Readers Place

Tom Wolfe interview/review

Taken from eye

FEMINISM, AGING AND DECIDING TO WRITE NOVELS

1. A profile of the New York social scene in Bonfire of the Vanities maybe seems like it was a bit of a gimme for you, and the corporate titan in A Man in Full also was maybe an obvious subject. College life strikes me as less so. What attracted you to the subject?

To me it actually seemed obvious. I was working on A Man in Full since the 1990s, and I would hear these stories that just came through the air about co-ed dorms and political correctness – there was all kinds of talk about that. And binge drinking – there was now a name for heavy drinking – and I heard a little bit, not all that much, about drugs, and it was obvious that certain ideas were being nurtured and spreading from colleges. A good example is feminism.

As far as I know, there was never any debate about the rights of women to work in the upper levels of corporations with men, it just seemed that one day all the corporate leaders woke up and scratched their heads and said, ‘Gee, I guess we have to hire some women, and I guess we have to put them high up in the field, as high as it gets beneath the glass ceiling,’ and they didn’t know why. Gee, all this happened and it seems like this is all you have to do and there was never any debate. And also all the new topical value seemed to be coming out of the colleges. I think just the co-ed dorms alone seemed to be titillating enough to for somebody to stake out on it.

So at one point when I was working on A Man in Full, I was having so hard a time with that I was tempted to drop it and do something on colleges. I thought it could be done very quickly. By somebody it probably could.

1. It never seems to work out that way does it?

Not for me lately.

1. I was rereading “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” [Wolfe’s November, 1989 essay for Harper’s Magazine] the other day and of course you mention this New York social novel you had been thinking of writing. You figured you would finish in a year or two, which turned into more than a decade, I guess, and went from being non-fiction to fiction. Right. Fiction seems to take you more time. Looking back over your published work, it seems that you had a book every year or two for a while, and this switch from journalism to novels has sort of slowed the pace.

I have a feeling, I wrote something on this line when I was young. Of course when you’re young the possibility that you ever might be old is ludicrous. I mean, I was born in 1930, so I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, if I reach 70 it’ll be the year 2000.’ But that’s not even – obviously by the time you’re 70 you’re not even functioning, so what does it matter if you get there. And as you get old you say, ‘Well, maybe I’ve got a few more years.’ Anyway, I read that writers tend to become more perfectionists as they get older. Now this is ex post facto author’s psychoanalysis, but perhaps they feel there’s more at stake because they’re so wonderful in their later years and that the world will expect something closer to perfection.

There’s writers who get the idea that the world expects anything from them, but the world can get along fine without you. But there’s also the challenge – I’d never written a novel before and here I was 54 when I started The Bonfire of the Vanities and I’d been thinking of this non-fiction Vanity Fair for a long time. Then I said to myself, ‘If I’m ever going to do a novel, now’s the time.’ I had a limited financial cushion from The Right Stuff. And I must have sat catatonically at my desk and I just couldn’t get – I think I was intimidated by switching to this new form.

That’s when I went to Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone and suggested a serial novel, and I think Jan was probably the only editor in the country that was mad enough to run a serial novel at this point in history. If people want a story every week they just turn on the television, there’s lots of stories that resume every week. But he went ahead and did it, and I think if it had not been for that I could have never finished it. I knew I could meet a deadline if I had to meet a deadline, having worked for newspapers for 10 years. And pretty much the way it worked out, I didn’t miss an issue for 27 issues, that’s a little over one year’s worth. Of course I had to change it a great deal, because I’d basically written a first draft in public. I really only meant to write one, just to prove that I could do it. And that seemed to go over pretty well, a lot better than I thought it would, so I thought, weeellll, I’ll do another one. And that’s the one that stretched on forever.

I tried to jam so much into that one book, A Man in Full, there was going to be a Japanese component, an Art World component, there’s a whole novella that appeared in the collection Hooking Up – a novella called “Ambush at Fort Bragg” – that was originally part of A Man in Full. Just why, I’m not sure, where it was going to go in there. And then I think there was the lure – I know you’re not supposed to mention sales, but god, that book sold a lot of copies. So I thought, ‘Ahhh, I’ll do one more.’” FREE LOVE AND THE 1960s Looking back to the introduction of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, way back in the beginning, you point out that you realized that in Las Vegas, on racetracks, in teenage dance crazes, there were new, essentially American art forms being created and that no one was paying attention because it was popular and because it was proletarian.

1. Do you feel vindicated now that almost our memory of the 1960s is almost entirely made up of those things?

To me it was pretty clear that for the first time, probably in human history, that young people were able to get their hands on enough money to express their beliefs or just simply attitudes in a big way. For example, if you’re able to customize a car, that takes money, and most of these custom cars – the title, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby was a car after all – they somehow had the money to create these forms. And they were by no means from the upper orders, these were street kids in Los Angeles. And the same thing would later be true with surfer communes that I talked about in The Pump House Gang, they would be young, really just boys and girls no older than 14 or 15, living together communally in the same town where their parents lived, and somehow they had the money – often the money was probably from their parents – to live this kind of communal life. And out of the communal life comes the possibility of styles such as the baggies, the swimming suits that the boys wore that now look like the NBA basketball shorts. And they had the vocabulary, “Hang ten” and all that.

Then there were the hippies were the same in a big way, living without working in a colourful manner. It was only made possible because there was somehow money in the air that could be somehow tapped into. What I found in the hippy communes would be three or four women with children and no husbands and each would qualify for aid to dependent children and if you’ve got four in one house then that’s not bad, that goes a long way to paying the rent. And that was all new and I think it was – I wasn’t really writing them in terms of predictions, the subsequent history has played out pretty much according to the – “youth revolution” seems like such a trite term – the changes that the youth living together created.

Without The Beatles, there’d be no heavy metal and all the other things that have come along. The Beatles look like pretty tame music now but they showed the way in the ’60s for everything else. It started in the ’60s and now it’s standard, in the life of young people particularly. Now I guess this is something that ties back into the current novel.

1. One of the criticisms or observations people have is that – and I think you said it yourself – is that you found it really interesting, the sexual atmosphere on campuses. And as one of the primary chroniclers of the counterculture of the 1960s and being an eyewitness to the sexual revolution in the first place, was it really surprising to you that on college campuses the attitudes are what they are today?

That’s something that also started in the ’60s in these communes, it was the idea of releasing all the restraints on sexual behaviour in the communes. I don’t know if you remember that a townhouse in New York City blew up, on West 11th Street. It turned out to be a bomb-making factory of the Weathermen or SDS, one of those fairly violent anti-Vietnam war groups, and it was a real explosion, demolished the whole thing. And running from the ruins were two naked girls.

Everyone assumed that the force of the explosion had blown their clothes off. That wasn’t true at all. The commune had decided that as they went around making bombs all day they would wear no clothes, so they became a nudist colony. And of course, also a – to use an old term – a free-love commune. And the seeds for all of that came from out of the 1960s.

1. So is that just playing itself out on college campuses?

What I kind of bring out in the book, in one way, is to have one of the main characters who is a male senior who’s a virgin. Males have always hidden their virginity, but he’s really obsessed about the fact that he is a virgin and all of this sexual carnival taking place around him. But this atmosphere, I found extremely hard on women. Women used to have natural outs if they didn’t want to engage in sexual activity – they had to be in by 10:30, or boys couldn’t come into their dorm – there was always something that they could point to, something that seemed external to their own decision-making, something that kept them from granting the boys’ wishes.

But now there’s really nothing other than a desire not to have sex. And girls now respond like boys do. It used to be that the worst slut in the world would maintain a veneer of virginity, and today there are female virgins in college who try to create an air of sexual experience. It’s turned around 180 degrees. And the most extreme version of this is the co-ed bathroom. I can’t imagine that there’s one girl out of 50 who likes that, but you don’t want to object, because that makes you very uncool or prudish. That’s something also that was never debated. Co-ed dorms were never debated either, they’re something that just happened in the colleges.

You can make an argument for co-ed dorms, a feminist argument, it’s stretching things a little bit, but you can make the argument that unless you’re able to form the same kind of old-boy or in this case old-boys-and-girls network through close contact, you are at a disadvantage if you intend to go into business. But I don’t see any argument for co-ed washrooms or bathrooms.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE AN AMERICAN ICON; THE TROUBLE WITH ALBEE AND FELLINI

1. I won’t keep you much longer, but I have one awkward question that I want to ask. Almost every character that you’ve ever written about, status something that’s there for them. You must be aware that you are an iconic figure in American letters. When Harper’s Magazine was looking for somebody to put on the cover of their sesquicentennial issue alongside Mark Twain, there was you. You sell millions of books and you’ve contributed dozens of phrases and concepts to the culture and I guess – When you look at yourself in the mirror with a second set of eyes, as Hoyt does in the book, what does it feel like to be Tom Wolfe?

You know, I wish that every morning I looked in the mirror and felt like an icon – I’ve, I’m really – I love the question because it raises the possibility that it might be true – I just cannot possibly think that way. I mean, bless you for even toting it out as a question to which the answer might be yes, but you know I grew up in the South and we’re always raised to be essentially modest, and I.… Well, to answer the question, I’ve never really entertained the thought – it might be dangerous to entertain the thought, ‘Hey, I’m an icon – hey, listen to me.’

Well certainly I’m not surprised by that response at all, but it’s certainly something that, you know, in The Right Stuff with Chuck Yeager and the astronauts, it wasn’t something they talked about. And I understand obviously that nobody walks around thinking of themselves that way every day, but I just wondered if you sometimes sit back and feel like a Master of the Universe at all.

I still have creditors, and – on a more serious level, I’ve seen signs of writers doing that and it becomes a fatal flaw. I’ll give you a good example: Edward Albee became extremely celebrated for his first play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and I think at that point he decided that that play was awfully rooted in the here and now, in the particular era of the 1950s, and that from now on he maybe should write plays that were more timeless and had more symbolic richness so that they could be as easily appreciated in the year 2500 as today. And that’s when he began to write plays like Tiny Alice, which were forms of magic realism, I would say.

Even Fellini fell into this trap, a little bit, after the huge success of La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 he began to do movies that featured clowns who are ageless figures… and there were all sorts of archetypes in these films … and not realizing that the real power of La Dolce Vita was specifically rooted in Italian life after the Second World War in Italy and for that reason it’s just as easy to watch that movie today, it’s just as powerful, just as funny as it was when it was made. So I think it does become a trap for writers who think that way – I think in long-term ways.

THE TROUBLE WITH NORMAN MAILER

1. Norman Mailer springs to mind for some reason. He’s a good example of what I’m talking about, because after The Naked and the Dead, which was a realistic novel and was a great success, he began listening to the Francophile view that the novel of the future would be the novel of psychological nuance and sensibility and things on a much tighter, narrower scope, and he wrote a book called Barbary Shore which is a book about, near as I can remember it, about a group of intellectuals living in a rooming house in Brooklyn. What a come-down after a book that had gone out into the world and tied huge events to the individual psychology. Well, as you mentioned about Hemingway and Steinbeck, Mailer wrote that he specifically signed up for the army because he wanted to write The Book of WWII and it’s exactly that kind of research you think he abandoned. I think I read somewhere that he transferred from one zone to another because there wasn’t enough going on in his zone to get the kind of material he wanted. If that’s all true, God bless him.

1. But he abandoned that?

He did. But then he lucked out with The Executioner’s Song when this remarkable guy Lawrence Schiller, a photographer who gets great book ideas and he tries to get a writer, preferably a well-known writer to collaborate with him. He supplies the idea and the material – and the material through his own reporting, and all the writer has to do is type it up. And that’s what happened with The Executioner’s Song, which was the only novel of Norman Mailer’s to get a good reception after The Naked and the Dead. And Schiller just turned up at his door one day like Santa Claus – “Hey here’s the story of Gary Gilmore, the killer.”

The Gary Gilmore case was a great sensation, I can’t remember why, but it was. And as far as I can tell, all that Mailer did was transfer passages from the tapes that Schiller had made with Gilmore and Gilmore’s family and people who’d been affected by the killing and so on – just transferred from transcriptions of tapes right straight into book form.

Mailer has never been able to write dialogue. To write dialogue, you really have to be interested in somebody besides yourself. (Laughs) And with these tapes, suddenly he had realistic dialogue. And after it was a success, he should have drawn a logical conclusion there that he should get Lawrence Schiller to do all the work for everything else he wrote and then he could just write it up. But he ignored the obvious and.… I have come to the conclusion – and I am sincere about this – when you first decide to be a writer, usually that means “I’m going to be a novelist,” and you assume that 95 per cent of a great novel is your own genius, 5 per cent is the clay that you’re using to demonstrate it. I would turn it around a bit. I would say it’s 65 per cent content and 35 per cent talent, that really makes the difference.