Tim Adams interviews Tom Wolfe (original) (raw)

Tom Wolfe does not dress like a child of the Sixties. In his 14th-floor Manhattan apartment with its snow-covered, late-afternoon view over Central Park, he is Wolfeishly immaculate in his white suit and his co-respondent shoes. He does not behave like a child of the Sixties, either. We sit at his circular antique dining table and he sips iced water while polishing anecdote and aphorism. But the Sixties was the decade that formed him and the one that he first helped to form (he has had a hand in characterising all those that have followed, too). America's greatest sentence-by-sentence show-off is 76, and made somewhat frail by an unreliable heart, but when he thinks back over those decades, he does so with a wicked grin. For all of his grand ambition as a novelist, he has never forgotten that a journalist's primary function is the creation of mischief, and Wolfe's mischief-making began in earnest in 1962.

That was the year he first came to live in New York. It had taken him a while. He was 31 and still deciding how he could make his name when he was hired by the Herald Tribune as a writer of features. On arrival in the city, he felt he needed a trademark, so he adopted the suit and a homburg hat, an outfit that his father, an agronomist and gentleman farmer in the Shenandoah Valley, had worn in the golden summers of his Virginian youth.

The suit (he now has 40 or so of them) served many purposes: it got under the skin of the natives (early on, Wolfe's most truculent sparring partner, Norman Mailer, declared: 'In my mind, there is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, particularly in New York'), it disarmed his subjects, and, most of all, it gave him something to write up to. As he is fond of pointing out: 'If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before they were not noticed, now they are.' All he needed to find was a voice that had the same exclamatory élan as his tailoring.

Wolfe instinctively understood that the essence of the 1960s lay not in its politics but in its fashions. He was the first pop journalist, alive to the cults of youth and the glister of American capitalism, able to do for American writing pretty much what Andy Warhol, that other arch-conservative dandy up from the sticks, did for its art. By 1964, he was opening articles (about 'the Girl of the Year') with sentences like this: 'Bangs manes bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter face brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms éclair shanks elf boots ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them, these flaming little buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside the Academy of Music Theatre underneath that vast, old, moldering, cherub dome up there - aren't they super-marvellous!'

Wolfe believes the Sixties began with the arrival of the Beatles in New York in 1964. He had been sent by his paper to cover the story and remembers a wave of young men running across the airport, having seen the group for the first time, all furiously combing their hair out of rock'n'roll DAs and forward into moptops. There were four limousines, one per Beatle; Wolfe managed to jump into a car with George Harrison and drove into the city with him: 'I might have got better lines in Lennon's car,' he says, 'but a more straightforward man than Harrison I never met.'

The decade ended, he suggests, four years later, in 1968, the year he published The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the high-voltage account of the psychedelic experiments of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. In between times, Wolfe was an ever-more excitable transmitter of the energy of the moment. His great secret was that he was as much horrified as amused by what he reported. He wrote like a pot-head but thought like a Southern gent. 'As long as I was writing about hippies and stuff, I was assumed to be a flaming liberal,' he says now, snorting at the idea.

Wolfe's default attitude is devilment; he behaves as if nothing is more fun than winding up liberals. Thus the short Sixties decade in his reading was primarily about money. 'There was,' he says, with a cocked eyebrow, 'almost 10 years of uninterrupted boom in the financial markets and that accounts for so many things that happened': children living in communes on trust funds; children for the first time with enough money to support the music and fashion industries; children who could afford drugs.

It was dollars, he also believes, that led to Vietnam: without the booming economy, America would never have undertaken the war (just as he thinks that without the bullish stock market of recent years, George W Bush would not have gone into Iraq). He is happy to describe both conflicts as 'idealistic' in the sense that they were driven by American desire to police the world. 'Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.' The goals in Iraq, he concedes, are somewhat less clear.

If money created the conditions for a youth-led revolution, it was, he suggests, ignited by the loss of faith in God 'among higher-degree-educated people'. The result of this sudden atheism was that parents had no authority with which to disapprove of their children's behaviour. 'If your children have convictions and you don't know what to believe, it is very hard to say, "Thou shalt not", with that long alabaster finger.'

Wolfe recalls sitting on a panel discussion about Vietnam with Allen Ginsberg and Günter Grass and some underground film-makers in 1967. 'They, and the audience,' he says, still slightly affronted by the memory, 'were all making not only anti-war statements but malign statements about the American government - as some people are now, freedom of speech and all of this...' Wolfe heard himself shouting: 'Ah! Come on! This is a happiness explosion! People are flush with money! They go dancing in these discotheques all over the country!' And the thing is, he says now: 'I was right and they were wrong.'

Wolfe's account of this happiness explosion was always at one remove. The idea of his 'new journalism' was to dissolve the distinction between writer and subject and Wolfe was so good at the tricks of this total submersion reporting that it was easy to forget that he was as likely to let go of his critical distance as he was to walk down Fifth Avenue in flip-flops; it was this tension that gave his writing its narcotic charge. His friend and fellow new journalist Hunter S Thompson, who had no qualms about genuinely throwing himself into the fray, once argued: 'Wolfe's problem is that he is 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 they make him nervous. The only thing new and unusual about Wolfe's journalism is that he is an abnormally good reporter.'

Those skills were paraded to pyrotechnic effect in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which still stands up as a definitive document of 1968, a decline and fall of the DayGlo empire. Wolfe had been looking for a subject that would allow him to dazzle about the decade at book length and the hallucinogenic road trips of the Merry Pranksters were everything he wanted. 'It was a primary religious group. That is why Kesey began these acid tests [lacing Kool-Aid at parties with LSD]. It was the ecstatic experience... in the way that the early Christians depended on wine.'

Wolfe's first interest in Kesey was as a fugitive. The author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was off in Mexico on the run from drug charges. When Kesey was eventually arrested south of San Francisco, Wolfe went to the jail to interview him. Kesey's followers were camped out. 'One guy had a crystal in the middle of his forehead so if you looked at him a certain way there would be a sudden sunburst. I had never seen anything like them.'

When Kesey got out on bail, Wolfe was in an abandoned pie factory in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco where the Pranksters were living. 'Kesey walked in and for a long time he said nothing. Eventually he sat down and they literally gathered on the floor around his feet and he told them parables.' In the months that followed, Wolfe stayed with the Pranksters, listening, recording. Was he seduced by Kesey's charisma? 'I would find myself under this spell,' he says. 'It was all very mystical and in the morning I would be driving back to San Francisco to get some sleep and all these people would be going to work; I felt infinitely superior to them because I had been up all night hearing truths,' he laughs. 'By noon, though, I would be thinking: "What the hell was that all about?"'

Did he ever take the drugs?

'I would not have touched that stuff,' he says, mock-shocked at the thought. 'And Kesey did not push it. But one day he came to me and said, "Tom, why don't you put that notebook and that ballpoint pen away and just Be Here?"'

Was he tempted?

'Well, I thought hard about it for about six seconds.'

He held on to his notebook, reaffirmed his own faith. 'You have to believe that what you write is more important than any cause, up to the point where the barbarians are two blocks from your home. Then maybe you should think again...'

As Wolfe is talking, with the wintry sun going down over the park, I'm reminded of a line he is fond of using: 'You never realise how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.' Wolfe never wanted to stop being the Southern boy in the big city and it is from that sense of himself as the blow-in to 'Cultureburg' that he still derives his outsider's eye. It's a bit absurd now, like the Panama hat lampshades in his study - he has a wife who was art director of Harper's magazine, this apartment, summers in the Hamptons. He could hardly be more embedded in the literary world but it is an identity he holds on to. His opinions survived the Sixties probably not that far removed from those of his Virginian father.

'When these hippy kids would move on to a farm somewhere, my father always laughed,' he recalls. '"Farmers," he would say, "get up at four in the morning to feed the cattle... you don't play the guitar on a farm." These kids would use the fields as a bathroom. You would go to some of these communes and you thought maybe it was the remains of a decoration for some holiday and in fact it was toilet paper going on for acres.'

This sense of the absurdity of the liberal 'charmed aristocracy' has been Wolfe's most consistent theme. Not long after he arrived in New York, he wrote a 15,000-word attack on the bible of that aristocracy, the New Yorker, that many of the city's literati have never forgiven him for. He has added many insults to that original injury over the years, not least in his invention of 'radical chic' to describe the infatuation of the intelligentsia with the Black Panther movement. Nothing is more likely to raise hackles in New York than a Southern dandy having fun with racial politics, as Wolfe has consistently done since civil rights days. It is, he still argues, the last great taboo and hence a major theme of all of his novels - his next, set in Miami, will look at illegal immigration. Having grown up in segregated Richmond, he knows all about the sensitivities he is addressing. 'It was apartheid [back then],' he says. 'And it was never discussed. I remember visiting New York for a baseball game when I was 17 and going into a drugstore to get a Coca-Cola and there were black people sitting there at other stools. And I remember thinking: this is odd. I can remember extolling the virtues of coloured people, as they then were, to my mother and she would say, "Don't get carried away now - they are not the be all and end all."'

If America was strange to him then it has only got stranger. 'I'm still convinced,' he says, 'that if you went to live anywhere in this country for 30 days you would see sides of life that you did not think possible. Think of Paris Hilton. A novelist could dream up a beautiful heiress who gets caught on a pornographic tape. But the rest of the novel would be about extortion. I don't think you could come up with a plot where an heiress becomes a television star because she has done a pornographic tape.'

Mailer - 'I miss him. He was good to feud with, which I did over and over' - took to putting Wolfe down as a journalist, not a literary man. Despite his first two novels selling more than a million hardback copies, he has no problem with that. At heart, he knows he is a reporter - 'such an exciting calling'. It's what fuels his fiction, keeps him going. He still works at the pace he did in 1968 and his writing has never stopped buzzing. Is there a secret?

'John Maynard Keynes said the people who are successful are the people with animal spirits who refuse to acknowledge the risks they are taking in the same way that the healthy young man ignores the possibility of death. I'm not a young man, and,' he checks ostentatiously, pulling back the buttoned cuff of his jacket, grinning his Wolfe grin, 'I do have a pulse, but when it comes to mortality, mostly I choose to ignore the subject.'

From cub to Wolfe

1931 Born 2 March in Virginia. He began writing seriously at nine and wrote and illustrated a biography of Mozart before reaching his teens.

1959 Hired by the Washington Post as a reporter.

1962 Joined the New York Herald Tribune as a reporter and feature writer.

1964 Wrote a feature for Esquire about car culture in southern California, credited with kickstarting a new style of reporting, new journalism, which incorporated literary techniques.

1968 Published The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an account of Ken Kesey's travels across America, experimenting with LSD, which became one of the defining texts of Sixties.

1987 Published his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, originally serialised in Rolling Stone

He says 'To me, the great joy of writing is discovering. Most writers are told to write about what they know, but I still love the adventure of going out and reporting on things I don't know about.'

Listen in

Tom Wolfe talks to Tim Adams about his recollections of 1968, to Norman Mailer and the Hells Angels here