Manhattan Cut in Slices
Johnston, George Sim
George Sim Johnston
MANHATTAN CUT IN SLICES
Tom Wolfe publishes a novel one chapter at a time.
What is going on in the pages of Rolling Stone! After years of making faces and otherwise annoying our...
...Describing his own stab at the form eleven years later-as well as, to my mind, William Kennedy's Albany cycle- Wolfe predicts, "I think there is a tremendous future for a sort of novel that will be called the journalistic novel or perhaps documentary novel, novels of intensive social realism based upon the same painstaking reporting that goes into the New Journalism...
...He does not believe in objective aesthetic criteria: The value of a work of art is strictly a matter of If you don't think some of the subject matter in this novel is anathema to the progressive mind, wait for the reviews-or, if you like, take a liberal friend to a Richard Pryor concert film...
...The American Dream, as it appeared in Esquire in the early sixties, was a mess...
...but that don't do them a damn bit a good 'less they know how to control...
...But apart from whatever aid he is giving to Rolling Stone in its quest for the holy grail of upscale readership, he is performing the invaluable service of presenting our literary lions with a concrete example of what writing a novel is all about...
...The last major writer to publish a novel in this fashion was Norman Mailer...
...right away...
...Wolfe's displeasure with Ulysses is on record, and it would not surprise me to learn that he does not much care for the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the late novels of Henry James, or the music of Gluck-works whose intent is to abstract us into a realm of aesthetic pleasure devoid, or almost devoid, of social contingency...
...how happily will they give up their very birthrights!- just to control that wild and hungry steam...
...But we learn more about architecture and interior decoration than we may care to know (let's get on with the story...
...The original was restored in 1823 when the great actor Edmund Kean bragged to his wife, "The London audience have no notion of what I can do until they see me over the dead body of Cordelia...
...Should Dryden and Coleridge have judged Tate the greater poetic dramatist...
...I'm gon' tell you about capitalism...
...The city in The Bonfire of the Vanities is an international carnival...
...I have combed his work for years in search for a hint of a suggestion of where he gets his aesthetic pleasures...
...Sexual confusion is, of course, rampant...
...Their books are veritable warehouses of brute social fact, which is why the form was held in low regard by the reigning literary panjandrums (Johnson, Coleridge, Saint-Beuve) until the middle of the nineteenth century...
...A good novel, finally, is not mere reportage, anymore than a good oil painting is a photograph...
...John O'Hara, John P. Mar-quand, and Louis Auchincloss, for example, are very long on observed social detail...
...Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn-how much longer you think what you own gon' make a damn bit a difference in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn...
...The art of the novel is not exactly new to him, anyway, since, by his own admission, he has been ransacking everyone from Gogol to Henry Miller for his journalistic tricks...
...But the vicissitudes of public taste only prove that the public can, on occasion, be tasteless...
...And what difference is what you own gon' make on that day...
...There are enough vivid characters from different milieus to please the shade of Balzac...
...Wolfe is fortunate in not being inhibited by the usual liberal taboos regarding the depiction of racial and ethnic distinctions...
...And he is not just giving us a wafer-thin slice of Manhattan...
...The reaction will be pretty much the same in both cases...
...Even in its incomplete state, it puts to shame those fiction writers who are capable of portraying only the pale, tentative rebellions of a few deracinated souls living near Central Park...
...Their meticulous rendering of life on the Eastern seaboard has no imaginative fire...
...I can control the steam...
...They are...
...Wolfe will probably do some housecleaning before the hardcover edition, so I may as well throw in a few nitpicks in the interests of verisimilitude...
...see...
...If Wolfe and others want to throw all that European baggage overboard and return to the manner of Dreiser and Norris and Sinclair Lewis, it would not be a bad thing for serious American fiction...
...People own the boilers...
...controlling things...
...This is not true of journalists...
...Tom Wolfe has been pointing out the error of their ways to American novelists since he was a young journalist...
...I'll give you an audit...
...He gave as examples the changing fortunes of Shakespeare and Dickens, the latter of whom, he pointed out, almost went off the stock exchange in 1900...
...Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road also fits the bill of a "documentary novel based on painstaking research...
...If you can't control...
...Finally, last August, in an audience of suntanned matrons who were balancing plates of quiche and salad on their laps, I heard him come out with it...
...Also, it is time to retire the vinyl-wallet manufacturer and the Pontiac Bonneville, both of which have done good service in Wolfe's past work and deserve a break...
...In 1681, Nahum Tate wrote an insipid happy ending to King Lear, and for a hundred and forty years this version held the stage...
...But there is, I think, an element of special pleading in Wolfe's discussion of the "novelist as journalist...
...Yates, for one thing, hates his suburbanites too much to write a good novel about them, and his vision of America is vulgar and reductive I mention him only because there is an effort at the moment to push his work into critical favor...
...My favorites thus far are the confrontation between the preppy Episcopal charities aide and Reverend Bacon in the latter's Harlem office and the del Ponces' Park Avenue dinner party...
...The novel covers every base except the young professionals, who at the moment seem to be overrunning the city like the pod-people in that movie...
...Take the example of Shakespeare...
...The social texture of The Bonfire of the Vanities is dense...
...You think it's something you own, don't you...
...Consequently, our best books on the hippies, on the Vietnam war, and on the political turmoil of the late sixties were written by journalists...
...As in painting and architecture, American writers have been far too obedient to the dictates of European formalism...
...And this is exactly what American fiction writers did after the Second World War...
...a European," Eliot wrote, apropos of James, in 1918...
...All you had to do was get to it and stand on it, and it was yours...
...Every scene is done with Wolfe's supersensory eye for social detail...
...This would have seemed incredible thirty years earlier...
...And not the least of the novel's virtues is the dialogue, which is fast becoming a lost art among American novelists...
...You don't know who's out there on those wild and hungry streets...
...Jane Austen, for example, never tells us what Emma Woodhouse is wearing, and yet she lingers in the mind more distinctly than any of Balzac's heroines, whose wardrobes often seem to go on for pages...
...In approaching the postwar situation of the novel, however, Wolfe's instinctive avoidance of aesthetic issues lands him on solid ground...
...I offer this criticism with hesitation, because when he gives us a catalogue of every object in the del Ponces' dining room, for example, he hits one bull's-eye after another...
...Even after the novel became accepted as the literary genre, close social observation was still understood by all to be the taproot of the form...
...It is the final perfection, the consummation of an American to become...
...As a result, by the early sixties journalists had the whole incredible terrain of American society to themselves...
...And they ain' thinking 'bout no boiler as a capital asset and no return on their investment and no escrow accounts and audits and the prudent thing . . . see...
...And on that day the owners of capital...
...Only the so-called New Journalists (who managed to recruit and resuscitate washed-up novelists like Mailer and Capote) were willing to do the legwork and get the stories...
...If you don't think that some of the subject matter in this novel is anathema to the progressive mind, wait for the reviews-or, if you like, take a liberal friend to a Richard Pryor concert film...
...north of Ninety-sixth Street...
...have become unreadable footnotes to the literary age...
...They draw nigh...
...You best be happy to enter the money on my books, my way...
...You owned all the land in the world...
...You owned all this land...
...as long as you was white...
...He waved his arm about in a great semicircle...
...He has the discipline of concrete presentation...
...He is taking us, with extreme accuracy and a great deal of merriment, on an amazing tour of Gotham, starting with a raucous press conference in Harlem, then through the unspeakable subways, the Bronx criminal courts, a Park Avenue duplex, a midtown expense account eatery, the office of a tabloid newspaper, a wrong exit ramp of the Grand Central Parkway, the dark and dangerous streets of the south Bronx, and the Harlem rectory of a power-broker minister not unlike the late Adam Clayton Powell...
...is showing them how to do it...
...The rock foundation of the novel, Wolfe argues, echoing critics like Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy, is social realism...
...No...
...You want land in Kansas...
...I'm a conservative, whether you know it or not...
...James and Eliot are, in this respect, bad influences...
...The man's style is infectious...
...In the manner of the great Victorians, Wolfe has set spinning several plots at once whose connection is not immediately apparent...
...He has paid considerable attention to artistic subjects like painting, architecture, and the novel, but nowhere in his work will you find an aesthetic judgment...
...You have to assume that the man has been there...
...He is trying to resurrect the social novel on a grand scale, as it was practiced by Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, and his subject, no less, is New York, the capital of the late twentieth century...
...Wilde said the same thing when he remarked that Balzac invented the nineteenth century...
...But the serialization of The George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...
...You can't imagine how furious I am not to have thought of a title like that...
...out there in Kansas and 'em places . .. everybody just lined up and they said, 'On the mark, get set, go!' and everybody started running, and there was all this land, and it was yours...
...The twenties and thirties were the heyday of the social realist novel...
...You heard my mama in 'ere singing about the Millennial Days...
...oh, how happily will they exchange what they own...
...Think of poor Salinger, who apparently has spent the last twenty years in a New Hampshire bomb shelter trying to get down on paper the sound of one hand clapping...
...That's the day it blows...
...taste...
...You came to America, and out there .. . out there...
...the steam .. . then it's Powder Valley for you and your whole gang...
...The whole complex scene is gathered up into the baroque comic vision which infuses all of Wolfe's writing...
...They do a good job of reporting, but they do not create a world...
...Forgive the lapse into Wolfean locution...
...And the nature of these fundamentals has not changed since Homer...
...Mailer cleaned it up for hardcover publication, but it remained a dismal performance...
...We do not admire Monet's water lilies for their botanical verisimilitude, any more than we read Proust to find out the recipe for madeleines...
...It must have become clear to Wolfe that the only way to show them was to roll up his sleeves and do the job himself...
...is owning things...
...And there is an IND subway stop near 77th Street on Central Park West, so the young lawyer does not have to indulge his co-op envy all the way to 81st Street...
...George Sim Johnston MANHATTAN CUT IN SLICES Tom Wolfe publishes a novel one chapter at a time...
...see...
...Take, for example, Reverend Bacon's sermon to the young preppie, who is trying to retrieve $350,000 which Reverend Bacon has siphoned from a day-eare project...
...on Judgment Day...
...would do well to imitate the New Journalists and dirty their hands a little in the field...
...Can we not say that, while it is true that great novelists have to start from literal reality, they may end up in a place where "facts" count for very little at all...
...She knows . . . the Millennial Days are coming...
...Leavis, for that matter) account for an astonishing performance like WutherWolfe's tiptoeing around this issue relates, to a peculiarity of his work as a whole...
...Lionel Trilling outraged literary leftists in the forties by suggesting that novelists thrive best in a society with plenty of class distinctions and free-floating wealth...
...Great novelists are more than glorified journalists...
...We can only extend Wolfe's own metaphor and say that in the aesthetic, as in the financial, market place, the best performers in the long run have the most solid underlying fundamentals...
...I'm gon' tell you something...
...I don' suppose you ain' ever work in a boiler room...
...Haight Ashbury, Vietnam, the race riots, the go-go years on Wall Street, the carnival of electoral politics, all of these were virtually ignored by novelists...
...I don't think it rash to predict that Wolfe, both for his journalism and now for his foray into the novel, will be remembered for the same reasons, long after Roth, Updike & Co...
...They abdicated their traditional role of reporter and began turning out Kafkaesque fables, Borgean puzzles, "pale fictions," metafictions, all for academic consumption...
...Wolfe's ambition, and his achievement so far, is far greater...
...Kansas...
...Some of the best can make a character or situation vivid with almost no detail at all...
...But, according to Wolfe, obituaries for the novel are premature...
...But it ain't...
...Wolfe's diagnosis in this season of writing degree zero is perfectly correct...
...They come up hard against control, and they running for their lives . .. see...
...Before taking a look at The Bonfire of the Vanities, it is worth reviewing Wolfe's brief against the postwar American novel, especially since most of it appears in the introduction to the anthology he edited with E.W...
...They gon' blow, my friend...
...Wolfe's journalistic training is serving him weil...
...Johnson, The New Journalism (1973), which was out of print for several years and is available only in a hard-to-find and not terribly legible paperback...
...Great writers, whatever the currents of fashion, always appeal to a few intelligent readers, and they are the final court of appeal...
...This is the social novel writ large, such as we only seem to get these days from unmentionable writing machines like Harold Robbins...
...He is even serializing his story in the Victorian manner...
...The characters in their novels don't run off to a desert island pursued by the Nameless Dread...
...Which critical estimate is closer to the essence of Balzac's greatness-Wolfe's praise of his piling up of innumerable details of dress and interior decoration, or Baudelaire's remark that Balzac should be regarded as a visionary...
...But it is a bad novel...
...Or, in the case of Updike, Roth, and Barth, they fulfilled George Orwell's prophecy that someday people would write novels about writing a novel...
...But neither Updike, Roth & Co., nor the legions of income-supplementing academics who review their books, seem to have gotten the message...
...Bonfire of the Vanities is of some literary consequence...
...He almost totally avoids mentioning the qualities that make for a really great novel...
...They would do better, however, to follow Emerson's advice: Forget Europe only after it has been mastered...
...the steam...
...There is no way to prove this...
...This incredible notion was fortunately not taken to heart by American novelists until after the Second World War...
...The apprentice novelist is taking Balzac too much to heart...
...Capital is controlling things...
...its early practitioners either started out as journalists (Defoe, Dickens) or at least, like Fielding and Balzac, had the journalist's instinct for empirical observation...
...And how does Wolfe (or F.R...
...The novel was born as an offshoot of journalism...
...Europe, after all, includes Evelyn Waugh, one of Wolfe's favorites, whose work has an incredible aesthetic rigor...
...He does not fudge any of the improbable array of settings...
...After years of making faces and otherwise annoying our menagerie of Great American Novelists, who have mustered only a morose stare in response to his wild gesticulations, Tom Wolfe has climbed into the cage, taken off his mauve sports jacket, loosened his Edwardian collar, and with a wink at Updike, Roth, and Styron, grabbed hold of a swinging bar and...
...they graduate from Harvard, take the bar exam, and try to get into the right clubs...
...After putting together the best body of work of any American journalist since Mencken, Wolfe is writing a novel which, whatever its defects, will probably tell us more, in the Trollopian phrase, about "the way we live now" than any novel published in recent memory...
...At the other end of the social ladder, the underclass is laying waste to large tracts of the city, gradually closing in on the carnival of high-living...
...I'm your prudent broker...
...The whole golden boom was in the air...
...Upper-middle-class women maintain a residual femininity strictly for social advantage, and their male consorts have difficulty looking them in the eye...
...I imagine that, given the competition, Tom Wolfe feels the way Fitzgerald felt after the First World War- "America [read: New York] was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it...
...you best be waking up...
...Wolfe once ventured the sound opinion that Evelyn Waugh will eventually stand as England's major novelist of the twentieth century, because Waugh told us so much about society and its manners...
...Wolfe's dialogue is expert enough to allow him a margin of freedom from these stage props and he should take advantage of it...
...And if you ever seen a steam boiler go out a control, then you seen a whole lot of people running for their lives...
...You know what capital is...
...You think it's land and buildings and factories and things you can sell and stocks and money in banks...
...But the other three also lack something basic...
...Trilling was only stating the obvious, and Wolfe points out that a novelist who cuts himself off from society in the pursuit of "myth" or poetic vision is severely handicapping himself...
...Updike, Roth & Co...
...1 he Bonfire of the Vanities, as we have it thus far, stands to the side of this particular debate, as Wolfe has gone to the early Victorians for his inspiration...
...There have been serious American novelists since the war, moreover, who have not turned their backs on American society...
...Henry Miller, Thopic of Cancer...
...The waiter in La Boue d'Argent needs a Berlitz course-it's mesdames, not madames, and un Perrier, not une Perrier, s'il vous plait...
...I did...
...First you got to control...
...My major reservation so far concerns the excessive use of detail...
...The jockeying for social position, such as it is in the eighties, is intense, and Wolfe is alive to innumerable air-lines of status...
...You heard about Judgment Day...
...at hand...
...Their fiction (with the brilliant exception of a few of O'Hara's short stories, such as "Summer's Day") does not send an aesthetic tingle down the spine...
...who, in fact, have been quite obsessed with money, power, and class...
...money flows like lava, and lots of Europeans have crossed the Atlantic "to devour at leisure the last plump white meat on the bones of capitalism...
...nor can one prove Socrates' assertion in the Symposium that real aesthetic beauty is "not fair in one point of view and foul in another . . . 'but absolute, separate...
...Some of the detail, such as Reverend Bacon's gold chain and Rolex watch, does exactly what it is supposed to do, which is to tip the reader off in a few quick strokes about a character...
...and so you owned it all, and you still own it all, and so you think capital...
...You best begin practicing the capitalism of the future...
...The central character, who, it seems, will tie all the strands together, is Sherman McCoy, a high-priced novelist, author of A Man in Slices ("A Man Cut in Slices...
...ing Heights, whose "journalistic" content is virtually nil...
...You think it's something you own 'cause you always owned it...
Vol. 18 • March 1985 • No. 3
