Tom Wolfe : Author Who Rewrote the Way Journalists Write Talks About 1st Novel at Chapman

As Tom Wolfe was sitting in a Bronx courtroom one afternoon watching a criminal trial unfold, the judge suddenly looked at his watch, noted that it was 5:30 p.m. and called a 15-minute recess.

As the judge left the bench, the court clerk leaped to his feet and yelled: “Yoh! Yoh!” Off scrambled the prosecutor, the defense attorney and assorted court personnel.

Thus Wolfe, who was observing the incongruous coming together of the upper and lower classes in New York’s courts for his latest book, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” discovered that this was the appointed hour for court personnel to “circle the wagons”; they retrieved their cars from nearby parking lots and parked them curb side on streets immediately surrounding the courthouse in the Bronx’s 44th police precinct--a decaying, crime-infested section of New York City.

“Otherwise, these people would never make it to their cars in safety,” Wolfe recalled last Thursday before an overflow audience of 300 at Chapman College in Orange. “Nobody dares walk two blocks after dark in this area.”

Founder of ‘New Journalism’

Nearly two decades after helping found the “New Journalism”--which has forever altered what we read in newspapers and magazines (the “nonfiction short story”), books (the “nonfiction novel”) and see on television (docudramas)--Wolfe still considers himself just a journeyman journalist ferreting out the facts as illustrated by his reporting forays into the Bronx.

To this task he brings a keen eye for observation, a fine ear for the varied speech patterns of America’s different social classes and a dogged determination to uncover the “facts” about the multifaceted subjects he has chronicled in his 30-year career.

“When I explained ‘New Journalism,’ ” Wolfe said in recalling his early attempts to define what it meant, “it always came out as being half-fact, half-fiction, subjective writing, instead of what it really is: very thorough reporting using every effective device known to prose, including what is usually associated with the novel.”

Writing First Novel

During his four-hour visit to Chapman last week, in which he gave a lecture to a receptive audience of 300, answered questions from a panel of Chapman students for a cable television show, fielded questions from students in a journalism class and was interviewed by The Times, Wolfe argued that not only is fact stranger than fiction, real life is more revealing about the human heart than fiction ever can be.

The author, who described himself to the theater crowd as a “naturalist, a realist,” has written “The Right Stuff,” “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” “Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine,” “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby” and “From Bauhaus to Our House.” His work in progress, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” is his first stab at a book of fiction.

When Wolfe burst on the national scene 20 years ago in articles on pop culture for New York magazine (then a supplement to the Sunday edition of the New York Herald Tribune), fellow journalists accused him of bastardizing journalism and distorting the truth.

Critics deplored his introduction of fictional techniques to journalism--the use of interior monologues, extended scenes, dialogue and a strong narrative voice. He took seriously the pop movements of the moment and dissected them in minute detail; he summed up whole eras and phenomena with clever catch phrases--”radical chic,” “the me decade,” “the right stuff.”

For an article about the socialite Baby Jane Holzer, he began as if he were a camera panning a concert hall audience from overhead:

“Bangs manes bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puff sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms eclair shanks, elf boots ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them, these flaming little buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside the Academy of Music Theater.

“Aren’t they super marvelous!”

While Wolfe’s writing is flamboyant, Wolfe himself is not. He projects an image more like his own description in “From Bauhaus to Our House” of the architect Robert Venturi--”soft-spoken, cool, ironic, urbane, highly educated, charming, witty, just the right amount of reticence, sophisticated . . . , able to mix plain words with scholarly ones.”

Nattily Attired

The only thing startling about Wolfe in person is his attire. Known as the fashion plate of American letters, Wolfe, 54, had clothed his 6-foot, 175-pound frame in a light-gray silk jacket, a red silk handkerchief stuffed into his breast pocket, a double-breasted white vest set off by the chain from his gold pocket watch, white shirt, a white tie with gray polka dots, white silk slacks, red socks with bold white stripes and white shoes. With his bemused, boyish face, blue eyes and light-brown hair, he looked like a cross between a carnival barker and a dandy.

Wolfe’s courage and confidence to set himself apart--even in the face of vitriolic criticism--seems deeply influenced by his background. He grew up in Richmond, Va., a city where everyone intuitively knew to which caste and class he or she belonged.

Wolfe also drew a sense of security from the closeness of his family. He has a sister, five years younger. His father was an agronomist. His mother had eclectic artistic interests. She taught her son to draw, lectured about the use of color in painting and read voraciously.

“I always had the feeling--and I’d give anything to have it for my own daughter (Alexandra)--that my parents knew exactly how life should be conducted,” Wolfe said. “They had confidence in the choices they were making, and they made us feel that we should have confidence, too.”

It was Wolfe’s father who seems to have influenced him most. Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Sr., a scientist and teacher, was also the editor of the Southern Planter, the leading farm journal of the period. Wolfe talks about him with uncharacteristic emotion.

Memories of His Father

“To my mind he was a writer,” Wolfe said. “My first memories of him are when he was editing the Planter. He would write in longhand and it seemed magical to me.”

Though Wolfe planned to be a writer, at age 21 he tried out for the New York Giants, but his pitching repertory wasn’t enough to land him a job. Instead, after graduating in 1951 with honors from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.--where he majored in English, was sports editor of the campus newspaper, a founder of the literary quarterly Shenandoah and a pitcher on the baseball team--he went to Yale. In 1957 he earned his doctorate in American Studies, a multidisciplinary approach to American history.

Feeling confined by academia, he was attracted to journalism and its renegade quality. Without openly rebelling himself, Wolfe found he could explore unconventional worlds through the people he reported about, and command attention through the dazzling style he adopted.

“I enjoyed the cowboy nature of journalism,” he remembered, “the idea that it wasn’t really respectable, and yet it was exciting, even in a literary way.”

At the same time, Wolfe’s enthusiasm for the career he’d long expected to pursue, writing novels, was waning. Self-revelation was something he says he found personally distasteful, and he believed that leading novelists of the ‘50s such as James Jones, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer were all writing thinly disguised autobiographical fiction. But Wolfe also had a strong Protestant work ethic--a conviction that the only legitimate way for a writer to gather material was to knock on a lot of doors.

Downplays Talent

“Writers like to think that their talent and brilliance is 95% genius encased in a brass crucible somewhere in the interior of the skull,” Wolfe said. “The other 5%, the material, is just clay. I think it’s more like 65% material and 35% something inside the writer.”

Wolfe worked for the Springfield (Mass.) Union for 2 1/2 years before moving on to the Washington Post in 1959 and in 1962 to the New York Herald Tribune, where he developed his distinctive writing style. Liberated from traditional journalistic form, Wolfe poured out impressionistic articles on subjects considered trivial by his colleagues--aging surfers, custom-car builders and Las Vegas billboard artists--while insisting that he considered them quite significant.

But sheer reporting is often what has set Wolfe’s work apart. Although he wrote “The Right Stuff,” his best-selling book about the early years of the space program, in only eight months, he preceded it with six years of reporting.

“Rich material is essential,” he said. “There’s not a damn thing you can do without it. You’ve got to have the details right. Without scenes and dialogue, I just feel at a loss. Those are the things that enable you to get inside a character, to portray his emotional life.”

Indeed, Wolfe said the overarching theme of his works has been: “how we fight for status in this country and the codes each status group adopts to differentiate ‘us’ from ‘them.’ ”

Wolfe’s conservative inclination may derive from the fact that he grew up in Richmond with such a strong and secure sense of community. Not surprisingly, his first political impulse is a celebratory one: His country is basically a good one, its form of free enterprise is the best guarantee of “Dionysian freedom,” and even the system’s shortcomings are less glaring than those in other countries.

Stresses the Positive

Talk to Wolfe about the darker side of American life--the plight of the country’s underclass, for example--and he’ll steer the conversation in a more upbeat direction. “When I was working for the Washington Post, the city was 60% black, but there were no stories about the black middle class, the fabric of black life. They shed a lot of tears over black people living on welfare, but that was a small part of the story of black Washington.”

Soon after, Wolfe, who had won Washington Newspaper Guild Front Page awards for humor and foreign news reporting, left the Post for a job in New York City.

Although Wolfe writes from a largely conservative perspective, he is no ideologue. Wolfe insists he is merely recording the folkways of an America at the height of its affluence, which he suggests is transitory. Wolfe believes American writers will never again have such rich material about which to write.

“We live in the ‘American Century’ in which America became the most powerful military and economic force in the world,” he said. “If we’re foolish enough to blow all this up, we’ve even designed an escape route to the stars (in the space program). This is an amazing time for an amazing country.”

Whereas orthodoxy and pretension are the most frequent targets of Wolfe’s satire, it is unorthodoxy and folksy authenticity that most attract his reporting. Ken Kesey, the protagonist in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” epitomized those qualities--a man who could have coasted on his critical and financial success as a writer (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”), but chose instead to experiment on the outer edges, with LSD and anarchy.

Kept Distance

“He was one of the truly charismatic personalities I have ever run into,” Wolfe said. But much as he was drawn to Kesey, Wolfe kept his genteel distance. He never made an attempt to join Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters.”

Wolfe managed to re-create their drug experiences in great detail, although he tried LSD only once, and then on his own. He didn’t even try to look the part during his reporting. To interview them, Wolfe appeared each day in his suit and tie.

“I wear a typical business suit when I do my reporting,” Wolfe explained. “I found out early in this game that you don’t dress to fit in with the people you’re interviewing. One of the first (magazine) pieces I did that got any attention was about the world of stock car racers in the ‘60s. With nonfiction you have to get the intense cooperation of people to get them to divulge their inner lives, so when I started this piece I was tempted to ‘dress down.’ It was a way of saying: ‘I’m one of you; I understand you; you can trust me to write about you.’

“But you can’t act like you’re a stock car racer and be a reporter at the same time. When you ask questions like: ‘Now tell me about this overhead cam you’ve been talking about?’ the act falls apart. I take the opposite approach; I tell the people I’m interviewing: ‘I don’t understand what you do, but I’m really interested in learning.’ ”

Wolfe has finally undertaken to write the novel he has been promising for a dozen years. “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” which has been appearing in serial form in Rolling Stone magazine for the past nine months, is about New York City--its high and low life, its manners and morals in the ‘80s. He says no one is doing this kind of novel where the city is in the foreground, where the material comes from “real life, from reporting, not personal experience.”

Married Late

Yet Wolfe, by his own admission, is not doing something completely without precedent. The model for his novel is Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” written in 1848. So Wolfe’s novel is different, but it makes a bow to tradition, too.

Single until he was 47, Wolfe in 1978 married Shelia Berger, a woman 12 years his junior and the art director at Harper’s magazine. Their marriage followed a courtly 12-year liaison. In 1980, they had Alexandra.

“I kept waiting for them to hand out an award for long-term bachelorhood,” said Wolfe in explaining his decision to marry. “But nobody did, and somehow not being married was a very tacky condition. So many scrimy (‘scruffy plus grimy’) people were ‘not married’ that it deflated the status.”