undefined

 

One of Tom Wolfe’s favorite restaurants in New York City is the Isle of Capri on the East Side, specializing, as one might expect, in Italian cuisine; indeed, the menu does not condescend to non-Italian speaking customers: an extensive list of choices is not identified in English. The table set aside for Wolfe is in a corner of a patiolike glassed-in enclosure facing Third Avenue. Clusters of potted plants hang from its rafters. The author arrived wearing the white ensemble he is noted for—a white modified homburg, a chalk-white overcoat—but to the surprise of regular customers looking up from their tables, he removed the coat to disclose a light-brown suit set off by a pale lilac tie. Questioned about the light-brown suit, he replied: “Shows that I’m versatile.” He went on to point out that his overcoat only had one button—rare in overcoats, quite impractical, obviously, in a stiff wind. “One must occasionally suffer for style.” At the table he ordered bottled water and calamari. Squid. His accent is more cosmopolitan than Southern, though he grew up in the South (Richmond, Virginia) and went to school there (Washington and Lee). His face is pale, fine-featured. During the interview a young woman nervously approached the table for an autograph. She announced that she hoped to become a writer and that he had been her idol from the first. Wolfe thanked her and asked where she was from. North Carolina. While he worked the pen across the paper (Wolfe’s autograph is a decorative scrawl that if stretched out straight would measure a foot), the two chatted about her home state, which he knows well—his mother and sister live there. The young woman went on to say that she found New York City wonderful and looked forward to moving. Wolfe nodded, and afterwards remarked how pleasing it was to hear from someone not swayed by the bad publicity, least of all by reading his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Part of the interview which follows was conducted before the public under the auspices of the West Side YMCA in Manhattan.

 

INTERVIEWER

When did you first realize that you had a knack for writing?

TOM WOLFE

Very early. When I was six or seven years old. My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called The Southern Planter. He didn’t think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I’d seen him working at his desk. I just assumed that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer. There’s an enormous advantage in having (mistakenly or not) the impression that you have a vocation very early because from that time forward you begin to focus all of your energies towards this goal. The only other thing I ever considered from six on was to become an artist, something my mother had encouraged me to do. 

INTERVIEWER

Regarding writing, was there any particular book that influenced you?

WOLFE

I was greatly struck by Emil Ludwig’s biography of Napoleon, which is written in the historical present. It begins as the mother sits suckling her babe in a tent. 

INTERVIEWER

And that impressed you? 

WOLFE

It impressed me so enormously that I began to write the biography of Napoleon myself, though heavily cribbed from Emil Ludwig. I was eight at the time.

INTERVIEWER

Did it start the same way, with a babe being suckled in . . .

WOLFE

It did, though no one would tell me what suckled meant. I only knew that that was what Napoleon did at the start. I always liked Napoleon from when I was six on because he was small and had ruled the world and at the time I was small. I liked Mozart for the same reason.

INTERVIEWER

What about Thomas Wolfe? Did he float into your consciousness at all?

WOLFE

Yes, he did. I can remember that on the shelves at home there were these books by Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward Angel and Of Time and the River. Of Time and the River had just come out when I was aware of his name. My parents had a hard time convincing me that he was no kin whatsoever. My attitude was, Well, what’s he doing on the shelf then? But as soon as I was old enough I became a tremendous fan of Thomas Wolfe and remain so to this day. I ignore his fluctuations on the literary stock market.

INTERVIEWER

You started off writing for newspapers . . .

WOLFE

The first newspaper I worked on was the Springfield Union in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two nos.

INTERVIEWER

Style is pretty much dictated in newspaper work, isn’t it? Can you say something about the development of your style, which is certainly one of the more unique in American letters?

WOLFE

The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one’s prose style. That’s why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style. When I started writing magazine pieces for Esquire, I had to unlearn newspaper restraints and shortcuts. Working on newspapers, you’re writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor—women can’t drive, things like that. That’s about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness. But I wouldn’t give anything for the years I spent on newspapers because it forces you, it immerses you, in so many different sides of life. I did try to cut up as much as I could; I think I was a lively newspaper writer, but that’s a long way from being a good writer. 

INTERVIEWER

Did editors tend to say, Come now, you can’t do this sort of thing?

WOLFE

Yes, if the subject was serious. The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when The Washington Post suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious. Every time I tried to write about the veins popping out on the forehead of a Cuban revolutionary leader it was just stricken from the copy because all they wanted was, Defense Minister Raul Castro said yesterday that . . .

INTERVIEWER

When did the breakthrough come?

WOLFE

Well, this happened really in two stages. While I was in graduate school at Yale I came upon a group of early Soviet writers called the Brothers Serapion. These were people like Boris Pilnyak who wrote a book called The Naked Year, and especially Eugene Zamiatin, probably best known for his novel We, upon which George Orwell’s 1984 is based. He is a brilliant writer who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1927, I believe. These were Russian writers writing about the Soviet revolution; they were heavily influenced by French Symbolism, so you had all the preciousness and aestheticism of the Symbolists converging upon a very raw subject, namely the Revolution. I began imitating the Brothers Serapion in the short pieces I was writing for myself. I even tried to sneak these things into my newspaper work. I never got very far with it.

INTERVIEWER

What sort of thing?

WOLFE

For example, one of the things they did was experiment with punctuation. In We, Zamiatin constantly breaks off a thought in mid-sentence with a dash. He’s trying to imitate the habits of actual thought, assuming, quite correctly, that we don’t think in whole sentences. We think emotionally. He also used a lot of exclamation points, a habit I picked up and which I still have. Someone counted them in The Bonfire of the Vanities—some enormous number of exclamation points, up in the thousands. I think it’s quite justified, though I’ve been ridiculed for it. Dwight Macdonald once wrote that reading me, with all these exclamation points, was like reading Queen Victoria’s diaries. He was so eminent at the time, I felt crushed. But then out of curiosity I looked up Queen Victoria’s diaries. They’re childhood diaries. They’re full of exclamation points. They are so much more readable than the official prose she inflicted on prime ministers and the English people in the years thereafter. Her diaries aren’t bad at all. I also made a lot of use of the historical present (getting back to Emil Ludwig) in my early magazine work, along with eccentric images and metaphors. These were things that I began to use as soon as I had a truly free hand. That was when I began to do magazine work in 1963 for Esquire—which was that rarest of things: an experimental mass-circulation magazine.

INTERVIEWER

Presumably there was an editor at Esquire who supported what you were up to . . .

WOLFE

Well, Byron Dobell was the first editor I had at Esquire. I’ve written about this in the introduction to The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The piece about car customizers in Los Angeles was the first magazine piece I ever wrote. I was totally blocked. I now know what writer’s block is. It’s the fear you cannot do what you’ve announced to someone else you can do, or else the fear that it isn’t worth doing. That’s a rarer form. In this case I suddenly realized I’d never written a magazine article before and I just felt I couldn’t do it. Well, Dobell somehow shamed me into writing down the notes that I had taken in my reporting on the car customizers so that some competent writer could convert them into a magazine piece. I sat down one night and started writing a memorandum to him as fast as I could, just to get the ordeal over with. It became very much like a letter that you would write to a friend in which you’re not thinking about style, you’re just pouring it all out, and I churned it out all night long, forty typewritten, triple-spaced pages. I turned it in in the morning to Byron at Esquire, and then I went home to sleep. About four that afternoon I got a call from him telling me, Well, we’re knocking the “Dear Byron” off the top of your memo, and we’re running the piece. That was a tremendous release for me. I think there are not many editors who would have done that, but Esquire at that time was a very experimental magazine. Byron Dobell was and remains a brilliant editor, and it worked out.

INTERVIEWER

Is it hazardous to have a style as distinctive as that?

WOLFE

It became so. At the outset I didn’t think of myself as having something called a Tom Wolfe style. Many of my first pieces were for the Herald Tribune’s new Sunday magazine, which was called New York and is now an independent magazine. Sunday supplements at that time were like brain candy, easily thrown away. I never had the feeling that there were any standards to writing for a Sunday supplement. So you could experiment in any fashion you wished, which I began to do. Still, I didn’t think of it as a Tom Wolfe style. Finally, after The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby came out as a book, and I began to get a lot of publicity, people began to write about me and about this style. Suddenly I would start writing an article and I’d say, Wait a minute. Is this really a Tom Wolfe style? Now that is fatal, I assure you. I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I’m a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.

INTERVIEWER

Readers have always followed your fascination with clothes, material goods, and so forth. Where does that come from?

WOLFE

I couldn’t tell you in any analytical fashion, but I assume I realized instinctively that if I were going to write vignettes of contemporary life, which is what I was doing constantly for New York, I wanted all the sounds, the looks, the feel of whatever place I was writing about to be in this vignette. Brand names, tastes in clothes and furniture, manners, the way people treat children, servants, or their superiors, are important clues to an individual’s expectations. This is something else that I am criticized for, mocked for, ridiculed for. I take some solace in the fact that the leading critic of Balzac’s day, Sainte-Beuve, used to say the same thing about Balzac’s fixation on furniture. You can learn the names of more arcane pieces of furniture reading Balzac than you can reading a Sotheby’s catalogue. Sainte-Beuve said, If this little man is so obsessed with furniture why doesn’t he open up a shop and spare us these so-called novels of his? So I take solace in this. After all, we are in a brand-name culture.

INTERVIEWER

Do you read catalogues, for example, to keep up on shoes and so forth?

WOLFE

I must confess to having read furniture-auction catalogues so that if I walked into somebody’s living room I’d be able to tell you what these articles of furniture were. When I wrote Radical Chic, as a matter of fact, about a party for the Black Panthers at Leonard Bernstein’s apartment, I noticed that the platters upon which the Panthers were being served Roquefort cheese balls were gadrooned. They had this little sort of ribbing around the edges of the trays. You may think that’s a small point, but I think that small points like that can really make a piece, particularly at the beginning. There’s something about a gadrooned platter being served to the Black Panthers that really gives a piece a bite, particularly at the beginning. It doesn’t matter if your audience doesn’t know what a gadrooned platter is. Often people are flattered to have an unusual word thrust upon them. They say, Well, that author thinks I know what he’s talking about!

INTERVIEWER

At that party did you remember such things or do you have to whisk a notebook out and write a note down in the bathroom or wherever?

WOLFE

At that party I did take notes very openly. I was not the only person in the room doing so, incidentally. Charlotte Curtis of The New York Times was taking notes a mile a minute, and she did write about the party too. If it’s a situation in which it’s impossible or very awkward to take notes, I will try to write down everything I can remember before going to sleep. I find that memory decay is very rapid. Even going to sleep and waking up the next day, there’s an awful lot that simply doesn’t come back. At least it doesn’t come back accurately. So I do it as soon as I can.

INTERVIEWER

Are memorable stories like that assigned to you by editors? How do you pick your subjects?

WOLFE

A great many stories that I did, particularly early in the game, were assigned to me, often things that I had no interest in covering at first. For example, after I did the piece on customized cars, Esquire assigned me a piece on the then Cassius Clay, which I did want to do very much, and then a piece on Las Vegas. I felt that Las Vegas was the most tired story imaginable, but I wanted to be in Esquire again. And I wanted the money. So I went off to Las Vegas, and the place was a wonderland in a way that I had never expected. It turned out to be a very successful story as well; other stories were assigned. There’s probably never been a better originator of story ideas in journalism than Clay Felker. Harold Hayes and Byron Dobell at Esquire were both very good. I did a story on a stockcar driver in North Carolina, Junior Johnson, who had been a whiskey runner for his father. That was an idea that came from an Esquire editor. On the other hand, Radical Chic, which was about the party at Leonard Bernstein’s, was my own.

INTERVIEWER

Between journalism and fiction, which is the more difficult and which the more satisfying?

WOLFE

The problems are enormous with each, and I wouldn’t say that one is any easier than another. I found it extremely difficult to shift from nonfiction to fiction and for reasons that surprised me. One was that I didn’t face up to the most obvious thing of all . . . which is that in nonfiction you are handed the plot. You are handed the characters. It just didn’t dawn on me how much I was now depriving myself of. The other thing that surprised me when I first started writing The Bonfire of the Vanities was that I was not nearly as free technically and in terms of style as I had been in nonfiction. I would have assumed it would be the opposite, since you have carte blanche in fiction, this tremendous freedom. What happened was that all the rules of composition I had been taught about fiction in college and graduate school came flooding back—Henry James’s doctrine of point of view, Virginia Woolf’s theory of the inner psychological glow. All things were suddenly laws. I was on an unfamiliar terrain and so I’d better obey. My first time around writing The Bonfire of the Vanities for Rolling Stone I was not nearly as free as I should have been. It took me a long time to realize that I could enjoy the kind of freedom that I’d had in nonfiction where I was operating without any rules to speak of. I finally began to appreciate the enormous flexibility of fiction, but it really took some doing.