Many years ago, I had a brief Tom Wolfe moment. This was at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival where he spoke while I attempted to photograph him. I can’t remember what he talked about, but he wore his patented three-piece white suit, a white handkerchief with a black border sticking out of his pocket.
Looking back, it seems appropriate that I remember the form, not the content of that session; I had the same relationship with his books.
Wolfe, who died last week, was the kind of writer you admired when young but who sounded increasingly annoying as you grew older. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby was programmed to fire the imagination of the twenty-somethings, it fired mine. That was probably the demographic Wolfe excited most, with his outrageous punctuation, repetitions, strange words and sounds.
He was a maverick, he broke the rules, and that was attractive. He once began an essay with the word ‘hernia’ repeated 57 times. Was this the prophet of the 1960s or an undergraduate having fun?
Wolfe’s so-called new journalism (it was neither new, nor strictly speaking, journalism with its imagined dialogues and peeps into thought processes) had its attractions too. You wrote around the subject, you looked for the telling gesture, the unexpected quote that revealed everything in a sudden cascade of light.
It was fun, this immersive style, but the temptation to make things up was strong. You were a part of the story, and often the story was about your reaction rather than what was out there. “Tom may be the hardest-working show-off the literary world has ever owned,” wrote Norman Mailer, no mean show-off himself.
Yet, when Wolfe divested himself of his mannerisms, he could be both funny and perceptive. The Painted Word , his take on modern art, was delightful. For not only was he a satirist, he was, to coin a word, a sarcasticist, simultaneously distorting and dismissive.
Wolfe wrote four novels, deciding in an essay, Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast , that the American novel had deteriorated into something “weak, pale, tabescent” and that its future lay in the documentary novel, of the Emile Zola school. His debut novel Bonfire of the Vanities, written after he was 50, was, in his words, an exemplar of such a work.
Both Wolfe and the American novel survived, the former despite attacks from the likes of Mailer, Updike and Irving. Mailer compared reading a Wolfe novel (he was speaking of A Man in Full ) to making love to a 300-pound woman: "Once she gets on top, it's all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated." No welcome into the pantheon for Mr. Wolfe, then.
Astronaut Scott Kelly has written about how Wolfe’s The Right Stuff changed his life. The musician and actor Jarvis Cocker says The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test introduced him to modernism. It might be Wolfe’s fate to remain a cult figure rather than the father of a school of writing that he wished to be, his once cutting-edge style reduced to a curiosity.
Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu
