Opinion: Wolfe tore strips off pompous upper class

TOM Wolfe, who died last week, is credited with inventing New Journalism. He certainly pioneered its practice, along with his contemporary Hunter S. Thompson.

Author and New Journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe has died.

T HE book titles said it all in those days of change and wonder, the late 1960s.

Even for teenagers like me they couldn’t help but stop and fascinate.

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Pump House Gang and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers were all written and published by 1970.

My friends and I devoured them and we kept reading whatever the American author Tom Wolfe wrote for decades to come.

Wolfe was born in Richmond, Virginia, a Civil War town like few others, and died in his adopted New York City last week aged 88.

He had a shelf of published works – 17 nonfiction and fiction books and enough magazine and newspapers articles to weigh down the sturdiest library trolley.

Wolfe is credited with inventing New Journalism. He certainly pioneered its practice, along with his contemporary Hunter S. Thompson.

Despite the comparison of aspects of each other’s prose – streams of consciousness, littered with excess punctuation and sentences without verbs – they were very different.

Wolfe was a genteel, mannered and reserved ying to Thompson’s bile-spitting, junkyard dog yang.

There are so many examples of Wolfe’s genius at puncturing the pomposity of the affected middle and upper classes – whether they were the nouveau riche of New York’s Upper East Side or the strung out, once-were-rich kid yippies of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury – it’s hard to find a premier exemplar.

Anyway, his mid-1970s slim volume, The Painted Word, is certainly one. No one else has slashed the mind-boggling insanity of modern art criticism as Wolfe did in this book.

After describing how he’d woken to read an art critic’s work in the Arts & Leisure Section of The New York Times, he said he had an “aha moment” when the “buried life” of contemporary art was revealed for the first time. “The fogs lifted! The clouds passed! The motes, scales, conjunctival bloodshots and Murine agonies fell away!” he wrote.

What he discerned from this review of an exhibition of seven realists at Yale University was that modern art was not to be looked at, it was to be read.

This was because the critic said for a work of art to “lack a persuasive theory was to lack something crucial”.

During years of viewing paintings in the great galleries of New York and elsewhere, Wolfe thought “seeing is believing”. This, he said, was very shortsighted. “Modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text,” Wolfe said.

He saw through the faux intellectualism of the modern metropolitan art world where a wealthy and influential clique of collectors, gallery owners and critics told the plebeians what to like and not like. These people couldn’t handle Wolfe’s observations with one critic in Newsweek calling him a fascist while another review of his book – in the Parisian Review no less – likened him to porn star Linda Lovelace who’d just made Deep Throat.

Another rapier swipe at these affected manners was Radical Chic – a hilarious look at a dinner party at the home of the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein where the guests were the Black Panthers, a group of revolutionary African Americans who had terrified the establishment.

After wondering whether it was all right to serve the Panthers “little roquefort cheese morsels” it’s revealed the hosts had hired servants for the evening but not the usual ones.

“They’re white servants, not Claude and Maude, but white South Americans,” wrote Wolfe, calling the idea genius and reflecting how other salon dwellers at the time pressed for such a solution but couldn’t nail it.

“So the current wave of Radical Chic has touched off the most desperate search for white servants,” was the coda for this look-away scene.

Following his death, Wolfe’s been eulogised across the world, with the National Review saying he conducted a campaign against intellectual idiocy.

Those 50-odd years of famous book and magazine writing are what Wolfe’s remembered for, but he began his career as a reporter on The Springfield Union in Massachusetts before working for The Washington Post and The New York Herald Tribune.

A remarkable thing about Wolfe, who maintained his conservative Republican politics throughout the summer of love and radical years of the ’70s and ’80s, was his ability to charm those he lampooned. It was a skill that made Wolfe able to lift up his prose to heights few of his peers were ever able to reach.

Dennis Atkins is The Courier-Mail’s national affairs editor

Originally published as Opinion: Wolfe tore strips off pompous upper class