running the rest of it in the magazine.”
The title that Esquire gave the piece was “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” soon to be the title of his first book.
No false modesty this man whose talent made him great. “I regard myself in the first flight of writers, but I don’t dwell on this,” Wolfe said in 1981. “If anything, I think I tend to be a little modest.”
I think he was entitled to be impressed with his ability. I will be forever!
