Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe died on Monday at the age of 88.  In recent photos he looked his age but still dapper in his trademark white suit.

The white suit!   Here he is, author of The Right Stuff.  Of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Of a body of essays and articles unmatched in the 20th century. Who transformed writing and any understanding of culture in America.  So what did the obits and the stories all start with?  The white suit. That's what makes him memorable to 2018.  But exactly!

Readers of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye used to wonder, what happened to Holden Caulfield after the end of the book?  What fate could possibly befall him?  But isn't it clear?  After suitable treatment and better nutrition, he got his PhD in American Studies at Yale, and became Tom Wolfe.

Nobody who wrote for publication after 1968, in journalism and possibly not in American fiction either, could escape the influence of Tom Wolfe.  Whether or not you buy the claims he and others made for something called New Journalism, he changed how we could write, and how we did write.

in the 60s

Nobody who observed anything within American culture could escape his influence either.  One of his signature pieces of the 1960s was about Marshall McLuhan, another cultural observer and prophet. They both brought attention to current phenomena that serious intellectuals and journalists ignored, disdained and just couldn't see.  Especially if said phenomena existed chiefly outside of Manhattan.

Though their methods and personalities were different, they were both oracular, given to deploying snappy cultural labels that stuck.  And maybe Wolfe recognized another similarity: they both wrote with an enthusiastic sense of discovery about the latest trends, which suggested that they approved of them.  But they were both deeply conservative in many ways, and at times horrified by the new.

I read Wolfe over his long career, and came to disagree fairly sharply with some of his theories and conclusions.  But he was always thoughtful, so even in the tangents I couldn't follow with him there were astute observations.  All this is still evident in this lecture from 2006, some 40 years after he achieved his first big successes.

This lecture provides insight as well into his formative sources.  That was something else about him--he didn't just partly absorb and forget (or "move on").  He remembered his touchstones, like Max Weber.  For all that he wrote about the new, he did not himself embrace the new and discard the old without reason.  Years after others had moved on from the old Royal Mounted Police calisthenics we did in high school, Tom Wolfe was still doing them.  Jumping jacks and stuff.

And though I'm not crazy about any of his novels, I applaud the fact that while many journalists promise to write novels, he actually did.

I envied his education and erudition.  I couldn't match it, especially in fashion and its history.  But apart from representing possible new choices in writing voice, he offered an example to emulate in, for example, how much he worked a story, his immersion, his "saturation" method.  When he reported on Las Vegas, he even spent time observing in the mental hospital.  Of course not many reporters or magazine writers got the budget to spend that much time on a story, not even then, and certainly not now.  But it also takes concentration and dedication.

As for the white suit he adopted as his uniform sometime in the 60s...They weren't always white.  He could tell you what shade of white, off-white, etc. they were however.  He wrote about choosing socks that pick up the color of his tie.  He was something of a dandy, but at least he made dressing well seem something that was also available to heterosexual men.

in 1987, around the time I met him

I met him in 1986 maybe, or late 1985, when he spoke either in Pittsburgh or more likely at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, PA.  My book, The Malling of America had just been published and since it owed a debt to his writing, I brought a copy along to give to him.  The only opportunity was a public one, as he mingled with attendees after his lecture.  He was wearing a suit of cream color, or would he call it custard?

We chatted briefly.  He approved of my phrase "the mallcondo continuum" for the landscape of malls and condos spreading between cities in Canada, for instance, where he'd just narrated a TV film.  He said he might steal it.

I yielded to others asking for his attention but some students had overheard our conversation and were excited to learn that I was the author of The Malling of America.  They formed a circle around me to ask me questions, near where others were crowding around Wolfe.  It was the kind of status moment that he wrote about so often.

I expect that at the very least The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test will be read for generations (I took a peek at the first few pages of the latter and look forward to re-reading the rest of it), and at least a dozen of his shorter pieces will be studied by cultural anthropologists of the future, if any.  This is the minimum of his tangible legacy.  May he rest in peace--his work and his influence live on.

For interesting evaluations there's Louis Menand and Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker, Laura Miller at Slate, and a commentary before Tom Wolfe's Paris Review interview.