In his elegy to the late Tom Wolfe, Professor Louis Menand closes with some Wolfean satire in his exchange of letters with Tom Wolfe about the design of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Point, counterpoint, touché! If this is a (fair & balanced) thrust of a verbal rapier, so be it.
[x The New Yorker]
Tom Wolfe, Sage Of Status Anxiety
By Louis Menand
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A great magazine writer is a writer who sells magazines. Tom Wolfe sold magazines. People bought magazines on the newsstand in order to read the pieces in them written by Tom Wolfe.
Behind every great magazine writer is a great magazine editor, and the editor behind Wolfe was Clay Felker. Felker and Wolfe began working together, in 1962, at the New York Herald Tribune, where Felker was the editor of the paper’s Sunday supplement. That’s where Wolfe wrote his famous profile of the New Yorker editor William Shawn, and where he was working when he published his first piece in the style of New Journalism (1963), “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” That piece appeared in Esquire, because a newspaper strike had shut the Herald Tribune down. When the Trib folded, soon after, Felker founded New York magazine, and Wolfe followed him. That is where he serialized his book on LSD, Ken Kesey, and the Merry Pranksters’ bus tour, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."
Felker and Wolfe believed that what New York City is all about, what every New Yorker is obsessed with, is status, and status, or status anxiety, is the theme of most of Wolfe’s writing. Wolfe’s own famous sartorial look, the three-piece white suit, was really a disguise. He called it “neo-pretentious,” but who was he pretending to be? No one wears three-piece white suits in New York City. The suit made him socially unplaceable. It was an escape from the problem of status.
Felker and Wolfe also understood that the people who like to read magazine stories about status are the people who are insecure about their status. Flush economic times produce people like this, people who worry that their money is not buying them standing, and those times in New York—the nineteen-sixties and the nineteen-eighties—were the best times for Felker and Wolfe’s kind of journalism.
Wolfe was a satirist. Politically, satire is a conservative genre. Satire is highbrow populism. (Hence Wolfe’s diatribes against modernist art and architecture.) Satire is premised on the belief that, no matter how much liberal enlightenment you introduce into human affairs, people will still sort themselves into some kind of pecking order, in which all the little birds are trying to get in with the big bird at the head of the line.
Satire also associates aspiration with fatuousness and newness with faddishness, and Wolfe was skilled at making those reductions. He was predictable and he was mean, but he was also (in the beginning, anyway, until he assumed the role of a cultural warrior) funny, and he was not vicious. This may be because he was so maniacally focussed on surfaces—dress, manners, styles of speech—that he left the person underneath relatively unscathed. His piece on Leonard Bernstein’s party for the Black Panthers, “Radical Chic,” is merciless on matters of style and manners, but it is actually not as cruel or unfair as the story on the party that ran in the Times.
It was a little odd that after claiming, in the introduction to his 1973 anthology, The New Journalism, that reporters were destined to make novelists obsolete, Wolfe turned to novel writing. The novel for which he will be remembered is The Bonfire of the Vanities, serialized in Rolling Stone and published in 1987, at the peak of the Reagan recovery. The title is an homage to the Victorian satirist William Makepeace Thackeray. Wolfe’s novel is unpleasant, as a book that mocks liberal pieties is bound to be. But it is not completely successful satire. Wolfe had a soft spot for his hero, the young investment banker Sherman McCoy, whose life is upended during an unplanned visit to the South Bronx. He imagined Sherman could be redeemed; Thackeray would have had no pity for him.
My brief Tom Wolfe moment—apart from coming across him one day waiting to cross Park Avenue; he was not an easy figure to miss—had to do with a piece I wrote on Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I had quoted Wolfe, along with other critics of the design, as calling it “a monument to Jane Fonda.” In due course, I received a fantastically high-handed letter from Wolfe, protesting that he had not been judging the design; he had only been repeating what someone else had said. This seemed to me beyond absurd. Of course Wolfe hated Lin’s memorial. Why would he pretend that that was not his view? I wrote him back to explain that he had, in fact, written those words as his own, and to ask why he was troubling to insist otherwise.
I received a second letter from Wolfe, this one even more fantastically high-handed, in which he deftly filleted every sentence in my letter to him and ended by putting it to me that my reportorial talents were beneath notice. No doubt they were, or are. Still, he had clearly devoted a lot of time to the composition of two longish letters concerning less than a single sentence in my piece. I concluded that he must be suffering from writer’s block on whatever novel he was working on, and did him the kindness of declining to continue the correspondence. However, I saved the letters. # # #
[Louis Menand has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001. His book The Metaphysical Club (2001) was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. See other books by Louis Menand here. He was an associate editor of The New Republic from 1986 to 1987, an editor at The New Yorker from 1992 to 1993, and a contributing editor of The New York Review of Books from 1994 to 2001. He is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. Menand received a BA (English) from Pomona College (CA) and a PhD (English) from Columbia University (NY). In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.]
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