Tom Wolfe, American Social Critic?—and Me

March 2 this year would have been the 93nd birthday of author Tom Wolfe, who was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1930 and died in New York City in 2018 at the age of 88. The New York Times once called him the Great Gadfly.

I became a fan of Tom Wolfe, who is not to be confused with the much more staid novelist Thomas Wolfe—who wrote a generation before him—when, at the age of 32, I was an older than average undergraduate divorced mother of two children under the age of six, and I was finishing up a double major studying writing and art at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s. I read everything Tom Wolfe wrote. He first became famous for writing outrageously prolix articles that used the techniques of fiction along with a lot of hyperbole and excessive exclamation marks to bring to vivid life various odd sub-cultures in American life, such as the custom car culture in Southern California in an essay titled, "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” and the bohemian proto-hippy culture that clustered around writer Ken Kesey (in the book “The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test).

Tom Wolfe’s Critiques of Modern Art and Architecture

But what I liked most were Tom Wolfe’s cultural critiques. I was hooked when I read his book The Painted Word (1975), in which he skewered the modern art world and its many absurdisms.

Wolfe wrote about the sham process by which art becomes "serious" in the mind of the art establishment. He satirized the process by which art by an unknown artist becomes praised, and he compared the art business to the fashion business, where hemlines go up and down depending on what the designers say is "in" on any one year.

“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.”—The Painted Word

“He maps the social history of modern art — from its revolutionary origins of abstract expressionism that protested the literary content in art — to its [then] current state which, he believes, has become a parody of itself."—Publisher's blurb.

After piling up examples of earlier art techniques and the schools that abandoned them, Wolfe topped the argument off with his conception of the real achievement of Conceptual Art:

"…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representation objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. …Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until… it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture… and came out the other side as Art Theory!… Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision… late twentieth-century Modern Art was about to fulfill its destiny, which was: to become nothing less than Literature pure and simple.”

Hence the aptness of the title.

Above: The original dust cover of the hardback edition shows Wolfe in his trademark white suit on the back. The front cover shows a fanciful but quasi-literal illustration of the title, with the words in primary colors looking as if they’ve been poorly silk screened onto a sheet of paper coming out of a cartoon typewriter on a cracked sidewalk. The cartoon typewriter has an angry grimacing face with typewriter keys for teeth.

The second cover design includes a great Norman Rockwell painting that shows an impeccably dressed middle aged man in a pale blue suit with his hands behind his back standing in front of a large framed painting made of drips and dribbles of paint, obviously a Jackson Pollock. Rockwell did the painting first using Pollock’s method of dribbling paint over the painting surface lying flat on the ground, then he superimposed the figure of the man on top, before completing the piece. One of the man’s hands wears a white glove, the other is bare, and both hands clasped together hold a white hat, a second glove, the curved wooden handle of a tightly furled umbrella, and what looks like it might be a gallery program. Some read the man’s stance as appreciative. I read it as contained befuddlement. What do you think?

Here is what Tom Wolfe thought. When he was asked in an interview with C.F. Payne of the Illustrators' Partnership about Norman Rockwell, Wolfe replied,

“Remember the one he did of the man in the CEO's suit looking at a Pollock, which of course Rockwell had painted just to show he, having great skill, could do Pollock better than Pollock. It was brilliantly done and a brilliant idea. . . . Another example, almost like Rockwell, is Tissot, who was written off through most of the twentieth century as this French illustrator who happened to do big paintings. Now his work is selling [for] two, three, four million dollars each because the skill is overwhelming. Finally, there can be only so much resistance to someone that good. I don't know if you are aware of his work. Some of the things he did are breathtaking. He created what I think of as super-perspective in which you are on a ship's deck that fills up the foreground of the picture, and you look carefully, there in the deepest imaginable distance is a ship that is about as long as a gnat in true perspective out on the sea somewhere. He really is fun. . . . In the long run, talent and skill will win out. Rockwell is a perfect illustration, if you'll excuse the word.”

In my estimation, Wolfe also did the world another great service later (in 1981) by pointing out the pernicious effect the Bauhaus movement had on architecture in his book From Bauhaus to Our House. The Bauhaus movement pronounced anathema on any architectural attempts at beauty in the form of “applied ornamentation.” Wolfe pointed out that this avidly held and indiscriminately applied theory was driving architecture the way he showed similar theories were driving art, making buildings similarly uninspiring and unattractive to the people who have to live and work in them, similar to how art had become inexplicable and unattractive to the people who have to look at it.

“The architecture world—like an art world dominated by critics, and a literature world dominated by creative writing programs—was producing buildings that nobody liked. Many architects, in Wolfe's opinion, had no particular goal but to be the most avant-garde.”—From a review of Bauhaus to Our House at Art and Popular Culture

Meeting the Man in the Suit, in North Dakota, Of All Places

When I met Tom Wolfe at a writers' conference at University of Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1977, I told him I was a great admirer of the kind of writing that he practiced and perhaps invented, which he called New Journalism.

In an essay published in 2007, Tom Wolfe wrote about the techniques of fiction that he brought into his New Journalistic writing, long after he had turned to writing books of social criticism and novels,

“There are exactly four technical devices needed to get to ‘the emotional core of the story.’” These devices “‘give fiction its absorbing or gripping quality, . .. make the reader feel present in the scene described and even inside the skin of a particular character.” They include constructed scenes, dialogue, carefully noted details of social status—"everything from dress and furniture to the infinite status clues of speech, how one talks to superiors or inferiors ... and with what sort of accent and vocabulary" and point of view "in the Henry Jamesian sense of putting the reader inside the mind of someone other than the writer."

I now think that the way that fictional techniques are often used since then in non-fiction give the author a bit too much free range to make things up, but I have to say that the way Wolfe used them made for some devilishly funny and rollicking good reading.

Also featured at that conference where I met Tom Wolfe was Alan Ginsburg, who I was glad to see again, a decade after I'd hung around with his entourage in Harvard Square one week in 1964 when he was in Cambridge for a poetry reading at Harvard, and who I had met again where he lived in the Lower East Side when I lived in the summer of 1966.

And Ken Kesey was there too, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, whose travels with a bunch of stoned friends in a psychedelic painted bus Wolfe wrote about in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

Ken Kesey in 1974-Wikimedia commons, public domain image

While possibly delusional Ken Kesey was sitting at the kitchen table in some professor’s home at an after-reading party asking some adulating undergrads if they could score him a tank of nitrous oxide—which was an impossible thing to try to scavenge late on a Saturday night—Wolfe and I had a brief quiet conversation in the dining room as we stood among a more staid segment of the partying crowd. Wolfe was wearing one of the counter-cultural-straight-man painstakingly tailored pastel suits he always wore, even in the midst of the 70s, even when he was researching The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test with the tie-dyed, fringed, long-haired bell-bottom-jeans-wearing freaks on that psychedelic bus.

All the pundits said Wolf was the epitome of style. I'd say that he was the epitome of out-of-style, wearing wide lapeled suits, wide collared shirts, and wide ties when everyone else wore narrow—if they even wore suits or shirts with collars, at a time when wearing suits was considered square and was just not done. The night I met him, I was surprised that the wide-lapeled suit he wore was pale yellow. He is still renowned for his white suits. It goes without saying that men usually don’t wear pale yellow suits at all, then or now. I fingered his lapel thoughtfully, to check the quality of the fabric, since I read where he’d written about how much he was into well-tailored fine fabrics, decided the material was linen, noticed his pocket handkerchief was made of silk, and then I told him I wanted to be a famous writer. And he said without a pause, You will be. For no apparent reason at all.

Wolfe was one of a kind. His writing blazed with bizarre extremely effusive descriptions, sparing no adjectives and no outrageous comparisons.

“I make out a schoolbus...glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Léger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of day-glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it.”― The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Following Wolfe’s Example into American Studies

When I finished my B.A. with a double major in English and Studio Arts: Drawing and Painting, my skill set didn’t match up with any job openings that would pay enough for me to support myself and my children, which I needed to do, since my ex-husband wasn’t paying alimony, and I was going to have to be the breadwinner. I thought I’d study writing some more and keep scrambling for openings for classes I could teach to get by. I was encouraged because I had already won a short story contest in a Minnesota Daily competition and another story of mine placed fifth in a Playgirl Magazine college writing contest (ironically, I thought, since my story didn’t have a bit of sex in it). I couldn’t afford to move the three of us to Iowa to enroll in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, so I decided to pursue an M.A. English: emphasis in writing right where I was, at the University of Minnesota Minneapolis. . .. Or was it an M.A. English: emphasis on writing? I forget. I actually never was sure. I reasoned that taking the courses would force me to write, and if before I completed the M.A. I could manage to sell a story for a significant amount of cash—I was dreaming of a New Yorker sale, where they paid the then-munificent amount of $5,000 for a story—I would try to make a career of it.

As it turned out, I didn’t make the longed-for big sale by the time I finished the M.A., so I started work on a Ph.D. in American Studies, partly because I knew Tom Wolfe had gotten a Ph.D. in American Studies, his from Yale. And also because after you are accustomed to academic life, the world outside is hard to re-enter. I escaped the Ph.D. program after about a year to take a job as a technical writer in the booming computer field. But that’s a whole other story.

Winding Down

I want to wind down by sharing this Tom Wolfe quote about his experience in American Studies graduate school, because it is a quite funny and also because it illustrates more of the break-neck pace and exaggerations that defined his unique"new journalistic" style.

"Half the people I knew in graduate school were going to write a novel about it. I thought about it myself. No one ever wrote such a book, as far as I know. ... Such a novel would be a study of frustration, but a form of frustration so exquisite, so ineffable, nobody could describe it. Try to imagine the worst part of the worst Antonioni movie you ever saw, or reading Mr. Sammler's Planet at one sitting, or just reading it, or being locked inside a Seaboard Railroad roomette, sixteen miles from Gainesville, Florida, heading north on the Miami-to-New York run, with no water and the radiator turning red in an amok psychotic over boil, and George McGovern sitting beside you telling you his philosophy of government. That will give you the general atmosphere."

Still later I came across a bit of information that makes it clear in a way I’d never realized before that much of Tom Wolfe's writing actually could be seen as American Studies writ large in a flamboyantly exaggerated style. In an interview with William F. Buckley on Firing Line, Wolfe said this revealing throw away line, "I'm only a social historian."