Hooking Up With Tom Wolfe

...Meanwhile there is The Right Stuff, Wolfe's nonfiction masterpiece...

...It is the story of a sting operation-hidden cameras and such-that a television program conducts to trap three young soldiers into confessing they killed another soldier because he was gay...

...A pale brown tie, along with ginger brown shoes, do not just happen on their own...

...In fact, Wolfe was on to what soon would be called the New Journalism, and he would become its best-known practitioner...

...In fact, even though you may not think of him that way, he is the quintessential, and probably most admired, influential, and imitated journalist of our time...

...I've never wanted to fall into an ideological trap-you have the conclusion before you have the evidence...

...older ones thought not...

...Navy pilots from the carrier Coral Sea...

...There are two lamps in the shape of homburgs, and a D-shaped mahogany desk, with internal wiring for a radio, clock, calculator, tape recorder and pencil sharpener...

...It's a bit boring...

...second base' meant oral sex...

...He has often been described as a dandy, and in news photographs he usually is seen in a white or an off-white suit...

...They also strained for special effects...

...They provide the scaffolding for his work, and it is remarkable how often and where he finds them...

...This hardly excuses the death of the gay soldier, but it does introduce a moral ambiguity...

...There are people on the right, and people on the left, but the train just rolls along...

...It's warm enough, but it's not fuzzy enough...

...Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving all insisted Wolfe was only a journalist, and not a real novelist like any of them...

...It got fine reviews and sold a great many copies, and Time put him on its cover...

...He seemed to be as much an objective, disinterested but still sympathetic sociologist as he was a journalist...

...The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," probably Wolfe's best known magazine piece from the early sixties, may have wrecked as many young writers as it inspired...

...After disposing of Mailer, Updike, and Irving in "My Three Stooges," for example, Wolfe goes on to write about the naturalistic novel and the movies...

...It is a study of the status system of military pilots...

...I'm proud I haven't done that...

...third base' meant going all the way...

...Wolfe's journalistic reputation took a great leap forward after that...

...The flight deck pitches and heaves, black smoke pours from engines, a SAM looks like a telephone pole...

...Preserved...

...But that was in the future, and meanwhile there was academia...

...pat pat pat pat pat pat pat pat, four-four, we were all very hippy along the Mississippi in naughty naughty naughty oughty oughty oughty-eight...

...Their wardroom, rich in buried wood and upholstered chairs, looks like an upper-class men's club...

...Wolfe says his doctoral dissertation, on the nineteen-thirties League of American Writers, was dusty and dismal and read like "early 32 February 2001 The American Spectator Sumerian history...

...40 years later in the Trib newsroom, Wolfe did, too...

...The techniques used to write fiction could now be used to write news stories...

...At the Times, the newsroom was divided...

...The piece was about the custom-car culture in California, and Wolfe wrote it for Esquire all in one burst...

...The carpet is in shades of blue, and has the same motif as the carpets in Radio City Music Hall...

...The American Spectator 9 February 2oox 33...

...When he stopped typing at 6:15 A.M., it was forty-nine pages...

...S entences like that, of course, could make Wolfe look like a show-off or poseur, a flash in the pan whom respectable reporters and editors need not take seriously...

...eight is the point, the point is eight," and then more "HER-Nias" and "hernias," and finally a quote: "What is all this hernia, hernia stuff...

...No one could remember anything quite like "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby" before...

...Meanwhile Wolfe fell in love with sociology...

...But this is how Wolfe began an article on Las Vegas: "Hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia...

...This is a stable country, and the American government is like a big train...

...The clothes style is like the prose style...

...in American studies, he could roam through the stacks ("It was a little bit of heaven," he says) and he discovered the Brothers Serapion, early Soviet writers who borrowed techniques from the French symbolists when they wrote about the Communist revolution...

...Nonetheless it is all a re-creation...

...However...

...Dobell called...

...And this is how he ended a two-part series on the New Yorker that angered, shocked and secretly entertained the Eastern Seaboard literary, journalistic and even political establishments: "Harold Ross...

...The Trib was losing circulation and advertising to the New York Times, and wanted to re-invent itself...

...The essay appears in Hooking Up, a new collection of Wolfe's work, including the novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg" and a sampling of his pieces from over the years...

...Shawn, God bless you...

...I don't think you can find a political stand in anything I've written, and I've always passed up the opportunities to become a political writer...

...The League, a Communist front, was more committed to Soviet foreign policy than it was to literature, but was still supported by virtually every prominent writer in the country...

...In an essay called "My Three Stooges," he said they reminded him of Larry, Moe, and Curly...

...Consequently it changed the name of its Sunday supplement to New York, and hired Clay Felk-er to be its editor...

...write in italics, and sometimes end sentences with dashes-so why couldn't they...

...Meanwhile, whatever the reason, he upset some other men of letters...

...When he appeared on the cover of Time, he also wore a white homburg, while he held a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a white walking stick in the other...

...Like the cream-color mohair jacket and cream-color pants, it suits him...

...Wolfe could use ellipses...

...On someone else, a white suit in winter, like a sentence with italics or ellipses, would be an affectation...

...He told Esquire he simply could not pull the story together...

...Pat pat pat pat pat pat pat...

...It is also about courage and commitment, and how men bond in war...

...The pilots are awakened every rooming by a little Filipino steward who wears a white jacket...

...At Yale he was introduced to the work of Max Weber, and found a framework for much of what he would write about later: status, or where we rank, and how we get ranked, in our particular social order...

...Anyway, Wolfe handled them in a way appropriate for a man of letters...

...At the same time his article is about more than just status...

...SO, in "Ambush at Fort Bragg," the producer is driven, frustrated, and sour...

...Done and done...

...When the Herald Tribune allowed Wolfe to experiment, he drew, in part, on them...

...Hooking Up confirms this, of course...

...Nonetheless it is all a re-creation...

...In retrospect you can see a sign there, even as his career was beginning: Tom Wolfe was a conservative...

...Sam referred to SAM missiles, and Charlie to the Vietcong, and the jousting was between them and U.S...

...The Web-mind fallacy," for example, is the "purely magical assumption that as the Web, the Internet spreads over the globe, the human mind spreads with it...

...It is about the seven astronauts desperately trying to justify themselves in their own society...

...Whatever he might have said he was doing, he was also applauding the pilots who risked their lives in Vietnam...

...Wolfe's larger accomplishment, though, is to invest the young soldiers- uneducated and barely literate- with a kind of dignity...

...So, Wolfe says, at 8 P.M...

...Wolfe, of course, is listing here the things he reports when he writes...

...In the seventies, though he still wrote only nonfiction, he said the American novel had become precious and airy, but a marriage with journalism would revive it...

...Journalists would write themselves into their stories, believing that they were at least as interesting and probably more important than what they were writing about...

...The novelist Eugene Zamyatin, for example, broke off sentences with dashes...

...Wolfe, at 69, is affable, approachable, and very recognizable...

...and 'home plate' meant learning each other's names...

...It also shows Wolfe's conservatism in its manifold forms...

...In the nineties he wrote A Man in Full...

...Wolfe wrote A Man in Full there on a 1966 Underwood typewriter...

...the entire complex of signals that tell the human beast whether it is succeeding or failing and has or hasn't warded off that enemy of happiness that is more powerful than death: humiliation...

...Meanwhile they fly over Hanoi and Haiphong every day, and try to avoid anti-aircraft fire and SAM missiles...

...was writing in 1975, and describing scenes from 1967...

...Newspaper writing then was mostly formulaic, and nowhere more so than at the Trib's great rival, the Times - who, what, when, and where in the first paragraph, with nothing murky, everything clear, and adjectives at a minimum...

...Wolfe was a general assignment reporter on the old Herald Tribune...

...But at the same time he made them uneasy...

...What if he really was onto something...

...Clearly he does not get up in the morning and put on whatever he finds from the day before, left hanging on the back of a chair...

...If Wolfe says that's what it is, that's what it is...

...As officers and gentlemen, they dine off fine china and use expensive silverware...

...He also seemed to respect and admire an authentic down-home, lower- and middle-class California-American culture more than he did a stuck-up, Eastern Seaboard upper-class Anglo-American culture...

...One of them defiantly explains how they aided one another when they were under fire in Mogadishu...

...It has long since been hijacked by ideologues, but its rightful place, he insists, is at the top of the social sciences...

...As he tells it, the deadline was on him, but he had frozen...

...Nonetheless his decision to write about the League-"It was a radioactive subject," he says dryly-suggests what would become a long-term interest...

...Whether this is fiction, or, as his old antagonists might say, mere journalism is almost irrelevant...

...and then JOHN CORRY is TAS's senior correspondent...

...The walls are robin's egg blue, with a lot of ornate white wooden molding...

...How could it not...

...But now he is at home, in the room he calls his "office," in the brownstone on the East Side of Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and children...

...The Esquire article was, and still is, one of the finest pieces, and very likely the finest piece, ever written about carrier warfare...

...Esquire decided once to devote an entire issue to sports, and asked him to do an article...

...Or, among young people "in the year 2000, in the era of hooking up, 'first base' meant deep kissing...

...In a way they were half right...

...All of this, of course, indicates their high status on the carrier...

...Younger reporters thought Wolfe was on to something...

...The novel, he says, is better at noting "status details, the cues that tell people how they rank in the human pecking order, how they are doing in the struggle to maintain or improve their position in life or in an immediate situation, everything from clothing to furniture to accents, modes of treating superiors or inferiors, subtle gestures that show respect or disrespect...

...Wolfe says he wrote it to explore the psychology of a television producer...

...and after a while, "HERNia, hernia, HERNia...

...He took it to Esquire at 9:30, and then at 4 P.M...

...On this particular day, however, he is wearing a cream-color mohair jacket and cream-color flannel pants, accented by a pale brown woolen tie, white shirt, and ginger brown suede shoes...

...I'm the opposite," Wolfe is saying now, almost four decades after "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby...

...The American Spectator o February 2001 31 It was beautifully written, and marvelously reported, and even though Wolfe wrote it in the first person, he never got in the way of his story, and he never patronized the people he was writing about...

...Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin were its principal writers, and in no time at all it attracted attention...

...Wolfe, in effect, was performing a literary sleight of hand...

...Byron Dobell, the managing editor, told him to type up his notes, and he would get someone else to write it...

...he began typing a "Dear Byron" memo, and by midnight it had grown to twenty pages...

...As he told Mailer, Updike and Irving, he goes out and mucks around in real life...

...To dress as Wolfe does requires both a fair amount of effort and a highly developed taste...

...It was beautifully written, and marvelously reported, and even though Wolfe wrote it in the first person, he never got in the way of his story, and he never patronized the people he was writing about, or the world in which they existed...

...Mailer, Updike, and Irving may only have been jealous...

...You may, however, respectfully disagree with him about the novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg...

...It is not about space, and only incidentally about the Soviet-American rivalry," he says...

...He said he would take the "Dear Byron" off the memo, and run the rest of it as the story...

...A s much as it did anywhere, Wolfe's career as a writer began in the library at Yale...

...The article is very likely the finest piece ever written about carrier warfare...

...As a graduate student work-ung for a Ph.D...

...Or, the campaign to discredit Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson was "one of the most remarkable displays of wounded Marxist chauvinism in American academic history (and there have been many...

...Wolfe is both a novelist and a journalist...

...This led to livelier and more provocative stories, but there were also unfortunate side effects...

...The flight deck pitches and heaves, black smoke pours from engines, a SAM looks like a telephone pole...

...This would require him to be a superlative reporter...

...In the eighties he wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities, and proved his point...

...Orwell said he never wrote a decent sentence that wasn't politically inspired...

...The anonymous fly-on-the-wall school of reporting gave way to look-at-me-now...

...He is solely responsible for the program's success, but correspondents win all the glory...

...What is important is that it is real, and that Wolfe has given us another notable work about young men at war...

...HOT I Tom Wolfe is not our best known and most accomplished man of letters, then who is...

...He responded with "The Truest Sport: Jousting With Sam & Charlie," a classic in New Journalism...

...So return now to the early sixties, when all of this began...

...But on Wolfe it is appropriate and right, and while he may be a dandy, he is never an exquisite...

...The best example is Deke Slayton standing up in front of fighter pilots and saying, 'Look, guys, we're really flying these things.'" Obviously you cannot argue with that...

...Wolfe, who was never aboard the Coral Sea, "Alan is still recovering from the near-death experience of his mutual fund...

...One of Wolfe's favorite themes has been the propensity of artists and intellectuals and their hangers-on to embrace the left and all its causes without knowing anything about them...