Tom Wolfe: The Rolling Stone Interview
KA-THUNKA-KA-WHOMP! KA-THUNKA-KA-THUNKA-KA-WHOMP-KA-WHOMP! KA-THUNKA-KA-THUNKA-KA-THUNKA-KA-WHOMP-KA-WHOMP-KA-WHOMP! KA-WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMPWHOMPKATHUNKAKAWHOMPAKAWHOMPA W H O M P A W H O M P a WHOMpaWHOmpaWHompaWhompawhompa . . .
What inna name a Christ we got going on here? This is the famous writer’s orderly and even very literary study, I mean, the white bookshelves seem to zoom up about 18 feet straight and they’re just chockablock with, you know, the heavy lumber: old Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence and everybody else up there in gleaming binding, the expensive first editions, none of these half-price reviewer’s copies from the Strand Book Store, where every Saturday afternoon you can see every low-rent book reviewer in Manhattan struggling in with these D’Agostino shopping bags full of review copies—Scruples!—staggering down the metal stairs into the basement and weaving through the aisles — tachycardia time! — to finally dump these goddamn shopping bags full of books they’ve heaved and carried all the way down from West 96th Street, the goddamn bags ripping and The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet falling out on the goddamn sidewalk there at 12th and Broadway, so they scoop it up and finally dump all these goddamn books on the floor there at the back of Strand’s basement in front of this rope they have stretched across there, and they avert their eyes and try to look literary – bug-eyed and wheezing and army-navy turtle-necked and Frye-booted, real-Levied literary – while some goddamn pustular NYU lit major behind the rope takes his goddamn sweet time to sift through the bound detritus and hand them this little chit like it had a bad smell, like it had dogshit all over it or something, and this NYU twit calls out ”$27.50!” and they take their dogshit chits and heave their way back upstairs to collect $27.50 and buy a 75-cent paperback of E.M. Forster’s that they always meant to read but something always came up and they just never got around to it, but tonight, this very night, they will, after hitting Zabar’s with their remaining $26.75 to get the latest goddamn new cheese and some real coffee, this very night they will read the whole goddamn book and feel very self-righteous and very literary.
Nosiree, no goddamn dogshit reviewer’s copies of books in this here office, this precise, white-on-white office looking right out on one of the … better treelined Upper East Side streets, where the author can look right out and see these perfect East Side priapic buds just undulating their way over to Bloomingdale’s for more of those crotch-grabbing Jordache jeans that just deliciously creep and slither into every secret fold and fissure.
But – KA-THUNK-KA-WHOMP – the famous writer is not peering out at the undulating buds. He’s not even pacing back and forth, stopping to leaf through the fifty-pound Webster’s dictionary (to see how to spell hummocky or some damn thing, for those hummocky shanks, you know) that lies there like the world’s supreme authority on its very proper wooden stand. KA-THUNK – the famous writer in his handmade English suede shoes and those transparent socks with the little stripes on them and the handmade suit – real buttonholes, nothing off the rack at Barney’s for this boy – the goddamn writer is standing out there flailing away, just beating the shit – KA-WHOMP – out of this Everlast punching bag – the real thing, just like what they got down at Bobby Gleason’s Gym, whamming the bejesus out of this punching bag that he finally decided he needed in his study to combat that goddamn writer’s block that just comes sweeping over you like a goddamn migraine and just poleaxes you. KA-WHOMP! Take that, motha! Let me meet my quota. That goddamn quota! TWO THOUSAND words a day. Count ’em; onetwothreefour … it just never stops. One thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine won’t get it: twofuckinthousand a day. When you’re in your agent’s office and you’re signing that fifty-page contract – you practically get a goddamn hernia just lifting the thing – and you look at that due date for The Work – which is the way they refer to your creativity, your life’s essence, your goddamn blood and vital juice, you figure mentally, oh, I can hit about 2000 a day easy.
Well, Tom, boy, nobody ever said a writer’s goddamn life was easy. Exactly!
(Sorry, Tom, boy, but you know how impossible it is to avoid . . .… just kind of slipping into that Jax-Slax-kind-of-clinging Tom Wolf-ese just to sample what the air is like at that altitude, and then before you know it you leave oxygen behind and you find that your respiratory system is running on soma or some damn thing. If there is a practicing young American writer alive who denies ever having lifted anything from your style . . . well, we all know that’s impossible:::::::am I . . . …right? Exactly!)))))(((((((Perfect!)))))))
Thomas K. Wolfe Jr., now forty-nine, was an extremely unlikely candidate to be the writer who would happen along in the Sixties and propel American journalism into a new realism that would become known and worshiped and vilified as the New Journalism. Wolfe grew up in Richmond, Virginia – he still retains the careful inflection of aristocratic Southern speech – where his father was editor of the Southern Planter. Tom decided to be a writer and went to Washington and Lee University, where he was surprised to find there was no such thing as a major in writing. He studied English literature instead, was sports editor of the school newspaper and distinguished himself by wearing a hat and carrying an umbrella, rain or shine. A course in American studies led him to pursue a doctorate in it at Yale. In 1957, as he finished his Ph.D. and still yearned to write, he took a “prole” job as a truck loader to try to get insights and become a writer. All he got was drunk after work every day.
“Most of the things I have done have not been send-ups or zaps, but those things are remembered somehow.”
He decided that a newspaper job would let him write, and he applied at all the New York City papers. The Daily News offered him a post as copy boy for $42 a week. He was ready to take it, until he heard laughter behind him during his job interview: an editor told him, “We never had a Ph.D. copy boy here before; the Times has them all the time.” Wolfe foresaw a future of fetching coffee for reporters and decided to rethink things. He bought a job-hunting book, from which he learned how to prepare a resumé, and he wrote to 100 newspapers around the country. He got three replies. The Buffalo Courier-Express and the Worcester, Massachusetts, Telegram said no, but the Springfield, Massachusetts, Union invited him for an interview and hired him as a reporter. He remembers that his most important assignment was tallying the number of empty stores on Main Street.
Wolfe moved to the Washington Post. He thinks he got the job because he was totally disinterested in politics: the city editor was amazed that Wolfe preferred cityside to Capitol Hill, the beat every reporter wanted. Wolfe’s apartment overlooked the DuPont Theater, which had Never on Sunday for an extended run. Every morning he could see the marquee, which read ‘Never On Sunday’ – Tenth Big Week or whatever week it was. When the movie reached its 44th big week, that marquee was a big reminder to Wolfe that he was having no big weeks, and he saw that marquee as a big clock ticking his life away. Tom still wanted New York City, so he made the rounds of the newspapers again.
He was lucky. Lewis Lapham (now editor of Harper’s) had just quit the Herald Tribune and Tom got his job. It was there that Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill and others were encouraged by editor Clay Felker to try new avenues in journalism. New York magazine, begun by publisher Jock Whitney as the Trib‘s Sunday magazine, was the birthplace of New Journalism. The Trib‘s ad campaign was, “Who says a good newspaper has to be dull?” and Felker let his writers take the bit and run. They were encouraged to go beyond the “objective” journalism that ruled daily newspapers, and the result was crisp, alive writing that, more than anything else, made its subjects personal the way fiction did. It was like the difference between Jack Webb, cop (just the facts – but only the facts I like), and Frank Serpico, cop (facts don’t tell the whole story). Tom went out to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to interview the widow of slain “rackets boss Tony Bender.” Tom couldn’t understand, if the dailies called Tony a mob chieftain, why Tony didn’t seem to have any money or a big house or a big car. The widow showed Tom the modest house, let him see the “rackets boss'” little woodworking shop and described the last bag of garbage that the “rackets boss” himself had neatly tied up with string. All of a sudden – all of a goddamn quick sudden, newspaper targets became people. This irritated most newspaper editors in America. What would later be called New Journalism was ignored or denounced as biased reporting or even fiction. By now New Journalism has been examined enough so that even William Safire should admit that it’s an attempt at honest, personal reporting.
Tom blazed the national trail by accident. He covered a hot-rod and custom-car show in New York for the Trib and treated it as a sideshow, which was what was expected of him – the sort of coverage that any respectable newspaper gives to anything the chamber of commerce wouldn’t endorse.
Tom was uncomfortable, though; he sensed these car nuts had bypassed the system and were operating in a stratosphere they had created and knew could exist on its own. Subcultures. Tom thought these weird car people were a story.
He talked Esquire into an assignment to talk to car geniuses in Los Angeles but couldn’t make a story out of it. Tom is not a fast writer. He worried and worried over it. Esquire already had the piece laid out, was not patient and directed Tom to type out his notes so a good rewrite man could get on it. Tom sat down at eight p.m. and started a memo to his editor, Byron Dobell (“Dear Byron, The first good look I had at customized cars was at an event called a ‘Teen Fair'”); it took all night and ran to 48 pages. Esquire x-ed out “Dear Byron” and ran the piece as it was: presto, chango, New Journalism! Tom had read history; he knew historical patterns, but he was obsessed by what he sensed to be a new wrinkle. He had stumbled on the fact that the United States of America post-World War II had broken all the rules of history: it no longer took generations for change to take place – after the war, the sudden injection of money into every level of American society had canceled all bets and called off all games. Wolfe was the first to see a major upheaval. The enormous changes allowed subcultures to create themselves despite the fact that the media failed to recognize their existence: Vegas high rollers, rock tycoons, forever-young surfers, Manhattan high-class groupies – America finally was financing a fantasy island for anyone who would lift a little finger. Tom began reporting about a movement that disturbed a great many people, mainly those who controlled the media. The disturbing message from the heartland – from North Carolina, where Junior Johnson’s racecar fortunes were more important than Lyndon Johnson’s electoral fortunes – was that the aristocracy was finished; that Americans cared about their neighbor-hoods and their neighbors but not much else. That chauvinism narrowed down quickly to the predictable minimum: me and myself.
Everyone credits Tom for naming the Seventies the Me Decade. What’s funny is that he was out of sight for most of the Seventies. He was a late-Sixties hero, especially for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, about Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, and also for The Pump House Gang and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. But once he pegged the Seventies with the Me flag, he took himself off the college-lecture circuit, where his first question from audiences was invariably “What’s Ken Kesey doing?” followed by “How many times did you do acid?” He was not rich, but he was tired of being a Kesey travel guide. Tom was, after all, a journalist, he told himself.
He did take an assignment from Rolling Stone to cover the space program, and he wrote a series of four articles (for RS 125, 126, 128, 129) that he eventually expanded into his recently published book, The Right Stuff. It took him six years to report it, he said, but only six months to write. It takes, he said (and he should know), any writer only six months to actually write any book. The rest of the time is…leisure time, eh, Tom?