I'm Addison and Steele, or the early Thackeray! Look at Dickens' Sketches by Boz."

The Evolution of Dandy Tom

It's out. It's finally being published— Tom Wolfe's big novel of New York's high life and low life, The Bonfire of the Vanities. Writing it has changed the dean of the New Journalism—or at least the world's perception of him. TOBY THOMPSON digs beneath the image of Wolfe as dandy and social satirist to find the man who has always viewed himself as an outsider

It's raining in New York, on one of those spring nights when a light shower contains all the blessings the city might bestow. The white umbrella Tom Wolfe unfurls against this patter does little to conceal his glee at a stroll down Park Avenue—past those great co-ops where apartments sell for $4 million apiece and for which one must pay cash, showing a portfolio of $30 million to even apply. Wolfe himself has shopped for such an apartment, but, he says, laughing, "anyone can shop." The homburg and spatted shoes he protects with this circus tent of an umbrella suggest a man who fritters his life away at Le Cirque or in private dining rooms overlooking Central Park. But this is a writer—a worker happy to see the publication of his first novel after three years of backbreaking effort. The Bonfire of the Vanities is a big book, 560-odd pages, with a first printing of 150,000. And Wolfe is a big author. Still, he steps through the streets of Manhattan with some reserve.

"New York feels very much like home now," he says hesitantly, and with a touch of irony. "But it took a long time for me to feel that way... like it was my city."

"WHEN I WAS NINE, I STARTED WRITING a biography of Napoleon. He was small, and I was small. I was nine years old. It bothered me that the world was run by large people, and Napoleon was this little guy who, at one point, ran the world."

Tom Wolfe pauses, sipping his iced tea. "I also did an illustrated children's book at that time, about Mozart—a child prodigy—who gave concerts to tremendous applause. Then I had a long fascination with sports writing. But I think that was bound up with my aspirations to be an athlete. That's who got applause in school! Not writers!" he says with a slight smile. "At one point I went to a tryout camp for the New York Giants, and they told me, in not all that polite a way, that I didn't have a chance. I just didn't believe them. The denial is rampant."

Tom's life in Manhattan is glamorous," says Gay Talese, "And he's found glamour in family life."

Tom Wolfe has flown down to Virginia to accept the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature from Longwood College. He's at lunch, a few blocks from the Richmond neighborhood where he grew up—in the Art Deco bar at Benjamin's. It's a room with a wide oval mirror set into its mahogany, so that genteel Richmonders may check out their neighbors as that most subtle of southern drawls, the Richmond drawl, wafts around them. Despite Wolfe's fame, despite the arrestingly gangsterish elegance of his white slacks, white shoes, and baby-blue jacket with exaggerated lapels, no one at Benjamin's appears to take notice of him.

A tablemate remarks that Wolfe is one of a few serious authors never to have written about his childhood, and asks why.

"I don't know," Wolfe answers thoughtfully. ''I probably need a psychologist to tell me." He glances up, appraising the room. ''It's true, though. I've never written about Richmond, for example." His eyes narrow. ''Maybe I want a safe harbor to come back to."

STATUS IS ONE OF TOM WOLFE'S GREAT themes. It is safe to surmise that he was profoundly affected by his family's move in 1927 from the rural Shenandoah Valley to a city with one of the haughtiest and most closed societies in the South. Wolfe was bom in Richmond in 1931. Though his parents were gentry, they were country gentry. They were enlightened, Jeffersonian democrats who felt themselves above the fripperies of Richmond society.

''My father was the editor of The Southern Planter, a farm magazine," Wolfe says, driving toward Longwood College. His voice is full of Richmond, but his hands are thick as a plowboy's. ''He was an agronomist and the director of a farmer's cooperative, but I always thought of him as a writer. He kept the novels of Thomas Wolfe on his bookshelf, and for years I thought he'd written them."

Thomas Wolfe Sr., a Cornell Ph.D. and a professor at Virginia Tech, died in 1972. He had moved to Richmond to mn the Planter, which was geared to the squirearchy and to the elitist philosophy of the agrarian South. Wolfe's mother is now ninety and living near his sister, Helen Evans, in North Carolina. "My mother's interests are artistic," Wolfe says fondly. She is remembered by one Richmond neighbor as "delightful... and a liberal Presbyterian lady of the intellectual variety." In her youth, she studied social work in New York and was accepted at medical school but did not attend.

The family lived in the Sherwood Park section of Richmond, far from the fashionable west end: "We had professors living there, working people... everybody," Wolfe's sister remembers.

Wolfe attended* public schools until the seventh grade. But that year his parents enrolled him in St. Christopher's, an Episcopal prep school where boys were taught "math and manners, Latin and lineage," as one friend describes it. There were nineteen sons of the conservative Richmond elite in Wolfe's graduating class.

Wolfe was still spending weekends and summers on his father's farm in the Shenandoah Valley; he was also actively Presbyterian, and "from the north side," remembers John Page Williams, his headmaster. "Not the part that was moving out to the country club." Perhaps from loneliness, Wolfe bragged to a Sunday-school teacher of the eight brothers and sisters he did not have. He was a sensitive boy who studied tap and ballet, and who became an overachiever. He was an honors student, chairman of the student council, a fair athlete, and coeditor of the school paper, for which he wrote and illustrated "The Bullpen," a column already crackling with his style: "Different spectators have suggested motorcars, bicycles and rickshaws for keeping up with Coach Petey Jacobs' livefive," he wrote of the basketball team.

Notice me was the subtext of these early accomplishments. Applaud.

AT FIFTY-SEVEN, TOM WOLFE HAS REceived more applause than any other literary journalist of his time. An author who has truly influenced his era, he's perhaps the best and best-known nonfictionist in America. As a humorist "he's the funniest fucking guy standing, when he's on," says novelist Tom McGuane. As a phrasemaker Wolfe is nonpareil: "radical chic," "the right stuff," "the me generation," and other idiosyncratic designations have entered the language. McGuane calls him "our Thackeray. His style has been imitated so much that he has the burden of having to live it down.''

It's surprising to hear Wolfe speak of writer's block and of the terrible time he's had producing The Bonfire of the Vanities: "I remember something Red Smith said when someone asked him how he managed to turn out a column five days a week. 'There's nothing to it,' he said. 'You sit there at your typewriter and you think, and if that doesn't work, you open a vein.' "

For about six months Wolfe had sat there, "and absolutely nothing was happening.'' Believing that pressure would be helpful—as it had been when he began The Right Stuff in Rolling Stone— he'd decided to compose his first draft on deadline, "to put myself in a vise and force it out." Publisher Jann Wenner jumped at the prospect of a Tom Wolfe novel appearing in twenty-nine consecutive issues of Rolling Stone, and offered a contract for close to $200,000. "No question," Wolfe quips, "that spurs you on." The public reaction to the Rolling Stone serialization was mixed. There was a rave from the ultraconservative American Spectator, but one major New York editor, a Wolfe fan, described it as "just dreck." Few of Wolfe's colleagues responded to the book. "I don't think they're reading it," he commented at the time.

'When I was nine, I started writing a biography of Napoleon. He was small, and I was small... and Napoleon was this little guy who, at one point, ran the world."

In The New Journalism (1973), Wolfe declared that "the most important literature being written in America today is in nonfiction," and predicted that journalists "would wipe out the novel as literature's main event."

But "the road has been built," he says now of literary nonfiction. "We're seeing what's traveling down it. Which is not as exciting as building the road.

"And I didn't want to be in the position where at the end of my career I looked back and said to myself, 'Wonder what would have happened if I'd written a novel?' "

"The wind is utterly out of the sails of New Journalism," McGuane commented recently. "The art juice is in fiction."

WOLFE FIRST DISCOVERED FICTION WRITing at Washington and Lee, a private university in Lexington, Virginia, where Lee served as president after the Civil War. "The kind of boy that goes there is the boy whose family still believes in the Confederacy. . . planter money from Mississippi, big money from the Delta, from Memphis, and Texas," says Marshall Fishwick, one of Wolfe's teachers at W&L. The tobacco executive Smith Bagley is a fellow alumnus, as is Herb Hunt, the oil billionaire. Hunt's father bought him the local Texaco station after Herb suffered a slight there as a student. Wolfe found he could compete against W&L's wealth and its adoration of sports by writing about sports for the school paper—and by publishing short stories. He pitched for the varsity team, pledged a Richmond-boys' fraternity, and flouted the dress code "out of contrariness," he remembers, with styles that were both hyper-English and Hollywoodtough-guy.

Wolfe used W&L as a laboratory to polish his innate manners, for as his friend Clay Felker, who is now editor of Manhattan, Inc., says, "Formal manners are a marvelous way of fending people off—without offending them."

George Foster conducted a fiction seminar once a week in an off-campus taproom called the Dutch Inn. "We would read our work aloud," Wolfe recalls, "and that could be brutal." He was disquieted by the credo that "the only valid subject matter was something you knew very personally within your own life." Or, as his classmate novelist William Hoffman put it, you had "to undress to write fiction."

Two of his stories appeared in Shenandoah, then a campus literary magazine. In one, "Shattered," a freshman football player dreams of "a wonderful someday hero worship by the whole university," but his hopes and a weak knee are smashed in the first game. "It has actually happened," he thinks, "these dumb goddam people are gawking at your helplessness."

Bill Hoffman, a war veteran from the mining country of West Virginia, was even more of an outsider than Wolfe. The two became close friends. Hoffman found the younger writer full of contradictions. He'd confide about St. Christopher's, for example, that "I didn't really belong to that group—I didn't move with that crowd," and would talk about status "in practically every other sentence." Yet he persisted in his dreams of playing professional baseball—hardly a gentleman's occupation. Hoffman remembers Wolfe's early stories as being "filled with fireworks and astonishing, huge detail."

"Tom had from the very first," Hoffman says, "a real sense of the absurd. I hated to go to the movies with him. He'd see something ridiculous like Elizabeth Taylor in Ivanhoe and call out in the theater, 'You can't beat Hollywood!' "

Wolfe was galvanized in his senior year by Marshall Fishwick, W&L's popular-culture guru. "He gave a course," Wolfe says, "which in effect was all of American studies compressed into one year—American architecture, American art, theories in psychology, history, across the board." "I tried to baptize the proletarian," Fishwick explains. "Tom immediately took the bait." Fishwick organized field trips to hear country music, taught his students how to rebuild old farmhouses, and even how to lay mortar. To Wolfe the course was an epiphany. He learned to respect his father's rural heritage, and found he could use the discipline of sociology creatively, turning his sharp literary eye away from himself. "He saw through the facade of the small, elite college,'' Fishwick says, recalling Wolfe's student papers, "and demonstrated that everyone was of the same pattern."

Though Fishwick had persuaded Wolfe to pursue American studies at Yale (instead of a career in baseball), Wolfe continued to write fiction. "I was the sort of person who from a certain moment knows that he's going to write novels. You just know you're going to do it. But when that's going to happen is another question."

TONIGHT-SOME TWENTY-FIVE YEARS later—as Wolfe accepts the Dos Passos Prize at Long wood College, it's his fiction that he's showcasing, rather than the journalism that made him famous.

"This award means a lot to me because the last of the Wolfes living in Virginia, Frances Roberdeau Wolfe, went to Long wood.. .and because I've been thinking a lot about Dos Passos. ... I undertook as my project a work of contemporary fiction that would somehow encompass the life of the modem metropolis.

"Sometimes I thought of it as a Vanity Fair written 150 years later, or, if I was really feeling good about myself, something on the order of Manhattan Transfer.... The high life I felt I knew cold... because I lived in Manhattan .. .but, for the low life, I decided to go to the Bronx. The Bronx to me was sort of like the Arctic Circle: it was north of where I was, and you didn't go there."

The audience titters. "The lowest of the low life of New York is in the Bronx," Wolfe explains. Then he reads a chapter of Bonfire that turns upon the unmasking of his protagonist, Sherman McCoy, a Park Avenue liberal who will be exposed as an adulterer when prosecuted for disabling a black youth in a traffic accident in the Bronx.

At one point in the novel, in a scene of profound humiliation, Sherman is herded through the Bronx courthouse and penned in a holding cell with the black and Hispanic low life that, as a liberal, he has romanticized. Once released, he assures his lawyer, "I'm not going back inside that... place... ever, and I don't care what it takes to keep me out. Even if I have to stick a shotgun barrel in my mouth."

Wolfe leaves his Longwood audience in a park opposite the courthouse, where, "just last week, some poor devil was stabbed to death at ten A.M... .for his portable radio, one of the big ones, known upstairs inside the Island as a Bronx attache case."

There is shocked silence in Farmville, Virginia.

Then thunderous applause.

WHEN WOLFE MOVED TO NEW YORK, IN 1962, he dropped a letter to a friend, Hugh Troy, that hints at his ambivalence:

"The first thing I knew I was on the 1:20 A.M. bus with 15 colored brethren, all of us, no doubt, out to make it in New York.... Whether I am moving on to bigger arid better things, I don't know, but I knew I wouldn't be happy until I gave it a try. This is one big sonofabitch of a town, I have found out, but I guess they are used to boys from the foothills coming in here, and they are probably even tolerant."

Today, Wolfe is still edgy about New York, but for a different reason: it won't let him alone. He is at his Manhattan tailor, Vincent Nicolosi, for a fitting, and his customary politeness becomes strained when he runs into two New Journalists who have been Anglo-dandiacal to the extreme since he published his 1965 piece on "the secret vice" of custom tailoring. He's delighted, however, when his close friend Richard Merkin, the "post-Pop Expressionist" painter, turns up with a silver The Right Stuff promo bag. Merkin is dressed in orange slacks, pink tasseled slippers, a striped boating shirt, and a doublebreasted jacket.

"Dandyism is a mask," he observes, "but underneath, Tom's not flashy. He does it for effect. Remember Tom Buchanan's outrage at Gatsby's pink suit? I think that's Tom Wolfe in a nutshell: Gatsby in a pink suit. He's a very sensitive creature.. .and I've never met anyone so responsive to people's feelings. The last thing he would ever want to feel is that he's hurt you. Writing is a tremendous escape. What you do there is to assert yourself in a way you can't in real life. It's the invented part of life."

There's a male clubbiness at Nicolosi's this afternoon redolent of Savile Row—or, in Wolfe's case, his father's Victorian tastes.

"I see certain things of my father in me that I never was aware of," Wolfe says. ''He always had his clothes made in Richmond. It was not considered a big deal. I started having mine made in Washington. Unlike him, I became very conscious of it. Then I started wearing large hats. That's something he did, also.... And he wore white suits, in the Norfolk style, with a belt in the back and pleats over the shoulder."

Wolfe stares toward the street. ''Never underestimate how much of your childhood is sewn into the lining of your garments when you go to New York."

WOLFE CAME TO NEW YORK TO BECOME a writer following an unhappy six-year hiatus in graduate school at Yale—''tedium of an exquisite sort."

Wolfe would blow off steam by visiting Bill Hoffman, who was then living in New York. Hoffman recalls that Wolfe would check into a welfare hotel on West 103rd Street, and ''we'd go down to Greenwich Village to these crummy dives—Tom was very much interested in Bohemia then and he liked engaging these people in talks. But he didn't look like he belonged there."

He did not belong at Yale either. It was a rich Yankees' school, liberal and stuffy. ''I was a Stevenson man," Wolfe remembers, ''but everyone was so liberal and patronizing to Eisenhower that I acted more conservative than I was. I'd kid them by saying, 'You know, Eisenhower's really very bright. He reads seven foreign papers a day. He has to. And there's that one from Belgrade.' "

''The professors didn't know what to make of him," Hoffman says. "He was supposed to present scholarly papers, and he would write them in this fireworks style of his and just drive them crazy."

Finally Wolfe buckled down and wrote his American-studies dissertation, "The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942." "My theory was that writers, who think of themselves as loners in pursuit of a great goal. . factually are lonesome. It's a socializing influence to join these organizations."

Increasingly he questioned the enterprise of writing fiction. The regurgitation of an author's deepest fears, hangups, and secrets onto the page still went against the grain, and he had begun to find it suspect as art. He wondered if "creativity in prose wasn't embedded in material" and if reporting wasn't the key to unlocking it.

After enduring reportorial stints at the Springfield, Massachusetts, Union and the Washington Post, where he won awards for his writing, Wolfe made it to the New York Herald Tribune in 1962. It was the experimental paper in town. Its Sunday magazine, New York, was edited by Clay Felker, just over from Esquire, and his mandate was liveliness at any cost. Wolfe had been hired as a general-assignment reporter, but soon was writing weekly features: "I looked out across the city room of the Herald Tribune, 100 moldering yards south of Times Square, with a feeling of amazed bohemian bliss... Either this is the real world, Tom, or there is no real world."

He rented an apartment in Greenwich Village and hit the streets.

"The idea," he later wrote of his fellow feature writers, "was to keep body and soul together, pay the rent, get to know 'the world,' accumulate 'experience,' perhaps work some of the fat off your style—then, at some point, quit cold, say goodbye to journalism, move into a shack somewhere. . .and light up the sky with. . .The Novel."

Though Wolfe derided this plan publicly, he kept it as a hidden agenda. "He always had an idea of doing a novel about New York, a la Vanity Fair," Felker remembers.

In the early sixties, as Wolfe pointed out in The New Journalism, "the literary upper class were the novelists... the middle class were the 'men of letters' ... the lower class were the journalists ... As for people who wrote for popular ('slick') magazines and Sunday supplements.. .they weren't even in the game. They were lumpenproles."

Wolfe toiled as a lumpenprole, writing lively if conventional journalism, until a Hot Rod and Custom Car Show gave him a fundamental insight into the American class system and the 1960s. He talked Esquire into sending him to California, where he could further examine the phenomenon; it was his first national-magazine assignment. Back in New York, he had a terrible time lashing the piece together. His editor, Byron Dobell, remembers fearing they would be "stuck with having to write something based on the author's notes, because the author was having a nervous breakdown." In desperation, Wolfe typed up his ideas in the form of a memo to a friend and found a conversational tone that unblocked him and proved exactly right. He wrote all night, listening to manic rock on WABC, and turned in the memo the next morning. Dobell struck out the "Dear Byron," plus "a few 'Chrissake's and the things that were too blatantly Holden Caulfield, and we rolled with it."

That was "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," whose thesis was that the American class system could be beaten, that a reverse snobbery was afoot, in which the old elite was imitating the new. Wolfe characterized the California customcar designers as artists outside any "ancient, aristocratic aesthetic," free of "the amoeba god of Anglo-European sophistication that gets you in the East." Because of postwar wealth, this new elite had been able to form its own status group.

Wolfe identified other maverick prole groups of the 1960s—rock 'n' rollers, D.J.s, gangsters, publishers like Confidential's Robert Harrison, stock-car racers, record producers. All were constructing artifacts that polite society considered "vulgar and lower-class-awful beyond comment almost," but that were having a profound effect. He might have been describing his own status as a journalist—and anticipating the furor New Journalism would cause later in the decade.

Wolfe took the techniques of realistic fiction (scene-by-scene construction, dialogue, point of view, and meticulous status detail) and applied them to this new way of reporting. Gay Talese, Tom Morgan, and others had been doing the same thing in Esquire, but Wolfe took the form and pushed it to its limits, writing from inside his characters like a novelist; his best characters were outsiders—projections of himself. He was hip, the Lenny Bruce of letters. He wrote of the record magnate Phil Spector:

All these raindrops are high or something. They don't roll down the window, they come straight back, toward the tail, wobbling, like all those Mr. Cool snow heads walking on mattresses. The plane is taxiing out toward the runway to take off, and this stupid infarcted water wobbles, sideways, across the window. Phil Spector ...America's first teen-age tycoon watches.. .this watery pathology....

The pieces were supereclectic. "If you'd never seen one before, they were fabulous, really exciting," recalls Tom McGuane. They incorporated the electronic beeps and chatter of TV, of rock radio; they moved like the spontaneous bop prosody of the Beats; they had a visual quality, on the page; and they were scholarly, with bits of art history and sociology. Wolfe flung this pastiche at a baby-boom readership raised on television and Top 40 radio, the best-educated generation in the history of the world.

'He always had an idea of doing a novel about New York, a la Vanity Fair Clay Felker remembers.

"The sixties were a period when fictionists seemed to have abandoned the city as a subject," reflects Wolfe. "Nonfiction writers had a field day." In New York, styles and manners were changing faster than anyone could record them. The Social Register and Four Hundred crowd joined the rabble—in clubs like the Peppermint Lounge and Arthur—and mimicked their dancing, their dress. The new cafe society, or "Pop Society," as Wolfe preferred to call it, was "made up of people whose status rests not on property and ancestry but on various brilliant ephemera." It accepted Wolfe, the southern emigre, as its chronicler.

Wolfe's first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, a compilation of articles written in that first, manic, fifteen-month period, hit the best-seller lists. He became the Journalist as Superstar, part of an independent statusphere that included Jimmy Breslin (also of the Trib), Rex Reed, Pete Hamill, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer—writers as vilified or adored as rock stars.

"It was a very curious time for me," Wolfe recalls. "I'd spend the day at the Herald Tribune getting other people through the publicity mill, and after work I was being interviewed. Suddenly / was getting publicity." In 1966, he was photographed by Irving Penn for Vogue, and interviewed by a girlfriend, Elaine Dundy, who was Kenneth Tynan's ex-wife and a novelist. Penn caught Wolfe's arrogance of dress and attitude, but Dundy got below the surface flash to what was a driven and isolated young man. She noted his "country air," describing him as ''Tom Sawyer drawn by Beardsley." She remembers him today as "pretty wary, and scared of people putting him on.... He was very much the Southerner trying to get it right in New York." Meanwhile, Wolfe had moved to an apartment at 2 Beekman Place, one of Manhattan's swankiest addresses— "When I came up North, I didn't come here to fool around"—but kept its interior bohemian and sparsely furnished.

Wolfe told Dundy that "perfect journalism would deal constantly with one subject: Status," and admitted that what made him angriest was "humiliation. I never forget, I never forgive." He said he'd always wanted to be a writer, but "didn't actually become one until I was thirty-two," the year of Kandy-Kolored—"I suppose there was a lot of fear involved." He complained that he had "taken more physical punishment from writing than. . . from any sport I've ever played." He felt that his greatest talent was for drawing (he'd illustrated the first book, and had had a oneman show in New York), but that he was least talented at "creating stable ties with other people."

Wolfe stayed untied to anything but ambition throughout the mid-sixties (though "a lot of girls were chasing him," remembers Clay Felker), and traveled helter-skelter across America and England in search of new trends or status groups who were "starting their own league," as he had. He "moved constantly," Richard Merkin remembers. "Tom must have lived in fourteen or sixteen different places in New York."

Gay Talese, who has known Wolfe since they were "young men on the street of journalism" together, describes him as "very much the Southerner who feels distance as he moves through the New York scene. It doesn't touch him. He doesn't want it to touch him."

Professionally, Wolfe ensured this distance from "the kentucky colonels of both Journalism and Literature," as he put it, by publishing a two-part Tribune article, in April of 1965, characterizing William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, as a "museum custodian, an undertaker, a mortuary scientist" in charge of the magazine's staff—themselves no better than zombies in the liveliness of the copy they produced. E. B. White responded that ''Mr. Wolfe's piece on William Shawn . . . sets some sort of record for journalistic delinquency." Muriel Spark commented that Wolfe's style of attack "is plainly derived from Senator McCarthy," and even J. D. Salinger emerged from his New Hampshire woodshed to sneer that the article was "inaccurate and sub-collegiate and gleeful and unrelievedly poisonous."

The Three Amigos

"That piece put New York magazine on the map," Clay Felker says, "and it put Tom on the map too."

' 'There are two ways to make reputations," Wolfe says today. "Build up yours, and tear down everyone else's."

AMERICA WEST OF THE HUDSON beckoned. Wolfe got out of New York to write a series of articles for the Trib about Ken Kesey, a novelist on the lam in Mexico. Kesey had been arrested on drug charges and had jumped bail. He was a good old boy in the mode of stock-car racer Junior Johnson, whom Wolfe had profiled in "The Last American Hero," a protagonist of the sort Wolfe was finding increasingly attractive. Kesey's father, like Wolfe's, had headed a farmers' cooperative, and both writers were committed to experimental realism in prose. They were outsiders who had gathered around them revolutionary constellations. Kesey's was the Merry Pranksters, post-Beat proto-hippies of a literary bent. One of them was Robert Stone, who had landed an assignment with Esquire to write about the group himself.

"Wolfe didn't know where Kesey was in Mexico," Stone remembers, "and I did. I immediately got on the phone and told everybody who knew where Kesey was not to tell Wolfe. So Wolfe's sources promptly dried up." When Esquire rejected Stone's piece, he bequeathed his notes to Wolfe and agreed to be questioned by him. "He's a dangerous kind of interviewer," Stone observes respectfully, "because he really does put you at your ease."

The Trib articles resulted in a contract for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe's first book-length work. He had begun to work on it in New York, when his father became seriously ill. "I came home to sort of help my mother out," Wolfe recalls, "thinking that I would say good-bye to this book for a while. 1 was going to the hospital three times a day—and the damdest thing happened. Since I had maybe a couple of hours in the morning, an hour in the afternoon, and maybe an hour at night to work, 1 was religious about it. I never missed those hours. 1 would sit right down and start writing."

Coming home had unblocked him. Even after Dr. Wolfe recovered, Tom stayed on in Richmond, completing the book in four months.

The Pranksters' experiments with LSD were on the cutting edge of theories about the mind that Wolfe had been exploring for some time. He'd developed a technique "that I thought of as a controlled trance," he says. "I'd review my notes for a certain chapter, then I would close my eyes and try to imagine myself, as a Method actor would, into the scene ...going crazy, for example... how it feels and what it's going to sound like if you translate it into words—which was real writing by radar."

Eventually he decided there was one essential bit of reporting he'd failed to do: take acid. "I had a friend in Buffalo who had access to LSD, so I went up there and took 125 milligrams. At first I thought I was having a gigantic heart attack—I felt like my heart was outside my body with these big veins. ... As I began to calm down, I had the feeling that 1 had entered into the sheen of this nubbly twist carpet—a really wretched carpet, made of Acrilan—and somehow this represented the people of America, in their democratic glory. It was cheap and yet it had a certain glossy excitement to it—I even felt sentimental about it. Somehow I was merging with this carpet. At the time, it seemed like a phenomenal insight, a breakthrough."

Though Wolfe dismisses this insight today as not meaning ''a goddam thing," it seemed to free him to write Kool-Aid as a love song to America. The book was American to the core, imitating the workings of the contemporary mind by incorporating stream of consciousness, poetry, and multiple points of view.

(Continued on page 160)

(Continued from page 127)

And it was unreservedly hip. It remains the best book about 1960s America, and it is emotionally free in a way Wolfe's writing has not been since.

Kool-Aid was simultaneously published with The Pump House Gang in July of 1968—"Two books!!!!!!! Heeeeeeeeeeewack! The same day!!!!!! Too-o-o-o-o-o-o freaking much!" said the New York Times review—and became an immediate best-seller. All across the country, students in creativewriting programs stared at the photo of Wolfe on its jacket—Tom in a dark shirt, white tie, white step-collared vest, white shoes and suit—and said, "Hey, that ain't Allen Ginsberg." And turned toward the New Journalism.

In the mid-sixties, "fiction moved a long way toward New Journalism," Tom McGuane says. Today "there's a kind of weird, natural meeting ground. All novelists are trying to fool readers into thinking it's real, and all adventurous journalists are trying to seize the flexibility of fiction."

The New Journalists had seized that flexibility, effecting at the very least a revolution in style. And, as Robert Stone remarks, "a revolution in style can be called a revolution in consciousness. ... Wolfe reflected it, as I think Kesey reflected it."

Yet Kool-Aid had finished on a somber note. Despite a revolution in consciousness, the Pranksters had failed to liberate America with their vision of "now." The hierarchical status groups still reigned. "WE BLEW IT!" the Pranksters chant in Wolfe's final chapter, "WE BLEW IT!" "WE BLEW IT!"

By 1970, Wolfe thought he had cleared the decks for his big book about New York. In search of material, he crashed a fund-raiser for the Black Panthers' legal-defense fund at the Park Avenue apartment of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein. What he found at the Bernsteins' was such gold that it resulted in another postponement of his fiction.

Radical Chic is brilliantly executed and marvelously funny. "As a piece of sheer writing," Wolfe says, "it's my favorite book." In it Wolfe remains the outsider. If he identifies with anyone, it's with the Black Panthers, whom he characterizes as hip, stylish, and aghast at the hypocrisies of Park Avenue liberals. Radical Chic demolishes New York's rich socialites for their pandering to radical causes (it was authentically damaging, having its effect on both "radical chic" fund-raisers and the reputation of Leonard Bernstein) and analyzes the whole shebang, once again in terms of status. As Ellen Willis commented in the Village Voice, the piece's "underlying assumption is that political action is inherently ridiculous and irrelevant. ... The very idea of social conscience pisses him off. ' '

Suddenly the apostle of Pranksterism was being labeled a right-winger. Wolfe blames this on "my having gone against the prevailing orthodoxy" of high liberalism. He had always felt about politics "the way the hippies who were asked to make statements felt about the F.B.I. Who cares? I'm a democrat with a small d. I think it would be perfectly O.K. to have an electrician or a burglar-alarm repairman as president."

Today Robert Stone characterizes Wolfe as "a southern conservative of a very sophisticated kind. I think he sees New York, and political liberalism, as wimpy and posturing and hypocritical."

He was feeling pugnacious in the early seventies. What seemed to anger him most was the Vietnam War and the public's gloom over it. Not only had Vietnam curtailed the "Happiness Explosion" of the 1960s, it had severely divided Wolfe's natural constituency, the college-age baby-boomers. In a 1983 piece about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, he would note of the war, "The sons of the merchant and managerial classes in America sat this one out, in college, graduate school, Canada and Sweden," and would assert that "the unspeakable and inconfessible goal of the New Left on the campuses had been to transform the shame of the fearful into the guilt of the courageous." Despite Wolfe's conservatism during the early 1970s, he was a huge draw on the campus lecture circuit. "What's Kesey doing now?" became a ritual inquiry that nearly drove him crazy.

Once again during these years, Wolfe was deflected from writing his New York book. "The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie" was an article that presaged The Right Stuff, comparing bomber missions over Vietnam to jousting. Later he'd comment, "Sports were... a way of training young men to be warriors in a relatively harmless fashion.... If we want to get into the psychology of it, I think we'll find that men, not so many women, love war— and they love sports."

The Right Stuff took him six years, during which time he conducted voluminous research and cranked out three other, shorter books to avoid finishing it. "I was stuck with how to handle point of view, I had no main character—no one you could just tell the story through.... I was obsessed with the notion that this book would have no suspense, because everyone knew how it came out."

Changes in his life may have contributed to this block. Wolfe was affected deeply when his father died, and he had become seriously involved with Sheila Berger, a magazine designer whom he'd met in the art department at Esquire. And he was unsettled by the desire to write his Manhattan book instead of The Right Stuff.

He finally created a suitable protagonist by digging within, presenting the Southerner Chuck Yeager as the very embodiment of that good-old-boy, knock-'em-dead spirit which had invigorated his portraits of Kesey and Junior Johnson. The book is a brilliant dissection of the status pyramid in the modem officer corps. At its apex stand the Mercury astronauts: modem knights locked into a Cold War struggle with Soviet cosmonauts for supremacy in the heavens. The right stuff emerged as an amalgam of bravery, style, patriotism, and masculinity. It was the spirit of the rural South, and of his father.

With the publication of The Right Stuff in 1979, Wolfe became a mature statesman of American letters, a literary oracle reflexively consulted on any number of national events, from the space-shuttle tragedy to the Statue of Liberty's hundredth birthday. The conservatism of The Right Stuff did no harm to either Wolfe's sales or his reputation. "You might say,'' Clay Felker observes, "that Tom anticipated the whole American conservative movement.''

The Right Stuff certified Wolfe as a historian, and he abandoned his seat as pop-culture critic of the moment. The Victorian collar climbed his neck in Bauhaus and The Painted Word as his abhorrence of modernism intensified.

"The reaction to The Painted Word [in which he outlines the status hierarchies of the art world and argues that modem art would be devoid of meaning without the criticism of the New York culturati] was the most violent of anything I've done,'' Wolfe remembers, "much more so than Radical Chic. The things I was called in print amazed me."

Wolfe's annual retreat from ManhatW tan is reminiscent of the one his family made from Richmond each summer. The white frame house he rents in Southampton from May through September is late Victorian in style, with gardens out back and an enormous expanse of rolling green yard to Agawan Lake. Though grand in a way, the house offers no competition to the Gatsbyesque mansions that typify Southampton, but is extremely livable, with room for Wolfe's wife, Sheila, and the children (Alexandra, seven, and Thomas, two), and the requisite help, and enough privacy to write.

"I really do a lot of work out here," Wolfe says. "Southampton's an old town, and it's a real town. ... There aren't that many people I know in a literary sense." But, as Richard Merkin quips, "Tom can dissect the population of Southampton for you. The Real Stuff is there."

In June of '86, Wolfe's friend Ed Hayes married the fashion model Susan Gilder in Bellport, and Wolfe attended. "Tom doesn't have that many close friends," Merkin says, "and Eddie's as good a friend as Tom has, maybe his best."

The thirty-nine-year-old Hayes, an ex-Bronx D.A. now practicing law in Manhattan, is from an Irish workingclass family in Queens. He came up the hard way. Wolfe's friendship with him seems an unlikely one. Yet, as Hayes observes, "Tom is fascinated with New York ethnic life, and I'm fascinated with this Wasp warrior class from the South. The real English dandies were aristocrats who were usually soldiers, and aggressive and athletic. Tom sort of represents that. It's that Protestant warrior mentality... similar to what you find in the street life of New York."

Beautifully dressed, Hayes exudes the elegance of a young Cagney. Wolfe has a fatherly affection for him. He is the model for the lawyer Tommy Killian in Bonfire, and has served, with Bruce Cutler and others, as Wolfe's guide through the criminal-justice system of the Bronx.

"The hard guys," Hayes says, "without exception love Tom. He's extremely manly in his way of dealing with things.... Actually, he's a police reporter in a nice suit."

When not writing, Wolfe will spend entire afternoons at Hayes's house in Bellport, or Hayes will drive out to Southampton. "I'll kill the day there," he says. "We eat, we talk... I'm the only Irish guy from Sunnyside who got crazed for gardening, and I'll go down to his house and prune his trees for him."

"I think Tom's life in Manhattan is glamorous," Gay Talese says. "And he's found glamour in family life." The years of loneliness when, as Wolfe recalls, he would "haunt the halls of a magazine you're writing for like an odor" are gone. With his children, he gets all the company he needs "at quarter to seven every morning." Wolfe did not marry until he was forty-seven, or become a father until he was nearly fifty. When his son was bom in 1985, "it was all I heard about," laughs Hayes. "They climb all over him. They drive him crazy. It's tough to be a father in a white suit."

Despite the extramarital affair so painfully outlined in Bonfire, there appears to be no parallel in Wolfe's life. "When I got married," says Hayes, "I had an extensive discussion with him about wearing wedding rings, and about vows. Women really like this guy... but he's one of the few I know who's genuinely faithful. He and Sheila have been together about eighteen years, and the guy comes home nights."

Though Wolfe has friends from most strata of Manhattan life, his closest friends—Hayes and Merkin—are native New Yorkers from different ethnic heritages. Sheila is Jewish. "She's not from a wealthy background," Hayes says, "she's from the Bronx—but 99 percent of the women born to privilege should have her manners, and her looks to boot." He adds that "it's hard to be married to a very famous man, especially in New York. Sheila does that well."

Now forty-one, Sheila was twentythree when Wolfe met her. "She's very feminine and refined," says Gay Talese. "Tom has a woman who cares greatly for him, and can protect him from a lot of the distractions of New York. She appreciates his need for solitude. Sheila Berger has good judgment. She's no Zelda, in other words."

The East Side town house that the Wolfes own is an 1868 brownstone, and with its block shaded by sycamores and its azalea-filled backyard is as close to a southern milieu as one might construct in Manhattan. Wolfe's second-floor study is colorfully functional: high white bookshelves lined with the classics, Chinese-yellow drapes, a word processor (his wife's gift, unmastered), and the galleys to Bonfire spread about. Wolfe's production quota on revising Bonfire for publication in book form has been a fierce two thousand words a day. To overcome inertia, he's kept a clock on his desk "to see if I can do a page and a half an hour. "

It has taken him a year and a half to revise his novel. His anxiety about the book caused him to consult his first Esquire editor, Byron Dobell. "I frankly read it with great dread," Dobell reports. "I said, 'Oh shit, the guy always wanted to write a novel and can't'—but I was thrilled, delighted, and somewhat surprised. I told him, 'Absolutely this is a book to be published.' "

Bonfire has been altered substantially since its serialization in Rolling Stone. Wolfe has changed the nature of Sherman McCoy's crime, heightened the female characters, and made Sherman a career man on Wall Street rather than a writer. "Maybe the writer was too close to him for comfort," says Jann Wenner, who edited the Rolling Stone text. "And maybe if he distances himself from Sherman McCoy, he'll write Sherman McCoy with a little more fervor."

"I can see why he's having trouble with it," Bill Hoffman says. "Tom's great strength is his intellect. And intellect almost always finds its greatest satisfaction in the satirical. But a lot of times you've got to have real feelings for people who are less well equipped than you are."

This afternoon Wolfe seems exhausted by the toll of completing his novel. He is pencil-thin, sniffly, and obviously on edge. We have tea in the elaborate Victorian sitting room off his study; silver-framed photographs of his mother and father look on. Wolfe ushers me to an Art Deco settee he designed as "a memory from my teenage years of what looks swell," and talks about rewriting the ending of Bonfire, "making it more complete, and more beautiful."

One of his difficulties with the reportorial novel has been that he's repeatedly been scooped by breaking news. "I guess I just have to write faster," he says. Before the Bernhard Goetz incident, he'd composed a subway scene with nearly identical events, which he had to discard. "Here was this great piece of city life that I thought I'd introduce. But Bernhard Goetz did it for me—in style. He shot up everyone in sight."

The urge to retreat to pure journalism has been strong: "Often in the midst of writing this novel there were so many resonances with the Goetz case that I really would say, 'Well, why don't I just write about the Goetz case?' " But he's persevered in his drive to join the literary upper class.

"I see the coincidences in the news as an upside-down compliment to my reporting. I'm hitting upon the things that are happening."

Like the Goetz case, Bonfire crackles with racial tension. "If the city's going to be in the foreground, you can't duck the factor of ethnic hostility, which is so much a part of life in all our cities." He sniffles, takes a sip of tea. "The point I'm trying to make about status in the novel is that it's so different now from what it might have been fifty years ago, because the ethnic lines in New York, ironically, are more sharply drawn now than they were before World War II. The black population then was hardly a factor at all politically. Now it's very much a factor. ' '

It's because of this "resort community" paradox, Wolfe explains, that wealthy interlopers (whites) control New York's high life, while the townies (blacks, Latinos, and the new-immigrant New Yorkers) have the real political power.

"Somebody like Sherman McCoy, who you'd think is on top of the status hierarchy in America—he's white, Protestant, old family, best schools, Wall Street—is odd man out once he gets into a political situation. He becomes a victim, a fat turkey to be sliced up."

Ed Hayes has explained it thus: "People with a lot of money and social connections in New York have a power that is very disconnected from ordinary life. You can wake up and become involved in an incident like this in Tom's book, and the people you come in contact with in the criminal-justice system, who are powerful, are so different from you. They're smart, competent people who really give a fuck about what they're doing. And they can hurt you."

Wolfe has given Sherman McCoy a family with roots in Tennessee: "His grandfather was a man of no particular standing, but made some money and came to New York. Sherman's father goes to the right schools and becomes a pillar of Knickerbocker society."

In the first chapter of the book, Wolfe writes of a classmate of Sherman's named Pollard Browning, "who at the age of nine knew how to get across the astonishing news that McCoy was a hick name (and a hick family), as in Hatfields and McCoys, whereas he, Browning, was an Episcopalian Knickerbocker. He used to call Sherman 'Sherman McCoy the Mountain Boy.' " Although there are strong overtones here of Wolfe's early sensitivity to his family's outlander status in Richmond, he seems oblivious to this connection. "Sherman's from New York, but Pollard's family has been here longer," he snorts.

The status of an individual within a group is still his first interest as a writer. "I try to make the characters in this book inseparable from that notion. The psychological development of a person is utterly inseparable from the status that surrounds him. The task of a writer is to show how the social context influences the personal psychology.''

Wolfe's passionate feelings about New York's status hierarchy have resulted in a novel that is venomously critical of the city. "New York really is a bonfire of vanity. But there is no villain in my book—unless you consider the human condition villainous. And I don't. Everyone in the book is vain, though. This is the human comedy!" Wolfe says, gesticulating. "We're right in the middle of it. Every ethnic group is mocked equally in Bonfire; just about everybody is hypocritical—everybody is 'doing well by doing good.' Everyone is equally shown as a creature of vanity."

This sounds like yet another addendum to Wolfe's diatribe against New York. When I make this assertion, he puts down his teacup and stares.

"I don't see any antipathy at all! It may come out as mockery and so on, but, God, I love the cities—I love New York! And often it's hard for me to get across the idea that I don't want it to change. I don't want people like the Bernsteins to stop giving parties like the radical chic. And I really don't want people like the characters in Bonfire to act any differently."

He's nearly out of his seat. "I don't have an arcadian bone in my body," he says in outrage. "I'm Addison and Steele, or the early Thackeray! Look at Dickens' Sketches by Boz. Are there any sympathetic figures in Sketches by Boz? Not really. It's full of mockery, raillery, irony. And yet there is a love of the city. My relish of life in the cities is the very fabric of what I have done! Look at Balzac, who was extremely critical of Paris. Who can say Balzac didn't love the city? He wallowed in the city. He would have died anywhere else. And I feel the same way."

Tea, apparently, is over.

Once Wolfe has regained his composure, I ask the key status question: How might he categorize his own reputation among the hierarchical statuspheres of New York?

"I was afraid you'd ask that," he replies morosely. He deliberates a long moment, then says, "I'm either going to make it as a writer.. .or nothing."