R.I.P. Tom Wolfe

As W.B. Yeats wrote of Jonathan Swift: “Imitate him if you dare.”

Tom Wolfe was one of the most imitated of American writers, with his combination of reportage, gossip and sudden flashes of insight about the sea-change in American culture post WWII (the rise of the teenager, pop art, the lower-classes as Tastemakers as opposed to the other way around, the various rise of sub-cultures including car culture, gambling culture, New York art culture, etc.) He helped create a new wave of writers, all of whom tried to locate the source of the upheaval they sensed around them.

Sometimes Wolfe is so hip you can’t tell what is sincere and what he is lampooning. (Which is part of his point.) I mean, the man dressed in a white suit and a white hat. Was he putting us on? Was he for real? What is he up to??

Sometimes he could be hard to take. Other times he was laugh-out-loud funny. Sometimes he was hard to take and laugh-out-loud funny simultaneously. He was an obsessive, circling around and around and around his themes and observations. At the time, what he was doing was akin to what William Hazlitt did in the 18th century, when he wrote about boxers and circuses and theatre, and it was seen as a scandal that an important intellectual would waste his time detailing the enjoyments of the lumpen proletariat. Boxing, for God’s sake? That is what Tom Wolfe did in his first major piece “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” a massive 50,000 word essay on a custom car show he attended in the early 1960s. He saw that something was happening, something seismic, a “something” no one was paying attention to. He saw that these so-called mechanics who created souped-up tailfinned cars were artists, as creative, as radical as Mondrian and Paul Klee and etc. and etc. And yet the New York art world would never, in a trillion years, consider a tail-finned tangerine-colored car a work of art. Tom Wolfe said, in 50,000 words, not so fast.

He wrote about stock-car racing, the rise of NASCAR and the Indy 500 – again, a sub-culture nobody “in the know” in journalism would take seriously enough to investigate, although it entertained millions of people. (It reminds me of Don Draper in Mad Men, encountering the car-culture guys out in California, who all seem to be “real men,” unlike his slick city-slicker helpless self.) Of course Wolfe then moved on to detail Ken Kesey’s merry brand of acid trippers, the Space Program, and the cataclysmic clash of race and class in New York City. His books were always events. There’s a white-hot conservative streak in Tom Wolfe’s outlook, but it’s a streak is sparked with humor, irony, appreciation. He’s not a scold. He is one of those rare observers who can sense “what is going on” AS it is ‘going on’.

I picked up with the Tom Wolfe train in the Bonfire of the Vanities era – a book I didn’t really care for, but you HAD to read it, because you HAD to, and then went back and read The Right Stuff (which I loved, and still love). He thrilled me. He was always on my radar. But I had never gone back and read all of the essays which launched him. It’s just one of the many “gaps” in my education. Every year I try to fill at least 1 or 2 of those gaps. This year, totally coincidentally, I decided would be the “Tom Wolfe” year. And so I read the first collection of his essays: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. These essays were all written in about a one-year period, starting with the aforementioned Custom Car Show title essay. It’s an astonishing output. The man was on FIRE, and he writes with total trust in the validity of his own perceptions. Whether or not you agree with his perceptions is not the point. As a writer, you need to have this kind of confidence. What I see, what I perceive, the connections I make … I stand by them. I have thought them through. I have considered all the angles. Here is what I see. Here is what I think is going on. If you need a role model for that kind of writerly confidence, Tom Wolfe is about as good as it gets.

Here are some excerpts.

From “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!”

Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings, like New York, nor of trees, like Willbraham, Massachusetts, but signs. One can look at Las Vegas from a mile away on Route 91 and see no buildings, no trees, only signs. But such signs! They tower. They revolve, they oscillate, they soar in shapes before which the existing vocabulary of art history is helpless. I can only attempt to supply names – Boomerang Modern, Palette Curvilinear, Flash Gordon Ming-Alert Spiral, McDonalds Hamburger Parabola, Mint Casino Elliptical, Miami Beach Kidney. Las Vegas’ sign makers work far out beyond the frontiers of conventional studio art that they have no names themselves for the forms they create.

From “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!”

Captain Gubser is telling me about life and eccentric times in Las Vegas, but I am distracted. The captain’s office has windows out onto the corridor. Coming down the corridor is a covey of girls, skipping and screaming, giggling along, their heads exploding in platinum-and-neon-yellow bouffants or beehives or raspberry-silk scarves, their eyes appliqued in black like mail-order decals, their breasts aimed up under their jerseys at the angle of anti-aircraft automatic weapons, and, as they swing around the corner toward the elevator, their glutei maximi are bobbing up and down with their pumps in the inevitable buttocks decolletage pressed out against black, beige and incarnadine stretch pants. This is part of the latest shipment of show girls to Las Vegas, seventy in all, for the “Lido de Paris” revue at the Stardust, to be entitled Bravo!, replacing the old show, entitled Voila. The girls are in the county courthouse getting their working papers, and fifteen days from now these little glutei maximi and ack-ack breasts with stars pasted on the tips will be swinging out over the slack jaws and cocked-up noses of patrons sitting at stageside at the Stardust.

From “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!”

Thousands of Europeans from the lower orders now have the money to go to the Riviera, but they remain under the century-old status pall of the aristocracy. At Monte Carlo there are still Wrong Forks, Deficient Accents, Poor Tailoring, Gauche Displays, Nouveau Richness, Cultural Aridity – concepts unknown in Las Vegas. For the grand debut of Monte Carlo as a resort in 1879 the architect Charles Garnier designed an opera house for the Place du Casino; and Sarah Bernhardt read a symbolic poem. For the debut of Las Vegas as a resort in 1946 Bugsy Seigel hired Abbott and Costello, and there, in a way, you have it all.

From “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!!”

As Riddle speaks, one gets a wonderful picture of sex riding the crest of the future. Whole tableaux of bare-bottomed Cosmonaughties will be hurtling around the Casino de Paris Room of the Dunes Hotel at fantastic speed in elliptical orbits, a flash of the sequined giblets here, a blur of the black-rimmed decal eyes there, a wink of the crotch here and there, until, with one vast Project Climax for our times, Sean Kenny, who used to work with this fellow Frank Lloyd Wright, presses the red button and the whole yahooing harem, shrieking ooh-la-la amid the din, exits in a mushroom cloud.

From “Clean Fun at Riverhead” (about demolition derbies)

Such, in brief, is the early history of what is culturally the most important sport ever originated in the United States, a sport that ranks with the gladiatorial games of Rome as a piece of national symbolism. Lawrence Mendelsohn had a vision of an automobile sport that would be all crashes. Not two cars, not three cars, not four cars, but 100 cars would be out in an arena doing nothing but smashing each other into shrapnel.

From “Clean Fun at Riverhead”

Sports writers, of course, have managed to ignore demolition derbies even more successfully than they have ignored stock-car racing and drag racing. All in all, the new automobile sports have shown that the sports pages, which on the surface appear to hum with life and earthiness, are at bottom pillars of gentility. This drag racing and demolition derbies and things, well, there are too many kids in it with sideburns, tight Levi’s and winkle-picker boots.

From “Clean Fun at Riverhead”

For years now sociologists have been calling upon one another to undertake a serious study of America’s “car culture.” No small part of it is the way the automobile has, for one very large segment of the population, become the focus of the same sort of quasi-religious dedication as art is currently for another large segment of a higher social order. Tommy Fox is unemployed, Don Fox runs a junk yard, Spider Ligon is a maintenance man for Brookhaven National Laboratory, but to categorize them as such is getting no closer to the truth than to have categorized William Faulkner in 1926 as a clerk at Lord & Taylor, although he was. Tommy Fox, Don Fox and Spider Ligon are acolytes of the car culture, an often esoteric world of arts and sciences that came into its own after World War II and now has believers of two generations.

From “The Peppermint Lounge Revisited” (an early “thinkpiece” on what is now known as the Bridge-and-Tunnel crowd)

The first time people in Manhattan noticed the Jersey Teenagers was when they would come bobbing out of the Port Authority and move into Times Square. No one ever really figured out what they were up to. They were generally written off as Times Square punks. Besides the bouffant babies in their stretch pants, furry sweaters and Dick Tracy eyes, there would be the boys in Presley, Big Bopper, Tony Curtis and Chicago boxcar hairdos. They would be steadying their hairdos in the reflections in the plate glass of clothing stores on 42nd Street that featured Nehru coats, Stingy-Brim hats, tab-collar shirts and winkle-picker elf boots. No one ever seemed to notice how maniacally serious they were about their hairdos, their flesh-tight pants, puffy sweaters, about the way they walked, idled, ogled or acted cool; in short, how serious they were about anything that had to do with form and each other.

From “The First Tycoon of Teen” (a fascinating essay about Phil Spector, boy genius)

Spector, while still in his teens, seemed to comprehend the prole vitality of rock and roll that has made it the kind of darling holy beast of intellectuals in the United States, England and Europe. Intellectuals, generally, no longer take jazz seriously. Monk, Mingus, Ferguson – it has all been left to little executive trainees with their first apartment and a mahogany African mask from the free-port shop in Haiti – let me tell you! – and a hi-fi. But rock and roll! Poor old arteriosclerotic lawyers with pocky layers of fat over their ribs are out there right now twisting with obscene clumsiness to rock and roll. Their wives wear stretch pants in the seafood shoppe. A style of life! There have been teen-agers who have made a million dollars before, but invariably they are entertainers, they are steered by older people, such as the good Colonel Tom Parker steers Elvis Presley. But Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen. Every baroque period has a flowering genius who rises up as the most glorious expression of its style of life – in latter-day Rome, the Emperor Commodus; in Renaissance Italy, Benvenuto Cellini; in late Austustan England, the Earl of Chesterfield; in the sal volatile Victorian age, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; in late-fancy neo-Greek Federal America, Thomas Jefferson; and in Teen America Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen. In point of fact, he had turned twenty-one when he made his first clear million. But it was as a teen-ager, working within the teen-age milieu, starting at the age of seventeen, that Phil Spector developed into a great American business man, the greatest of the independent rock and roll record producers. Spector’s mother, Bertha, took him from the Bronx to California when he was nine. California! Teen Heaven! By the time he was sixteen he was playing jazz guitar with some group. Then he got interested in rock and roll, which he does not call rock and roll but “pop blues.” That is because – well, that is a complicated subject. Anyway, Phil Spector likes this music. He genuinely likes it. He is not a short-armed fatty hustling nutball fads.

“Anyway.” Classic Wolfe.

From “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” (about a custom car show)

But after a while, I was glad I had seen the cars in this natural setting, which was, after all, a kind of Plato’s Republic for teenagers. Because if you watched anything at this far very long, you kept noticing the same thing. These kids are absolutely maniacal about form. They are practically religious about it. For example, the dancers: none of them ever smiled. They stared at each other’s legs and feet, concentrating. The dances had no grace about them at all, they were more in the nature of a hoedown, but everybody was concentrating to do them exactly right. And the bouffant kids all had form, wild form, but form with rigid standards, one gathers. Even the boys. Their dress was prosaic – Levi’s, Slim Jims, sport shirts, T shirts, polo shirts – but the form was consistent: a stove-pipe silhouette. And they all had the same hairstyle: some wore it long, some short, but none of them had a part; all that hair was brushed back straight from the hairline. I went by one of the guitar booths, and there was a little kid in there, about thirteen, playing the hell out of an electric guitar. The kid was named Cranston something or other. He looked like he ought to be named Kermit or Herschel; all his genes were kind of horribly Okie. Cranston was playing away and a big crowd was watching. But Cranston was slouched back with his spine bent like a sapling up against a table, looking gloriously bored. At thirteen, this kid was being fanatically cool. They all were. They were all wonderful slaves to form. They have created their own style of life, and they are much more authoritarian about enforcing it than are adults.

From “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”

Things have been going on in the development of the kids’ formal attitude towards cars since 1945, things of great sophistication that adults have not been even remotely aware of, mainly because the kids are so inarticulate about it, especially the ones most hipped on the subject. They are not from the levels of society that produce children who write sensitive analytical prose at age seventeen, or if they do, they soon fall into the hands of English instructors who put them onto Hemingway or a lot of goddamn-and-hungry-breast writers. If they ever write about a highway again, it’s a rain-slicked highway and the sound of the automobiles passing over it is like the sound of tearing silk, not that one household in ten thousand has heard the sound of tearing silk since 1945.

From “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”

Picasso, I should add, means nothing to Barris, although he knows who he is. It’s just that to Barris and the customizers there is no one great universe of form and design called Art. Yet that’s the universe he’s in. He’s not building cars, he’s creating forms.

From “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”

If Barris and the customizers hadn’t been buried in the alien and suspect underworld of California youth, I don’t think they would seem at all unusual by now. But they’ve had access to almost nothing but the hot-rod press. They’re like Easter Islanders. Suddenly you come upon the astonishing objects, and then you have to figure out how they got there and why they’re there.

From “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”

Somewhere back in the thirties, designers, automobile designers among them, came up with the idea of the Streamline. It sounded “functional,” and on an airplane it is functional, but on a car it’s not, unless you’re making a Bonneville speed run. Actually, it’s baroque. The Streamline is baroque abstract or baroque modern or whatever you want to call it. Well, about the time the Streamline got going – in the thirties, you may recall, we had curved buildings, like the showpieces later, at the World’s Fair – in came the Bauhaus movement, which was blown-up Mondrian, really. Before you knew it, everything was Mondrian – the Kleenex box: Mondrian; the format of the cover of Life magazine: Mondrian; those bled-to-the-edge photograph layouts in Paris-Match: Mondrian. Even automobiles: Mondrian. They call Detroit automobiles streamlined, but they’re not. If you don’t believe it, look down from an airplane at all the cars parked on a shopping-center apron, and except that all the colors are pastel instead of primary, what have got? A Mondrian painting. The Mondrian principle, those straight edges, is very tight, very Apollonian. The Streamline principle, which really has no function, is very free Dionysian. For reasons I don’t have to labor over, the kids preferred the Dionysian.

From “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”

The customizers do not dream of working as stylists for the Detroit companies, although they deal with them more and more. It would be like Rene Magritte or somebody going on the payroll of Continental Can to do great ideas of Western man. This is an old story in art, of course, genius vs. the organization. But the customizers don’t think of corporate bureaucracy quite the way your conventional artist does, whether he be William Gropper or Larry Rivers, namely as a lot of small-minded Babbitts, venal enemies of culture, etc. They just think of the big companies as part of that vast mass of adult America, sclerotic from years of just being too old, whose rules and ideas weigh down upon Youth like a vast, bloated sac.

From “The Marvelous Mouth” (detailing a night he spent in the company of then-named Cassius Clay)

But the crowd at the Metropole hit several wrong notes. One was hit by a white man about fifty-five, obviously a Southerner from the way he talked, who came up to Clay from behind – people were gaggled around from all sides – and stuck the blank side of a Pennsylvania Railroad receipt, the kind you get when you buy your ticket on the train, in his face and said in a voice you could mulch the hollyhocks with:
“Here you are, boy, put your name right there.”
It was more or less the same voice Mississippians use on a hot day when the colored messenger boy has come into the living room and is standing around nervously. “Go ahead, boy, sit down. Sit in that seat right there.”
Cassius took the Pennsylvania Railroad receipt without looking up at the man, and held it for about ten seconds, just staring at it.
Then he said in a slightly accusing voice, “Where’s your pen?”
“I don’t have a pen, boy. Some of these people around here got a pen. Just put your name right there.”
Cassius still didn’t look up. He just said, “Man, there’s one thing you gotta learn. You don’t ever come around and ask a man for an autograph if you ain’t got no pen.”

My first thought when I heard Tom Wolfe died was a dismayed … “Oh no. Who will pick up his torch? Who do we have now? Who can see like this? There are many many many too many people telling us what they see now. And not one of them is as fun to read as Tom Wolfe.”