The Bonfire of the Vanities
Wolfe, Tom
It is Tom Wolfe'striumph in this, his first, novel to spend 659 pages on a tale that could be told in three hundred fewer and not only get away with it, but make the reader realize all he's been...
...Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Hollis, Jamaica, Ozone Park—whose is it...
...Let us call it a work of intellectual journalism, of which this century has seen some very great examples...
...If Mr...
...I have in mind the love relationships of John Breckinridge, the Senator from Kentucky (later to be a general in the Confederate Army), with the Abolitionist Anna Carroll, and also with the Confederate spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow (the double liaison is an invention of Mr...
...Safire also shows us Lincoln making every effort to get along militarily without it...
...All of which is to say that the inner life is nothing—certainly nothing interesting—without the outer life, and that a novel without aspirations toward being an essay is doomed to be just another modern novel...
...Morningside Heights, St...
...The ted bib was arterial blood, which had "mimed out of the stalk of his head like a fountain...
...Everywhere...
...Before Henry Lamb dies, and before Sherman and Maria are even sure what's happened, Sherman is exhilarated...
...You don't think the future knows how to cross a bridge...
...FREEDOM William Safire/Doubleday/$24.95 Lionel Abel 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 Surely Professor Woodward knows as well as anyone that in the great theatre of the French seventeenth century, every story told by Livy and Tacitus was dramatized...
...Sherman McCoy, a 38-year-old Master of the Universe, is a million-dollara-year bond salesman with a Park Avenue co-op...
...Safire, dealing with real individuals taken from historical records, did not have all the freedom to invent a novelist must have...
...Detective Martin has to examine a shooting victim with Assistant D.A...
...All right, then you know that if you pull any more of that arrant bullshit in this courtroom, you're gonna wish you never laid eyes on Mike Kovitsky...
...Safire who are ready to reintroduce into historical accounts that element of story telling without which facts lack any color or quality, and cannot persuade us to remember them...
...Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope—little Hong Kongs, that's all...
...It's the Third World down there...
...Safire makes it clear that Lincoln was unable to fight successfully so long as he did not commit himself to the Abolitionist ideology...
...Modern historians have indicated that they are now opposed to narrative form in the writing of history...
...Now hatred is what the Abolitionists alone could supply...
...To which there is a corollary: Facts lose interest when not in a story...
...timental cast of mind in his full manliness before us...
...And something else has restricted the author...
...It was like something in the jungle...
...His first novel, Arts and Sciences, will be published in February...
...New York in the eighties is a single city composed of two worlds, First and Third, poised against each other in a tension alternately dynamic and sickening, and this is Wolfe's real subject, the gulf between White Manhattan, an "offshore boutique," and most of what's north of 96th Street, known to everyone who lives here as the DMZ...
...If anything, Wolfe does the Bronx, where Sherman's felony is investigated and tried, better than he does Manhattan...
...Meanwhile, the City Light, a Murdochian daily whose staffers include the alcoholic young Brit, Peter Fallow, turns Henry Lamb into a sacrificial paragon after a phone call to his English teacher at Colonel Jacob Ruppert High School in the Bronx: "At Ruppert," Mr...
...Go visit the frontiers, you gutless wonders...
...How did they—I mean, shit...
...If we try to think of some American figure we might plausibly compare with the heroes of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, we soon find we have no one at all in our literature, and in life only Lincoln...
...AIDS makes a brief, and awkwardly obligatory, appearance in a chapter called "The Masque of the Red Death...
...If our historians from now on turn their backs on narration there are still gifted writers like Mr...
...You know something, Maria...
...Now we Americans hardly have a history to match that of either France or Rome, and there are not many Americans who know their own history well...
...Satire's envy...
...unhappily, Mr...
...But all is not apocalypse in these 659 pages...
...And where does that leave Ridgewood, Bayside, and Forest Hills...
...But it had already become apparent by the time of Nixon's election that if it was dangerous to fight an ideological war in Vietnam, without a fighting ideology we might actually be defeated, a dilemma for the American President in 1968 not unlike that faced by Lincoln between 1861 and 1863...
...transcripts of the witlessly fake conviviality of the Hive thatlistlessly parties from Good Building to Good Building...
...Kramer backed out of the car...
...And then, on the first day of 1863, Lincoln announces his Emancipation Proclamation, sought from the outset of the war by the Abolitionists...
...Historical fact, it seems, may restrict literary invention, even as it may inspire it...
...The Reverend Reginald Bacon, an activist-hustler from Harlem—a "poverty pimp" as the current Mayor of New York used to put it in more verbally confident days—turns Henry Lamb into a symbol of white judicial indifference to black victimization...
...The only false temporal note Wolfe—or, more precisely, Sherman—strikes, concerns sex: "It was in the air...
...Safire's...
...One wonders: To what extent did Anna Carroll and Rose O'Neal Greenhow depart from the accepted mores of their time...
...nobody understood the police commissioners, who were usually black, because their skin hid the fact that they had turned Irish...
...Nicholas Park, Washington Heights, Fort Tryon—por que pagar mas...
...I was struck by this detail: the two women involved sentimentally with Senator Breckenridge seem as free from sexual inhibition as the most aristocratic Frenchwomen of the eighteenth century's salons, and as interested in political ideas...
...And our biographers, including Carl Sandburg, and our fiction writers, like Gore Vidal, have, in writing of Lincoln, done only partial justice to him, not having set the man with his unsenLionel Abel, professor emeritus at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is author of Metatheatre, Intellectual Follies, and most recently, Important Nonsense (Prometheus Books...
...When it's crawled under a latex rock...
...To which Martin had said, "Yeah, musta ruined his whole fucking day...
...And they often describe their feelings in a way which makes us speculate on the kind of columnists they might have been in other circumstances—Mr...
...Did you see that...
...What they have in mind is something I came to think myself many years ago when in an essay on Georges Bataille I penned this sentence: "A story is true to the degree that it is not a story...
...Lincoln would surely have made a columnist to excite even Mr...
...If Freedom is not to be regarded either as a novel or as a scholarly history—I think it is because he took it from a scholar's viewpoint that C. Vann Woodward came to question its usefulness—then by what standard are we to judge it...
...I have in mind Gide's Journey to the Congo, Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, and, greatest of all, The Gulag Archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...The hero of this account—most certainly not a novel despite its publisher's claim—is hardly a dramatic creation of Mr...
...Do you know...
...The Proclamation was just a war measure and Lincoln understood it to be essentially that...
...And his war, Lincoln finally came to see, could not be won...
...Now I find this argument from a historian we all have to respect just amazing...
...Killian, from the Reade Street offices of Dershkin, Bellavita, Fishbein and Schlossel...
...Now the figures of Roman history were at least as articulate as nineteenth-century Americans, and the situations they found themselves in were often extraordinary...
...The important fact about the drama of seventeenth-century France is that the writers of that period regarded Roman history as continuous with France's, the French, in their view, being the real inheritors of Rome...
...His aim was simply to allay the rage against him of the Abolitionists, who had criticized him for fighting his war, not theirs...
...But more is involved here than a taste for extraordinary characters and improbable situations, yielding different results to different writers...
...Now that President Johnson did not want to fight in this way does him credit, in my view...
...And Staten Island...
...The "chow" arrives each morning at the D.A.'s office, police vans full of those accused of the "same stupid, dismal, pathetic, horrifying crimes . . . committed day in and day out, all the same...
...Satire is, it seems to me, less intrigued by the incidence of erotic feeling in a political context than in the incidence of political feeling in an erotic one...
...though he never expected the Southern blacks to revolt, and was not disappointed that they did not...
...Irish bravery was not the bravery of the lion but the bravery of the donkey...
...The Irish were disappearing from New York, so far as the general population was concerned...
...One idea that I was left with after having read Freedom—an idea certainly not proved, but then little is proved by historical fact—is that even during the nineteenth century, we Americans were not capable of fighting an unideological war...
...President Lyndon Johnson had no inkling of this historical weakness of ours—and his—and was not helped to understand it by the Democratic party's favorite historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., when a decision as to whether to intervene in Vietnam was before our government...
...From which one must assume that in C. Vann Woodward's judgment, Freedom does not offer enough to the "finicky"—this is Woodward's word—to be worth reading...
...Brooklyn—your Brooklyn is no more...
...And yet the Irish stamp was on the Police Department and on the Homicide Bureau of the D.A.'s Office, and it would probably be there forever...
...T hough I am by no means the only 1 reviewer to have found Freedom interesting, I do seem to be among the very few who have found an importance in it that goes beyond its evident readability...
...Sex...
...Safire sometimes satisfies this first requirement of the novelist, he often fails the second...
...They are interesting only when their peripherals are stirred in, repetitive as teletype unless one knows what tax bases support them...
...and a mistress, a Southern-accented bombshell named Maria, who keeps a little trysting pad for those "moments when the Mager of the Universe stripped away the lc mg-faced proprieties of Park Avenue and Wall Street and let his rogue hormones out for a romp...
...Tom Wolfe has for the last twenty years been the most stylish essayist in America, the best performer in this country's liveliest genre...
...Our weakness in this respect was demonstrated during the Vietnam fiasco...
...I must also say against Freedom (considering it for a moment as a novel) that while its action develops, the characters who are entangled in it—with the possible exception of the President—do not, so that we can hardly ever feel that we have come to know them better...
...When Sherman finally fights for his WASP hide, it's not with the Protestant family retainer at his side, but with Tommy ("Whaddaya whaddaya...
...Can there really be any legitimate reason for questioning the worth of an original slant on the first two years of our Civil War, and this by a man who at least can write, even if he is not a professional historian...
...The war that Lincoln wanted to fight was to have as its sole political goal the vindication of the republic by force of arms...
...The range runs more from cooperative to life-threatening . . . at Colonel Jacob Ruppert High School, an honor student is somebody who attends class, isn't disruptive, tries to learn, and does all right at reading and arithmetic...
...Safire's Freedom can be classed with such outstanding works of mind, and loses nothing in our literary estimation when not regarded as a novel...
...What Wolfe really loves is "Tawkin' Irish" (one of the chapter titles), and Bonfire is full of Mick-worship: All the cops turned Irish, the Jewish cops, like Goldberg, but also the Italian cops, the Latin cops, and the black cops...
...And while Lincoln had not decided on war out of hatred for slavery, hatred, it appeared, was needed to firm up his army emotionally, and bring it the recruits it required...
...of the Bronx is always in search of a Great White Defendant, someone whose prosecution will mollify the non-white electorate he'll soon again face, and he eventually manages to find Sherman on the basis of a partially seen license number...
...two of them trying feverishly to get away, perpetrators of the hit-and-run death of a black kid from the projects named Henry Lamb, who may or may not have been the tire-thrower's accomplice...
...Do you Saturday do-it-yourselfers really think you're snug in your little rug...
...but these are the very reasons which made Corneille write of Pompey, Sertorius, and Horatius, Racine of Britannicus and Berenice...
...The same was true of assistant district attorneys in the Homicide Bureau...
...Irish machismo—that was the dour madness that gripped them all...
...Satire, being none other than President Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, probably the most interesting individual—from a psychological as well as from a dramatic standpoint—to have appeared (in life or in print) on American soil...
...Shit...
...The possibilities of drama for an American politician caught in such involvements are most intriguing...
...what politics and manners give them motive and grammar...
...Have you ever thought about that...
...THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES Tom Wolfe/Farrar, Straus and Giroux/$19.95 Thomas Mallon 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 W illiam Safire has written a wise and often absorbing account of the first two years of the Civil War, from the First Manassas (Bull Run) defeat of the Union Army in 1861, to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which at least gave some promise of Union victory...
...Brown, without Mr...
...The right thought we should have fought an anti-Communist war...
...At that time, the point was constantly made by the political right that President Johnson had erred in trying to fight the war without justifying it ideologically...
...The climax of Freedom comes at the book's close, after more than a thousand pages devoted, in the main, to Lincoln's defeats, military and political...
...We fought...
...Satire's unnovelistic treatment of them we are left only with the fact of their unconventionality, but without a clue as to how they were socially regarded...
...As Bonfire's dyspeptic Jewish mayor rants in one of the frenzied interior monologues that are a speciality of the author's: Come down from your swell co-ops, you general partners and merger lawyers...
...Professor C. Vann Woodward in the New York Review of Books has even asked, " . . . is it worth reading...
...Safire has given himself a most significant task, and if I am right about how he has acquitted himself at it, this country and its literature are greatly in his debt...
...Inescapable...
...he said...
...And while the events in Freedom are only occasionally of the kind one expects in a novel, the narrative does turn up situations which have novelistic interest...
...her facts are, in fact, more intriguing than her thoughts...
...It was a wave...
...The black cops even...
...what cars people drive to them...
...You were supposed to turn Irish...
...But, poor rich slob that he is, Sherman is about to lose everything, all his WASP birthrights and all his eighties acquisitions, in a chops-licking uproar of trashy politics and tabloid glee...
...I bring this matter up again because it has not been sufficiently noted that Freedom was conceived and actually begun while its author was a speechwriter for President Nixon, then trying to end our venture in Southeast Asia...
...livo-thirds of his head was gone...
...The Bonfire of the Vanities has a plot, an ingenious one, but plots have never been the main things in novels or lives...
...Bennett, is a dull wisp...
...He quotes Edmund Wilson's remark on the articulateness of almost everyone in the period, and asks: With such articulate individuals, and "a script that outdoes fiction for improbability . . . why resort to fiction...
...and refuses to answer his own question...
...a fine Protestant chin, an indifferent wife, a lovely little daughter...
...For an ideological war at that time could easily have brought us into conflict with China...
...Such a goal had little meaning to the Abolitionists so long as Washington had not publicly committed itself to cleansing the South of slavery...
...It has been said that the novelist lends his characters his vision without taking their place...
...In fact, the Jewish D.A...
...There for the taking...
...The truth, despite Virginia Woolf, is that Mrs...
...Tough little Judge Myron Kovitsky speaks, from the bench, in one of the dozens of idiolects that squawk through the book...
...From Mr...
...Sherman's life -takes a wrong turn, literally, when one night he picks Maria up at JFK and, on the way home, misses the off-ramp for Manhattan, winding up in the Bronx, where the two of them are, first, the victims of a highway-robbery setup (the tire-thrown-into-traffic scenario) and then, with Maria at the wheel and the Thomas Mallon is the author of A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries...
...How Lincoln was prevailed upon by events to yield to the ideological promptings of the Abolitionists makes not only fascinating but instructive reading...
...Lawrence X12114,K...
...So it will be seen that Mr...
...Rifkind tells Fallow, "we use comparative taxes, but outstanding isn't one of them...
...Back in his mistress's hideaway, he says: "You're right, Maria...
...If the Romans came from Aeneas, then the French came from Andromache, and that is why she and Astyanax emerge safely from the tragedy of Racine's play...
...It is Tom Wolfe'striumph in this, his first, novel to spend 659 pages on a tale that could be told in three hundred fewer and not only get away with it, but make the reader realize all he's been missing in this age of short-winded and, quite literally, anti-social fiction...
...From then on, as the ring closes around Sherman, it's always an "HONOR STUDENT" he's mown down in City Light headlines (which run to ones like SCALP GRANDMA, THEN ROB HER, and which Wolfe has a gleefully DosPassosian time writing...
...And Queens...
...Venturing into fiction in mid-career risked being an act of genre-slumming, but has instead turned out to be a kind of mercy mission...
...vignettes of Eurotrash and the bond market...
...it's all over the car...
...Are Americans still incapable of fighting an unideological war...
...The rear window of The Cadillac looked as if sermeone had thrown a pizza up againSt it...
...a Mercedes...
...Wolfe has time for word-photo essays on changes is -upper-East-Side decor between the 1970s and eighties (mirrored walls gave way to lacquer and tile...
...In the eighties...
Vol. 21 • January 1988 • No. 1
