Posted on 06/08/2008 5:41:24 AM PDT by billorites
For more than 40 years, author Tom Wolfe has challenged the way Americans look at themselves. His unconventional style of mixing literary techniques with factual reporting became known as the "new journalism." His novels include the bestsellers "Bonfire of The Vanities," "A Man in Full," and "I Am Charlotte Simmons."
TCS contributor Ben Wattenberg sat down with Tom Wolfe in New York following a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Derriere Garde, a loosely organized group of artists and composers working to rediscover and reinvent traditional forms and techniques. The full video of this interview can be viewed at www.thinktanktv.com.
TCS: Tom Wolfe, we are speaking now immediately after the final session of the tenth anniversary celebration of Derriere Garde. Tell us about it and what it stands for.
TOM WOLFE: I had never heard of the Derriere Garde and Stefania de Kenessey the composer who started it -- until I got an invitation in the mail and it had this phrase, I just loved it. Ten years ago everything was still Avant Garde, and here was the Derriere Garde.
And, so, just out of curiosity more than anything else, I went to the very first meeting. Not that this is an ongoing club, but it has drawn quite a few terrific talents who are simply not seen by the existing art world.
I'll give you an example. Jacob Collins is, certainly in terms of skill and technique, one of the most brilliant artists in the entire country. Frederick Hart, who did the colossal deep relief called Ex Nihilo. It is about two stories high on the West Wall of the Washington National Cathedral.
He was naturally nervous. What was going to be the reception in the art world of this essentially neoclassical piece? And there was none. None. When he died I wrote an article about him called "The Invisible Artist" because here he had been commissioned to do the biggest and really the most costly piece of religious art of the Twentieth Century - certainly in this country - and there was no mention of it whatsoever.
If it's realistic, it's just something that happens, as if you add concrete inside of some existing model and out it comes.
TCS: Is art an attempt to understand life? Is that what the artist is trying to grope with?
TOM WOLFE: I don't think the artist is trying to understand life. In my experience the artist is trying to be famous.
TCS: Is that why you write, to be famous, or to get a message across, or to create enjoyment and understanding?
TOM WOLFE: I had that question sprung on me once. I had given a talk at a college about something else entirely and the first question in the question period was, "Why did you write?"
Well, now, if you and I were talking, I would say, I have to think about that. And I will come back tomorrow and let you know. But you feel on the spot when you are up on the stage.
So, I free associated and I found myself repeating part of the Presbyterian catechism which I hadn't taken in I don't know how many years. And I said, well, I think of the Presbyterian catechism -- the first question is, "Who created heaven and earth?" And the answer is God.
The second question is one of the most interesting in all of religion. Why did He do it? And the answer is for His own glory. Now, that's what came up when I free associated, and that may be the most honest reason.
As far as the task of the writer, I feel it is to simply discover things that most people don't know about or find a concept that pulls things together.
I totally disagree with Orwell, who I admire. Orwell said, "I never wrote a decent word that wasn't motivated by a deep political feeling." I have never written a decent word that was dominated by politics.
People always talk about me as this right-wing writer. And to them I say, "What's my agenda? What is political about I am Charlotte Simmons? What's political about A Man In Full, what's political about The Right Stuff or The Bonfire of the Vanities, or The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test?"
TCS: Some of your readers think that the answer to that is it's a rebuttal to some of the crazy leftism that has gotten into our arts.
TOM WOLFE: Well, I can't stand the fact that party lines are created all the time in the arts. And in the days of communism, they used talk about the party line. Well, this is not the days of communism. But there's still a party line and I just can't resist trying to pop the bubbles.
TCS: But in our society bubble popping is a political art and has political meaning to it.
TOM WOLFE: Well, not in the terms of who's going to win elections.
TCS: You were one of the originators of what is called "The New Journalism" which is sort of fact and evocation mixed together. Is that the right definition?
TOM WOLFE: New Journalism as I understood it is using the techniques that had hitherto been confined to fiction, such as telling a story scene-by-scene. And also the careful notation of status details. To me, that is the most important thing to spot in any situation you're writing about. What is the status line-up? What are the rankings within the group?
That's why my book The Right Stuff about the Mercury Seven astronauts is not a book about space. It's about this hierarchy that I knew nothing about when I approached the subject - this pyramid of accomplishment that they won't even name -- I'm talking about the pilots now, they were all military pilots.
It's a code and I had to give it a name, so I called it "The Code of the Right Stuff". When I do reporting, I love to find something like that -- a whole concept that I knew nothing about.
TCS: Let me ask you for a thumbnail reaction to some writers and what you think of them. John Steinbeck?
TOM WOLFE: Steinbeck was far more experimental than he was credited with being at the time. If you look at The Grapes of Wrath, which was his great monumental work, published in 1939, we were following the Joad family. It's a well-known story, the Okies as they head for California.
But in between the chapters he has a turtle crossing the highway. And this turtle gets hit again and again by automobiles, but it draws itself into its shell and keeps going.
You finally realize he's talking about the Okies. They're going to keep going. Ken Kesey's father was one of them, and Kesey became one of the great American writers of the post World War II period.
TCS: Norman Mailer.
TOM WOLFE: Mailer cannot write novels. I'm sorry to have to say that. He has no ear for anyone other than himself. Just look at the dialogue. The one exception to this is a so-called novel called The Executioner's Song, which has wonderful dialogue.
How did he change? Well, he didn't. Lawrence Schiller, a photographer, knocked on his door one day and says, "I have all this material, tapes of Gary Gilmore, the killer who was the center of a highly publicized case. And I'm not a writer, but I need a writer." So Mailer agreed to do this. He never went to see Gary Gilmore, who was alive at that time, in prison, and could be visited.
He just took this material -- all the dialogue is written -- and he won a Pulitzer Prize. You would think that he would have learned a lesson from this and would have either gone out himself, doing what Lawrence Schiller had done—or have Schiller go out again.
TCS: Moving on, William Faulkner.
TOM WOLFE: I was in high school and I was browsing in a bookstore and I saw this paperback with an interesting looking cover. There were two convicts in a row boat and it was called The Old Man, referring actually to the Mississippi River.
And I read this thing and I went into my English teacher -- -- and I said, "I've just discovered this writer. Oh, my God you won't believe this. He's written this novel about these two convicts who escaped from jail during a flood and one of them wants to go back in jail. The other one wants to run for it."
And the teacher said, "You mean, William Faulkner." I said yeah, that's his name. Faulkner is the greatest American novelist I ever read.
TCS: Is there anything that we haven't covered that you would like to issue a grand pronouncement about?
TOM WOLFE: I have no pronouncements today. But I would stress this one thing. And you open yourself up to grandiloquence here. I think the fundamental motive of every person is to live by a set of values, which if written in stone would not make you yourself, but rather your group, the supreme group on earth.
Intellectuals do this every day. "We're up here at the top of a mountain and look at all those smarmy politicians, presidents, kings, how vulgar they are."
But also good old boys from the south will do the same thing. My brother-in-law happened to be present in 1943 in a general store, and here were three good old boys who were too old to go into the armed forces, talking about the war.
And one of them says, "You know, this whole war -- the whole problem here is this man called Hitler. I don't know why we just don't go over there and shoot him."
And his friend says, "Well, I'm sure it's not that easy. I don't know how you can just go over there and shoot him."
And the first says, "Look, you get me over there in a boat, I'll shoot him."
"How are you going to do that?"
He says, "Well, I'll go to the front door and I'll ring the bell."
His friend says, "Are you crazy? He's not going to come to the front door. The whole place has probably got a big wall around."
He said, "Okay I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll wait until its dark, I'll go around to the wall and back, I'll climb over it and I'll hide behind a tree with my rifle. And in the morning when he comes out in the yard to pee, I'm going to shoot him."
These were Scotch-Irish people. They loved guns and guns mean a lot to them. And they hated officials and they hated all the layers of bureaucracy. They believed the government can't get anything done right. It's all so simple. You just have to go over there and do it yourself.
TCS: Thank you, Tom Wolfe.
Nice post, thanks, Wolfe used to be a personal hero of sorts.
>>>>”Frederick Hart, who did the colossal deep relief called Ex Nihilo.”<<<<
I think Hart also did the Vietnam Memorial sculpture next to The Wall.
A friend of mine represented him for a bit, sold a few of his pieces.
TCS: Some of your readers think that the answer to that is it's a rebuttal to some of the crazy leftism that has gotten into our arts.TOM WOLFE: Well, I can't stand the fact that party lines are created all the time in the arts. And in the days of communism, they used talk about the party line. Well, this is not the days of communism. But there's still a party line and I just can't resist trying to pop the bubbles.
The Communists are still there, and a part of the reason that 2-story mural was a "non-story" to them.
Orwell was deeply repulsed by concepts of "thoughtcrime", party line, and political correctness that he had observed as a socialist. It is WHY the work that he stood by was deeply political. He just couldn't shrug it off.
I've read some Wolfe in my day (the non-fiction works, not the fiction). What I say here is not an indictment of his writing or any agenda.
TOM WOLFE: New Journalism as I understood it is using the techniques that had hitherto been confined to fiction, such as telling a story scene-by-scene. And also the careful notation of status details. To me, that is the most important thing to spot in any situation you're writing about. What is the status line-up? What are the rankings within the group?That's why my book The Right Stuff about the Mercury Seven astronauts is not a book about space. It's about this hierarchy that I knew nothing about when I approached the subject - this pyramid of accomplishment that they won't even name -- I'm talking about the pilots now, they were all military pilots.
It's a code and I had to give it a name, so I called it "The Code of the Right Stuff". When I do reporting, I love to find something like that -- a whole concept that I knew nothing about.
The events of both The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests and The Right Stuff were heavily documented (filmed and recorded firsthand) and the participants were quite well and alive when he put pen to paper. I'm curious just how deep his research went into these archives when he wrote these texts.
Ken Kesey spent his earnings from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest on film and recording equipment. The films were processed but have only really begun to come out in any sort of an edited and narrated sense. A few hours of I believe at least 50 hours of footage.
Wolfe does manage a good sense of time and place even where he was not present. And he didn't feel motivated by his subject matter to "cross over" into participation.
Can't a guy just write because he writes?
I mean, if some guy in chelsea wants to put chicken guts on a canvas, nobody says to him, "oh, you're so left wing."
But if a guy writes about common sense and the undeniability of truths that transcend the current f*cking fashion, he's considered "a right winger."
Ugh. No matter where you turn, the imbecils are waiting to infect you.
It ain't easy, I'll tell ya.
Very interesting. Tom Wolfe is quite a character.
There is a mantra on the left “Politicize everything”.
It is a commandment, go forth and propagandize.
It got pretty bad in the 1990s. And even today in articles on apolitical subject matter there will suddenly be a slam of Bush or the Iraq war or something else totally unrelated.
And the reader is fully expected to agree with the writer’s viewpoint. There is no support for the aside, no defense of the attack. Just something that hits the reader like a speed bump.
A better editor would suggest taking this or that line out (of non-fiction writings) because they will forever horribly date them.
And there's only one way to defeat fascism, and that's by kicking ass. Intellectually kicking ass.
“Jousting with Sam and Charlie”; one of Wolf’s best essays on carrier pilots during the Vietnam War.
If I recall, Wolfe actually traveled with the Acid Test on Kesey's bus for a while.
As for The Right Stuff, my equally befogged (1st Sunday coffee) memory is that he spent a lot of time with Chuck Yager, the lens through whom the novel is actually focused.
The "status" comment is funny, because it's much clearer in the novel than in the movie that Yager - the lowly test pilot who broke the sound barrier - remains most expressive of the Code Of The Right Stuff, even as the astronauts gain in popular celebrity.
It seems to me that finding affinity with a group named Derriere Garde is a declaration of conservatism, as is endorsing fine objective religious art. Leftist intellectuals are programmed to "push the envelope" (Avant Garde) on all matters cultural and sexual. The movement, at its root, is really a rebellion against the Christian church and its teachings. Avant Garde-ism seeks to destroy all rules of personal conduct.
I also see it inextricably linked with Leftist politics as well. In essence it's about breaking down the old social order and creating new ways of "seeing" so as to create a new social order.
I doubt Wolfe is so naive as not to understand this, or his contribution to bringing runaway Avant Gard-ism into some kind of traditional focus. He's a fine writer and a clever man. He's worth a thousand Mailers.
My husband and I listened to the audio version during a long car trip. The actor who read the book is very good, and in some parts of the book hysterically funny. We enjoyed the book very much.
My only fault with the book was Wolfe's failure to examine the character Charlotte's religious experiences on campus. Surely, there must have been various religious groups, Christian and non-Christian, vying for members. Also, I feel certain her mother and father and minister would have urged her to become active in a local church. Doing so would have saved her a great deal of heart ache.
remains most expressive of the Code Of The Right Stuff, even as the astronauts gain in popular celebrity
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Spot on! Excellent analysis.
Thanks for this post. Tom Wolfe is just about our greatest living writer and I have read eveything he’s done, nonfiction and fiction.
FYI..... National Review Online had an series of interviews with Wolfe posted on their web site a couple of weeks ago. Great series. Check it out if you’re interested.
Thanks for the post. I have been addicted to Tom Wolfe since my freshman year (1969) when I attended a lecture of his where he explained (paraphrased) that a bachelor’s degree is the middle-class’ invention for training their kids to be able to carry on a conversation at cocktail parties.
As he said above, he “...just can’t resist trying to pop the bubbles.”
And I hope he continues for a very long time.
I suspect Wolfe knows very well that openly associating himself with conservative views would harm his career, to put it mildly, but it’s clear that he is not a liberal.
This is kind of weird, interviewing authors. We do it, sure, but only in the hope they will divulge the SECRET all authors know but they never do.
I know exactly what you mean. There is a local column written by a former teacher who is actually not that bad when he sticks to literature. But every now and then he sinks into mindless, gratuitous Leftist rhetoric—Bush-bashing and the rest of it.
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