Tom Wolfe, RIP

 

Tom Wolfe and Blue Yeti at the Uncommon Knowledge taping (video below).

The Peacock Inn in Princeton during the summer of 1979, when, having just graduated from college, I was interviewing for a job in New Jersey: Radical Chic & Mau Mau-ing the Flak Catchers. My room at No. 2 Brewer Street in Oxford in 1980, when, now a graduate student in England, I was feeling intensely homesick for my own country: The Right Stuff. The bookstore near the corner of Seventeenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. in 1984, when, a White House speechwriter, I had read all the government memos I could stand for one day and slipped out of my office in the Old Executive Office Building in the middle of the afternoon: the first installment, in “Rolling Stone,” of Bonfire of the Vanities. Tom Wolfe’s prose wasn’t just prose. It was an event. I can recall where I was when I read each new work by Wolfe just as clearly as I can recall where I was when men landed on the moon or the Berlin Wall came down.

When a friend introduced me to him years later—by then I was at the Hoover Institution, and he spent several long stays at Stanford, researching university life for the novel that became I Am Charlotte Simmons—I learned that the man who wrote prose in the style of “machine gun rococo” (Joseph Epstein’s phrase) proved understated. A gentleman of a particular kind, a southern gentleman, as quiet and kind and wry as if he had never left Richmond, Virginia, the city in which he had grown up. When I drove him back to Stanford after our meal, Tom sat in the car for awhile, chatting. He had read my first book, my memoir of business school, Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA. “You’re a writer, you know,” Tom said. He might as well have pinned me with a medal.

A word about this video.

When the Blue Yeti got in touch to arrange the shoot, Tom hesitated. Not long before, he explained, a television crew had damaged a piece of furniture—Tom lived in a beautiful apartment in a classic, pre-war building between Fifth and Madison. Infuriated, Tom’s wife, Sheila, had declared that she would never permit a crew in her home again. Then Tom turned conspiratorial. Checking the calendar, he found a morning when Sheila would be at the dentist’s. When the Blue Yeti assured Tom that the crew would arrive after Sheila had left and depart before she returned, Tom made it a date.

It almost worked. Tom welcomed us to an otherwise empty apartment—he had even ensured that the housekeeper would be out. The crew set up and we recorded the interview. But before the crew had finished breaking down the equipment Sheila returned, a good twenty minutes early. While the Blue Yeti and the crew went into double-quick mode, packing up as fast as they could, I lamely attempted to distract a cross Mrs. Wolfe with small talk. Sweetly amused, Tom hung back, doing what he always did: taking it all in.

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  1. Quake Voter Inactive
    Quake Voter
    @QuakeVoter

    Hoyacon (View Comment):

    Plug: Back to Blood, Wolfe’s last novel, garnered mixed reviews, for whatever that’s worth. For anyone who is familiar with, or is a fan of, Miami (as I am), it’s a worthy endeavor–and most certainly for those who do audio books.

    The book is basically a series of interwoven, extended character portraits set in the city, and the audio narration by Lou Diamond Phillips is IMO superb (likely the best I’ve heard in an audio book), Phillips captures Wolfe’s staccato prose perfectly and adds a dimension perhaps missing on the printed page. Worth the time for Wolfe fans.

    Agree wholeheartedly.  Critics who dismissed Back to Blood for being over the top just don’t get Miami.

    Yet somehow an 80 year old Upper East Side grandee does.

    Conservative novelists get grudging reviews for their masterpieces and maligned for everything else.

    Helprin’s Paris in the Present Tense suffers from the same literary establishment brush off.

    Phillips is right up there with Michael York and Lindsay Duncan in my book.

     

    • #31
  2. Cosmik Phred Member
    Cosmik Phred
    @CosmikPhred

    I wrote my 11th college prep English term paper on The Right Stuff. My English teacher, Miss Burns, was not so thrilled by my choice of literature.

    In any event, it led to weeks of marinating in his history, works, and impact. And most importantly, a lifetime love of his humor, prose and laser-focused observations.

    He will be missed.

    • #32
  3. Drusus Inactive
    Drusus
    @Drusus

    Quake Voter (View Comment):

    Drusus (View Comment):

    Quake Voter (View Comment):

    A sad question: do any conservatives under 40 read Tom Wolfe?

    Is politics downstream of culture? I guess we mean pop culture or twitter culture.

    At the end of the latest Commentary podcast, after a thoughtful and passionate discussion of the left’s insanity over Gaza, JPod called an audible and substituted Tom Wolfe’s death as the last item.

    The bright young men at Commentary — and they are exceedingly bright — had nothing to say.

    Podhoretz stepped up with a smart, nuanced, politically astute and almost philosophical retrospective.

    Thank you John.

    But what does it say about conservative culture when Rothman, Greenwald and Ahmari have nothing to say about the greatest and grandest conservative writer of the past half century?

    Let’s be frank, the world of conservative American fiction isn’t that vast. Percy, Helprin, Wolfe, McCarthy, Dos Passos and Bellow.

    Quit Twitter and hit the books boys!

    I’m 34 and a high school drama teacher. I’ve read Tom Wolfe. In fact, when I read I am Charlotte Simmons the year after it came out, I had to set it aside for a few months. It’s realism was so ridiculously painful that I couldn’t continue until I had taken a break. When I finished it, it was an absolute gut-punch. Shocking that a man in his 70’s could have exposed my generation wriggling on a pin in that manner.

    I wouldn’t take the Commentary young folks as examples. They are serious foreign policy wonks, and I’m a literary nerd. They’ve read extensively where I have not, and vice versa.

    They are senior editors of one of the foremost journals of conservative ideas, not Foreign Policy.

    You think a thirty year old Norman Podhoretz or Irving Kristol ever said, “Well I’ve never read any Bellow, but …”

    If politics is downstream of culture, and our brightest conservative yuggins are more conversant with Marvel and the next Battlestar Gallactica reboot than Tom Wolfe, we’ve got a problem.

    I agree with half of what you said, and disagree with the other half. I’ve got some time tomorrow, maybe I’ll write a post about it, since thinking about it is generating ideas. 
     

    • #33
  4. Michael S. Malone Member
    Michael S. Malone
    @MichaelSMalone

    Drusus (View Comment):

    Quake Voter (View Comment):

    Drusus (View Comment):

    Quake Voter (View Comment):

    A sad question: do any conservatives under 40 read Tom Wolfe?

    Is politics downstream of culture? I guess we mean pop culture or twitter culture.

    At the end of the latest Commentary podcast, after a thoughtful and passionate discussion of the left’s insanity over Gaza, JPod called an audible and substituted Tom Wolfe’s death as the last item.

    The bright young men at Commentary — and they are exceedingly bright — had nothing to say.

    Podhoretz stepped up with a smart, nuanced, politically astute and almost philosophical retrospective.

    Thank you John.

    But what does it say about conservative culture when Rothman, Greenwald and Ahmari have nothing to say about the greatest and grandest conservative writer of the past half century?

    Let’s be frank, the world of conservative American fiction isn’t that vast. Percy, Helprin, Wolfe, McCarthy, Dos Passos and Bellow.

    Quit Twitter and hit the books boys!

    I’m 34 and a high school drama teacher. I’ve read Tom Wolfe. In fact, when I read I am Charlotte Simmons the year after it came out, I had to set it aside for a few months. It’s realism was so ridiculously painful that I couldn’t continue until I had taken a break. When I finished it, it was an absolute gut-punch. Shocking that a man in his 70’s could have exposed my generation wriggling on a pin in that manner.

    I wouldn’t take the Commentary young folks as examples. They are serious foreign policy wonks, and I’m a literary nerd. They’ve read extensively where I have not, and vice versa.

    They are senior editors of one of the foremost journals of conservative ideas, not Foreign Policy.

    You think a thirty year old Norman Podhoretz or Irving Kristol ever said, “Well I’ve never read any Bellow, but …”

    If politics is downstream of culture, and our brightest conservative yuggins are more conversant with Marvel and the next Battlestar Gallactica reboot than Tom Wolfe, we’ve got a problem.

    I agree with half of what you said, and disagree with the other half. I’ve got some time tomorrow, maybe I’ll write a post about it, since thinking about it is generating ideas.

    Don’t forget J.P. Marquand.  He always gets overlooked.  Point of No Return is a great American novel.

    • #34
  5. Jim Kearney Member
    Jim Kearney
    @JimKearney

    Phil Turmel (View Comment):

    Interesting. Not knowing his work, nor recalling having him recommended, I’ve not read a word of his. And had no idea he is considered a great conservative writer.

    Guess I’ll have to get started.

    FWIW, I’m 51 yo.

    You’ll have no trouble finding well-know masterpieces like Bonfire of the Vanities, The Right Stuff, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, etc. etc. 

    Here are some personal favorites …

    In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”  (Harper’s, 1989) Tom rebukes fiction writers, literary academics, etc. about their fixation on navel gazing novels, when they could be out researching like reporters in the tradition of great social fiction. 

    Radical Chic (New York Magazine, 1970) is his most famously iconic bit of reportage. Just replace the Black Panthers and Leonard Bernstein with Black Lives Matter and George Soros to see who’s paying for history to repeat its dumbest mistakes. The published companion piece, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, was also ahead of its time, zapping the nascent but already corrupt poverty bureaucracy.

    In “Hooking Up” (2001) the man who dubbed the 1970’s “The Me Generation” came up with a prescient take on the “lurid carnival” of fin-de-millennium debauchery.

    Wolfe didn’t just write great books, he also wrote himself great speeches. Cities of Ambition covers the interwoven relationships between high status lunches, the art scene, and real estate values in New York.

    Wolfe’s piece on Marshall McLuhan, … what if he is right? (1965) is Tom taking his own medium, the printed word, into acoustic space to expand his messaging. Later he did this McLuhan Introductory Video to decode the thoughts of the 20th century’s prophetic thinker about media.

    Tom Wolfe is being handsomely eulogized across ideological boundaries. Scribes see him as one of their own who made good. James Rosen reminded us of Wolfe’s days as an ink-stained wretch, reporting for the Washington Post.  

    An engaging Wolfe overview remembrance is The Lexicon of Tom Wolfe. (The Atlantic) Between his novels Wolfe kept writing for the sophisticated liberal magazines (e.g. Vanity Fair) which were otherwise turning less and less hospitable to contrarian thought. His name on the cover meant sales, to be sure. Somehow technique transcended theme. His bemused social vision took the edge off the implicit politics. Liberals just can’t resist irony.

    One wishes The New York Herald Tribune, the conservative paper which really launched Wolfe and “The New Journalism,” were still around to celebrate him. Closely attuned to the resonances of popular culture and social status, Tom Wolfe is a role model for anyone who’d like to create or enable a broadly entertaining kind of “right stuff.”

     

     

    • #35
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