Mummy Wrap. The Spectator Interview:
Wolfe, Tom
"Mummy Wrap. The Spectator Interview:" TOM WOLFE Mummy Wrap The Spectator Interview: Tom Wolfe The novelist and "new" journalist discusses new media and...
...This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism...
...The foreign correspondents pride themselves on the ability to come in cold knowing nothing...
...TAS: Are the tiny mummies these days a liberal media monolith that is cracking up...
...If that's all it takes for a novel to be labeled satire, I guess it is satire but I never sat down and said, 'Now I am going to write a really biting satire.' For example, in this book a lot of my conservative friends will probably comment on the political correctness...
...Without that Anna Karenina would have been forgotten like any other popular romance...
...That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time...
...TAS: Have the reviews of I Am Charlotte Simmons been influenced by the contretemps with Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving ? TOM WOLFE: They may...
...Now they say it probably came from outer space when an asteroid hit the earth and a few of these things bounced out...
...He had never written anything about me as far as I know...
...If that's as big an issue as you can come up with, then political correctness is not having a big effect on the students...
...NBC once broke this huge story about nuclear atomic weaponry in Israel and got it totally wrong...
...The Internet doesn't really change anything, it just speeds it up...
...In finding out how they did sting operations...
...I just found it interesting that three old novelists of high standing would attack any novel all at once...
...Actually I wish I had now that I know there is a web site called ratemyvomit.com, which is pro-binge drinking, especially as I have vomiting as a recurring sound in the book...
...Just think about the theory of the Big Bang or this ridiculous theory about where the first cell came from...
...So if television news is the way most people get their news and television gets their news from newspapers and newspapers have settled down into local monopolies and don't have nearly as many reporters looking into anything, then the funnel is much smaller at the beginning...
...TOM WOLFE: That's one problem with novels...
...Look at Darwin...
...What newspaper did you get this out of...
...I noticed that 9/11 was not a jolt that affected students...
...I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page...
...It started with Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and ends with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath...
...For most of them it was just something on TV...
...TOM WOLFE: There are a lot of subjects I would cover, such as black middle-class life, which is totally ignored by the press...
...When I wrote that thing about Mailer, Updike, and Irving, I didn't say a word contesting their judgment of my work...
...You get everything faster...
...The anchor's voice converts material written by others into a form that is easily consumable by the audience—that's what the linotype machine did...
...You are pretty much free of commercials except these damn pop-up things...
...I was openly taking notes, but they just assumed that if I was there for New York magazine it was because I must have approved of what they were doing...
...The New York Review of Books does this quite regularly to me...
...It was a big deal to me when I started out...
...The anchormen really are the primitive version of the old linotype machine...
...There was no mass ringing of hands unless the student was from New York...
...And then suddenly it changes very rapidly after the war...
...There was no written source...
...Yet television is so colorful, so literally colorful, that you get the impression that they are covering everything...
...The other problem is that you have to scroll...
...I had never written about Irving...
...But there are lots of way to get this information...
...TAS: What did you make of Rather's fake-but-accurate defense...
...The great American novels were compressed into 39 years-1900-1939...
...TAS: By pursuing realistic fiction during satirical times, you unintentionally became a great satirist...
...TAS: Will your three stooges with their rusted-out hips come after you again...
...But that's what people want to know...
...But I didn't do any...
...TOM WOLFE: What I see is that there is less news covered today than there was 75 years ago...
...But for whatever reason, and I'm not enough of a psychiatrist to tell you why, now when he hears my name, first he will literally start sputtering, then he will try out the naughtiest word he can think of on short notice, and then he'll be incoherent for about 120 seconds, and finally become a rational person again...
...I am struck by the fact that Karl Marx, this unpleasant man sitting alone in the British museum writing these abstruse essays, really did change the world...
...But I am struck by one thing: Try to think of a single important idea that has ever come out of these media...
...Then along came television news and the local monopolies...
...There is always a faction of activists...
...And there is some in there, but in fact the students pretty much ignore and discount it...
...The media have a pretty wild history in this respect...
...Its first question was, 'Where did this first appear...
...I was once assigned to do a story on Walter Cronkite after he had been demoted for the only time in his career...
...That's why Shakespeare's plays were written in poetry...
...What are your thoughts on the condition ofjournalism...
...But obviously I didn't take certain holy things very seriously, which I insist is different from saying that something is bad...
...TOM WOLFE: I'm not sure it is dying because they are liberal or not...
...That's why Henry Fielding wrote Tom Jones and called it 'An Epic Poem in Prose,' as a way of saying: I know that poetry is where the action is, this is not that far off, so give it a shot...
...DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 39...
...It is primitive in the sense that the Internet is a scrolling medium...
...And that's really all they are...
...That goes back to monks in the 13th century...
...The best writers are in masters of fine arts courses and they are DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 37 THE SPECTATOR INTERVIEW encouraged to turn their backs on the world, not to get their hands dirty...
...It was such a stupid kind of thing because anybody who has ever used a typewriter could tell at one glance that this was not typewritten...
...One of the most colorful employees they ever had was a guy name Lucius Beebe...
...There's no question about it...
...And one of the copy editors comes in and says, 'What the hell is this, Beebe?' It was the word 'nevertheless' repeated 80 some times...
...But as far as I can tell they are really not bothering with it...
...Most places don't have an afternoon paper and if they do chances are they are owned by the people who put out the morning paper...
...TAS: If you were writing for a newspaper today, what would you write about...
...Younger people are getting their news from the Internet or television...
...TOM WOLFE: I think that is true...
...TOM WOLFE: I think it will...
...I just thought it was a scream, because it was so illogical by all ordinary thinking...
...That was true of the astronauts at the beginning...
...And Old School is a wonderful comedy of college life...
...TOM WOLFE: I sort of doubt it, except perhaps John Irving...
...It is hard on your eyes...
...The fact is they are technically less advanced than print at getting across ideas and theories and simply explaining things in a way that can change history...
...In fact I have never consciously made any of these novels satirical...
...When he came in at 10 in the morning the program was set by a producer who came in very early and pulled together everything that was on the wires...
...At one time I thought 'Other People's Money' would make a good magazine cover...
...They were shaken up by the acclaim for A Man in Full...
...It is really too bad that the novel is dying...
...They are called researchers...
...I don't know how you can be realistic without describing the foibles of mankind...
...The producer was like a managing editor...
...Think of all the printing presses that would then be useless...
...A novel of psychological depth without social depth isn't worth an awful lot because we are all individuals caught in an enormous web that consists of other people...
...But I defy you to locate the novelist who could have conceived the actual plot of Paris Hilton's life, which is that she got the $10 million contract because she was on the pornographic tape...
...You can also get great pictures on the Internet...
...I had never commented about Irving...
...When I was visiting Stanford, students were protesting that the catering staff—they weren't even university employees—were underpaid...
...TAS: But you did research the media for 'Ambush at Fort Bragg.' TOM WOLFE: I did...
...Beebe said, 'Well, that's all your editorials ever say anyways.' 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 TOM WOLFE TAS: What do you think of the Internet...
...I would cover religion to keep up with new wave movements, the evangelical movements, and traditional movements within traditional denominations...
...Tolstoy knew the social setting very well and set it so carefully...
...To go back to scrolls is to step into the past...
...There have been some good comedies about college life, Animal House being one of them and it is still 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 TOM WOLFE watched religiously by college students...
...My God, what a powerful theory...
...Novels have to be plausible...
...Television, meanwhile, does very little reporting as a newspaper would understand it...
...But readership is declining...
...Seventy-five years ago there were infinitely more newspapers...
...But I missed the big story, which was that he didn't do anything...
...Most people don't read editorial pages...
...People like the handout better when it is being read by Saddam Hussein...
...To think that somebody living in an absolutely stunning duplex on Park Avenue could be having in all these guys who were saying, 'We will take everything away from you if we get the chance,' which is what their program spelled out, was the funniest thing I had ever witnessed...
...Incidentally I have no history with Irving...
...TOM WOLFE: I think that is just called covering your back side...
...ckt But how can I write about reality today without describing the foibles of mankind...
...Cronkite would get to work about 4:30, put on makeup, go over the script, possibly to ensure that he could pronounce all the names...
...That was before publication...
...Poetry isn't literally dead, it is just marginal...
...They were really in love with all of the details of American life, and they captured this great sprawling, brawling country in words...
...There was a great story at the New York Herald Tribune...
...Like a pro he turns out that first page in less than a minute and hands it to the copy boy...
...It is not a big deal now...
...TAS: Is the media discussed in your new book...
...Not enough people read it, whereas at one time that was the form...
...It is a story about the media rather than those soldiers...
...THE SPECTATOR INTERVIEW 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 TOM WOLFE Mummy Wrap The Spectator Interview: Tom Wolfe The novelist and "new" journalist discusses new media and old and the further decline of the American novel...
...They will eat it up with a spoon...
...TAS: What do you predict for 21st-century journalism...
...It is just not a very good use of an old man's time...
...That made her career...
...I tried to do that in The Bonfire of the Vanities...
...The most interesting thing was the reaction of the management...
...TAS: Why 40 years...
...Does I Am Charlotte Simmons lend itself to a movie...
...So my story idea was to see how this would change the way he was treated by others...
...A novelist could have conceived of a beautiful heiress who has no particular talent getting a $10 million television contract...
...Most before-publication reviews are slams...
...It is really funny...
...How can you argue that something is not boring...
...A lot has happened since the 13th century to improve the technology of reading, and so far no one has come up, for sheer reading ease, with anything better than hard copy pages...
...I was on the cover of Time and giving lectures about the realistic novel, and they thought, 'We got to head this damn thing off.' The novel as it is now going will die...
...It has never forgiven me for saying that their editor Bob Silvers got a small package in the mail and opened it and inside was a British accent and he put it into his mouth and it just fit perfectly...
...They always come from somebody who just can't wait...
...He would describe his role as not that of a reporter but of a managing editor...
...But what this is, is getting the party line from a person instead of from a document...
...That's a fairly recent theory, and it is already burning out...
...Television reporters aren't really called reporters...
...This led to real competition...
...What...
...TOM WOLFE: I have no predictions...
...But, it is not pleasant to read things on the Internet with a backlit screen...
...The big story in television news that hasn't It is not pleasant to read things on the Internet with a backlit screen...
...It is hard on your eyes...
...I don't think he ever forgot that...
...The anchors can have a lot of influence whenever they want to stick their oars in, because they are getting the biggest salaries...
...TOM WOLFE: The Internet is the modern form of knitting...
...By the time the news gets to television not much is being covered...
...TOM WOLFE: Look at the Big Bang...
...TAS: Your novel is serious and satirical...
...TOM WOLFE: I didn't consciously make it satirical...
...How much are people actually spending...
...They were celebrities, so if they got together to demand this or that they would get their way...
...In The Painted Word I didn't pass critical judgment on anything...
...It comes out every now and then in scandals or bankruptcies...
...The producer prefigures Mary Mapes...
...been fully told is the producers...
...TAS: Did you do any research using the Internet for I Am Charlotte Simmons...
...There is an inverse status in television news: the person who leaves the building least is the highest ranked...
...And there is one good effect of it all, which is that even in the roughest fraternity houses you are very unlikely to hear racial epithets...
...TOM WOLFE: I wasn't surprised it happened...
...In his 1975 book The Painted Word and the 1981 companion book From Bauhaus to Our House, he detailed the effete theories dooming America's art and architecture...
...TOM WOLFE IS AMERICA'S preeminent observer of decaying elites, chronicling and often forecasting their decline in his journalism and novels...
...In his 1970 book Radical Chic & MauMauing the Flak Catchers, he exposed the comic decadence of Leonard Bernstein and his friends, an elite so indifferent to its own survival it feted the Black Panthers at its Park Avenue mansions...
...He was being anything but tough on Saddam Hussein...
...All of that is repudiated as being clumsy, being a little primitive, 'what writers do if they don't understand the finer things of life,' and the idea spreads that literary writing should be done for a charming aristocracy...
...I would do status articles, which deal with standards set by different groups to demarcate themselves as superior in some fashion...
...TOM WOLFE: No, and that's an accurate reflection of college students...
...Eventually maybe they will find away to make it a lot easier to read...
...The very first reviews of The Bonfire of the Vanities were negative...
...It is perfectly conceivable that the next generation would be so used to getting news off the Internet that the whole focus would shift...
...It will become like poetry...
...They will put up with it and regurgitate it to the extent that they need to get credit in the courses...
...Balzac was one of the few novelists to get down to dollars and cents...
...When television does dig up news—a big story, a big scoop—it is almost always wrong...
...I had students using the Internet...
...So everyone said, `Where's Beebe?' So they brought the old pro upstairs with the copy boy right behind him to take the rush copy...
...They are told, never mind about all this social muck and write about your psychological relationship with your lover...
...And they are all realists...
...The people who actually gather the news are ranked way down the scale...
...He had been demoted in the sense that he became the co-anchor and that was big news...
...And then what I wrote about the Black Panthers at Leonard Bernstein's was taken as a reactionary gesture, but I had no political motive...
...You should do an experiment: Give him a ring and just say you were interviewing Tom Wolfe and he said you wasted a career as a novelist by not confronting life and should get off your farm, and that'll be enough to get him started...
...A printed book with pages was such an advance over scrolling...
...and his 1996 novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg," which captures the tendentiousness of television magazine show producing, forecast the scandal at CBS involving Mary Mapes and Dan Rather...
...What they did was give him an ear piece and a producer in New York read AP copy to him...
...He was the pro, he was the guy under fire, great reporter, great writer, fast...
...In the old days women who had nothing to do would knit, but at least you got something out of it—a pair of socks, maybe a scarf, occasionally a little bedspread...
...But how can I write about reality today without describing the foibles of mankind...
...So one night something had happened at the very last moment, which exploded the lead editorial, and they had to get somebody to write a new one in 15 minutes...
...Take the Paris Hilton phenomenon...
...TAS: Reality outpaces satire...
...TAS: You have said that in some respects film does what the realistic novel used to do...
...TAS: Just by describing reality as it is you became known as a conservative.' TOM WOLFE: I think I have been called conservative because of what I have said about cultural matters...
...It is because of all this silly stuff that Darwinism is going to go down in flames...
...They aren't digging up news...
...Executive editor George Neumayr caught up with Wolfe in Southampton, New York, shortly before publication of I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe's third major novel, to get his observations on today's tiny mummies...
...Incidentally, I give that one about 40 more years, and it will go down in flames...
...I have had so many bad reviews in my life...
...Rather interviewed Saddam Hussein...
...In the middle you have Sinclair Lewis, Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, John Dos Passos—just one marvelous writer after another...
...TOM WOLFE: No, the novel is committing suicide as fast as it can by turning its back on the world...
...There has not been to my knowledge any serious movie about college life...
...But he was not like a managing editor...
...Dan Rather certainly wasn't going to say he was wrong just because this, this, and this right-wing source had come up with proof that it was a forgery...
...Every now and then somebody like Dan Rather will put on an Afghan costume and you will see him with some turban thing on this head and robes walking up some rocks, wanting to feel like a reporter...
...He anticipated the decline of a privileged media class in his famous puncturing of the pompous New Yorker under William Shawn—"Tiny Mummies...
...And I would cover stories about other people's money...
...TOM WOLFE: No, I didn't...
...TAS• It has been a year offiascoes in the media...
...Had Tolstoy not written about the class structure in Russia, Anna Karenina would come across as just a soap opera...
...In that story Iry Durtscher resents the fact that he is doing all the work but this airhead Mary Carey gets all the publicity, all the salary, all the celebrity, all the credit...
...Whenever somebody would make up a story, they would say, 'Oh, that's the influence of the New Journalism.' God, newspapers have been making up stories forever...
...But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning...
...It is in the social setting that the psychological battles take place...
...TAS: Will the novel survive the age of the Internet...
...TOM WOLFE: It could...
...Are you crazy?' DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 35 THE SPECTATOR INTERVIEW TAS: So you weren't surprised by the Dan Rather debacle...
...There are too many scientists who are saying this is rubbish...
...I thought to myself, 'My god, you are in deep trouble here.' The first one was in Newsday...
...There was one case where a correspondent was sent to Tehran during a hostage crisis, and then within 20 minutes of getting off the plane he gives a fluent report of what was happening...
...You can't really argue with reviewers...
...There were seven when I first arrived in New York City...
...I think a novelist could have thought up the story of a beautiful heiress who gets involved in a pornographic videotape...
...You simply cannot separate the psychological from the social...
...TAS: Will the Internet changejoumalism significantly...
...They are not nearly as conscious of the media...
Vol. 37 • December 2004 • No. 10
