Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe? by Marc Weingarten (original) (raw)

It was a story meeting to generate some provocative ideas for New York, the Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune. Clay Felker, the magazine's editor, had mentioned that the New Yorker, great literary magazine of his youth, had become deadly dull.

"Well, Clay," general reporter Tom Wolfe suggested, "How about blowing up the New Yorker in New York?"

Felker loved the idea, and it was timed perfectly. That year, 1965, was the 40th anniversary of the New Yorker, and the magazine was going to throw a big party for itself at the St Regis Hotel. The culture of the New Yorker was shrouded in mystery, particularly the identity of its editor, William Shawn. Wolfe called Shawn for an interview anyway, and was warned off. But there were sources closer to home. One contributor gave Wolfe a trove of great stories regarding the New Yorker's byzantine editing process. But the best material was to be found at the magazine's party. It was an invitation-only affair, but no one stopped the New York reporter when he walked in.

By the time Wolfe sat down to write the article, he realised that a straight-down-the-middle parody of the New Yorker would beget more of what the magazine offered: grey prose. "Something that's dull is funny for about a page," said Wolfe. "So I figured I would treat them in a way that they would hate the most - like the National Enquirer, something that would be totally inappropriate."

Using what Wolfe called his "hyperbolic style", he wrote more than 10,000 words. Four days before the first instalment hit the streets, Jim Bellows, the Tribune's editor, messengered two copies of the story to Shawn with a compliments card.

Shawn was incensed. He reeled off a letter to the Tribune's owner, Jock Whitney, calling Wolfe's article "murderous and certainly libellous", and urging Whitney to pull the piece from Sunday's paper.

"Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead", screamed the headline in the April 11 issue of New York: Shawn was a funeral director, his writers the walking dead, his staffers "tiny mummies". Art director Peter Palazzo ran an illustration of the New Yorker's monocled Victorian icon, Eustace Tilley, but swathed him in a mummy's shroud.

The indignant letters poured in - Muriel Spark, Richard Rovere, Ved Mehta, EB White, even JD Salinger. Dwight Macdonald, one of America's most prominent postwar intellectuals and a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1951, wrote a 13,000-word counterattack that ran in two issues of the New York Review of Books and methodically refuted Wolfe's two stories.

The first piece was called "Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe & His Magic Writing Machine". Macdonald skewered Wolfe's style of writing as "a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric licence of fiction. Entertainment rather than information is the aim of its producers, and the hope of its consumers." Macdonald dismissed Wolfe's stories outright: "Their ideas bogus, their information largely misinformation, their facts often non-facts and the style in which they were communicated to the reader neither orderly nor meaningful."

"Tiny Mummies!" brought into the open what had been hiding in plain sight for a few years: the widening rift between traditional reporters and the "parajournalists" whom Macdonald had so witheringly criticised. As the de facto ringleader of this irreverent bunch, Wolfe was most vulnerable to attack. But, as it turned out, the decade's most exciting developments in reporting would bear Wolfe's imprint far more than the New Yorker's.

When Wolfe's first book, a collection of his pieces for Esquire and New York, was published three months later, reviews were mixed. No matter - The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby was an immediate hit. A month after its July publication, it had gone into its fourth printing. But Wolfe wanted to try his hand at a book-length project - if not the epic social-realist novel he longed to write, then an epic non-fiction project with a compelling narrative at its centre.

He found his subject in July 1966, when he received a cache of letters from an anonymous sender. The letters, addressed to novelist Larry McMurtry, were written by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey, who had been busted for marijuana possession in April 1965 and again in January 1966 and had jumped bail to Mexico.

Kesey was raised on a farm his father owned in Springfield, Oregon. A strapping athlete with literary aspirations, 18-year-old Ken enrolled in the University of Oregon in 1953 and earned a bachelor's degree in journalism. In 1959 he received a creative writing fellowship from Stanford to study with Wallace Stegner. Kesey wrote during the day and worked the night shift at a psychiatric hospital in Menlo Park.

His first exposure to hallucinogens occurred at Menlo Park, when he volunteered to take part in experiments with LSD for scientific research. His initiation into the world of psychoactive drugs and mental illness provided the raw material for Cuckoo's Nest, a book whose allegory about institutionalised repression resonated with young readers, and made Kesey enough money to live comfortably and support his future endeavours. He purchased a plot of land in La Honda, a mountainous rural outpost near Stanford, and began an experiment in communal living.

It was Kesey's firm belief that LSD was a portal to a higher consciousness; his group, which would become known as the Merry Pranksters, proselytised the good word with a series of "Acid Tests". Using an arsenal of bright, colourful electric lights, Day-Glo paint, and amplified music, they created a warmly communal atmosphere in which initiates would drop acid and burrow deep into their inner selves.

Wolfe decided he would hang out with Kesey and file a story for New York. "Despite the scepticism I brought here," he would later write, "I am suddenly experiencing their feeling. I am sure of it. I feel like I am on something the outside world, the world I came from, could not possibly comprehend, and it is a metaphor, the whole scene, ancient and vast ... "

What he originally intended as a standard feature ballooned into a three-part epic that ran in three issues of New York in January and February 1967. "The first part, setting the stage, was OK," Wolfe wrote in the New York Times. "The second and third were pretty thin stuff. Certainly they failed to capture the weird ... fourth dimension I kept sensing in the Prankster adventure."

Wolfe needed to go back to the west coast and gather more anecdotes, probe the inner lives of Kesey and the Pranksters more rigorously. But the story itself was changing, and the truth was uglier than Wolfe had anticipated. There was a dark side for those who weren't psychologically strong. Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, Wolfe's primary source, was the saddest case of all. A sound engineer from New York, he had a reputation for erratic behaviour and manic-depressive tendencies.

His experience with Kesey had been marked by paranoid episodes and bad drug experiences. He had endured an unusually frightening trip on the powerful hallucinogen DMT during the Pranksters' visit to Timothy Leary's Millbrook estate in upstate New York, as well as unsettling flashbacks. When the Pranksters travelled to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, Lehmann-Haupt, suffering from paranoid delusions, ran away to Monterey, fearful that Kesey had initiated a plot to kill him.

There was another disturbing undercurrent to the Prankster experience; their uneasy relationship with the Hell's Angels. For information about the Angels, Wolfe turned to Hunter S Thompson, who had spent considerable time with the gang for his own book, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.

Using Thompson's research, as well as Kesey's extensive archive - diaries, photographs, correspondence, the Acid Test movie reels, and a 45-hour mass of film - Wolfe wrote 900 manuscript pages in four months. Just about everything he had written in the New York series was reworked. The prose style was a complete departure for him. The Pranksters didn't function in real narrative time, not with all those drugs, and the book couldn't abide by a linear storyline. Instead of the omnipresent third-person voice, Wolfe shifted point of view, using interior monologues where necessary, thus taking the fictional trope of the unreliable narrator to unprecedented extremes.

"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is an astonishing book," wrote CDB Bryan in the New York Times Book Review when it was published in August 1968. "Wolfe is precisely the right author to chronicle the transformation of Ken Kesey from respected author of And One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest [sic] to an LSD enthusiast ... Wolfe's enthusiasm and literary fireworks make it difficult for the reader to remain detached." Such reactions were just what Wolfe had been aiming for; to bring the reader as close as possible to the Prankster experience without becoming an active participant.

Wolfe and Thompson's relationship had started on an awkward note. In 1965, Thompson was a struggling freelancer who was starting to make a name for himself as a roving foreign correspondent for the National Observer. When Kandy-Kolored Tangerine was published, Thompson embraced it as a revolutionary step forward for American journalism, and wrote a rave review for the Observer. The magazine's cultural editor, however, was not a fan of Wolfe's writing; like so many traditional journalists, he felt Wolfe was bastardising a time-honoured tradition. When the magazine killed the review, an enraged Thompson severed his ties with the National Observer for good.

Thompson and Wolfe were unlikely allies. Thompson was also from the south, a liberal firebrand from Louisville who abhorred authority and lived in a perpetual state of conflict. Wolfe held to a more conservative philosophy, sceptical of the liberal political movements of the decade. What bound them together was their break from conventional journalism, the feeling they were fighting for new ways of reporting.

"Wolfe's problem," Thompson would write in a playfully vitriolic essay in 1971, "is that he's too crusty to participate in his stories. The people he feels comfortable with are dull as stale dogshit, and the people who seem to fascinate him as a writer are so weird that they make him nervous. The only thing new and unusual about Wolfe's journalism is that he's an abnormally good reporter." In short, Wolfe was a very artful stenographer, always keeping a discreet distance and never sullying his suit. Thompson, on the other hand, was a man willing to throw himself into the breach and risk his well-being to get the story.

In 1964, Carey McWilliams, editor of the liberal political weekly, the Nation, wrote the struggling freelance reporter a letter soliciting a story on the insurgent band of motorcycle outlaws called the Hell's Angels. It was a good time to assign a piece on the Angels: California attorney-general Thomas Lynch had polled law-enforcement agents around the state and culled the information into a 15-page document called "The Hell's Angels Motorcycle Clubs", which listed 18 major crimes and countless other infractions in clinical detail. A reporter for the New York Times wrote a story on the report, followed by Time and Newsweek, and soon the Hell's Angels were a full-blown national menace. McWilliams, who had obtained a copy of the Lynch Report, suspected Thompson, with his keen talent for sniffing out stories that fell beneath the radar of more conventional journalists, might be an ideal candidate to get the real dirt on the motorcycle club, to tell the story from the Angels' point of view, rather than Lynch's.

Thompson dug into the Hell 's Angels story with both heels. After questioning a few functionaries in the attorney-general's office, he determined that no one working for Lynch had ever made contact with any Hell's Angels member. Thus, the real story had yet to be written, and Thompson had grand plans for it. "To my mind," he wrote to McWilliams, "the Hell's Angels are a very natural product of our society. Just like SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] or the Peace Corps ... But different people. That's what I 'd like to find out: who are they? What kind of man becomes a Hell's Angel? And why? And how? The mechanics."

The resulting story, "The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders", was in fact a meticulous debunking of the Lynch report, with tantalising allusions to Thompson's meetings with Hell's Angels used for corroboration. Thompson couldn't resist a few digs at the mainstream press: "The difference between the Hell's Angels in the papers and the Hell's Angels for real is enough to make a man wonder what newsprint is for." But the story doesn't really deliver on its insider's promise, only offering fugitive glimpses of the Angels' culture.

By the winter of 1965, Thompson had accumulated enough material on the Angels to begin writing a book. He now occupied a strange position in the Angels' universe - an outsider on the inside. Occasionally, a stray Angel would drop by to drink his beer and have a look at some manuscript pages. Thompson didn't want to step on anyone's toes; although the book wasn't necessarily an authorised history of the Angels, accuracy was crucial, lest he get his head stomped in.

Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga was published in February 1967. Early reviews were effusive and sales were brisk. By April, more than 50,000 copies were in print. Thompson had produced a riveting chronicle of an American tribe without a homeland, displaced by the mainstream and lost in perpetual exile. By doing so, he had brought himself out of freelance exile; finally magazine editors would know who the hell he was, all right.

Like Wolfe, Thompson recognised one salient fact of life in the 60s: the traditional tools of reporting would be inadequate to chronicle the tremendous cultural and social change. War, assassination, rock, drugs, hippies, Yippies, Nixon - how could a traditional "just the facts" reporter dare to impose a neat and symmetrical order on such chaos?

Within a seven-year period, a group of writers emerged - Joan Didion, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, John Sack, Michael Herr, as well as Wolfe and Thompson - to impose some order on all this mayhem, each in their own distinctive manner (a few old hands, like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, chipped in as well). It was an unprecedented outpouring of creative non-fiction, the greatest literary movement since the American fiction renaissance of the 1920s.

As soon as Wolfe codified this new reporting tendency with the name "New Journalism" in his 1973 anthology, critics emerged to strike it down, confusing Wolfe's theorising with self-promotion. There's no fixed definition for New Journalism, granted, and its critics have often pointed to its maddeningly indeterminate meaning as a major shortcoming. How can you have a movement when no one knows what that movement represents? Is New Journalism the participatory "gonzo" journalism of Thompson? Breslin's impressionistic rogue's tales? Wolfe's jittery gyroscope prose? The answer is that it's journalism that reads like fiction and rings with the truth of reported fact. The leaders of the movement had all been reared in the traditional methods of fact-gathering, but, convinced that American journalism's potential hadn't yet been explored to its fullest, they began to think like novelists.

Working with sympathetic editors such as Harold Hayes, Clay Felker and Jann Wenner - the three greatest magazine editors of the postwar era - the New Journalists could write as long as they pleased: 3,000 words, or 15,000, or 40,000, for an audience that genuinely cared about what they had to say. This was a great time for magazines and newspapers - a pre-cable, pre-internet era when the print media reigned supreme. The greatest work of New Journalism's golden era - the last, great, good time of American journalism, which roughly spans 1962 to 1977 - left a profound impression.

· This is an edited extract from Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe? How New Journalism Rewrote the World, by Marc Weingarten, published by Aurum Press on September 26, price £14.99