Tom Wolf's Laundry List
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=30&theme=&usrsess=1&id=102289
Silhouette: It’s for real
A classic Tom Wolfe laundry list reads much like a reporter’s notebook verbatim; but then it is funny and effective, writes
Stephen Bayley
VERY few are deliriously optimistic at the survival prospects of print-on-paper journalism, not least those sorry drones who get paid for it. So, two new publications are a timely stimulus to wondering what’s now happening to the writing economy. First is The Hotspur, parish magazine of St John’s, Healey, a village in the North Pennines.
The whim of Jamie Warde-Aldam, a rococo Newcastle ad-man with a long local family history, The Hotspur is interesting, clever and funny. Warde-Aldam’s first edition has a Gilpin painting on the cover, a starburst offering a “free concrete poem”, articles on Inuit vocabulary, WH Auden and recipes for the Northumberland snow-bound who may, at this time of year, take recourse to fried squirrel or crow and mushroom stew. Through sheer neck and nerve, Warde-Aldam has attracted, with charm rather than editorial budgets, real writers: it is free and it is fabulous.
The second is Marc Weingarten’s The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight (Crown Publishers, New York, 2006). This is the first proper study of The New Journalism, the name taken from a 1973 anthology which described a loosely connected group taking journalism beyond reportage and the rancid solemnities of criticism into new territory where they dealt with the “art of fact”.
Weingarten’s title is taken from Jimmy Breslin’s novel about hopeless Brooklyn mafiosi who had problems with the accuracy of their firearms. Breslin, a University of Hard Knocks sportswriter, was a pioneer New Journalist. But it was not a “movement” in the sense that The Beats — Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso et al — were a movement, with beliefs and objectives. Rather, the New Journalists were united (mostly) by ambition and (mostly) by talent. And they were responding to a changed world. Norman Mailer described the Eisenhower years as “the triumph of the corporation”, a period whose cultural achievement was “tasteless, sexless, odourless sanctity in architecture, manners, modes, styles”. He must have been thinking of IBM. The suntanned JFK was a sort of catalyst, releasing among Americans, again in Mailer’s words, “untapped, lonely and romantic ideas”. And so we got the Sixties. The New Journalists were scarcely bo-ho, counter-cultural radicals (Joan Didion and Gay Talese were, for instance, very up-town indeed, as was the immaculately groomed Tom Wolfe). But they extended the boundaries of journalism to cope with the greater opportunities of the age: book length articles based on close observation where the writer was a participant rather than a neutral observer.
There had been precedents. Jonathan Swift, Dickens, Balzac. Or Jack London living among the London poor. George Orwell, posing as a down and out in Paris and in London. Mailer himself and even John Hersey whose 1946 New Yorker article Hiroshima is regularly cited in journalism school polls as the greatest of the genre. But of the New Journalism there is no better, nor more typical, exponent than Tom Wolfe. With his bravura effects, innovative language, sesquipedalian habits, mischief, his chutzpah, his hubris, his passion, satire and humour — not to mention his questions, even problems, of method — Wolfe stands for the New Journalism, good or bad.
At just the time Truman Capote was finishing his six years’ research on the Kansas murders whose account became 1965’s In Cold Blood, Wolfe was sent as general assignment reporter to cover a redneck stock-car race in Wilkes-Barre. The Last American American Hero is Junior Johnson, Yes! was published in 1964; in it the patrician Wolfe was, it is fair to assume, and to use one of his favourite words, boondoggled by the beer and the noise and the pheromones. Thus, awesomely, Wolfe describes the noise Junior Johnson’s car makes: “Ggggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzzz eeeeeeong! gawdam!” The year after, a collection of Wolfe’s journalism appeared as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, low-brow culture given high-brow treatment. His dander sufficiently up, Wolfe felt able to attack The New Yorker, sanctus sanctorum of the literary establishment. With the secretive William Shawn presiding over its closed world, Wolfe wrote an article in the Sunday supplement of The New York Herald Tribune called The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead. Shawn called it “murderous”, although it was in truth no more than cheerfully disrespectful. The New Yorker’s counter-attack accused Wolfe of “parajournalism”, of being more interested in elaboration than development and then, helpfully, defined New Journalism as “A bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric licence of fiction. Entertainment rather than information...” That accusation of frivolity has stuck, John Updike skewering Wolfe’s recent novels as entertainment rather than literature. And as a criticism, the “bastard form” also has some basis. But that is exactly the point.
Wolfe compared his technique to method acting, he was turning history into novels, a process that was complete when his account of Nasa was published as The Right Stuff in 1979. Thereafter, Wolfe devoted himself to “pure” fiction, although his novels have been written with a reporter’s painstaking diligence and tireless observation. The literary establishment continues to disdain him. And when you read a classic Wolfe laundry list — “bangs manes bouffants beehive Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans” — you do wonder if this is not merely a reporter’s notebook verbatim; but then you remember it is funny and effective.
Others were involved in changing journalism: The New Publishers, for instance. There was Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, Wolfe’s patron. Or Clay Felker, the editor who spun New York magazine out of the Herald Tribune’s Sunday supplement to become the most influential and most imitated magazine of the Seventies and Eighties.
New York established a services template that made stories like The Ten Best Upper East Side Sushi Restaurants with Dinner Under $100 the staples of magazine journalism to this day. Only when he manoeuvred a misalliance with the more radical Village Voice did Felker’s sure step stumble and parodists pitched stories called The Favourite Recipes of the Ten Worst Bisexual Judges in New York.
It all seems so quaint now, these battles about style and method. With its commitment to research, impressive effects, controversy and pleasure, The New Journalism was an end, not a beginning. It was not so new, in fact rather old-fashioned. It was the last time magazine writing really mattered.
It does not really exist any more, but you can read about it in Marc Weingarten’s engrossing account. Or, if you happen to be in the North Pennines, you could always try to find a copy of The Hotspur.
— The Independent, London
Silhouette: It’s for real
A classic Tom Wolfe laundry list reads much like a reporter’s notebook verbatim; but then it is funny and effective, writes
Stephen Bayley
VERY few are deliriously optimistic at the survival prospects of print-on-paper journalism, not least those sorry drones who get paid for it. So, two new publications are a timely stimulus to wondering what’s now happening to the writing economy. First is The Hotspur, parish magazine of St John’s, Healey, a village in the North Pennines.
The whim of Jamie Warde-Aldam, a rococo Newcastle ad-man with a long local family history, The Hotspur is interesting, clever and funny. Warde-Aldam’s first edition has a Gilpin painting on the cover, a starburst offering a “free concrete poem”, articles on Inuit vocabulary, WH Auden and recipes for the Northumberland snow-bound who may, at this time of year, take recourse to fried squirrel or crow and mushroom stew. Through sheer neck and nerve, Warde-Aldam has attracted, with charm rather than editorial budgets, real writers: it is free and it is fabulous.
The second is Marc Weingarten’s The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight (Crown Publishers, New York, 2006). This is the first proper study of The New Journalism, the name taken from a 1973 anthology which described a loosely connected group taking journalism beyond reportage and the rancid solemnities of criticism into new territory where they dealt with the “art of fact”.
Weingarten’s title is taken from Jimmy Breslin’s novel about hopeless Brooklyn mafiosi who had problems with the accuracy of their firearms. Breslin, a University of Hard Knocks sportswriter, was a pioneer New Journalist. But it was not a “movement” in the sense that The Beats — Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso et al — were a movement, with beliefs and objectives. Rather, the New Journalists were united (mostly) by ambition and (mostly) by talent. And they were responding to a changed world. Norman Mailer described the Eisenhower years as “the triumph of the corporation”, a period whose cultural achievement was “tasteless, sexless, odourless sanctity in architecture, manners, modes, styles”. He must have been thinking of IBM. The suntanned JFK was a sort of catalyst, releasing among Americans, again in Mailer’s words, “untapped, lonely and romantic ideas”. And so we got the Sixties. The New Journalists were scarcely bo-ho, counter-cultural radicals (Joan Didion and Gay Talese were, for instance, very up-town indeed, as was the immaculately groomed Tom Wolfe). But they extended the boundaries of journalism to cope with the greater opportunities of the age: book length articles based on close observation where the writer was a participant rather than a neutral observer.
There had been precedents. Jonathan Swift, Dickens, Balzac. Or Jack London living among the London poor. George Orwell, posing as a down and out in Paris and in London. Mailer himself and even John Hersey whose 1946 New Yorker article Hiroshima is regularly cited in journalism school polls as the greatest of the genre. But of the New Journalism there is no better, nor more typical, exponent than Tom Wolfe. With his bravura effects, innovative language, sesquipedalian habits, mischief, his chutzpah, his hubris, his passion, satire and humour — not to mention his questions, even problems, of method — Wolfe stands for the New Journalism, good or bad.
At just the time Truman Capote was finishing his six years’ research on the Kansas murders whose account became 1965’s In Cold Blood, Wolfe was sent as general assignment reporter to cover a redneck stock-car race in Wilkes-Barre. The Last American American Hero is Junior Johnson, Yes! was published in 1964; in it the patrician Wolfe was, it is fair to assume, and to use one of his favourite words, boondoggled by the beer and the noise and the pheromones. Thus, awesomely, Wolfe describes the noise Junior Johnson’s car makes: “Ggggghhzzzzzzzhhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzzz eeeeeeong! gawdam!” The year after, a collection of Wolfe’s journalism appeared as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, low-brow culture given high-brow treatment. His dander sufficiently up, Wolfe felt able to attack The New Yorker, sanctus sanctorum of the literary establishment. With the secretive William Shawn presiding over its closed world, Wolfe wrote an article in the Sunday supplement of The New York Herald Tribune called The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead. Shawn called it “murderous”, although it was in truth no more than cheerfully disrespectful. The New Yorker’s counter-attack accused Wolfe of “parajournalism”, of being more interested in elaboration than development and then, helpfully, defined New Journalism as “A bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric licence of fiction. Entertainment rather than information...” That accusation of frivolity has stuck, John Updike skewering Wolfe’s recent novels as entertainment rather than literature. And as a criticism, the “bastard form” also has some basis. But that is exactly the point.
Wolfe compared his technique to method acting, he was turning history into novels, a process that was complete when his account of Nasa was published as The Right Stuff in 1979. Thereafter, Wolfe devoted himself to “pure” fiction, although his novels have been written with a reporter’s painstaking diligence and tireless observation. The literary establishment continues to disdain him. And when you read a classic Wolfe laundry list — “bangs manes bouffants beehive Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans” — you do wonder if this is not merely a reporter’s notebook verbatim; but then you remember it is funny and effective.
Others were involved in changing journalism: The New Publishers, for instance. There was Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, Wolfe’s patron. Or Clay Felker, the editor who spun New York magazine out of the Herald Tribune’s Sunday supplement to become the most influential and most imitated magazine of the Seventies and Eighties.
New York established a services template that made stories like The Ten Best Upper East Side Sushi Restaurants with Dinner Under $100 the staples of magazine journalism to this day. Only when he manoeuvred a misalliance with the more radical Village Voice did Felker’s sure step stumble and parodists pitched stories called The Favourite Recipes of the Ten Worst Bisexual Judges in New York.
It all seems so quaint now, these battles about style and method. With its commitment to research, impressive effects, controversy and pleasure, The New Journalism was an end, not a beginning. It was not so new, in fact rather old-fashioned. It was the last time magazine writing really mattered.
It does not really exist any more, but you can read about it in Marc Weingarten’s engrossing account. Or, if you happen to be in the North Pennines, you could always try to find a copy of The Hotspur.
— The Independent, London
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