Every person on this earth has a great story to tell.
Pioneer of the New Journalism
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr. was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. His family had deep roots in the region, and though they were far from wealthy, placed a high value on education. His father was an agricultural scientist, and his mother was in her first year of medical school when she dropped out to have her first child.
As a boy, Tom Wolfe was an avid reader, and early in life he formed an ambition to become a professional writer. He has always written under the short form of his name, and is not related to the American novelist Thomas Wolfe, who died in 1938. Tom Wolfe graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1951 and earned a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale University. His doctorate was granted in 1957; by then, he was already working as a general assignment reporter at theSpringfield Union newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts.
By 1960 Wolfe was a Latin American correspondent for theWashington Post. He earned the Newspaper Guild’s foreign news prize for his coverage of the Cuban revolution. In 1962, Wolfe signed on with theNew York Herald Tribune. With reporter Jimmy Breslin, he was one of two staff writers assigned to the paper’s Sunday supplement, which later becameNew York magazine.
During the New York newspaper strike of 1962-63, Wolfe proposed an article on the Southern California hot rod and custom car culture to the editors ofEsquire magazine. When he found himself stumped for an angle, his editor suggested he send him his notes as a starting point for discussion. Wolfe replied with a long, spontaneous letter, dispensing with traditional journalistic conventions and describing the whole scene in a vivid, personal voice. The editor deleted the salutation and ran the rest of the letter verbatim. The essay was one of the first examples of what came to be known as “New Journalism.” Wolfe had invented a distinctive exclamatory style, replete with pitch-perfect mimicry, rhythmic repetitions and transcribed sound effects to capture the manic energy and day-glo pop art colors of the era. In “The Last American Hero,” a 1964Esquire article on stock car racing driver Junior Johnson, Wolfe introduced the term “good ol’ boy” for the first time to the general public outside the South. It was the first of many catchphrases that Wolfe would either popularize or coin outright.
These and other essays were collected in the book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, which became an instant bestseller. Wolfe was now the most talked-about young journalist in America, and his time as a daily newspaper reporter was over. He traveled the country, recording the dramatic changes in lifestyle taking place in America in the 1960s; his essays appeared regularly inEsquire,New York andHarper’s. In 1968, two new Tom Wolfe books were published on a single day.The Pump House Gang was a new collection of essays, whileThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was a novelistic account of the counterculture, centering on a coast-to-coast bus trip with author Ken Kesey and his band of psychedelic adventurers known as the Merry Pranksters.
Wolfe’s 1970 book,Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, provoked controversy with its ridicule of politics-as-fashion among the New York celebrity set, and its portrayal of street-wise hustlers manipulating government anti-poverty programs. By now, Wolfe was becoming a celebrity himself; his trademark white suit made him one of the most recognizable figures on the literary scene. He continued to provoke the assumptions of fashionable elites withThe Painted Word (1975), a challenge to the critical assumptions of the modern art world.
The following year saw the publication of another collection of essays,Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter & Vine, which included a celebrated essay, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” Wolfe’s coinage, “the Me decade,” was soon transformed into “the Me generation” in popular parlance.
For six years, Wolfe researched a book on the beginnings of the American space program and the subculture of military test pilots that preceded it. The Right Stuff, published in 1979, was a sensation. It returned test pilot extraordinaire Chuck Yeager from obscurity to national prominence and contributed a new set of phrases to the popular vocabulary, including “pushing the envelope” and the book’s title itself.
For years, Wolfe had made satirical drawings to illustrate his work; a selection of these appeared in his first book as “Metropolitan Sketchbook.” Since 1977, he had drawn a monthly illustrated feature inHarper’s magazine. The drawings were collected in a 1980 book,In Our Time.
The Right Stuff had brought Wolfe a whole new audience, but he was not done ruffling the feathers of the critical establishment.From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) was a full frontal assault on the critical orthodoxy of modern architecture. Having had his say on critical fashions in art and architecture, Wolfe called the literary world to account for its absorption in formal experimentation and the minutiae of undramatic lives, and for its relative neglect of the larger society’s public dramas.
Wolfe had long dreamed of writing a big novel of contemporary life; he now set out to do so in the most public way possible. Like the great novelists of the 19th century, he would publish his work in serial form, one chapter at a time as he wrote them. Throughout 1984 and 1985, a new chapter of Wolfe’s tale appeared inRolling Stone magazine every two weeks. Although his critics conceded that the individual chapters were entertaining, they insisted that a work written in this fashion would never hold together when assembled between hard covers. Wolfe gave himself time to prepare the work for publication.
WhenThe Bonfire of the Vanities finally appeared in book form in 1987, it was his greatest success to date. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, and sold millions of copies. Its portrayal of New York’s “money culture” of the 1980s has made it a touchstone of the era. Wolfe was paid a record-setting $5 million for the movie rights.
Wolfe’s next novel,A Man in Full (1998), was a hugely ambitious panorama of American life at the turn of the 21st century. It outsold evenThe Bonfire of the Vanities in hardcover. A collection of essays and short fiction,Hooking Up, appeared in 2000, and included the novella “Ambush at Fort Bragg,” previously serialized inRolling Stone.
Tom Wolfe’s third novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, was published in 2004. In his 70s at the time, Wolfe set himself the difficult task of anatomizing the sexual mores of American college students. The result was simultaneously sobering and hilarious. In his last book,The Kingdom of Speech (2016), Wolfe challenged a prominent school of linguistic theory and proposed that the faculty of speech, rather than natural selection, has been the driving force of human development. In 2017, it was announced that Leonardo DiCaprio plans to produce a dramatic miniseries based on Wolfe’s The Right Stuff for the National Geographic channel. Tom Wolfe died in Manhattan at the age of 88.
- Date of Birth
- March 2, 1931
- Date of Death
- May 14, 2018
Tom Wolfe was already a bestselling author of nonfiction when he took modern American novelists to task in print for failing to mine the riches of the life around them. His critics claimed that the kind of social novel he proposed in his essay, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” was no longer possible, but Wolfe proved them wrong with his own first work of fiction,The Bonfire of the Vanities. A runaway bestseller, it is now recognized as the classic literary account of New York City in the boom years of the 1980s.
The foremost pioneer of the New Journalism, Wolfe revolutionized American writing in the 1960s, documenting the emerging counterculture in books and essays such asThe Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby andThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At the end of the ’70s, he staked new ground with his provocative critiques of modern art and architecture:The Painted Word andFrom Bauhaus to Our House. InThe Right Stuff, he brought to life the untold story of America’s first astronauts and made a national hero of test pilot Chuck Yeager.
Wolfe continued to document the ever-changing manners and mores of American society in his novels, including the bestsellerA Man in Full and I Am Charlotte Simmons, an exploration of contemporary university life. Readers snapped his books off the shelves, and critics hailed him as a unique literary stylist and the premier chronicler of postmodern America.
Pioneer of the New Journalism
In your career, you’ve written fiction that’s very realistic, and nonfiction that employs some of the tools of fiction. How did you come to these hybrid forms?
Tom Wolfe: When I was in college, like almost everybody who was serious about writing and thought they might themselves be writers, I thought that writing was 95 percent genius. You had to write about something, so the other five percent was just this clay that you fooled around with. That’s why I think there are so many terrific young poets, because poetry is the music of literature. Just playing with words can do just marvelous things, when it’s used as music. But then you reach a certain age and you realize that the ballgame, in terms of prestige in literature, is not poetry, it’s prose. Whether that’s good or bad, that’s the way things are. And at that point, you find the young writer cannibalizing his life — let’s say he’s 22, 23, 25 — and he writes his first novel. And it may be great too. Everybody’s life has great material. In fact, Emerson said, “Every person on this earth has a great story to tell, if only he can figure out what is his unique experience.” But he didn’t say everyone has two. He said everyone has one. So now the second novel comes along, and that’s when you get this kind of pathetic novel. It’s about a young novelist who had a great critical success with his first book but he really didn’t make any money, and he’s living in this four-story walk-up in the Clinton area of New York, and he doesn’t have a girlfriend, can’t go out to dinner. And this is not really a terrific novel. Nobody really cares about his fate after his great critical success.
The writing programs, where you get the Masters of Fine Art in writing, are always telling people to “write what you know.” And students interpret that to mean your own life. Unless you’re Count Tolstoy, there’s not that much in your own life. I’d be out with a cup if I had to write sheerly what’s based on my own life. But in the 19th century, where there were so many great realistic novelists, they understood you had to go outside of your own life to get new material. Even Dostoevsky, we think of him being such an internal, psychological creative force. When he wanted to write about the student radicals of his era, he went to the archives. And then started going — he’d hear about a meeting of some of these groups, he’d go attend, to just get the material. Dickens was, of course, famous for this. Zola did it just time after time after time, going to a new area of life. He wanted to get all of France into a series of novels, and he pretty well did. He’d go from farming to warfare, to whatever he thought he really hadn’t covered yet.
You yourself didn’t start out writing fiction, but journalism.
Tom Wolfe: I became involved in what eventually was known as “The New Journalism” as soon as I got to New York. I still had in my mind I was going to write a novel. But this New Journalism — which was writing nonfiction using devices of the novel and still being accurate in the journalistic sense — was so exciting; you know, people like Jimmy Breslin and Gay Talese, who were doing it, and many others —that I just wasn’t interested particularly in the novel, until after I’d doneThe Right Stuff, which was nonfiction, and I had written it like a novel. It was the first time in my life I ever had a little cushion of money. And I decided this was a good time— if I ever was to sit down and write a novel, this was the time to do it because I could afford it. Because always, in the back of your mind, those people are saying, “Boy, this nonfiction stuff is the most elaborate writer’s block I’ve ever heard of.” You don’t tackle the big one because you’ve discovered this new thing that’s supposedly better.
So it was at that point that I startedThe Bonfire of the Vanities. And at first it was going to be a novel about New York. It had no real focus. It was going to be based more or less on Thackeray’sVanity Fair. Hence the title,The Bonfire of the Vanities. And I thought I could – I had been a reporter for all those years here in New York, and I thought I could just draw upon my experiences, the things I’d seen, and write this book. And I found I couldn’t. For the way I wanted to write a novel, I had to go out and do reporting just like the reporting that I did forThe Right Stuff, forTheElectric Kool-Aid Acid Test, or anything else that I had written.
I decided I should have a great party scene — a party of great social wattage in a Fifth Avenue apartment — in this book. And I had been to a number of parties like that. And so I said, “At last. I don’t have to do any research for this.” So I wrote this chapter, and then I read it over, and it was like a gossip column. You know, just “Who’s that person? Who’s that person? What did he say? What did she say?” So the next one I went to, I just shut up. I was just on the receiving end of whatever was going on. And for the first time, I noticed the strained, willfully raucous laughter that goes on at parties like that. People laugh in this frantic manner as if to say, “See! I’m a part of all this, and I know what’s funny, and I’m just having the time of my life because I fit in!” And then I’d notice that the worst fate in the world was not to be in a conversational cluster. And if somebody’s left out, you’d see them studying paintings as if they were very fascinated with art. They’d talk to empty spots on the wall. At last resort, they’ll go up to a wife or a husband and start conversation. But you’ve already lost the game if you’re reduced to doing that. There were so many things that I saw once I was not a participant. I was just there. I noticed that, at that time — and we’re talking about the 1980s — in an apartment of great social wattage, there was never modern lighting. There were no downlighters, which is essentially industrial lighting. It was always some time in the 19th century. Everything’s overstuffed. There are these sort of small amber lamps that make everybody’s complexion look pretty good. And I just never would have noticed any of this from my own experience. And I discovered that if my radar isn’t on, if I haven’t switched it on, I don’t notice any more than anybody else does.
You have to come outside it to really observe it.
Tom Wolfe: I think you have to listen hard, even if you can’t take notes at the moment. And this is just to write fiction!
What do you think of as the American Dream? ANew York Times reviewer attributed to you a sense of wonder about the American Dream, as evidenced by some of the people you write about inHooking Up. Do you still have a kind of romanticism about that?
Tom Wolfe: I think The American Dream is very much alive. That’s why there’s incredible immigration to this country. And the idea is that no matter where you start out, you have the freedom to reach the height that your ability will enable you to do that. And theNew York Times has just run a long series about class in America. They don’t even realize they’re not talking about class, they’re talking about status. I mean, when they have an article — one of the articles was about some evangelical Christians who somehow have come into money, and they know enough to go to Ivy League colleges, and they’re making inroads at Brown and so forth and so on. That’s class? These people have moved up? That is just sheer status. They’ve improved their status through hard work. And the entire series. Class, to have real class, it was understood in Marx’s day, you almost have to have a land-based economy. People have to be pretty static. And there has to be symbolism. There has to be a sense that in one class you cannot wear — in a lower class you cannot wear what they wear in a higher class. There’s a certain kind of obeisance you have to make to people who are above you. And all that is gone in this country.
You’ll notice that during the ’60s, when there were all the student protests, everything was against the middle class. I never heard a single outcry against the upper class, because there really isn’t any upper class in the European sense. Today, for example, it’s true that if you went to Harvard or Yale yourself, your children have a better chance than the children of somebody who didn’t come out of that background. But it’s far from being a class thing, because even if the family has been three generations at Harvard, let’s say — you really don’t find much of that — you’re not automatically in. They still have to reach a certain threshold in SATs and all the rest of it.
Where are the Astors today? Where are the Vanderbilts? What are they running? The Rockefellers have lasted pretty long. I think they still have a senator. But these families are more like the Chinese rule of “rags to riches to rags” in three generations. There just are not dynasties in this country, except for dynasties like an Enron dynasty that last about seven years.
What was the Virginia of your childhood like?
Tom Wolfe: I’ll tell you how calm it was in the 1930s, when I was growing up. There was a state fair that was just about three-quarters of a mile from where I lived, in an area of Richmond, Virginia, called Sherwood Park. And it was the biggest gathering of human beings annually in the state of Virginia, the state fair. At six in the morning, my mother would give me 12 nickels, and I and one of my elementary school classmates — I guess we were eight, nine, ten years old — would walk through the woods to the state fair. And we’d arrive at 6:30, even before the rides were really getting going, and stay there all day. The 12 nickels would get us through the day. And never was there a thought of this being dangerous. Now, in Richmond, Virginia, today I’m sure, not even in Richmond is that true. Nobody lets children go anywhere unattended. I can remember riding a bicycle way into the night with my friends. I say “way into the night” — 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. We’d be let out of the house in the morning, and the only instruction was to be back for lunch.
And I was not conscious of the Depression, which was hitting Virginia and the whole country very hard. Except occasionally a tramp — that’s a word you never hear anymore — would come to the kitchen door and my mother would give him a sandwich. I don’t remember her ever turning anyone away. And somehow tramps knew. I don’t know how they marked it, but they apparently would mark which houses would give you food. And we were only about three-quarters of a mile from the big north-south railroad tracks. So I’m telling you, this was a completely different era.
What did your parents do?
Tom Wolfe: My father was a scientist — an agricultural scientist, an agronomist, technically. And at the time I was first aware of what he did, he was editing a farm magazine calledThe Southern Planter. He didn’t think of himself as a writer, he was a scientist and he took over this publication, but he gave advice to farmers. But in my mind, he was a writer, because I’d see him at home, sitting at his desk, with his yellow legal pads writing these articles. And then two weeks later — I think the thing came out every two weeks — there they would all be in this pristine, beautiful type.
It’s funny that I can so well remember how things looked. At that age, everything was new. Comic strips were just wonders. They were so different from looking at one when you get older. Anyway, my mother mostly took care of me and my sister, although she had been married — I think it was seven years — and she hadn’t had children, she went to medical school at the University of Richmond. And as soon as she went to medical school and had been there one semester, she started having children. I don’t what the medicine, biology, or anything else had to do with it.
But my father, I can remember the day he made the decision. He went with a classmate of his — they had gone to Virginia Tech — to start a farmers cooperative, which is a set-up in which farms buy things at wholesale price, and any profits are redistributed — literally, in the form of checks — to everyone who bought anything, according to how much they bought. They were a godsend in the ’30s! The first year, I think the gross revenue of that company was about $800,000. And by and by it was a Fortune 500 company, and still getting tax exemptions for being a co-op. My father said — actually said in writing — that they shouldn’t be getting it. That’s what he did.
Were you an avid reader at a young age?
Tom Wolfe: I read all the time. You have to remember, the only alternate entertainment in those days was radio. And people would sit around the radio, I can remember it, just the way they sit around the television set today. There was Jack Benny. Bob Hope had a program. There were the same soap operas in the morning, except we couldn’t see the people. And late in the afternoon, cowboy shows like Tom Mix, and the Green Hornet. It was just like television, but it just happened to be radio.
Did you imagine your own pictures?
Tom Wolfe: Yes. There was one great show calledI Love a Mystery. The action always started at night. You could hear the chimes ring, and you knew it was night, and then all sorts of scary things would take place. But reading was the sort of thing you did in idle hours if you didn’t want to go out and play. I just read constantly. I’m sure if I was that age today, I would be watching as much television as anybody else, but it’s a huge advantage if you ever start writing.
I began to notice, when I was working on magazines years later, I kept looking over my shoulder for the new talent that would be coming along which would be competition for those of us who had reached the ripe age of 37 or 38, and it wasn’t there. It just never got there. And part of it is that today, I think, so many talented writers want to go into television, or they want to go into movie writing. Those are the hot industries. But without that reading, I don’t think anybody’s ever going to turn out to be much of a writer.
Now my daughter Alexandra, who’s 24 now, she went to a very tough all-girls school here in New York. And that school is so hard, she watched exactly one hour of television a week. Not because my wife and I said, “You can’t go near that set.” We never said that. She would watchBeverly Hills 90210. That was the only thing she ever watched on television. She read and read. And now— you don’t mind a father bragging a little, do you? So today she’s 24 and she’s got a book contract. She’s worked on two newspapers. She worked on theNew York Observer, a weekly here in New York, and she was a reporter for theWall Street Journal, and a publishing house approached her and gave her this book contract. And I think it’s partly because she read, she read, she read, she read, she read. It got to the point where she didn’t care about television, didn’t want to get news on the Internet, which is the main way news is distributed these days. Network television’s on the way out. I just read this today. There’s more advertising today on Google and one other search engine than there is on all of network television.
What books did you enjoy reading when you were young?
Tom Wolfe: I loved theWizard of Oz books. There was a whole series of Oz books. But before that, I remember reading tales of King Arthur. I have no idea who wrote that. But it seemed to me it was awfully good. I used to also like to read non-fiction. I can remember readingCount Von Luckner, the Sea Wolf, he was a German submarine commander in the First World War who was apparently a dashing and courageous figure. And the first time I started reading things like novels, I was probably 14 or 15. And my first great discovery, in my mind, was James T. Farrell, who had written the Studs Lonigan books. You don’t hear anything about them much anymore, but the first volume of the three Studs Lonigan books — it’s a trilogy — and the first one, which is calledYoung Lonigan, is so beautifully lyrical. And Farrell is thought of as a kind of plodding naturalist today, if he’s thought of at all. But that was an extraordinary book. And it was about a boy about my age. And it just opened up all sorts of possibilities to me.
At that time, as a teenager, had you already thought of becoming a writer yourself?
Tom Wolfe: Yes I had, from a very early age. I don’t know, six or seven years old. Because of my father. I thought of him as a writer, he thought of himself as a scientist. Interestingly enough, he has more entries in the New York Public Library than I do, because he wrote so many monographs in the field of agronomy. I daresay he did more good for humanity. He did things like discover how you could quadruple, or increase tenfold, the yield of corn. That was one of his specialties. This was back at a time when that was an exciting industry. This country was discovering ways to make American bountiful, in terms of crops. Wheat, corn, all those sort of things.
When word got out that you were interesting in writing, were your parents encouraging?
Tom Wolfe: Yes, they were. You don’t realize how interesting your family is until you get much older and you look back. I remember Thomas Wolfe, my namesake — we’re from the same mountain range and everything, but we’re no kin. But he once said that he grew up thinking he was in the most banal, boring, grind-along family that had ever existed. And he said, “I was 23 or 24 when I first realized I was living with a group of raging lunatics.” You can see this inLook Homeward, Angel. This is a family in turmoil, largely because of the excessive drinking of the father, and the fact that his mother’s turned the house into a boarding house, and there’s a constant flow of boarders who’d come to western North Carolina for the nice air and the cool air in the summertime. My family was anything but raging lunatics, but when I look back at how hard it all was in the middle of the Depression, it was just a horrible time. Particularly when I look back at the emphasis that was completely on education.
My father’s family apparently came to the Shenandoah Valley from somewhere north of there in the early 1700s. And nobody ever made any money that would catch your attention. But for six generations back, there were graduate degrees. My full name is Thomas Kennerly Wolfe. And the first person in the Wolfe family named Thomas Kennerly Wolfe went to the University of Edinburgh to study. Where the money came from, I don’t know. My father’s father was a country doctor who died when my father, I think, was 12. So his mother had five children — three boys, two girls — out of the 10 who had been born. Infant mortality was terrible. And all three of the boys went to graduate school, had higher degrees. One was a lawyer, one was a medical doctor, and my father had a Ph.D. in agronomy. Where that money came from, I don’t know. But I just love the fact that they didn’t care about the money. The thing was, you know, get an education.
Were there teachers that were very important to you?
Tom Wolfe: Yes, there were. In kindergarten, there was a teacher named Miss Shackleford, as I always called her. I honestly cannot remember her first name, although I saw her years later. She took a special interest in me very early, which made me feel very special. Maybe I can really do things with these words, and so on, and ended up combining my kindergarten and first grade into one year. Which I don’t really advocate, because you end up being smaller, a year younger than the people you’re competing with. But anyway, she got me off to a good start.
In high school, there was a course in the sophomore year of high school in rhetoric. And I’m talking about rigorous rhetoric: the use of figures of speech,figura sententiae, and tropes, and all these technical names, and training in the three or four ways that you can arrange a paragraph. I don’t think any of this happens any longer. Parsing sentences, which is a fading art. These diagrams of sentences, so you find out how all the different parts fit together. This was amazingly good training. And then in college, I went to Washington and Lee in Virginia, there was a young professor — it never dawned on me ’til later that he was probably only four or five years older than me — who had come to Washington and Lee from the American Studies program at Yale. That’s where he had gotten his doctorate. And this course was so exciting that I was determined to do what he had done, which was to go to Yale in American Studies, which I did.
What was the name of the course that he taught?
Tom Wolfe: I think that particular course, was called “American Intellectual History.” We went through every branch that might fall under that heading you can think of. Everything from philosophy to architecture to psychology. William James and figures like that. It was tremendously exciting.
So I managed to get into that program at Yale, which turned out to be a terrific choice for somebody who wants to write. A bad choice if you want to — as I was going to do — be a teacher, because there are not that many American Studies departments. And a lot of the people who graduate from that program would end up at the bottom of the heap in somebody’s history department or English department. But it’s absolutely great for writers. I discovered sociology there, which was like a light bulb going on over my head. Like most liberal arts students, I’d always looked down my nose at sociology as this kind of bogus science. When I finally had to deal with it in graduate school, I quickly came to the conclusion, which I maintain to this day, that it is, in fact, the queen of the sciences. I won’t get into this, but biology, in my mind, is a subset of sociology, not the other way around.
Sociology’s sort of the big picture?
Tom Wolfe: Yes. Sociology is the big picture. As I say, I have a long involved theory, but I’ll only inflict that if you really want to know. My first great real flash was reading the work of Max Weber, who wroteThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He wroteClass, Caste and Status, and many others, mostly essays. But he’s the one who originated the concept of status as a motivating force in life. It was one of those things that’s under everybody’s nose, but he gave it a name. The reason I call it “stay-tus” instead of “stat-us,” is that at the Yale graduate school, status had more “stay-tus” if you call it “stay-tus.” And I can’t get that out of my mind now. I still call it “stay-tus.” Maybe somebody from Yale’s listening.
My belief is that everyone, me included — I hate theories that don’t apply to the person who thought up the theory — All people live by what I call “the fiction absolute,” which is a set of values which, if absolute — in other words, God said, “Hey, here are the values,” and you heard the voice clearly — would make not you, yourself, but your group — your status group, whatever that may be comprised of — the best there is. For example, a group of good ol’ boys sitting around a general store in the South, and I’ve been around that a lot, they usually — things can get confused in this era — but they usually are very content to be good ol’ boys. And they’re not only content, but they value that life very, very highly. People who are obviously their superiors — or, in my case,my superiors — military people, politicians, President of the United States, movie stars, whatever — they become types who are really outside of your life. And whatever they’re doing doesn’t matter. Unless they move in the neighborhood, then it creates real problems. It really does. And so that just about everything we do is controlled by that constant need to feel that our status is being kept at a certain level. It doesn’t mean necessarily status climbing. It usually doesn’t mean that. More often it means believing that what you’re doing now, the people you’re with now, the values you have, are the most important.
But you call it a fiction.
Tom Wolfe: Oh, because itis a fiction! How can you really think that? But I do the same thing. Everybody does it. But if you’re really thinking clearly, you can’t really, honestly.
The “fiction absolute,” as you call it, is that a sort of mythology of contemporary life?
Tom Wolfe: No, I think it’s probably been here forever. I’ve swallowed it all very easily: “Well, writing is really important!” But you can get split by a career. On the one hand, I’m thinking that, “Jeez, there’s probably not much else in the world that you can do that’s more important than writing.” At the same time, I am protective of my Southern upbringing. And this leads to something I call “championism,” which is a kind of irrational attachment to certain figures, or certain cultural directions, because somehow that group, that person, in your mind is a champion of what you believe in to maintain your fiction absolute.
So many people’s votes are irrationally determined by championism. I remember, a Samuel Lubbell wrote a book calledThe Future of American Politics. He was a sociologist. He was trying to figure out why Truman had upset Dewey in 1948 — a huge upset. So he went around the country and did a sort of sociological survey. And he entered a town, I think it was in Wisconsin. It was a German town. It had been founded by German Catholics, and it still maintained its German majority. And they, in that election, were voting Republican by an enormous margin. It turned out the reason was Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, had declared war on Germany in 1917, which in turn brought a lot of opprobrium on Germans who were in the United States. And they had never forgotten that that’s what the Democrats had done. It really had nothing to do with the 1948 election. It had to do with something that had happened in 1917. And I think everybody does that. I’ll give you an example in my own case.
Right after 9/11, both Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, independently — I don’t think they got together — and came out almost the day after it and said the depravity and sinfulness of the American people, and their lack of contact with God, is what brought this on, that’s why it happened. And of course, it was around the bend. But this tirade of disparagement was directed against these two men: Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. And I found myself saying, “Hey, wait a minute! I know those people!” Pat Robertson, incidentally, went to Washington and Lee, the same place I went. His father had been a U.S. Senator. And, you know, he’s far from being stupid. I couldn’t agree for a second with what he was saying, but I found myself defending him. Jerry Falwell was just maybe 75 miles down the road from Washington and Lee, in Lynchburg, Virginia. And he was one of my people. “You don’t go around saying that these people are idiots, or morons!” It was totally irrational. I couldn’t agree with a thing they said, but it’s championism. And it’s all part of the fiction absolute that I’m talking about. And I can sit here and call it a fiction absolute, and yet my life operates by it. I think everybody’s does. That’s what has gotten me interested in neuroscience.
Another example, when I was working at theSpringfield Union, in Massachusetts, I came across the names of Italian American women, all from the Third Ward in Springfield, who were getting naturalized at age 61, 62, maybe 63. I couldn’t understand this. And so I went to the Third Ward, and it turned out that part of the Third Ward was like a preserved, authentic Italian village. And the people in that small part of the ward didn’t want to change a thing. I mean, they were quite happy to live in the old ways, and were not at all corrupted by the world around them. They didn’t want to be American citizens, or it wasn’t important to them, unless you wanted Social Security. At that point, you get naturalized. But I thought it was such a good example of status, in the sense of wanting to maintain exactly what you’ve got.
I should throw this in, another great example of championism. There’s a documentary movie you may have seen, calledWhen We Were Kings. It’s deservedly become very popular, as documentaries go. It concerned the fight that Muhammad Ali had against George Foreman in Zaire, the so-called “Rumble in the Jungle.” Nobody in print picked up the fact that to Africans — at least certainly in Zaire — Ali was their champion. Not just a boxing champion, he was their champion. And they presumed that his fight against George Foreman was Armageddon. It was black against white. And when Foreman stepped off the plane and he was black, they couldn’t believe it. That all comes out in the movie. It’s just a marvelous touch. Ali goes touring around Zaire, and they’ll go, “Ali Boom-ba-bay!” Apparently this meant, “Long live Ali!” He loved all that. And they wanted to love him.
How did this lead you to neuroscience?
Tom Wolfe: When I hit upon the whole concept of status and status absolute and all that, I was convinced that there is a part of the brain that controls this. For example, you can tell when you’re humiliated before you could put it into words. Something goes off. And you haven’t reasoned it all out. It’s just happened. And this has to be neurological in some way. Well, I must confess, I’ve never found this area, although I’m an avid neuroscience buff now. I subscribe to two newsletters, they give you week-by-week developments in neuroscience in language that I can understand. I go to neuroscience conferences. And the field has just become enormous. The annual meetings of the American Society for Neuroscience are among the biggest in the country now.
In your most recent novel there’s a description of a science experiment. At first it seems like nonfiction. It takes the reader awhile to realize it’s fictional.
Tom Wolfe: That’s right, and it’s one that I think metaphorically is quite accurate. Only I gave my man the Nobel Prize for it. I don’t expect to get that one. I made it an integral part of that novel. I’ll give you very quickly the premise of neuroscience. There are two quick examples. Edward O. Wilson is probably the dominant theorist in neuroscience today. He once said in an interview — he probably would never write this as clearly — he said every human brain is born, not as a blank slate waiting to be filled in by experience, but as a negative — as in the film, negative in a camera — that is waiting to be dipped into developer fluid. And the idea is, it can be developed well, it can be developed badly, according to the environment. But no matter how it’s developed, you’re not going to get any more than is on that negative at birth. Which, of course, gets into the whole theory of genetics and things like hard-wiring of the brain and so on.
Is Wilson active today?
Tom Wolfe: Yes, he’s at Harvard. His field is actually zoology. He’s the great expert on ants. He invented the term “sociobiology,” which is a combination of the social factors, whether it’s among ants, or macaque monkeys. As we know, there’s lots pecking order among animals, the pecking order among chickens. There is this interaction of status and genetics.
Before it hops out of my mind again, I’ll give you the other example from neuroscience. I do not know who first said this, but one of the principles of neuroscience is that if you took a rock and you threw it, and in mid-flight of that rock you gave it consciousness and the power to reason, that rock would give you, until the day it hit the earth, the most cogent and absolutely ironclad logic as to why he’s going in this direction, and why he hasn’t chosen another direction, and why he’s happy with his choice. Young neuroscientists in particular believe we’re machines, and according to which other machines we run into, we act in a predictable way. And they feel if they had enough computer power — so-called “parallel computers” — that they could predict what you’re going to do five seconds from now. They could predict that you’re going to suddenly hit your forehead with the tips of your fingers five seconds from now. That’s how sure they are about this kind of determination that goes on.
That’s a little bleak, isn’t it?
Tom Wolfe: It is. It actually is bleak. I already see people believing in what I call “the lurking force.” The whole 20th century has trained us to think that things happen because of “the lurking force.” For example, Marxism, which had a huge influence on the 20th century. The theory says that the class you’re born into is your destiny. In other words, you were born into this certain class, and the forces that come from that have shaped your life. You don’t have any choice. Freudianism, which was so powerful as a way of thinking about human behavior in the 20th century, holds that your destiny is an Oedipal battle that took place in your family when you were between the ages of three and six and were totally unaware of anything that was going on in any large sense. So these are both external theories.
Then there are many other theories, that were never quite individually as powerful, that say society shapes you in a certain way. Theodore Dalrymple, the prison psychiatrist, tells of how he was questioning a prisoner for psychiatric treatment, and asked him — he was in for 18 years for aggravated manslaughter — “How did this come about that you killed this man?” And the prisoner says, “Well, we were at this table. We were having a few drinks. We got into an argument. And the next thing I know, he’s standing up and he’s got his fists clenched, and I think he’s gonna hit me. So I stood up and I pulled out my knife. And then we yelled at each other some more, and things got worse. And I don’t know, and then the knife went in.” Believing, of course he’d read it, that if you had a chaotic childhood, and you were in the wrong end of society, these forces impel you to stick knives in people’s midsections. This is part of it.
And now neuroscience has made the threat seem even worse. If your genetic makeup at birth is determining so many things, I think it causes people to kind of give up on their children. “He wasn’t born a student. Why knock my brains out trying to make him into something he isn’t?” When most people just need a counselor who’ll kick him in the slats every now and then when the motivation drops. But I think it’s enervating to be constantly told that there’s a lurking force that is determining your life.
I’m so sorry that we have to stop. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.
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