How gay was Tom Wolfe? Well, pretty goddamn gay

Looking at the many pictures that have been published of Tom Wolfe in his white suit glory years, one has the strong sense of seeing something rare: a male anorexic. In what was surely his best book, The Right Stuff, Wolfe paid homage to “real men”, men who didn’t go the opera and couldn’t order a meal in French to save their lives, but could and did risk them for nothing more, and nothing less, than glory, men who put the pedal to the metal and kept it there, come Hell or high water. Yes, Wolfe loved “real men”. There was only one drawback: real men don’t fuck queers.¹

Wolfe grew up in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1930s and 40s, a setting that he described as “paradise”—a paradise which he left as soon as he could and to which he never returned. Wolfe arrived in New York in 1962, quickly making a name for himself at the upstart New York magazine, part of a stable of crockery breakers collected by editor Clay Felker intended to take on the reigning literary establishment.

Wolfe bewildered one of the reigning grand old men of literary New York, Dwight MacDonald, because he seemed to have an entirely negative sensibility: everything struck him as ludicrous and contemptible, while nothing was worthy of praise.

In fact, Wolfe had an informed contempt for the old leftist intelligentsia of which MacDonald was one. His Ph.D. thesis at Yale had been The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942. He interviewed many of the members extensively, men who he surely knew regarded his own background—“southern bourgeoise!—with the same contempt with which he regarded them. Like many another curmudgeon—Malcolm Muggeridge, for example—Wolfe knew how important success is in this world, and how hard it is to obtain, and he hated people who pretended to despise it and in fact did despise those who labored to obtain nothing more than a middle-class place in life—those sweaty, common types devoid of grace and style and passion.

Unlike Muggeridge, however, Wolfe had no “Church”,³ no positive set of values to set up against the vast wasteland of literary Manhattan. Wolfe’s great handicap was that he simply wasn’t very smart. He couldn’t understand a great deal of what was being said and done in New York, and he wanted to dismiss it all as nonsense, but he lacked the intellectual vantagepoint and tools to do the job. He was smart enough, I think, to realize that the literary prestige of southern writers of the previous generation, who were both numerous and highly admired, was dependent on their imaginative power and not on any coherent set of values. The myth of the “Old South,” which defined and obsessed them, he discarded like like a cheap suit. But he found nothing to replace it. He could tear down, and he did, but he couldn’t build.

It’s not surprising that perhaps Wolfe’s most successful works were the famous essays “Radical Chic” and “Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers”, which allowed him to give liberal hypocrisy on race the beating that it so richly deserved. The sight of the over-privileged Manhattan elite elbowing each other aside in order to prove who loved the “oppressed” the most—people with whom they had nothing in common and did not understand and whom they would not like if they did understand—was made to order for a bitter southern boy who could never express what he really felt—that things had been better for everyone under segregation and that these Yankee “geniuses” were destroying everything worthwhile in New York—everything that made life living—in order to pretend to a tolerance they neither felt nor practiced.

It still strikes me as curious that Wolfe remained resolutely apolitical. He certainly had a lot in common with the National Review’s hatred and contempt for “modern times”, and one would have thought that the advent of “Cowboy Ron” in the White House would have brought him out of the closet, as it were, but that didn’t happen. He seemed to prefer the company of the people he made fun of, the chattering class who ruled the Upper West Side. They were the in crowd, the fun crowd, the cool kids. It’s a pure guess, but perhaps his closely closeted homosexuality had permanently alienated him from conservatism—and religion in particular—while still a boy.

Wolfe’s fondness for the male form was openly on display in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), about Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest⁴ and leader of a gang of LSD dropping “Merry Pranksters”. Kesey, Wolfe informs us, had “a helluva build”, as did several other merry pranksters. I don’t regard “helluva” as “good writing”, and I don’t think “helluva build” is “guy talk”, as Wolfe wants us to believe. Do construction workers say stuff like “You know, Bob, you’ve got a helluva build there”? Or “Thanks, Jim. You’ve got a helluva build yourself”? I don’t think so.

I never read a piece by Wolfe that didn’t run too long. His books should have been magazine articles. Article length quickly became an exercise in literary dick measuring, and this was one area where Wolfe could keep up with the best of them. His famously florid “style”, which he used to “expand” his work, I found tediously mannered, repetitious, and predictable—his painful lack of imagination made more and more manifest even as he labored to conceal it.

In 1975 Wolfe took the bold step of being directly serious rather than satirical when he wrote The Painted Word, an attack on what was then the modern art establishment. There was certainly much to criticize, and in fact many of the critics that Wolfe attacked, rooted as they were in the essentially romantic notion of the artist as hero that flourished down through the 1950s, were as unimpressed as Wolf with the artists like Andy Warhol who detonated it in the sixties.⁵ But Wolfe unconsciously revealed himself as the earnest philistine he was, wondering why these goldurned fancy folk couldn’t paint a goldurned apple that looked like a goldurned apple. After all, everyone knows that Michael Angelo was the greatest sculptor ever, so why don’t modern sculptors sculpt like goldurned Michael Angelo?

Wolfe had much better luck with The Right Stuff, a series of essays on those ballsy bad boy patriots risking their asses for the gold old USA that originally ran as articles in Rolling Stone before being published as a book in 1979. The book was made into a widely heralded film that was a big flop, but Wolfe was sitting on enough cash, and enough acclaim, to attempt his great dream, a big novel in the style of the 19th century realists whom he (I guess) loved as a boy.

The result was The Bonfire of the Vanities, published in book form in 1987, a huge critical and financial success that I barely examined before concluding that the point of the book was to allow readers to hate black people in good conscience while allowing Wolfe to give full rein to his misogyny.⁶ The book is filled with conniving black hustlers and slutty rich bitches—though much if not most of the critical praise for the book assumes that Wolfe’s “real” target was Wall Street greed.

If that were not enough—and, of course, it is—Wolfe was a terrible novelist. “If you start with a type you end with a stereotype,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald explained.⁷ Wolfe started with a stereotype. His idea of character development was to say things like “he was a typical Wall Street lawyer”, followed a deluge of label dropping. Wolfe knew, and cared, far more about clothes than any straight man would.⁸

The Bonfire of the Vanities made Wolfe the most famous novelist in America in one stroke, to the helpless rage of geniuses like Norman Mailer and craftsmen like John Updike, Wolfe’s success doubly galling because it made them realize how much they wanted to be, not “great” writers, but rich and famous ones.

Like The Right Stuff, “The Bonfire of the Vanities* was made into a widely heralded film, directed by Brian De Palma and loaded with big stars, that was a massive flop—much more of one than The Right Stuff, because expectations were so high. It was expected by many to be the definitive putdown of Reagan-era excess, Hollywood somehow erasing Ronnie from America’s memory. Wolfe didn’t like the film—whether he started disliking it before or after it flopped isn’t really important. Anyway, he had the cash, and the book’s reputation—and Wolfe’s—was intact.

Unsurprisingly, the rest of his career was an anticlimax, though, if anything, Wolfe worked harder than ever. For the truly driven, work, not success, no matter how obsessively it be desired and pursued, is the true purpose. Only continuing labor can assuage the nameless fears that provoked the desire and the pursuit in the first place. Wolfe labored almost 12 years to produce A Man in Full, a stunningly awkward (awkward and bad) doorstop about a Georgia good old boy, Charlie Croker, who very unsurprisingly sports a “helluva build”, about which Wolfe finds it difficult to shut up. Critics, as they invariably do when confronted by a much heralded dog, struggled to avoid noticing how bad the book was. As I remember, no one had the nerve to actually call Wolfe a homo, but many did quote, at length, Wolfe’s obsessive and overwrought descriptions of pecs and abs. Six years later, in an even more absurd novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe tried to write himself into the persona of a young woman, somewhat in the manner of Henry James in Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove, but with less success. Neither of these books made it onto either the big or the little screen.

I only read one piece by Wolfe that impressed me, and I was amazed at how good, and how unlike his standard work, it was. I’ve forgotten the title, but it probably ran in New York magazine sometime in the eighties. The “frame” was standard Wolfe, about an obese homeless man who terrorized respectable folks (to Wolfe’s immense delight) rampaging around the Automat⁹ in Times Square at six in the morning on Christmas day. What’s interesting is not the bread but the sandwich meat in between.

Wolfe very uncharacteristically offers some autobiography, reminiscing about his early days in New York, how he’d always volunteer to work when other people didn’t, at night and on the weekends and holidays, a good way to avoid having to socialize and, above all, an excuse to avoid meeting mom and dad. “I’m sorry, mom, they’ve got me working both Thanksgiving and Christmas again this year.” This schedule left him free, free to wander the streets of the great big toy that was New York at all hours all by himself. Amazingly, Wolfe tells us that he had a romantic notion of himself as the protector of the city, who kept an eye on things while everyone else slept. Imagine being in Times Square at six in the morning on Christmas Day! You can’t get more alone than that!¹⁰

Wolfe’s solitude was his freedom. The city itself was a never-ending spectacle, but the greatest spectacle of all was the people at the top, the endless struggle for status, the women struggling to be beautiful so men would find them attractive and the men struggling to be “great” so that women would find them attractive. Buildings are built, novels are written, home runs are hit, fashion shows are held, bonnets are purchased, eye shadow is applied, and all for what? All in pursuit of a simple biological function that can be performed, in the nude, actually, with none of these grandiose trappings whatsoever! This enormous structure, ever changing and brilliant, and infinite in its variety, built entirely on fucking! How couldn’t you laugh?

Afterwords
The city that Wolfe enjoyed as a young man, where you could wander at all hours through many sections of the city with no fear of molestation, was destroyed by the great urban riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King. I lived, not in New York, but in Chicago from June 1967 through February 1968. In those days, the Loop swarmed with people until midnight during the week and later on Friday and Saturday (everything was closed on Sunday). When I visited Chicago years later it was deserted after the evening rush hour. Times Square in the seventies was devoid of commerce except for porno, prostitutes, and three-card monte dealers.