Tom Wolfe, as faithful and astute an observer
of the American experience as any writer I know, is gone. He died Monday at the
grand age of 88. Thankfully, his works live on.
They will continue to be read because they
offer a wise, insightful and entertaining look into the age in which Wolfe
lived. Together, his nonfiction and his fiction comprise a brilliantly written
and reported history of our times – our victories, our defeats, our joys, our tragedies,
both our nobilities and our absurdities.
The
Right Stuff is one of his best books, and my favorite.
It’s many things at once: a rumination on what makes a hero, a keen observation of the earliest days of the space program and a series of riveting character
studies. Its vibrant prose, attention to detail and spot-on dialogue make it
almost impossible to put down.
The first Wolfe book I ever read was The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his
account of a cross-country, acid-fueled trip with Ken Kesey and his Merry
Pranksters. It is, hands down, the best depiction of the ’60s counterculture
you’ll find.
Two collections of essays are worth
noting: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake
Streamline Baby and Radical Chic and
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. He also wrote critically acclaimed fiction, most
notably Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full.
I had to discover Wolfe on my own. As a
journalism student in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was taught to hate him
and the damage he and his other co-conspirators were doing to traditional
journalism with their hoity-toity, new-fangled, partly truth and partly fiction
“New Journalism.”
New Journalism, the evil creation of a
cabal of New York writers weary of the uninspiring conventions of American journalism,
would lead to the ruin of us all, opined the J-professors at North Texas State
University.
Straying from the path of doctrinaire,
objective journalism would be to betray the sainted memories of John Peter
Zenger and Joseph Pulitzer. Hell, you might as well urinate on the First
God-Damned Amendment while you’re at it.
Stick to the facts, ma’am, just the facts,
our profs preached, preferably organized in the holy “inverted pyramid” with
the most important information first and lesser data arranged in descending importance.
Ignore the trendy pretensions of New Journalism.
And I believed them. Lordy, I bought the argument
hook, line and sinker. I was known to pontificate – when properly fueled with
righteous indignation and beer – about how the techniques used by Wolfe, Norman
Mailer, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion and others
eroded reader confidence in the work of real
journalists. Those noble traditionalists, clad in shining armor and atop mighty
steeds, humbly presented the facts, and let their readers determine the truth
for themselves.
That such a presentation often was dull as
dishwater and virtually reader-proof mattered little.
One evening, while in full rant, a friend interrupted
me and asked a simple question. “Gunnels, have you read any of Wolfe? How about
Mailer? Armies of the Night is
terrific. If you haven’t read them, how do you know they’re full of shit?
Because some professor told you?”
Well, hell, I thought. He’s got a point.
Here I was, during a time when college students were damned near required to
question the status quo, blindly guarding it. Pretty pathetic.
So I set out to correct my oversight. What
I read promptly knocked me off my high horse and changed my perspective on journalism forever.
I was immediately captivated by the very
things of which I had been most critical – the subjective perspective, use of
literary techniques to bring events alive, the writer’s immersion in the story
in service of “truth” rather than just the “facts.”
In the journalism career that stretched
before me, I would have limited use of the lessons of New Journalism. I worked
in very traditional newsrooms for the most part and was bound by the
constraints of the inverted pyramid. But New Journalists – or whatever you
chose to call them –were always with me, inspiring me, teaching me,
illuminating for me the world as it really is.
Sometimes, they saved my sanity. At my
first newspaper job, night cops reporter for the dreary, button-down, rigidly
conservative Lubbock Avalanche Journal,
I felt isolated and adrift until I picked up Hunter Thompson’s brilliantly
absurd Fear and Loathing on the Campaign
Trail and later his Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas. They offered the promise of a future beyond the dusty,
wind-swept high plains. So I persevered.
In the end, New Journalism survived its
critics and changed them more than they changed it. Today, many of the
techniques once abhorred by traditional journalism are increasingly embraced in
both print and digital newsrooms where engaging readers literally is a matter
of life and death.
And when I think of my journalism heroes,
many are New Journalists. Tom Wolfe was one. His voice is stilled, but not his
words.
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