Whipped Cream Difficulties

Tom Wolfe roundup: NYT.

Young Tom was educated at a private boys’ school in Richmond. He graduated cum laude from Washington and Lee University in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in English and enough skill as a pitcher to earn a tryout with the New York Giants. He did not make the cut.

Quoted for the benefit of the Washington and Lee graduates in my audience. Wolfe was apparently quite the mover and shaker at W&L:

Upon graduation in 1947, he turned down admission to Princeton University to attend Washington and Lee University. At Washington and Lee, Wolfe was a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. He majored in English, was sports editor of the college newspaper, and helped found a literary magazine, Shenandoah, giving him opportunities to practice his writing both inside and outside the classroom.

He enrolled at Yale University in the American studies program and received his Ph.D. in 1957.

Tom Wolfe & I shared a similar sentiment about the "intelligence" of Yale from our experiences there. pic.twitter.com/YwtRxI9THQ

— Robert Barnes (@Barnes_Law) May 15, 2018

As for his remarkable attire, he called it “a harmless form of aggression.”
“I found early in the game that for me there’s no use trying to blend in,” he told The Paris Review. “I might as well be the village information-gatherer, the man from Mars who simply wants to know. Fortunately the world is full of people with information-compulsion who want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you don’t know.”

Wolfe once explained his dandified wardrobe:

Try to interview hippies or NASCAR fans dressed like one of themselves – they'll instantly sniff you out as a fraud.

Show up dressed like the Man From Mars, and they'll tell you all you wish to know. People love explaining things.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) May 15, 2018

NYT appreciation. NYT appreciation of his style:

Whether thrift or canniness inspired Mr. Wolfe to persist in wearing the suit into the following season, the effect was instantaneous, as he once said, “annoying people enormously.’’ Just by wearing white after Labor Day, he became the talk of any room he entered, and getting dressed each morning evolved for him into “a harmless form of assault.’’

WP.

He entered the world of stock-car driver Junior Johnson — the title figure of a 20,000-word Esquire article, “The Last American Hero” — so completely that he described the chickens walking across Johnson’s yard in Ingle Hollow, N.C.

Lawrence is a huge fan of this essay, especially for Wolfe’s observation that in Johnson’s part of the country, they grew courage like it was a natural resource. I’d happily link to it, but Esquire wants you to pay a subscription fee to access their archive, and I refuse to give those sumitches any money.

LAT:

“He had this kind of cynicism about liberalism,” said writer and friend Ann Louise Bardach. “If you look at what upset Tom, it was the card-carrying, raving, bring-down-the-barricade liberalism, but more than that, he was contrarian and a cynic in the sense that every great reporter is.”
He would later attend a state dinner at the White House during the Reagan administration, support President George W. Bush and complain against having to pay too much income tax. Walking the crowded streets of New York, Wolfe would wear a American flag lapel pin that he likened to “holding up a cross to werewolves.”

Borepatch sent over a nice note, and made a similar observation:

…my thoughts are that Wolfe and Reagan are inextricably linked. Political Correctness would not have allowed Bonfires to be published post-Reagan.

I’ll wait until tomorrow to post the Tom Wolfe obits. I think it’s better to give these things a chance to shake out, at least overnight. And I expect some thoughtful retrospectives and corrections to the initial press coverage.