Biographer Heath Hardage Lee interviewed Tom Wolfe when she was a student at St. Catherine’s in the 1980s. (Photo by Carrington Mangum)
Tom Wolfe, a chief practitioner of energetic narrative nonfiction and a novelist who influenced generations of writers, died May 14 at age 88.
“I was born in 1930 at the old Johnston-Willis hospital on Kensington Avenue,” he wrote in the foreword of a 2000 Dementi book of historical photography, “Celebrate Richmond.” The hospital is today Kensington Court apartments. “And grew up [at 3307 Gloucester Road] in Sherwood Park, a brand new subdivision of Ginter Park, during the bottom-most days of the Great Depression and the queasy lull between the first two worldwide wars in human history.”
These were days when hobos came off the boxcars in the Acca Yards and tramped along the bosky residential streets and came knocking on the Wolfe door for food. “My mother would fix him a sandwich and send him on his way. These encounters were always peaceful.”
The young Wolfe considered himself among the most fortunate on Earth because in September, when the Virginia State Fair erupted on the site now occupied by The Diamond, each night he’d watch a spectacle of pops and crashes and hisses and flashing and arcing and shimmering. “I was one of the handful of children in the entire world who could watch those fireworks from his bedroom,” he recalled.
He took those fireworks and put them in his later magazine writing and books. He assured his place in the literary canon with “The Pump House Gang” and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (both 1968), and the Project Mercury astronauts story “The Right Stuff” (1979), his Wall Street epic, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987), and “A Man in Full” (1998), which juxtaposes an Atlanta real estate developer in financial trouble with an Alameda, California, worker in a warehouse owned by the magnate.
Long about the time that “Bonfire” came out I recall a Washington Post interview with the writer — I cannot find it online, so excuse my vagueness — but the conversation took place at, of all places Extra Billy’s, late of memory. Wolfe shared the name of North Carolina's Thomas Wolfe, the author of mammoth novels such as “Look Homeward, Angel,” a coming-of-age story that vaguely disguised residents of his hometown, and a sequel, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” about that very problem. When the interviewer asked Tom Wolfe why he’d never written directly about Richmond, he smiled a little and replied, “I want to be able to come home again.” Which implied, perhaps, that he could, and perhaps considered the undertaking, but chose not to. Wouldn’t have been polite to turn his X-ray vision of observation against the place that birthed him. There was, after all, historic precedent: The place almost burned down once before.
Michael Lewis, writing in Vanity Fair in October 2015, explained “How Tom Wolfe Became … Tom Wolfe.” In that piece, Lewis cites how the New York Public Library in November 2013 paid $2.15 million for Wolfe’s papers. The author kept track of everything, including mash notes from stalkers.
Speaking of, I’ve had kicking around for a long time my notes from an article written a long time ago by Martha Steger (she interviewed him again just this March in a piece for Virginia Business magazine). The piece, for the December 1979 Richmond Lifestyles magazine, "The Kandy-Kolored Kid Comes Home,” covers an address Wolfe made at his St. Christopher's School alma mater. He spoke on a number of topics, including how the newspapers then were more interested in "setting a proper tone" than showing a true picture. He observed the creeping death of news gathering, put his finger on what drives Facebook and blogging, though they weren't yet invented (back-fence gossip didn't have the dignified techie name of "social networking").
He recalled his "man-on-the-street" assignment for the New York Herald Tribune following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He visited Little Italy, Chinatown and other ethnic neighborhoods.
“What I discovered was that the Tongs thought the Mafia had done it, the Italians thought the Tongs had done it, the Puerto Ricans though the Jews had done it, and so on. ... I wrote my story and handed it into the rewrite desk. Late that afternoon I was appointed to do the rewrites, but when I started going through the day’s stories, mine wasn’t there. I figured someone had lost it, so I rewrote it and included it in the stories for the morning paper. When I picked up the paper the next morning, however, my story had again been removed, and all that appeared of the man-on-the-street stories were little old ladies collapsing in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral — the ‘proper tone’ for the day in which a president had been assassinated. It was then that I knew I had to get out of newspaper work.”
Wolfe provided his explanation for gossip and/or blogging, whichever the case may be, again bearing in mind this was 1978.
"My one contribution to psychology may be my theory of information compulsion, that is, every human being feels a minor gain in status if he can tell another human being something that he didn't know before. Many people have a story to tell, and an introduction is all you need. I try to work this way, one-to-one, rather than arriving on the scene with my notebook."
He explained what he described as “the incredible shrinking news.”
“I firmly believe that less news was actually covered now than at any other time in U.S. history. There’s a [newspaper] monopoly in virtually every city, and without competition, there’s no need beyond ‘setting the proper tone’ for each story that’s covered." He continued, "I think the hope for the future of news lies in the weekly newspapers and the magazines because the local newspapers feed the newspapers, and the wire services supply virtually all television news. The reporter with his own beat has almost disappeared."
He made these statements before the proliferation of cable news (though the networks are owned by fewer and fewer companies) and the rise of the internet, all of which have combined both to zap the strength of newspapers and urge the flow of stuff that is as close to news as it is to those swirling masses of trash plastic in the oceans.
But we’re one of those magazines he mentioned, and we’re still at it. Thanks, Tom, for all that you did for us.