PRESS: The Lives of Writers

...Tom Wolfe is not a generous writer...

...New York writers, and a lot of their cousins elsewhere, are indeed cursed with a kind of mandarin attitude towards the world...

...The truth of the matter is that no profession is so ill-paid as writing...

...He'd like that well enough—the wonderful moment when you know you're going to get it—but the real pleasure would come later, as he shook it gently into his cholorofprm bottle, careful not to disturb the dust on its gorgeous wings, and later still, back in his study, when he took a plain steel pin, the kind tailors use, and skewered the plump little dead body to the mat board in his display case...

...It's hard to say what he'll add up to in the end, but he has certainly burst the cocoon of anonymity, and his ability gives him a fair shot at being the sort of writer people call great...

...Far from it...

...X is adding it all up—chuck...

...The "well-known American writer," meanwhile, is wondering how to squeeze a clause on advertising into his contract, and Wolfe is going through his check stubs, with a smile of distant amusement.THOMAS POWERS 148 lost forever the fairy tale land of Eden...

...And he's thinking about those $248 boots, caked with mud in the back of his closet...

...His world is a pampered place, fiilled with the rich, sometimes pugnacious follies of the over-protected...

...His peculiar gift is for satire, but it is satire of an odd sort...

...He's not just good at what he does...

...Not brooding...

...He unzips the cover of his pocket calculator and begins to add up what it costs him to live for a year—$1,000 a month for the maintenance and mortgage on his apartment, nearly $7,000 for private schools for his two children, another $7,000 for the place on Martha's Vineyard...

...it is clear Wolfe doesn't think X has the depth for honest brooding over anything much larger than a fancied slight to his dignity...

...He, more often than not, is working for free...

...Read George Gissing's New 147 Grub Street...

...Those boots are telling X his life is hollow and empty...

...X is sitting in his study in his seven-room apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side...

...Nailed...

...He's gifted in almost heroic proportion, not only with the writer's ear for irresistible words (a common enough talent, in truth), but with independence of mind, an amiable manner which persuades people to tell him things, and a genius for effortless self-promotion...

...But not Wolfe...

...he's tougher than that- Never give an inch...

...The people are demanding it...

...But Wolfe is not trying to reform us...

...Occasionally he speaks of himself as "the man in the white suit," amused and remote, a visitor at the carnival taking in the sideshows...

...It is not that their work is second-rate (although financial desperation will kill a talent quicker than anything else), but that there is not much demand for it...

...Can Christianity find a broader criterion for morality that will bring goodness closer to the loving that frees others from selfconcern to love in their turn, as Jesus did...

...Self-appointed defenders of the poor and oppressed, they can burn their way through enough money in a year to support a woman with six children on welfare for a decade...

...Partly by writing for magazines, exhausting work which pays badly—as little as $50 or $75 for a book review, rarely more than $1,500 for a major article...

...Cooperative efforts on hunger and poverty are encouraging, but certainly Christianity is failing to meet this challenge in the abortion issue...

...Thus, in our outrage at violence, we collaborate with it and encourage it...

...Their work is a crisp catalog of public sin and corruption, but they melt in the company of the great, toads slipping their way through crowds of people with drinks in their hands, trying to get close...

...You see their names for a year or two, and then they break and disappear...

...Besides, Wolfe has got another point in mind, and he isn't about to let it slip away.X has already been but there is one detail more in Wolfe's portrait of the well known American writer.X put away his calculator and dayoreams...

...They remind me of Samuel Johnson and Richard Savage, wandering the streets of London all night for want of the price of a bed...

...And that doesn't even count the ordinary bills, the $800 owing for a cocktail party last month, the $500 for library stairs specially made in Hong Kong, the $248 for a pair of boots made in England...

...The people who mattered had incomes, not jobs...

...a Florentine court...

...But really he is only putting off the moment of work, mulling over the way he lives now...

...To the Editors: The article by Sister Lois Spear in the November 25 issue underscores one of the frequently neglected arguments against the death penalty, namely, that it most probably induces some persons to murder...

...The major trade publishers issue perhaps 12,000-15,000 new titles a year—it depends on what you're willing to call a book —but I should be very much surprised if as many as two hundred of their authors were actually living on what they earned from writing...

...Another writer might have done something else with those boots...

...Unlike Juvenal, Wolfe does not long for a braver age...

...There are writers like this...

...A pile of bills is on the desk in front of him...

...The people who have gone before are a mottlier crew, armed with nothing but their own passion and conscience, publishing in small magazines, living as they can, trying to hold out against the world's indifference...

...How are we to keep the generators running without strip-mining, nuclear plants and imported oil...

...he's a figure as well, somebody in particular, a presence, unique...

...More often by teaching on the side (from $800 to $1,500 a semester, depending on the school), or by doing free-lance editorial work, or on grants (for which you pay in spiritual coin ten times over), or by depending on a wife or husband with a regular job, or by living on savings...

...it hasn't changed one whit...

...Not many of them last...

...How are we to free the banished classes of poor from their awful dependence on cold institutions...

...Wolfe's "well-known American writer" was settling down to a book on recession and repression, an ambiguous exercise for one so free from both...

...Wolfe's "well-known American writer" is out there all right...

...Wolfe artfully declines to name his victim, but anyone who regularly reads the political journalism which comes out of New York editorial offices can think of half a dozen candidates off the top of his head...

...He might have inverted the story, turning it inside out like a sock, and made them the point rather than merely an episode...

...it isn't fair to keep the kids in the city all summer—and the people that he has been meeting there, important people, big people, the kind whose intimacy can help to make him big too...

...chuck...

...Such questions pose no problems for the new mandarins...

...Can Christian love become the impetus for a sharing, cooperating world...

...He's almost proud of them.If People only knew...

...Father Greeley should have asked whether Christian theology and liturgy will be able to make Christians aware of the awesome mystery and paradox of this gift and give us the sense of direction, purpose, and humility to discern and follow goodness without creating a crutch, a fantasy, escapism, that allows us to avoid responsibility for good and evil...

...Who wrote about the hardship and the danger...

...He rolls a clean sheet of paper into his typewriter, and taps out the working title of his new book: Recession and Repression Police State America And the Spirit of '76 It would be unfair, if it weren't true...

...It certainly wasn't Wolfe, who was writing about "The Girl of the Year" during Vietnam, and the ballooning pretensions of modern painting during Watergate...

...X treasures those boots because they Prove his sensibility...

...When he got home he tossed them into, the back of Ms closet where they lie still, curling and cracking...

...It is not much different now...

...Shortly after the publication of her article, Daniel Webster, one of the inmates of North Carolina's death row, took his own life with a razor blade, dramatically illustrating his own suicidal drive [News & Views, Dec...

...The endless, specious arguments between pro- and anti-abortionists serve, merely to solidify these positions, while obscuring the one approach on which the majority could agree—cooperative efforts to reduce the need for aibortions...

...How are we to sustain our economy as we slide down toward the bottleneck of diminishing resources...

...It is not often the world will pay a man a living wage simply to hear what he's got on his mind...

...Or will Christianity remain a haven for those who want the comfort of a commitment to the loving Jesus without the discomfort of a commitment to help and share with their fellowman, a platitude to justify selfinterest, with love distorted into the self-righteous duty to save the world for our own personal salvation, becoming a force for evil rather than good...

...How do they live then...

...There is no Puritan or Republican fire in him...

...marilyn kramer ______Death on Demand_______ Raleigh, N.C...

...But there was a recession, and it was not so long ago that repression was very much the mood of Washington...

...Everybody involved in the production of a book—from the editor on down to the stockroom boy—makes a living of some sort, with one exception: the author...

...Advertisingmen are whores, corporate executives all thieves, public officials corrupt, ordinary people with ordinary jobs objects of pity...

...A state senator said to me several months ago with regard to capital punishment, "We do not know if it is a deterrent or not, but we have to do something...

...So why do I call Wolfe the least generous of writers...

...They were "not at all depressed by their situation," Johnson later told Joshua Reynolds, "but in high spirits and brimful of patriotism, traversed the square for several hours, inveighed against the minister, and 'resolved they would stand by their country...

...Some few manage to handle a job as well as freelancing on the side, perhaps even managing a book or two, always hoping for the freedom which might come with a big paperback contract...

...But no one ever called Tom Wolfe generous...

...There may be a grotesque disparity between their satiny lives and their public personae of gritty iconoclasm, but they are very far from being representative of the lives of writers as they are more generally lived...

...He wore them to his father's funeral on a rainy day in Chicago, but somehow, he just couldn't wipe the mud off those boots...

...I expect that this kind of desperation and frustration lies at the base of much popular and legislative support of executions...

...His father had been an immigrant from Russia, a tailor throughout the Depression, a self-educated man who could quote Goethe and Dante in his heavy accent And somehow, thinking of his father's life and his own life, X couldn't wipe the mud off those boots...

...His choice of subjects is his business—and I would certainly rather have him write about ephemeral peacocks, than not to write at all—but it doesn't sit well for him to speak with such scorn of those with a shade broader interests...

...Writers do not work for free from choice, but from necessity...

...If he were a lepidopterist (and he is, in his way) he wouldn't find his pleasure in the chase, out there in the fields with his net and his handbook, creeping up on a butterfly as it rested on a twig, its beautiful wings breathing in add out...

...But, we cannot discharge this responsibility without the knowledge of good and evil, and the traditionalists' claim to this knowledge is being seriously challenged by those who clearly see the evil in the unloving consequences of what the traditionalists call good...

...Most of them don't last long...

...Slick champions of Democracy, Justice and Freedom, their own lives are as filled with poisonous intrigue as...

...Their animosity towards business in all its forms has about it a touch of 19thcentury disdain for trade...

...someone has to build and run those businesses which sustain the government with its billions in taxes, and buy the ads in the magazines which run the mandarins' work...

...It is the same with almost every other aspect of national life: a willful blindness to the sheer complexity of the world, a reduction of genuine dilemmas to cheap moral certitude...

...Someone has to support them after all...

...The writers with agents like sharks and gold American Express cards who would turn murderous if Elaine ever put them in the back room...

...chuck!—as he taps the keys on his little calculator...

...People instinctively see his work as a whole...

...Take his portrait of the "well-known American Writer" X in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, author of Under Uncle's Thumb and about to embark on a new work...

...No one in his right mind would go into business...

...He might have written a fine piece about the Due de Saint Simon, who would strut and preen for a month in the afterglow of an amiable remark by the King...

...We do not know how many murders are motivated by a desire to destroy themselves, but there have been studies which document increases in homicide rates before and after highly publicized executions...

...all are heroes in their way...

...It seems there are a lot of magazines when you try to read them all, but there aren't so many really, and most of them are poor too...

...How are we to end the arms race...

...He is not like Juvenal, angry and excoriating, animated by fierce passion...

...Their credit cards are withdrawn, their savings gone, their agents sorry to report that the best offer for a book was $5,000...

...each new article enlarges our perception of who he is...

...By exercising his freedom to choose, man becomes responsible for good and evil and can never be free of this responsibility to live the childlike existence of Eden...

...A perfect specimen of its type...

...Mandarin writers are hypocritically, even willfully blind to the realities of economic life...

...They have their failings—intolerance, perhaps, or a tendency to exaggerated alarm—but superciliousness is not one of them...

...If the mandarins exist, paid too much for too little, and not so much made as destroyed by their good fortune, nevertheless they are few in number...

...The kind of writers who snickered about the Nixons in private, and sneered in print...

...His targets are ordinary humbug, inflated self-esteem, cant, childish preoccupation with styJr confused and timid sensibilities...

...In their snug minds there is an answer to everything, and it is only accident their answers never threaten them with war, un143 employment lines, schools that don't teach, cold houses, or the loss of those precious two months on the Vineyard...

...the silliness amuses him, just as it would have amused him at the court of Louis XIV...

...COLLINS KILBURN Director of Social Ministries North Carolina Council of Churches 159...

...They borrow attitudes which have already won the day...

...He could say in his defense—although he is certainly not a man given to defending himself—that his target is the "well-known American writer" who makes such a good thing out of bad things, but it is not the mandarins who write about war, injustice and threats to freedom in any important way...

...He is amused .- 142 in the manner of a man convinced that human nature is immutable, and it is his strength to see that our age is as sunk in vanity and folly as all the rest...

...Disappointment is the air they breathe...

...But the new mandarins brush all that aside with the same wave of contempt...

...He is probably snickering over something in the Sunday Times right now, thinking of stirring himself for a late brunch at One/Fifth, eyeing his wife across the breakfast table and wondering how he can engineer a free moment to phone that girl he met at a party the night before, the one who said she just loves writers...

...His portraits are pitiless enough, but he seems to speak from a great distance, as if none of this mattered very greatly to him...

...Well, his choice of subjects seems so odd and arbitrary...

...He is thinking about the Vineyard—an absolute necessity...

...they speak to whatever is honest in him...

...In the face of incidents like this, it is hard to see how proponents of the death penalty can continue to believe that it is effective as a deterrent...

...America is all hustle and ticky-tacky...