Book People | Features Summer 2018 Martha Steger

Tom Wolfe

We talk to the bestselling author about politics, prose, and the death of New Journalism fifty years after The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
© 2012 by Mark Seliger

Tom Wolfe

It’s not every bestselling author who lives to see collectors’ editions of his books, but Tom Wolfe is rare by many standards. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of his countercultural classic, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, chronicling a LSD-powered cross-country bus trip by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, for which the German art book publisher Taschen had already put in place a letterpress-printed limited edition. Next year, the fortieth anniversary of his 1979 bestseller, The Right Stuff, is apt to see the same treatment, plus a National Geographic series. The author of several bestsellers, including The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, Wolfe is, at 87, not content to rest on his laurels. Instead, he continues to chase the story.

In fact, Virginia’s native son is at work researching his next book. It will focus on the medical profession, though he isn’t sure whether it will be fiction or nonfiction. (A reader can’t help but wonder what he’ll come up with, especially given his prescient 1996 article, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” on neuroscience and brain imaging.) 

Wolfe owes his success to breaking the conventions of traditional newspaper writing while remaining true to realism. Long before the advent of “trending,” Wolfe foresaw—and in some cases facilitated—American cultural trends. He predicted the rise of NASCAR with his March 1965 profile of Junior Johnson for Esquire magazine. “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” was the basis for the 1973 sports-drama film with Jeff Bridges as Junior Jackson, the character based on Johnson, who went on to win more than fifty races and become a team owner.

After earning a PhD at Yale, Wolfe’s career began in 1959 with a three-year stint as a city reporter for the Washington Post. In fewer than three years, he had moved on to the New York Herald Tribune. In 1962, when he was writing for New York magazine, he covered Southern California’s hot-rod custom car culture; the popularity of his 1963 article, “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby…,”  gave rise to his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), and must have stimulated his later curiosity about Junior Johnson’s early days of racing in North Carolina. 

Although usually associated with the New Journalism movement, Wolfe has always been the first to say—as far back as 1972 in writing for Esquire—that he didn’t invent the idea or the term. If he didn’t invent New Journalism, Wolfe helped define it through his astute observations, immersion techniques, and innovative wordsmithery, e.g., lumpenprole: “a bunch of slick-magazine and Sunday-supplement writers with no literary credentials whatsoever in most cases—only they’re using all the techniques of the novelists, even the most sophisticated ones—and on top of that they’re helping themselves to the insights of the men of letters while they’re at it—and at the same time they’re still doing their low-life legwork, their ‘digging,’ their hustling….”

Most often publicly seen striking a sharp pose in a top hat and one of his three white suits (the fourth is being cut by a new tailor, he said), Wolfe is in no way flashy or dramatic in a conversational setting. His contrasting demeanor in speaking engagements over the years has demonstrated his talent for timing and tone, honed during his fifty-plus years as a writer.

This past January, I visited Wolfe in the book-and-art-filled apartment he shares with his wife on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to talk about books past, present, and future.

Courtesy of Taschen / Courtesy of the Richard Synchef Archive

Left: In 2016, the German art book publisher Taschen published a limited, letterpress-printed luxury edition of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The 1,968 copies (plus 250 artist’s proofs) range in price from $350–$950—all books are signed by Wolfe, but the $950 edition comes with a choice of one of two signed art-edition prints by photographer Lawrence Schiller. Right: The first edition of Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, with artwork by Milton Glaser. Wolfe and local photographer Ted Streshinsky teamed up to cover Ken Kesey for New York magazine, where portions of the book were originally published. 

Steger: You said in the late 1970s that people frequently confused you with North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe. At that time, you said you often got his mail and you wrote each fan back, ‘Unfortunately I’ve been deceased a number of years.’ Do you still get confused with that Thomas Wolfe?

Wolfe: That’s no longer a live issue. Sadly, Thomas Wolfe is not read avidly any longer.

Steger: You’ve also said in the past that you didn’t invent New Journalism. Who did?

Wolfe: Pete Hamill was the first to use the term, I think. Seymour Krim [New York writer and literary critic] said Hamill asked him, ‘Why don’t we do a piece on this new journalism?’ I don’t think the article ever ran, but Hamill began using the phrase, and it stuck.

Steger: New Journalism involved delving deep into a subject. You were avidly read early on because you embedded yourself inside diverse cultures and groups. How do you set up those relationships?

Wolfe: I never say, ‘I want a lot of your time.’ I’ve always started with one person and if I could get along with that one person, I would just follow the chain of associates. If you can get through a whole day with a person, then it will work out fairly easily. People have different techniques for entering [subjects]. Jimmy Breslin, my colleague at the New York Herald Tribune, was really aggressive. George Plimpton was not very aggressive. He would do things like play first base with the New York Yankees and that sort of stuff. That had to be set up ahead of time, but he never went charging out on the basketball court saying, ‘Well, okay, what shall I do?’ He would hang around near the wall until someone said, ‘George, come out.’ That was another way [of entering a subject]. I just go with the natural approach. I worked on the Herald Tribune where we would be sent out to do man-on-the-street interviews. I found there was no use saying, ‘Hello, I’m with the New York Herald Tribune and we’re doing a street survey…’ You had to start off with your notebook and saying, ‘Here’s our question today.’ You have to adapt yourself.

Steger: You adapted yourself to the early years of stripped-down cars by writing about Junior Johnson. How did you first learn about Johnson?

Wolfe: A good old boy from North Carolina came to work for Esquire magazine, and he was into this particular car culture, which I had never heard of, so I just headed down there. He had mentioned Junior Johnson to me because Johnson was an independent driver who had signed up with … oh, who was it? Chevrolet, I think.

© 2016 and courtesy of Tom Wolfe / Courtesy of James M. Dourgarian, Bookman ABAA

Left: Original manuscript page for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, complete with author Tom Wolfe’s doodles and corrections, ca. 1967. The author’s never-before-published manuscript pages appear as tip-ins throughout Taschen’s edition.  Middle: The first edition of Wolfe’s first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965). This collection of essays on custom car culture is often hailed as an early example of New Journalism. Right: A first edition of Wolfe’s 2012 novel, Back to Blood, described as a look at “class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption and ambition in Miami, the city where America’s future has arrived first.” 

Steger: What was Johnson like?

Wolfe: He turned out to be a really colorful figure. [Racing stripped-down cars] was strictly Southern for a long time. It was after the Second World War that a lot of people in the South got cars, and then they began to get really excited. The cars were, aside from the shell, unlike any street vehicle you have ever seen. Everything is just the engine.

Steger: Jumping ahead decades to the present immigration issue, you said when you were first in Miami researching your 2012 book, Back to Blood, immigration was not just an issue but “red hot.” How do you think immigration went from being a hot button in Miami to one for the whole U.S. and all of Europe—leading to the rise of the radical right?

Wolfe: Well, I think one the key influences in the United States is that we were known as the great haven of refugees. It was a large part of our history when you think of how the Irish were considered lowlifes when they came here, and now they’re great politicians and much more, but since the Second World War many more immigrants have been of a different ethnic background and different color from the prevailing Europeans. A lot of the heat that has been generated is due to that. We like to pretend that is no longer an issue, but it is an issue—a big issue all through southern border states.

Steger: Do any specific experiences relating to immigrants stand out from your travels for Back to Blood?

Wolfe: Yes. I was in amazed at how many workers in and around North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, were Mexicans because it was the kind of work—cutting Christmas trees on huge Christmas tree farms grown there—it’s very unpleasant work. You have to trim them constantly, every year for twelve years if you want a big tree. It’s unpleasant because there’s no machine that will do it for you. [The field] is too crowded so you just have to put up with it, brambles and everything else. As a result, it’s hard to get American-born workers of any description to work on those tree farms, but the Mexicans will do it just as a way to get in [to the U.S.] And now, of course, there’s Trump, who’s opposed to immigration.

Steger: An interview in the Spectator quoted you as calling Trump “a loveable megalomaniac.” Do you still think that description fits? 

Wolfe: I think it does. The ‘lovable’ part [refers to] childlike. For example, most extremely rich men will play the wealth down. He plays it up: ‘I am truly worth ten billion’—even though half that is the estimate. Literally half is the value of his name. We’ll see what the value is three years from now, two years now. Trump is a fascinating figure that way. We have never had a president, as far as I can figure out, who has not held political office of a substantial sort earlier in his career, and Trump hadn’t. I read recently that some people say he was really reluctant to do this. He wasn’t reluctant for one second. 

Wolfe at his desk, inscribing a book for a visitor.
1/4
MARTHA STEGER

Wolfe at his desk, inscribing a book for a visitor.

Inside Wolfe's home office. Note the fedora lampshades.
2/4
MARTHA STEGER

Inside Wolfe's home office. Note the fedora lampshades.

A hat-themed quilt is one of the quirky decorative elements in Wolfe's New York City apartment.
3/4
MARTHA STEGER

A hat-themed quilt is one of the quirky decorative elements in Wolfe's New York City apartment.

A small collection of canes and walking sticks lay against the wall near the apartment's entrance.
4/4
MARTHA STEGER

A small collection of canes and walking sticks lay against the wall near the apartment's entrance.

Steger: When you first started writing, the audience was your age. How do you see your audience now as having changed?

Wolfe: Well, I never thought of an audience my age. It may well be true, but I think it’s all a matter of reporting. It doesn’t matter what your age is if you can get close to the subjects and spend time with them, which was the crux of what became the New Journalism. I didn’t invent that, by the way, but now it has tended to disappear from journalism, although Rolling Stone kept with it for a long time. 

Steger: Why has New Journalism disappeared?

Wolfe: Magazines are no longer eager to pay a reporter to spend three months or half a year [on a long article]. It seems to be part of the past. Magazines aren’t flourishing anyway.

Steger: How was the writing different in New Journalism?

Wolfe: It’s very difficult. You have to learn to write what I call scene-by-scene construction. Instead of having this ordinary historical narrative, you do it all through scenes, which is key. One of the reasons I wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities [the way I did] was that there was no convenient way to do the reporting. It was hard enough to do The Right Stuff with seven different astronauts and no one figure that summed up the whole thing. I always wanted to do a nonfiction book about New York that would gather information about all its various facets. I couldn’t find the individuals I needed, so I said, ‘Well, I guess I’ll take a crack at this fiction business.’ When I finished that book, I was fifty-seven years old and had written my first novel. 

Steger: How do you see yourself adapting to changing publishing industry trends that encompass the digital world? 

Wolfe: I shouldn’t say this, but I don’t think I have to change anything. I don’t know what one would do to fit into the industry anyway. You have to figure out in your own mind what will be absorbing for your readers. 

Steger: Journalism and entertainment might be remaking what we once considered high literary art—namely, the literary novel. What do you see as the connection between high art, entertainment, and journalism?

Wolfe: I think labeling is one of the banes of our intellectual existence right now. It was an influence that the French had after the Second World War. They came up with all sorts of isms—absurdisms—there’s a whole list of them. We’ve always been little colonials influenced by the Europeans. Take the French and the English—they put much more emphasis on the psychological, so American fiction has tended to do that [in the past 70 years], too. I probably shouldn’t make that statement since I’ve grown weary of reading American novels. 

Steger: What would you consider as high art in literature if it isn’t literary fiction? 

Wolfe: It would be the kind of work Michael Lewis has done in The Blind Side and Flash Boys. I consider him at the top of the heap at this moment. He has an extraordinary sense of what’s going to work in nonfiction. 

Steger: Do you use a computer for writing?

Wolfe: No, I went back to writing books by hand when I couldn’t find parts for my typewriter on eBay. The Bonfire of the Vanities was the last book I did on a typewriter. I think the Internet has changed the writing of articles of all kinds. Because of the glare of the computer screen, it’s unpleasant to be presented with something more than eight hundred words long. It’s tiring. As a result, a premium has been put upon not so much style as brevity. It’s a curious situation because, in a way, things are moving a bit backwards. The long exegesis is not what it used to be, and I get the feeling that training in writing is not what it used to be. Maybe it doesn’t have to be that thorough anymore.