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Recently in Salon People

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Complete archives for People

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Blam blam! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Wolfe single-handedly wipes out machine gun nest of tired feature writers encamped in New Yorker magazine bunker! No more narcoleptic pseudo-objective institutional blow-job dispatches, no more sycophantic formulaic post-hypnotic feature writing! No more navel-gazing pasty-faced bad-faith "novelists" writing book-length crossword puzzles! It's time to put your boots on your feet and your reporter's notebook in your back pocket and stride out into the open American air and write about what the hell is really going on in this country!

Roused from Urizenic sleep, Dwight McDonald, New Yorker staff writer and patriarch of the literati, retaliated with "Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine," and "Parajournalism II: Wolfe and The New Yorker"! Renata Adler and Gerald Jonas joined in, citing: Factual errors! But Wolfe said he put them in on purpose! Attack Tom Wolfe! Kill Tom Wolfe! Manhattan aflame with literary envy and spite. Streets clogged with bile! Vindictiveness backs up subway! But Wolfe won't quit!

"As the most spectacular journalist in years," gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote, "Wolfe caused severe jealousy and outrage pangs throughout the U.S. literary establishment when he sprang right out of Pop Culture's forehead to become a star practically overnight. Seldom has anyone seen such visceral envies, such backbiting bitchiness, such voodoo malevolence directed at any writer -- especially after he took on the New Yorker magazine."

Over the next few years, the existence of New Journalism was debated as fervently as the existence of God. Articles such as "Is there a New Journalism?"; "The 'Old' New Journalism"; "New Journalism Now"; "Bad Writing and the New Journalism"; and "Want to See New Journalism in Newspapers? Well, Don't Hold Your Breath" appeared in journals of the trade such as Quill and the Columbia Journalism Review.

In 1973, Wolfe published "The New Journalism," a collection of examples of the art by Terry Southern, Rex Reed, Hunter S. Thompson and others. In its introduction he made a lucid and cogent argument for writers to turn away from introspection and to make the observable, reportable world the source of their art.

The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity," he wrote. "The material is merely his clay, his palette ... Even the obvious relationship between reporting and the major novels -- one has only to think of Balzac, Dickens, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and, in fact, Joyce -- is something that literary historians deal with only in a biographical sense. It took the New Journalism to bring this strange matter of reporting into the foreground.

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Wolfe has such a way of stirring things up that one cannot help picturing him getting his share of St. Christopher's School thumpings as a high school kid in Richmond, Va. After all, he co-edited the newspaper and chaired the student council. Who wouldn't want to smack him? And just look at those supercilious, smirking, smart-ass Tory eyes, that high, aristocratic forehead, the lock of WASPish flaxen hair inviting those who don't know opera to play knuckle sonatas on his porcelain chin.

The Richmond he was born in in 1931 may have been too polite for such things, and his parents, Helen Hughes and Thomas Kinnerly Wolfe Sr. -- his dad an agronomist who taught at Virginia Polytechnic and edited a journal called the Southern Planter -- may have been the Ward and June Cleavers of their time. It may even be that he safely navigated the deeply conservative, all-male Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va., where in his time one was still required to wear a tie to class (the son of a student there at the time says Wolfe wore bow ties), pitching on the baseball team, being sports editor of the school newspaper and co-founding the literary quarterly Shenandoah without so much as one session of boot-heel chiropractic. But his contrarian impulse and his genius for mockery backed by uncanny accuracy must have infuriated his peers as it later infuriated America's literary and artistic establishments.

Be that as it may, Wolfe dismisses his own childhood as routine, claiming, "I was lucky, I guess, in my family in that they had a very firm idea of roles: Father, Mother, Child. Nothing was ever allowed to bog down into those morass-like personal hang-ups. And there was no rebellion. The main thing about childhood was to get out of it."

After a failed tryout as a pitcher with the old New York Giants at age 21, he took with him to Yale and then to Manhattan what Liz Smith, writing in Status magazine in 1966, called "the Virginia-born resentment of the entire Eastern Seaboard clique's old leftover FDR liberalism and snobbism."

It was that keen awareness of class and status that he carried into everything he wrote. Moreover, the way his youth put a stamp on his writing provides not only a useful magazine-style transition here from the requisite little early-life bio section, but may indeed say something about why many believe Wolfe's talents are misused in the novel.

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