PRESS: Cry Wolfe
Powers, Thomas
CRY WOLFE PRESS Go to the nearest bookstore. Find the table where they stack the new releases. What do you see? Saul Bellow, E. L. Doctorow, Reynolds Price, Richard Yates, L. Woiwode, Peter...
...The result, in White's book (as will no doubt be die case in others to come), is that the event is seen as through a glass darkly...
...Like so much of his punctuation it's very expressive...
...His attack on the New Yorker a few years earlier had created a genuine stir, but Wolfe's potentially much more significant attempt to divert the whole focus of American literary energy was met by indifference...
...Now look at the contents pages of Harper's, Esquire, The Atlantic, et...
...It was a cortical fever...
...Wolfe was hardly the first to note fiction's labored breathing and feeble pulse but he was the first who offered a plausible alternative and had the talent to back up his claims...
...More novels are being published, with more success, than books of New Journalism-the contest is not even close- and Wolfe himself seems to be running a bit of the old fever...
...Even when the subject is there it's not always approachable...
...By 1972 the fever had ebbed...
...The latter do so reluctantly because editorial budgets on most magazines are about as flexible as New York City's, and because a failed attempt at New Journalism is primarily an artistic failure and often unpublishable...
...Wolfe had gathered a lot of terrific material about astronauts but then, apparently, he ran into trouble trying to tie it together...
...In addition to being expensive, New Journalism is subject-dependent...
...The truth is that New Journalism has always been an enthusiasm of the few, like war gaming, the novels of Edward Hoagland and pure malt scotch whiskey...
...he was going to write...
...The novel sickness, in short, is still pandemic...
...Serious literary folks were ready to laugh when he ran on about the Nanny Mafia and the Behavioral Sink, but when the Man in the White Suit, the Journalist of the Year, the Most Amusing Writer in New York starts talking about literature . . . well...
...It wasn't that no one believed he was serious...
...The general interest magazines are a little friendlier than newspapers, but not by much, and all of them-even Rolling Stone and Esquire-publish fewer ambitious pieces now than they did three and a half years ago when Wolfe raised about what seems to have been the only hurrah...
...Ho-hum...
...Wolfe's own Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test could stand up to any novel of the Sixties and Gay Talese's The Kingdom and the Power was equally extraordinary, a subtle and vivid portrait of men competing for power which was not only true in the sense that Hemingway and Faulkner are true, but also actually and literally true...
...it is hard to explain what an American dream the idea of writing a novel was in the 1940s, the 1950s and right into the early 1960s...
...polite silence...
...So he created a narrator, a kind of omniscient-astronaut who had seen, done and felt everything, a salty character in his own right who told Wolfe all about it-at times he came right out and said, "Now listen Tom, the thing you'll never understand" is this, that or the other...
...More of the above...
...Finally, read the Times, and Washington Post and whatever other local papers come your way...
...That is, something has got to happen before the writer can cut loose...
...Ragtime, Humboldt's Gift, Jerzy Kosinski's Cockpit, Judith Ross-ner's Looking for Mr...
...A good piece requires weeks of full-time reporting, sometimes a long way from home, which means that writers can't do it before breakfast or after work, as so many novelists and short story writers do, at least until they start winning grants...
...The final reason for the fitful progress (not the failure) of New Journalism is probably the one which Wolfe himself least expected...
...This was clearly a subject which Wolfe knew something about...
...Later he supported his case with an anthology called The New Journalism...
...Well, it didn't work out that way...
...In effect he had outrun his own reputation...
...It's a brilliant device, but it's not journalism...
...a novel...
...Wolfe was on the wagon...
...New Journalism depends on intimacy and there is apparently no way to become intimate with Nixon or the men who once surrounded him...
...It was going to be easy, I remember him saying...
...But not the rich, full-blown attempt to do literary justice to a real event which is the essence of New Journalism at its best...
...he simply said that it was, as if pointing out to the myopic that the emperor was at the very least down to his underwear...
...four novels in two years...
...Last year he published a short story and right now he's finishing up a long-promised book about astronauts...
...A piece of conventional reporting on a topic of the day is almost certain to have something in it...
...Somebody has got to put up a starvation wage, either die writer himself out of savings (which they are crazy to do, but do anyway, to their frequent ruin) or a magazine editor...
...let's say...
...At that time Wolfe declared with his usual verbal energy and charm that the novel was dead and journalism king...
...The Novel had been replaced by journalism as "literature's main event," a new form which was to revitalize American letters, clear away the New Critical mildew, and steal the hearts of all those young men and women who wanted to be writers...
...However literal the stories his narrator tells, what Wolfe is doing with his fictional narrator is . . . writing a novel...
...The Novel was no mere literary form...
...Now ask yourself, Whatever happened to the New Journalism...
...Of the writers cited as New Journalists in Wolfe's articles, only two-Gay Talese and Wolfe himself-are still working in the vineyard...
...Tom Wolfe would write the answer like this...
...Politics and pop sociology...
...What's moving...
...It can't be simply dramatic and exciting, like a grisly murder or a fire in a tall building or even a confused woman firing a pistol in the general direction of the President...
...The [New York] scene was strictly for novelists, people who were writing novels, and people who were paying court to The Novel...
...Willie Morris had turned Harper's into a writer's magazine-by no means a perfect one, just the best there was at the time-but then someone noticed it was losing readers and money, and switched it back...
...Theodore White's Breach of Faith is on the Times bestseller list, too, and so are Jimmy Breslin's How the Good Guys Finally Won and Nora Ephron's Crazy Salad, but White is an Old Journalist if there ever was one, Ephron is funny and smart but not New, and Breslin is plugging along...
...To begin with, no newspaper regularly-the Times never, the Post perhaps once a year, in a fit of inadvertenceprints what Wolfe meant by the New Journalism...
...It was as if a freshman congressman from a rural district in Utah had announced he was running for President...
...He himself, after the success of his dazzling articles for Esquire and New York, was quoted somewhere as saying he was going to take some time off from journalism and write a little fiction...
...It means full stop...
...The event has got to mean something, and its meaning must be sufficiently durable to survive four or five months of reporting, writing and magazine lead time without evaporating, like so many stories of the day...
...it's embarrassing, and the dismissal of The New Journalism was not the nervous conspiracy of a frightened establishment hoping the bad news would go away, but more in the nature of a...
...At this late date...
...So the novel is alive and well, the sweetheart of writers everywhere, which is okay with me, and journalism, from which Wolfe hoped to see such great things, trapped for so long in leaden boots-well journalism, alas...
...Human interest stories, stories with adjectives and dialog, stories in which the First Person Singular is led out in handcuffs, yes...
...In one sense The Right Stuff is the old Wolfe, but in another it marks a departure, or perhaps a closing of the circle...
...There are three reasons for the failure of Wolfe's revolution to progress beyond his manifesto...
...If a journalist aspired to literary status-then he had better have the sense and the courage to quit the popular press and try to get into the big league...
...The first and probably most important' is that New Journalism is very expensive...
...He didn't argue that it ought to be...
...Also one diet book, one book on how to get your way by intimidating people, one book on taking care of your money, one book on transcendental meditation, one book on how to be physically perfect, one book on the last two million years of human history...
...Goodbar...
...New Journalism, on the other hand, like any art, is a chancy sort of thing, a triumph when it works, useless when it doesn't...
...It was a psychological phenomenon...
...Three thousand words on agribusiness may not do much for the soul, but-however flat in its writing, however dull in its structure-at least it's got a lot of facts, readers are fortified with information, and the magazine gets something for its money...
...wrote Wolfe of this breathless ambition...
...The stop has not been absolutely full...
...to be called The Right Stuff...
...Things are happening all the time, of course, but a good subject has got to stand for something more than itself...
...The odd thing about Wolfe's announcement was that it didn't seem to bother anybody very much...
...is still journalism...
...He sounded like a reformed alchoholic describing slavery to drink...
...Back in 1972 he wrote that the literary fantasy which haunted his generation, the goal which brought all those ambitious young writer-reporters to New York, was the hope they were going to find out about the Great World, strip their style of all those literary conceits contracted like a disease in graduate school, and then sit down one day and write...
...If some of Wolfe's champions were already on the way out, like Dick Schaap, while others were literary bigamists at least equally interested in novels, like Jimmy Breslin, still, the New Journalism did seem to promise a kind of renaissance, a renewed engagement with life after decades of exhausted, self-conscious and emotionally faint fiction...
...The Herald Tribune had allowed the early champions to do as they liked for a year or eighteen months, but, as Sidney Zion has said, that was only because the Tribune's corporate mind was on more important things, namely money (lack of) and death (imminence of...
...It belonged in the glossary to A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, somewhere between Narcissism and Obsessional Neuroses...
...What might have been the occasion for a great debate on modern literature-not a weary talmudic Partisan Review symposium but the real thing, with anguished cries and ruined reputations-was instead one more puzzling publishing failure, a book which went more or less . . . nowhere . . . Not only did Wolfe's daring fail to animate reviewers, but it weirdly marked a kind of highwater mark for New Journalism itself, if indeed it had ever been anything more than a dozen writers and half as many editors willing to give them space three times a year...
...If Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, St...
...Your novel...
...Some of the pieces in it were great, and some not so great, but taken together they had more style, intellectual excitement, emotional force and narrative interest than five years' worth of slick magazine short stories...
...Saul Bellow, E. L. Doctorow, Reynolds Price, Richard Yates, L. Woiwode, Peter Mathiessen...
...The rest have disappeared or are writing novels, and for every young journalist out researching the Great American Article, there are two sitting at home, typing away at their novels...
...Clair and Haig would talk, someone could write a rich and significant account of Nixon's fall, but they won't talk...
...In fairness, perhaps that's too many colons...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...The New Journalism is not quite as dead as Westbrook Pegler but it is hardly the vital new genre, "the first new direction in American literature in half a century," which Wolfe announced back in February, 1972...
...it was that no one believed he was right...
...Now look at the New York Times' bestseller list...
...Two sections of it appeared some time ago in Rolling Stone and they were as good as anything Wolfe has ever done, much better than The Painted Word, for example, which read as if it had been researched while Wolfe was soaking in a warm tub...
...Presumption on that scale isn't funny...
Vol. 102 • October 1975 • No. 16
