Tom Wolfe

"I've never stopped looking at New York through hillbilly eyes," says Tom Wolfe, one plump pinkie gracefully arched as he fastidiously sips beer in the CRIMSON sanctum. "My grandfather fought in the Civil War for God's sake... Yes." Virginia born, he doesn't look much like a redneck in the custom made three-piece herringbone suit, in the custom-made white on white silk shirt with little diamonds, in the silk foulard and tie or side buckle shoes. Even less so when dressed for the street, another silk foulard peeping jauntily out of the breast pocket of his Chesterfield, his neck encased in a giant paisley muffler (silk!), and the unruly yellow thatch hidden behind a slouch hat imported from far-away France.

Another New York fop? Maybe. But the accent is still there (he says the hell with it, instead of the hell with it) and his off-stage manner is slow but concise, always searching for the right word: unhip, unfunny, but firm. The pudgy, chinless, spoiled-boy face creases slightly, the lower lip sucks in, and then Wolfe speaks--rephrasing himself once or twice in case you didn't get it the first time around.

No longer interested in the American Establishment, "an interlacing of relationships based on primordial status lines," Wolfe is more and more preoccupied with the world of custom cars, surf-boards and Harley 74s, peopled by "drop out forms," who have opted out of the mainstream of American social competition. These forms, rejecting "post-war bureaucracy which has made people interchangeable parts" in the commercial life of the nation, are inherently at odds with the "vertical" social structure they have left behind.

Since his subject matter is as alienated as any collection of Absurdist heroes, Wolfe feels he must over compensate to some degree in the interests of objectivity. "If I don't tip the scales a little bit," he says, "it will sound like I'm making fun of them". Sometimes, in Wolfe's description, these drop out forms seem as natural and organic a part of the contemporary scene as any aspect of that Mom's pie America which he dismisses like a crumb from his roll-away sleeve. At other moments, however, they resemble isolated islands of vitality just spoiling for a good fight to the finish with the moribund Mainland: lateral against vertical, Harley 74 against Country Squire station wagon, hipster against mark, today against yesteryear, WAR. And in any such conflict, who but the Herald Tribune's own T. K. Wolfe Jr., would emerge as the new Ernie Pyle?

But Wolfe doesn't see himself like that. "I'm a spoilsport," he says, "like that guy who was foxhunting during the War of the Roses and got caught between both sides." Apparently, neither Washington and Lee (B.A.), nor the Yale grad school (Ph.D. in American Studies), nor reporting stints in Springfield, Washington, and Latin stints in Springfield, Washington, and Latin America prepared him for New York. "I expected to see Mark Hellinger sauntering down Broadway in a white suit," he said to three different Harvard audiences, "but everybody wore these drab things."

Yet New York has welcomed Wolfe as the traditional Outsider come to tell them about themselves. Confusing him with camp, pop art, underground movies, and whatever else is au courant, they've honeyed him into a parlor gadfly, who describes the vital, vulgar, exotic American Now which is as far from their sphere of knowledge or comprehension as Ulan Bator. He himself admits that his readership significantly overlaps with that of his hated New Yorker.

Wolfe like to play the waif a little bit, and there is certainly enough instinctive vulnerability in his personal make-up to give credence to the "Tom Sawyer" haircut. Describing a female jazz pianist for whom he briefly led the life of a "prole-bohemian," he said, "I think she was basically interested in me as a Yale grad student. Love should be devoid of status factors, but of course it never is. Yes." The experience of manual labor left him with the conviction that there is no wisdom in the common man. He has never voted, and thinks politics are a matter of "parcelling out road contracts."

The Grail which motivates this glowing silkworm's Quest from coast to coast appears to be some mystic sense of Nowness, which, once possessed, will be the journalistic scoop of an epoch. Mainland commitment is no good, because "the moment you become a partisan of any cause you commit yourself to ideas fifty years old, because that's how long it takes an idea to become a cause.... George Orwell said everything that needs to be said about the current international scene in 1948." Well, statements like this don't quite read as cleverly as they speak, and neither does his assertion that Norman Mailer is writing 19th century prose because of phrases like, "the wind rode by." ("Wind doesn't ride, for god's sake," says the spoilsport, "it BLOWS.") But Wolfe's dedication to the minute is real enough, and extremely articulate. He is fascinated by California where the Free-way has broken up the quantitative thought patterns of Western Civilization by forcing men to measure distance by time rather than miles. He chronicles every strange twist and turn of a fully motorized America and its departure--since World War II--from a basically land-oriented state of mind, which he can persuasively argue was vestigial feudalism, to a totally disoriented materialism. He celebrates "age segregation," the war and post-war generations' cult of self which, even if it sounds a trifle too much like the emancipation proclamations of Aldous Huxley et al. some 40 years ago is still a real and well observed phenomenon.

But what about The Kid Himself? Wolfe is 34 and the dirty golden thatch is beginning to recede. Speaking about some older writers on the Trib, he says, "They say those guys get paid off, but that's not it. They're old. They lose perspective. They get strangled synapses in the brain." Discussing one recent Tribune features star who got sacked, Wolfe laments, "He had a rugged drinking problem... Old men can't take that. Young men drink. Yes." Sometimes he talks rather wildly about looking forward to growing old, "Old men can really cut loose. You should see those Old White Russian Aristocrats at any Salvadore Dali opening. Can they dress. WOW!" But it doesn't work. Tom Wolfe is the prisoner of an historical minute, which, if he didn't invent it, owes much of its definition and publication to his good offices. But soon there will great big cosmic TICK-TOCK and Wolfe will be on the wrong end or the freeway and the dark side of time. Yes.