The Tom Wolfe Interview
Bethell, Tom
Tom Bethell THE TOM WOLFE INTERVIEW Astronauts, test pilots, the uncritical willingness to face danger, the Right Stuff, reporting, essay-writing, the ''new journalism," and more from America's...
...Did you have some difficulty there...
...So there was a great feeling of patriotism about the space program...
...TW: I have always had the impression that in England one reason there were so many essays was that they were cheaper and that people could afford to write them...
...Finally, the Apollo program did create excitement...
...And you may not have the slightest idea that it is going to happen...
...complete set 11th edition Encyclopedia Britannica, bound in red leather...
...married Sheila Berger, art director of Harper's magazine, and bought the house they live in, both in 1978...
...He has, over the years, peeped out from an assortment of crania, ranging from pop stars to fighter pilots...
...Has it not benefited from your being able to devote a long time to it...
...Well, talk is cheap now...
...Although I thought I knew a lot about the space program when I did my Rolling Stone series, I began to discover how little I knew about any of it: the technology, the engineering, the dynamics of flight itself...
...Furniture...
...Yeager is from West Virginia, and he was a non-commissioned flyer...
...Also, familiarity began to breed disinterest...
...I still think composing by hand is better...
...Let's just say that there's much following of dictates not one's own, in a lot of areas...
...This doesn't count death in combat, which is not considered accidental...
...TW: I do...
...But some of the things that I have written would fit into such a form...
...He didn't say it would attract ecological interest, he said it would become an art object...
...I'm talking about magazines now...
...But everyone believed him when he said, "Oh, I'm a naturalist, I'm a scientist...
...TW: I'd like to be able to say yes...
...And the more severe the emergency, the more important it was to sound like Yeager...
...Q: You're making me think now that you haven't written a book about the space program at all...
...everything as neat and tidy as if house were on First Family of Virginia Home & Garden Tour...
...I think I set down for the first time the four devices that are responsible for what is known as absorbing or gripping prose...
...He had come close to being a triple ace-he had shot down 13 planes in the Second World War...
...He was, I believe, 22 when the war ended...
...I've done all the work...
...In the novels of World War II you might occasionally find a heroic officer, although I can't think of any offhand...
...As if he really believed it...
...I had read this fact before I read any Balzac, and I said, well, it must be junk...
...But it really didn't go down very well as far as I can gather...
...Have you read that marvelous essay by Orwell about having to knock off three book reviews on Sunday...
...Wolfe's reticence, nigh unto invisibility, piqued our curiosity...
...TW: All the way through, I attempt to present the astronauts' experience as they individually saw it, in terms of their ambitions...
...Presbyterian election and Catholic grace are quite different...
...They tend to assume that it is a form in which the writer is thrust into the foreground...
...The idea has been undercut by a cynicism about the business of fighting in the first place...
...I would sit around and say, "Well, how can I work this into the narrative...
...And they weren't happy, but then they didn't slice their wrists either...
...Until the very last, the morale in Vietnam was apparently excellent...
...But I would like to...
...One of the things that made the book harder to write was that I didn't want to allow myself what became the necessary technique of omniscient comment...
...Our reporter, not a student of furniture catalogues like Tom Wolfe, lamely replies "modern": glass coffee table...
...There was great concern that we were going to end up with three dead astronauts in orbit around the moon, having run out of oxygen and just out there endlessly circling the moon, to the tune of "Silent Night...
...Finally, what is this business about "the Right Stuff,'' how come it took so long to write the book, and how did he get involved in such a project...
...When I wrote Radical Chic, I wrote 30 pages in the first person and then saw that I was simply getting in the way...
...This does create a certain amount of intrigue...
...Even in the Korean war, the morale of pilots was very high...
...TW: I really haven't...
...I was constantly traveling, going to Houston or Florida or often to California, where quite a few of the astronauts lived by this time...
...The picture at the time was of the Russians coming over and dropping hydrogen bombs like rocks from a highway overpass...
...Nobody who spends years at what is called "writing a book," I'm convinced, actually spends very much time writing it...
...In the high schools children are dealing with a lot of problems, not just race but class and status, that adults seldom have to deal with and children never had to deal with before...
...He was taking the fashionable intellectual pursuit of his day, and saying, "That's me too...
...And then The Painted Word, and then Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine...
...But that's just for show...
...There were huge aerial dogfights and all the rest of it...
...It's not that unusual for a writer to have to spend two or three months to do a first-class piece of reporting and then write an article...
...It has made everyone since then take him at his word and regard him as this man who attempted to be a scientist using the medium of the novel...
...hands appear older than face...
...I found that when pilots start in the world of flying, they find themselves in a fraternity in which it is widely believed but never said out loud that you either have it or you don't...
...I can justify the time I spent in actual work...
...Q: I find that most people don't know what is meant by the "new journalism...
...TW: Actually, the reporting problems would be very complicated...
...It was the first time we got pictures of the earth from a distance...
...Who's to say...
...you are asking about the make-up of a test pilot...
...Born 1931, Richmond, Va., one sister, no brothers, father was an agronomist and editor of Southern Planter...
...I think it was a big mistake on my part, in just selfish terms, to go on about this damnable new journalism, although I was quite sincere in what I wrote...
...Q: But if you had been under the financial pressure to produce something every month, would you have been able to write The Right Stuff...
...It was on Christmas Eve, 1968...
...Life was paying the Mercury astronauts $500,000 over a three-year period for the exclusive rights to their stories, and their wives' and families' stories...
...TW: No...
...The idea of a heroic officer is practically unheard of now...
...There was some interest in that flight...
...What happened...
...I found it involved-and I think the kind of novel I would want to write has to involve -reporting...
...With the Gemini program there was a launch every two or three months...
...Flying really became the last knightly pursuit of total war...
...Therefore, the astronaut or his wife had the power to control what would appear under his or her own name...
...Q: You wrote the introductory essay to your book on the new journalism...
...And the military man says, no, I am defending this society and I cannot be critical about what dangers I am going to face...
...It has been unfashionable since World War I ended, 60 years ago, to write about the glorious side of the warrior's life, or to put heroism in a good light, unless it's the heroism of a dog soldier...
...I remember feeling that the subject was getting absolutely out of hand...
...I try to create a narrative in which the reader knows only what the astronauts could have known at the time...
...They have always been accused of being the handmaidens of business...
...So that's just an amazing figure when you think about it...
...TW: Oh, it didn't go down with anybody, as far as I know...
...The only book I know of that addresses courage as a positive state is The Anatomy of Courage by Lord Moran, an English doctor who was in the trenches in World War I. Lord Moran said that the adventurous young man in the wars of the future would choose flying as his form of soldiering...
...TW: Pretty much...
...Practically all of the first 16 astronauts were military test pilots, as well as many of the next 14, and all mission commanders were test pilots, the great majority of them from the military...
...How much does a writer have to get for that piece to make it economically worthwhile...
...So military life in its heroic, courageous side is left to the occasional memoir of a fighter pilot, or perhaps a soldier...
...TW: Yes, it is...
...Christopher's School, Washington and Lee University, and YalePh.D...
...A navy pilot tends to fly 20 years...
...But in a sense, you can look upon the ecology movement that way...
...Q: But you haven't started one...
...it was known that there was going to be a reunion of the astronauts...
...I am thinking about doing a sequel to The Painted Word which will move into the areas of architecture, music, dance, perhaps even philosophy if I can get up the courage to read that appalling morass...
...In flying there is a sense that you either have this "it," this Right Stuff, or you don't...
...Writers spend all that time coercing themselves into finally sitting down for the six or seven months that it takes to write a book and getting it done...
...TW: It fulfilled the prophecy of Marshall McLuhan...
...I'm doing a little mind reading here, because nobody said anything to me directly...
...I didn't have one word until 1977...
...And reporting is a kind of low rent pursuit, to tell the truth...
...Of course, the worst thing that can happen is to show a lack of courage...
...And those anniversary publications mean absolutely nothing...
...What is he like...
...Most airline pilots are trained in the military, and the voice began to spread...
...Today, for example, the proper moral tone is righteous indignation about even minor moral lapses among public officials...
...The game really becomes playing off the Right Stuff against the chances of death...
...That was the constant cry in the '60s after Eisenhower dreamed up the military-industrial complex as a phrase...
...TW: For some reason I find it impossible to write in the morning...
...But this becomes for pilots the grandest gamble of manhood...
...I can't do a thing...
...You are born elected...
...That was the prudent course for any military officer and his family...
...In the South, for example, I had never heard the word "redneck...
...That was back in the spring of '73...
...One was The New Journalism, which is an anthology, but which has a 75-page introductory essay that I spent about eight months struggling over...
...then by two o'clock in the afternoon you are through with your daily task, and you can play tennis and have a terrific social life in the evening...
...The same thing was true of Zola...
...But I cannot justify not having published it until now...
...Down on the ground you found the most demoralized soldiers in the history of the United States...
...Do you agree...
...TW: It really started back in December of 1972, when Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone asked me to go down to Cape Canaveral- Cape Kennedy it then was-and do a story on the final flight to the moon, which was Apollo 17...
...But to say, there is this thing called the new journalism and here is how it works and here are the techniques and here are the people who do it-I think they all resented that...
...But I doubt it...
...I think the story becomes more interesting as time goes by...
...If I get the strength, I'll write the other half, which would take it through the moon landings and the Skylab missions...
...I run out of gas about midnight...
...Of course, those desks were opened and they were empty...
...The ideal thing- Philip Roth tells me it's the way he does it -is to have a schedule, get up early, and write a certain amount...
...TW: There had been some pictures taken by unmanned craft-in fact they gave Stewart Brand the idea for the Whole Earth Catalogue-but Apollo 8 was the first time men saw the whole earth with their own eyes and took pictures of it...
...You have to consider the attitude of the press generally at that time...
...It's really a task over and over again of calling up strangers and somehow getting to see them and asking them questions...
...It's a book about the world of flying, as it was affected by the arrival of the astronauts...
...It really is a book about the Right Stuff, the Right Stuff being the ideal that animates the competitive pyramid of flying...
...Perhaps dictated by economics...
...Finding such events is a gold mine if you want to work in nonfiction...
...To write in the first person is one of the most self-beguiling things a writer can do...
...Thinner and taller than pictures suggest...
...Q: Gurus...
...This is doubly paradoxical because, in his personal appearance, Wolfe enjoys dressing up as an Edwardian boule-vardier in full regalia: white linen suit, watch fob, slightly rakish hat...
...At the same time NASA had a power of review over the pieces...
...After the Second World War, when so many excellent writers had been displaced or suppressed, there was a belief that a lot of desk drawers were going to open and out was going to come a torrent of superb literature inspired by the war...
...They tell you that's the best time of day, that it's the only time when your mind is really working...
...They all look the same in their suits, and they all seem to be conformists...
...So many things in The Right Stuff would have such a marvelous echo in a second volume...
...Although we read about the subject, we don't know much about it...
...Q: What time of day or night do you write...
...He has a 23 percent chance of dying in an accident...
...But for years it was Chuck Yeager's voice...
...I was telling about how I managed to find out about the party and how I managed to get into the party-all this kind of stuff...
...Q: How many hours at a stretch can you write...
...One of the things that fascinated me about the world of the military is that even in the doldrums of the most boring peacetime military officers have looked upon themselves as bearers of the highest ideals in this society...
...Before that, no one had left the earth's orbit...
...It is an ambitious undertaking, more difficult and time-consuming than the ' 'unflinching camera'' technique perfected by Lillian Ross, Gay Talese, and one or two other recent writers...
...I never thought of Vanity Fair when I wrote it, but it is a piece about Vanity Fair-about people using radical politics as an instrument of fashion...
...Q: What about the actual writing of the book...
...Quite aside from anything else about his career, he actually did -sometimes with no hope of publication- write and write and write...
...And these usually sink without a trace...
...One of the things I found out very quickly was that if you ask, "What is the makeup of an astronaut...
...Early in my magazine writing career I used the first person, putting the author in the foreground, and then I began to pull back from that-not totally, but nearly so-because it created a technical problem that very few journalists can solve...
...I have a feeling that that may be the very next thing I shall do...
...Q: Are you in fact a night writer...
...Some of the results are very funny, but they also lead to a heightened status or class consciousness among children...
...The Cold War was on, and the Russian space program seemed like a real threat...
...I can remember being taught about Zola in the comprehensive course on 19th-century literature- being taught that Zola was a rather plodding, Dreiser-like writer interested in pinning down the human species like a butterfly on a panel...
...worked as a reporter for the Springfield (Mass...
...The ante is raised continually...
...The combination meant that unless these people were stupid, which they weren't, you were not going to get anything but straight-arrow stuff about them...
...I suppose people will say that I waited until the 10th anniversary of the landing on the moon, which is really silly because they don't even reach the moon in this book...
...That's always been the picture I have had...
...The press is the Last Victorian Gentleman...
...Radical Chic is a good example...
...The general idea was to do a piece about what was going on at the Cape...
...I think I first ran across it in a novel by William Faulkner...
...Brief bio...
...I used to be able to write until three or four in the morning...
...Panic-stricken congressmen talked about New York Harbor blowing up and things of that sort...
...You either get on with these people or you don't...
...I think I did a lot of other writing in that period in order not to continue with the task of working on this book-it was so difficult pulling it all together...
...A lot of the controversy over the war in Vietnam was about whether you should be able to have a critical willingness to face danger, whether you should be able to pick and choose what dangers you care to face...
...There's the effort and the embarrassment and the general untidiness of the whole thing...
...At first, people are falling by the wayside because they can't master a certain technique, such as formation flying, and they "wash out," as it's called...
...It is unusual conduct for a modern writer-any writer...
...Union, the Washington Post, and the New York Herald Tribune...
...I have a feeling the whole thing could have been done in a year...
...Although Tom Wolfe is identified with a style of writing-the "new journalism" -in which the author supposedly tells us more about himself than his subject, the truth is that Wolfe has remained concealed from view in just about everything he has written...
...He came right out of high school and joined up...
...They were much more demoralized in Korea, in fact, than in Vietnam...
...About six and a half weeks later I finally finished my weekend's work...
...If you use the first person, you become a character in your story...
...Books...
...And I can understand their reaction in a way...
...As I said at the outset, nobody writes a book for five years-no one has a great unfinished work tucked away in his desk...
...There's a kind of a thread that runs through the forefront of each of these areas today that hooks up with what I found in the art world...
...TW: The Life magazine contract was mainly responsible for that image, I think...
...Wolfe can write a book on a subject without telling what he thinks about any aspect of it...
...A lot of its metaphors-this little jewel set on the black velvet of space-do come from the language of aesthetics...
...It finally dawned on me that I should have read some of the paragraphs of my own writings on the subject...
...There are books dealing with lack of courage, by psychiatrists and psychologists...
...But I'm always so far behind, for one reason or another, that I just end up writing on the typewriter...
...Q: What approach did you use in the book...
...I used to compose by hand...
...McLuhan said that as soon as the earth is viewed in its entirety from space, it will become an art object...
...Q: Meanwhile, there are all too many essays...
...I probably should change my way of living and eat a real farmer's breakfast, a whole fish and some brains, some sausage, lots of toast and coffee, and get the job done...
...And I guess nobody likes being dealt with that way...
...Apollo 8-the first flight around the moon-was an extremely courageous undertaking...
...Then he became, at the salary of $283-a-month, the army captain selected to test the X-l, and he flew Mach 1 back in October 1947...
...I think the book was most well-hated by the people I praised, like Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, and Hunter Thompson...
...Pilots stand a very good chance of losing a kneecap or an elbow or their head...
...You read the books, and that's not it at all...
...He's brilliant at technique, brilliant at structure, brilliant at character...
...But it really is a crutch for most writers...
...Q: You have suggested that Vanity Fair -a book about fashion and status in New York-could be done nonfiction...
...In a way I've done to myself the very thing that some of my confreres thought I was trying to do to them, which was to put myself within the confines of some artificial construct...
...The rate of death in military flying is very high...
...attended St...
...The editors decided to do them in the first person- ghost-written, of course-but in the first person all the same...
...And there is some junk, but most of it is brilliant...
...So it wasn't quite as easy as I had thought...
...The occasion (it's best to have an excuse) was the imminent publication of his longest work to date, The Right Stuff...
...in American Studies...
...Q: What are you going to write next...
...Then there's the feeling-and it's also true in this country-that the essay is a gentlemanly pursuit, whereas reporting is rather low rent...
...So I did a series of pieces on the astronauts, based on about three weeks' research...
...It can be humiliating...
...Solzhenitsyn...
...I think a lot of people think of astronauts as rather boring...
...Well, maybe I should bite the bullet and try a novel...
...Q: That was a significant flight in another respect...
...The man is brilliant...
...It doesn' t matter even if you' re writing about the same things over and over, because the techniques that solved the problem in one story won't work in another...
...Most writers don't want to feel like journalists...
...My social life becomes obliterated, because I end up doing so much work after 6 p.m...
...You may have to stay in motels you don't care for, go to towns you don't care about, talk to people who may not be the type of person you would choose as a friend...
...And you can't count on your own personality working in every situation...
...Korea was dreadful-officers sometimes had to drive soldiers forward with bayonets, literally, or with threats to shoot them...
...This book is actually half of what I originally set out to write...
...First they had Sputnik I, then Gagarin went up...
...Looking into the subject of test pilots is what led me to the whole theory of the Right Stuff-the title of the book...
...You either koow how to stay with them, be comfortable around them, or you don't...
...Elevator effectiveness regained...
...In writing this book, I set myself a quota of a certain number of pages, usually ten, triple spaced, which would be about two thousand words...
...And you may come up against your limit a lot sooner than you think...
...Bound volumes of old Esquire on shelves...
...If Jimmy Breslin had written the thing and lumped me in with himself and others, I might have been resentful, too...
...Writing, if I'm in the thick of it, just makes absolute hash of my social life...
...I thought that my fellow nonfiction writers would like it...
...Read The Painted Word, if you don't believe us...
...And unless there's a good reason for you to be a character in your story, it gets in the way of what you're writing...
...The transcription problem of writing by hand is enormous for me, because I end up doing so much rewriting while I'm transcribing...
...TW: I had no difficulty in writing it...
...I think that's quite unusual...
...Q: Do you find writing gets any easier, or harder...
...A lot of the story of the inner lives of people becomes public record, comes out in court...
...perhaps getting to know them, perhaps following them around...
...TW: Every time I do a long piece of nonfiction, which really is a dreadfully difficult undertaking if you take it seriously and you do reporting, I tell myself I'll never do this again...
...Q. Do you think that the monthly deadline pressure under which you have produced a lot of your work is good for you...
...TW: Well, I do want to create some suspense with this great work...
...It seems sentimental even to mention it today, but it is the way military officers conceive of themselves...
...I went to see an awful lot of people and did an awful lot of traveling...
...One of the things I have found in reading about Balzac and Zola is that they could be so productive and so good-and apparently it was the sheer pressure that made them do it...
...They began noticing at Edwards Air Force Base, where all these things took place, that suddenly all the pilots there had West Virginia drawls...
...I find I can't do that anymore...
...TW: I hadn't really thought of it as a book, although come to think of it I hadn't thought of The Painted Word as a book either...
...And I think it really hurt his reputation...
...Now read on...
...I suppose it would depend on finding events like the Bernstein party...
...All of that becomes onerous to some degree...
...He has a 56 percent chance of having to eject at some time, and ejection today from a high-performance jet is apparently a horrendous experience...
...published The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Radical Chic (1970), Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976...
...I had thought that life among the novelists must be very easy...
...I think that's why writers are attracted to crime stories, whether In Cold Blood or Joseph Wambaugh's The Onion Field, which is really quite an admirable book...
...The crimes often don't amount to much, but they pull back the sheets from the lives of the people around you...
...I think the feeling was that I had set myself up as the maestro who was going to characterize their work and lump them into some genre or school...
...Then I thought I would spend about three months converting them into a book...
...Anything else takes you out of the competition...
...And I think if I had never used the term "new journalism," which I didn't dream up anyhow, I would have been much better off...
...I must say in my own defense that I did publish three other books in that period...
...TW: As far as I know, it was the first thing that had been written in the first person plural...
...This has been his specialty as a writer-reconstructing the "point of view" of other people...
...If I understand Catholic theology correctly, you can in effect accumulate points, through good works, that bring you closer to a state of grace...
...He was so cool...
...Q: I always thought that the environ-' mental movement began at that moment...
...Q: Are you writing a novel...
...All of this is motivated by, at bottom, patriotism, or at least the willingness to face danger in the name of something, whether it's your country or your squadron...
...Busing, which of course doesn't exist in enlightened places like New York, has brought together not just black and white but different classes of whites in ways that hadn't been anticipated...
...But it wasn't just Life...
...I wrote one short story in 1974 called 'The Commercial," and I was going to do that on a weekend...
...Well, I jettisoned that approach in the book itself...
...He had very much a down-home, or rather up-hollow, West Virginia voice, and his coolness was legendary...
...Military officers believe, and I think they may be right, that no matter how sophisticated weaponry becomes, or how many satellites you have, when it finally gets down to a fight, the survival of the country depends on those who have what is called the uncritical willingness to face danger...
...I've also got somewhere in my mind the idea of a "Vanity Fair" book...
...TW: It doesn't get any easier at all...
...There is a great esprit wrapped up in all of that, and it's not understood...
...Q: I want to ask you about the new journalism later on...
...They were printed as fast as I could write them...
...Today I doubt whether there's a child much beyond the age of sentience who has not heard the term...
...I should have simply called it "great non-fiction": "And here is the Olympus, folks, of the great nonfiction writers-possibly the best writers in any form in the history of the world!'' That would have gone down all right...
...Look at Balzac: from 1829 to 1851, 90 books published, of which I suppose half were novels...
...Most writers learn it in a step-by-step way as they go through their writing careers, but I don't know of anyone anywhere else who actually wrote down the fact that scene-by-scene construction, the use of realistic dialogue, the use of point-of-view in the Jamesian sense, and the notation of status details are the four specific things that make the novel or any form of prose powerful...
...It never gets any easier...
...Incidentally, I didn't start writing it until late in 1977...
...they want to feel like great writers...
...In this pyramid of the Right Stuff, as I characterize it, to reach the top you have to go through combat, and having done that you may also have to do other things...
...Q: There seems to be a declining interest in reporting among some magazine editors...
...Q: Do you write on a typewriter...
...But I think I added in a modest way to the world's store of knowledge...
...Looks...
...You either know how to approach them or you don't...
...We instructed our reporter to Get the Story: What is he wearing ? Navy blue blazer, striped shirt, grey knitted tie, grey slacks...
...Q: I heard you were writing something about architecture...
...It does solve some technical problems: You have a main character, and you have a built-in point of view...
...I have become very interested in Zola in the past couple of years, and I find that one of the biggest mistakes of that man's life was writing these damnable essays about naturalism...
...So we armed our reporter with a tape recorder and dispatched him to the Wolfe residence on New York's East 62nd Street...
...If you are going to be a journalist and you are going to interview people, you have got to put yourself at their mercy to a certain extent-their schedules, their terrain...
...And that's also part of the Right Stuff...
...But it never works out that way for me...
...In the Presbyterian doctrine of election, that's not so...
...This is probably true in every country, but it certainly has been true here...
...They usually describe it in the negative: in terms of absence of neurosis...
...Also, as a writer gets better known, and his opinion of himself becomes enlarged, he begins to feel he shouldn't have to go through this, and he shouldn't be put at the mercy of his subjects...
...There are no techniques for reporting...
...In the last few years I've noticed pilots beginning to talk in a rather ordinary, everyday fashion...
...It's hard for us to remember that now...
...TW: Well, I had figured that what I had to say would not make the novelists happy...
...It's a task of personality...
...It is really Yeager's voice you hear out of the pilot's cockpit on every commercial airline...
...I think the press, which is considered to be so independent, is in fact determined to present everything with the proper moral tone...
...And that's what happened during the Second World War and in the 20 years thereafter...
...I have quite a bit in the book about Chuck Yeager, who was the first man to fly Mach 1, to break the sound barrier...
...I am exhausted now and the idea of undertaking the same sort of effort all over again is more than my constitution can face...
...In his Mach 1 flight, when he was flying at .98, just on the edge of the sound barrier, here was his voice talking to the engineer on the ground: "Hey, Ridley, make a note here will you...
...There's an exhilaration about it, and there's an exhilaration about facing danger...
...Tom Bethell THE TOM WOLFE INTERVIEW Astronauts, test pilots, the uncritical willingness to face danger, the Right Stuff, reporting, essay-writing, the ''new journalism," and more from America's best-dressed journalist...
...After the end of the Cold War, the attitude toward the astronauts changed tremendously...
...He's got to get at least $6,000, it seems to me, and there are not many magazines now that are going to pay that...
...TW: I doubt whether there is really a declining interest in reporting, but reporting has become expensive...
...TW: I think the most common notion about the new journalism is that it's highly personal, impressionistic, with the writer in the foreground, as you say...
...Conditions were pretty good, as fighting conditions go...
...Reserved, guarded, speaks softly, and only when spoken to...
...This changes with the period...
...I should make it clear that this book only goes up through 1963...
...You have to use what works, and I finally found that I could pull back and say this and that about world politics or whatever was necessary, and that it didn't destroy the fabric that I was laboriously weaving together...
...This is one of the things that excited me in working on this book, really-trying to understand the emotional side of the warrior pilot's life...
...Rather than tell us about what goes on inside his head, Wolfe prefers to get inside other people's heads and observe the world from there...
...Q: In the Rolling Stone articles, you used the anonymous collective voice of the astronauts speaking to you...
...The astronauts are not all the same person by any means...
...But they loathed it...
...TW: I am very much interested in doing a book about high schools in America...
...At the time, it was still thought that the Soviets were going to attempt a moon landing before we did...
...Q: That is a great mystery to me...
...they just are not read by the general public...
...That's why I must take my hat off to Solzhenitsyn...
...It's almost like Presbyterian election...
...In fact, military officers tend to look down upon businessmen as people who are animated solely by greed...
...In 1959, when the first astronauts were chosen, the country's mood was one of patriotism...
...For example, after the Second World War, "flight test," as it's called in the military (instead of test flying), was the thing to do, particularly when they started developing supersonic planes...
...So one afternoon it was decided, almost as if on the spur of the moment, that we would push ahead with this flight around the moon...
...Anyway, I went down there, and I found myself getting more and more interested in the whole business of what makes an astronaut- how you find people who ride on top of rockets...
...But after a while the contestants are left behind mainly by death...
...I realized that when I finally did reach the writing stage of The Right Stuff...
...And if you're going to make it to the top, you have to be in fighter aircraft- high-performance small jets...
...In fact, it took me a great deal longer to do the work on the later part of the space program, which involves so many people and so many flights, than it did to do the work for this book...
...But first, the astronauts...
...nevertheless, you would listen to them intently...
...TW: I suppose about eight...
Vol. 12 • July 1979 • No. 7
