Econ_May_26

The Economist

May 26th 2018

T SOME convenient point in anymorn-

ing, TomWolfewouldput onhiswork-

ing clothes. Over a silk shirt, maybe ultra-

marine, maybe striped, he knotted a silk

tie. A proper Windsor knot! No plastic

cheaters, like Marshal McLuhan! Then a

perfectly tailored white suit of linen or silk

tweed…with double-breasted vest…dark

blue trim of the matching square peeking

from the breast pocket…cream socks....

leather spectator spat boots…the summer

passeggiata

gear of Richmond, Virginia, his

home town, transposed to New York. A

glance in the mirror—the face fine, a china

doll’s, with hardly a suggestion of shaving.

The underlip puppet-stiff, but the hair flop-

py in the English style, falling almost to the

intertragic notch of his ear.

Work was not far to find, across a few

dozen metres of parquet flooring, past or-

chids and butter-yellow sofas, to his study

in his apartment on the Upper East Side.

There stood his desk. His desk! Abrass-gal-

leriedhorseshoe in light oaksporting silver

inkwells in the shape of top hats, paper-

weights of

millefiori

Murano glass, an

apothecary’s balance scale, familypictures

in silver frames, a silver-footed chalice of

blue Bohemian glass and a figurine of Bugs

Bunny. At 90 degrees to the command cen-

tre of the desk was a typewriter with the

blank paper set.

Ready to write! Ten pages a

day! Triple-spaced! Forcing himself to do it!

But every so often—he would pause—

smoothly swivel—to consult his huge

thumb-indexed and stand-mounted Web-

ster’s for “tabescent” or “prognathous”.

On this typewriter, or its predecessors,

with shoulders braced and pinkie finger

delicately raised, he banged out the excori-

ating articles and books that made his rep-

utation. As leader of the New Journalism

in the 1960s he piled up detail, drama and

the flash of fiction to tell of trips, bus and

otherwise, of the

LSD

crowd across Ameri-

ca (“The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”), the

business of customising cars in Los Ange-

les (“The Kandy-Koloured Tangerine-Flake

Streamline Baby”), and status battles

among pilots and astronauts in the first

space programme (“The Right Stuff”). Sta-

tus and power! The key to how the human

beast worked! Themotive for all activity in

America, the newRome, a nation so prodi-

giously wealthy and militarily mighty it

would havemade Caesar twitch.

Nostalgie de la boue

In college he had studied MaxWeber—im-

bibedhis theorieswhole andgratefully, let-

ting them seep through him like hot coffee.

Men were not individuals so much as so-

cial products…inevitably tied to their race

and class…but

struggling! Fighting to im-

press, to rise!

And nowhere more than in

New York, where he lived ever after com-

ing to work on the

Herald Tribune

in 1962,

wallowing too in the city of unbridled ap-

petites and ambition, ofoverbuilt ugliness,

shoving oneupmanship…his favourite

that party in 1970 at the Park Avenue du-

plex of Lenny Bernstein, in the days when

status required

nostalgie de laboue

, real rev-

olutionaries at your soirée, hence Black

Panthers in leather pieces and wild Afros

gobbling tiny morsels of Roquefort rolled

in crushed nuts on gadrooned silver plat-

ters…

Frisson of bomb-throwing danger!!!

Delicious counterpoint! Radical Chic!

On that typewriter too he had written

the Great American Novel. For at just the

moment when American society had be-

come so wild, bizarre, Hog-stomping and

Baroque that it cried out to be chronicled

by a Zola or a Balzac, the novel had died.

Those old bone-piles of American litera-

ture, Mailer, Updike and Irving, were writ-

ingpsychological fantasies orbooks of oth-

erworldly preciousness.

Never left their

studies!

But he embarked on a novel as de-

tailed as his journalism. A novel of

the real

world

. From the trading floors of Wall

Street to the police holding-pens of the

Bronxhe told the storyofShermanMcCoy,

bond-trader and Master of the Universe,

and his fall from grace. “The Bonfire of the

Vanities” was everyone’s vanity. New

York’s. America’s. Sherman in the stinking

cells…his terrifying stumbles into the

black netherworld…baying money fever

…racismon every side…no redemption…

There were more novels, further inves-

tigations of the social mores of Atlanta (“A

Man in Full”), of sex and society at univer-

sity (“I amCharlotte Simmons”) and of im-

migrants in Miami (“Back to Blood”). The

research took years. Each item of cheap

clothing was traced to its store, each chair

and lamp surveyed and each remark ren-

dered in its exact patois.

“If you ain’t off’n’at

roof, you best be growing some wangs,

’cause they’s gonna be a load a12-gauge bud-

shot haidin’ up yo’ ayus!”

His eye and ear

were so meticulously malicious that he

surely loathed theworld, but hewas court-

ly…spoke softly…had a wife and children

…opened doors for ladies…andwas every

inch a

WASP

southern conservative, hold-

ing the ring for God, Country and—usually

—the Republican Party.

And he retained the suit.

Always the

suit

, evenwith the perpetuallystonedMer-

ry Pranksters in “Acid Test”. Even in bar-

racks, sagebrush, slums. A necktie was his

pride. So was the green spiral-top steno

notebook in which, like some exquisitely

coutured man from Mars, he jotted down

everything around him in shorthand with

a ballpoint pen. Ken Kesey, leader of the

Pranksters, once told him to put his tools

awayand

BeHere!

But he already

Was! Ecce

vates! Prophet and seer of the age!

The man in the white suit

TomWolfe, chroniclerofAmerica, died onMay14th, aged 88

Obituary

Tom Wolfe