No man who ever dressed in a white dandy suit and wrote psychedelic “kandy-kolored” prose borne aloft on the lightness of acid ever needs recourse to tedious forms of agonised self-expression. So it’s fair to surmise that Tom Wolfe, the dearly departed journalist-novelist — the man who did his damnedest to do away with the conjunctive hyphen between those two forms of literary endeavour — isn’t exactly spinning in his grave.
Not even reading the staid, measured-tone obituaries, many of which celebrate his 1987 satirical novel The Bonfire of the Vanities over his rather more prodigious body of non-fiction works, will have provoked him to perform post-mortem pirouettes.
That wasn’t the man’s style at all. It’s far more likely that he will emerge from the other side to dash off a thunderous 20,000-word essay, bristling with acute reportorial observations and sizzling with made-up onomatopoeic words, the better to do justice to the chromatically rich tapestry of his life in letters.
Sure, not everyone was enamoured of Wolfe’s pharmacological prose. Novelist John Irving confessed to an inability to read him “because he’s such a bad writer”.
And Wolfe’s advocacy of what came to be called New Journalism — an immersive, subjective narrative technique that uses literary devices — infuriated his contemporary journalist-writers. “You thieving pile of albino warts,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson, founder of the ‘gonzo’ journalism style, alluding to Wolfe mock-malevolently. “I’ll have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters if you ever mention my name again in connection with that horrible ‘new journalism’ shuck you’re promoting.” It’s fair to say Wolfe could really get under writers’ skin, and inspire a certain lyricism in them.
A status type
Wolfe himself didn’t suffer ‘intellectual idiocy’, or ‘phonies’, as he called them, gladly. He delighted in lampooning liberal institutions and movements, particularly those that in his opinion did not give adequate credit to the things about America that were worthy of celebrating.
In ‘The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America’, published in Harper’s Magazine in 1976, he stereotyped the ‘intellectual’ class in sneering tones: “The intellectual had become not so much an occupational type as a status type. He was like the medieval cleric, most of whose energies were devoted to separating himself from the mob — which in modern times… goes under the name of the middle class… Moral indignation was the main thing...”
And since Wolfe was in the vanguard of the ‘New Journalism’ trend, this hot pursuit of the intellectual embrace of what he called ‘Radical Chic’ and the gratuitous self-flagellation manifested itself occasionally in satirical outpourings that didn’t concern themselves excessively with considerations of objectivity.
In one of his later works, The Kingdom of Speech , this enterprise leads him to tilt at windmills — for instance, questioning Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as lacking in evidentiary value — deploying language that would endear Wolfe to the Indian right-wing, one of whose leaders recently echoed much the same sceptical sentiment. (On another occasion, Wolfe termed the Big Bang theory as “the nuttiest theory I’ve ever heard.”)
For his exertions, Wolfe drew justifiable criticism that it was perhaps his social conservatism that inhibited him from acknowledging the implications of modern science — “that the universe works by natural rather than supernatural or divine laws”.
More egregiously, in The Kingdom… Wolfe ventured farther afield from his area of expertise in seeking to knock linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky off his intellectual pedestal, only to expose the limitations of his understanding of linguistics. One reviewer noted that the book was “awash with screaming errors”. Wolfe, said another acidly, is the “Donald Trump of linguistics.” (It’s possible, however, that Wolfe, who thought of Trump as a “lovable megalomaniac”, wasn’t offended by such a characterisation.)
Spiral of idiocy
There is, of course, much about the liberal worldview, particularly its cultish, self-delusional adoration of icons and its disdain for nativism of any sort, which opens it up to criticism and — as Wolfe did in The Bonfire… — searing satirical commentary.
But in setting up a bonfire of intellectual vanities in the way that he did, and by embracing a strain of pseudo-science that did little justice to his inquisitive mind or his journalistic instinct, which placed a premium on field-based observational findings than on desk-bound theorising, Wolfe contributed in some ways to a Trumpian de-intellectualisation of society.
“Brilliance,” Wolfe once noted, “is really not a requirement for politicians.” That may well be true, but to actively be a cheerleader in the reduction of a vibrant democracy into a confederacy of dunces, and to celebrate its descent into a downward spiral of idiocy, is beyond irresponsible. It’s a privilege that only a dude in a white dandy suit can afford.
Tom Wolfe’s prose was incandescent: it bristled with an enviable energy. Sadly, the same cannot always be said of his political formulations or the explorations of his mind in later years. Never has such prodigious literary talent been harnessed in the meaningless, obsessive hot pursuit of ‘phonies’.
