Goodbye to Tom Wolfe
McCann, William
BOOKS Goodbye to Tom Wolfe by WILLIAM McCANN A bookish bartender I know says it was no disgrace for a chap of my age to flunk Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I hope this is true,...
...When someone asked if I read Tom Wolfe, I thought of Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again...
...The man knew this but he recalled, no doubt, that I had also listened to the 1924 election returns from Pittsburgh K.DKA on a crystal set...
...Sure, H. L. Mencken called Bodenheim a "bush-league Baudelaire...
...And she was no Gretchen Fetchin...
...And let me be honest with you...
...First, there was Lew Flapp...
...Our librarian at Millwood Center, Miss Grudge, had located the book...
...On the surface the narrative is simple and straightforward...
...Even now, when the buzzing in my head goes away, I sometimes hear Dick Jurgens and his orchestra ("There's that band again") playing Day Dreams Come True at Night...
...Better get back with The Rover Boys and your own kind of folks...
...Well, I went back to the tavern to thank the bartender for his advice and to show him how well I was recovering from the freakout...
...Joseph Conrad could not have said it better...
...But he and Max were chasing the same girl...
...More interesting than the Rovers' friends were the Rovers' enemies...
...Lew was a deceitful scoundrel...
...There was a swinger...
...Gasper Pold bears a striking resemblance to Peter Quint in James' The Turn of the Screw...
...It happened in Wyoming—west of Laramie on old U.S...
...Dick Rover is about to embark on a perilous journey...
...And he told me all about B. A. Rolfe and his Lucky Strike dance orchestra...
...That was when Luckies came in green packages," I sighed...
...Ever hear of them...
...30, near a little town called Medicine Bow...
...Do you remember those venturesome boys, Sam, Tom, and Dick Rover...
...This I picked up from Russel B. Nye, the scholar and critic who rescued (see The Progressive, October, 1969) from undeserved obscurity the talented American author, Ellsworth Savacool (18421911...
...Reading it was perhaps the best thing that ever happened to me...
...fun-loving Tom was next...
...Tom Wolfe is not one of them...
...He seemed glad to see me, even set up a drink or two...
...Wolfe's radioactive book "blew" my mind and made my stout heart fibrillate...
...Professor Nye has found that Stratemeyer, in addition to being Win-field, was also Victor Appleton (the Tom Swift stories), Laura Lee Hope (the Bobbsey Twins), and Carolyn Keen (the Nancy Drew mysteries...
...There are allegories galore...
...That's a great story...
...The paregoric prose relaxed my tension, cooled the fever, and gave me the first full day of sleep in a week of convulsive nights...
...The adventures in Winfield's book can be swiftly summarized as the thrill-packed pursuit of villains who stole the Rovers' houseboat and fled with it down the wide Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico...
...Why, I had been On the Road with Jack Kerouac and howled with Allen Ginsberg...
...Ken Kesey is to Max Bodenheim what Joe Garagiola is to Ty Cobb...
...The funny buzzing in my head was nearly gone, and I knew I was going to curl up, as soon as the dishes were washed, with The Rover Boys Out West...
...Ken Kesey and his Pranksters are not for you," my friend the bartender admonished...
...What did he mean, "The Rover Boys and your own kind of folks...
...That Wolfe...
...In no time my panic subsided...
...You can glue that in your fedora right now...
...He bent over and kissed her, and gave her hand a squeeze...
...I hope this is true, for flunk it I certainly did...
...Among their chums, you may recall, were "Songbird" Powell, a would-be poet...
...You can count on the fingers of one hand the writers in this country today who can equal the delicate vibrancy of this passage...
...I haven't the slightest doubt of it...
...She did not answer, but looked up at him, innocently and confidently...
...However, I do not for a moment believe that F. Scott Fitzgerald used Dick Rover as a model for Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night, as one little-known critic has suggested...
...Faulkner's Flem Snopes was patterned on Win-field's Sack Todd...
...When I left, the bartender said, "Will you come back sometime and tell us about the night the old steamer Nostalgia went down in a raging storm off Eagle Harbor...
...The author, though he wrote ostensibly for boys, certainly had men in mind...
...clever, cool-headed Dick was the oldest...
...Sam was the youngest...
...Fred Garrison, a fellow who stood stoutly by the Rovers through thick and thin...
...BOOKS Goodbye to Tom Wolfe by WILLIAM McCANN A bookish bartender I know says it was no disgrace for a chap of my age to flunk Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test...
...For me, it is goodbye forever to Tom Wolfe and his acid-racked Pranksters...
...Author Winfield himself, I think, was influenced by Henry James...
...Dora, may I?' he asked softly and tenderly...
...and Hans Mueller, a German lad who had not yet mastered English...
...You have no business with Cassady and Babbs and Gretchin Fetchin...
...We understand each other, don't we, Dora?' he whispered...
...There was a fellow in here the other night you should meet," he said, "a fellow who remembered the Cliquot Club Eskimos and the A&P Gypsies...
...That's all...
...He knew, too, that for years I tuned in every Saturday night to the Aragon-Trianon Hour on WGN Chicago...
...They lived with their father, Anderson Rover, and their Uncle Randolph and Aunt Martha in a pleasant part of New York state—Dexter's Corners, which is 2,865 miles from Haight-Ashbury...
...But even worse than Lew Flapp were Sack Todd and Gasper Pold...
...The same stifling miasma of evil surrounds both Quint and Pold...
...These boys were anti-heroes, really bad eggs...
...And try this, if you will...
...That Stratemeyer was also Robert W. Chambers, Clarence Buddington Kel-land, and Sax Rohmer is my own wild surmise...
...But I wasn't misled...
...This was good advice, as it turned out, but at first I resented it...
...But The Rover Boys, my eye...
...James' book was published in 1898, by the way, and Winfield's in 1899...
...There are deeper levels of meaning...
...I felt pretty good as I hurried home in the dusk...
...I realize now that William Faulkner was immeasurably indebted to Arthur M. Winfield...
...A puzzled veterinarian in Medicine Bow gave me tran-quilizing pills, but it took eight days of cautious driving to get back to Millwood Center...
...Arthur M. Winfield was actually a writer named Edward Stratemeyer...
...Maxwell Bodenheim...
...He and Dora Stanhope, his "warm friend," are saying goodbye: " 'I'll take care of myself, don't fear, Dora,' he said, and, then as they were all alone, he drew her up to him...
...Then a strong wind sprang up and the gulf was covered with whitecaps as far as the eye could reach...
...And Winfield writes like a fallen angel: "The black clouds increased rapidly, until the whole sky was overcast...
...I wonder what ever happened to Dick Jurgens...
...Replenishing Jessica, by Maxwell Bodenheim, was my kind of book...
...You're not wired for them...
...Groping for a tranquilizer one dismal dawn not long after I talked with the bartender, my hand closed on The Rover Boys in Southern Waters, by Arthur M. Winfield...
...Halfway through the chapter, "Cosmo's Tasmanian Deviltry," I experienced what was probably a synaptic freakout...
Vol. 34 • July 1970 • No. 7
