Epiphenomenous Bosh

Mauve Gloves, Clutter & Vine

By Tom Wolfe

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $8.95, 244 pp.

THE GREEK WORD for newspapers is ephemeris, which is where we get ephemeral: short-lived, transitory. That's what most journalism is--stories that are here today, of practically no interest tomorrow, but caught for the moment like flies in amber. In that sense, the best journalists are the best fly-catchers, and very occasionally, fly swatters.

But when things began to change, about ten years ago, straight journalists found it increasingly hard to catch flies, and into the lurch came something called the New Journalism. At its best, New Journalism had it all over straight reporting because it was an epiphenomenon itself, sort of unconventional, just like the people and stories it covered, and the best of its practitioners was Tom Wolfe. When Wolfe wrote about stock car racers and the good ole boys around them, or Las Vegas with its plasticine madness, or Phil Spector, his was the most accurate stuff around, because he had the sense that what he was describing was now and new and likely to last about as long as confetti after a parade.

Then he began to take himself seriously. And after being out of the spotlight for a few years, Tom Wolfe is back, all over the pages of Harper's and New York Magazine last summer, and now with a new collection of essays called Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine.

Wolfe still has a wonderful ability to turn a phrase--"jivemonger," "he went with some trepidation and with his resentment tucked into his waistband like a .38" That's a wonderful phrase--is that a resentment in your pocket or are you just glad to see me. One gets the feeling that Wolfe is a careful craftsman, that he works hard at writing. A collection of random pieces of journalism often shows how hard it is to keep the same pet phrases that you used ten months ago for an Esquire piece out of the new one you're writing for New York Magazine. Wolfe is a fine writer; it's his ideas that are terrible.

IT'S AN ANOMALOUS collection of essays. The second piece in the book, "Jousting With Sam and Charlie," is about Navy carrier pilots. The essay was written in 1967. These guys are bombing Vietnam. They're killing people, and Wolfe is intrigued by their Rickerbacker-Lindbergh mystique. He gets upset that Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times went to Hanoi to write about the bravery of the Vietnamese in the face of awful destruction, after American planes had wiped out a North Vietnamese town thought to be an important transport center. A model operation, Wolfe calls it. What is Salisbury trying to do--sabotage the war effort? The next 20 pages drag on, like interesting patterns in punch tape, while Wolfe goes on even more enthusiastically describing how exhilarating it is to be young and a flyer, killing people you never have to see.

Almost as bad is "The Intelligent Co-ed's Guide to America," a piece that appeared in Harper's last summer. It opens with a great thesis: that the intellectual crossroads of America is O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, because that's where all America's intellectuals make connections while they're on the speaking circuit. From there Wolfe slides into a smug harangue about why socialism is ignored in America. We live the good life here--we're in the midst of what Wolfe calls a "happiness explosion"--and he's aghast that anyone might not think the way he does.

Then there's a piece called "Funky Chic," where Wolfe trains his guns on, for God's sake, the dress styles of radicals and pseudo-radicals. It's Wolfe's idea that he never met any radicals or anyone concerned with social change who dressed in jeans. True movers, says Wolfe, dress upwardly-mobile, in something called "funky chic." He mourns that the funky chic clothing stores of his days at Yale are sadly gone--Brooks Brothers, J. Press. This is an interesting idea in itself: to be oppressed you must be J. Pressed.

Wolfe's problem is his concern with style, with appearance, with fashion. One can only decide that he fancies himself the new Bernard Shaw. He goes on at great lengths in "Funky Chic" defending Evelyn Waugh whom he says will be remembered as the greatest English novelist of the 20th century for his concern with the stuff of life--manners, dress, the Right People. He continually attacks what he considers the accoutrements of bogus sophistication--white-walled apartments on Riverside Drive, unread stacks of The New York Review of Books, Coltrane records on the stereo. All that can be said for Wolfe's own style is that it's, well, catty. It's the style of a gossip columnist for a small-town newspaper who describes some awful shotgun wedding where all the principals involved hate each other with smug sarcasm as "a good time had by all."

FOR 15 YEARS now Wolfe has scampered up the trellis of his style. Up, up he went, up the face of one of those Riverside Drive apartments he pretends to despise so much. Peering in through the picture window he discovered, in a perverse parallel to Orwell's Animal Farm, that there's no difference between him and the writers at the cocktail party inside, that in fact, he's a lot worse than what he tried to supplant. During the trial of the Chicago Eight, J. Anthony Lukas '55, who covered it for The New York Times, tried to insert David Dellinger's comment, "Oh bullshit," (for which Judge Julius Hoffman revoked his bail) into the news story he was writing. The Times national desk balked. They wanted to say Dellinger used "an obscenity." Lukas persisted, and they compromised with "a barnyard epithet." You used to get a feeling that Tom Wolfe at his best gave you stuff like that, but no more. He has become too concerned with masks and manners to go about trapping flies. In fact, he has become a fly himself--the Truman Capote of journalism, caught up in appearances and in his own right-wing nativist assessment of American life. Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine leaves you with the feeling that if you were to suddenly say, "oh bullshit," and slam the book shut under Wolfe's nose, he would stand there dumb and amazed, little beads of fear and ignorance on his forehead, with no idea what you were talking about.